Hello everyone! I'm very happy to welcome you to a brand-new weekly series here at Journaly: Journaly TL;DR Weekly - most weeks I will write a nice little post here on Journaly sharing feature announcements & news with you directly here on the platform where you can engage and be part of the conversation. I'll then send an email with a very concise TL;DR (Too Long; Didn't Read) that summarizes the post in just a few lines and links to the detailed post here. I really hope this will help to boost traffic and engagement on the platform, bringing people who might normally miss the detailed post back here, and giving everyone a greater sense and awareness that we are actively improving Journaly!
Right – let's jump into the first entry! This first one will be a little bit longer than usual as we set the stage for an amazing 2023 here @ Journaly!
A Quick Look Back
2021 really was an incredibly prolific year for Journaly development. Literally thousands of hours went into transforming the platform from a shaky Beta product to a full-fledged software platform that mostly delivered its core value propositions to users, complete with a premium membership. There were still some bugs to work out and so many amazing new features & improvements on the roadmap, but the transformation was huge.
However, we still had spent 95% of our time over 5 years building free features and the premium offering was relatively small.
2022 was a very quiet year as I was going through a lot of huge life transitions – moving countries and starting a new full-time job as a Software Engineer at Google. As I've shared before, life really did feel quite empty not being able to work on Journaly as much as before, knowing how many exciting things were still on the roadmap and how much better things will get.
The Present / 2023
As some of you may have seen, these past few months I've been working very hard to bring all of my projects back to life and things are finally there! I've been posting actively on YouTube, Instagram, and Patreon; and me and Ryan have been working very hard on Journaly behind the scenes. Since resuming this work, we've already completed two new exciting features and have a full Journaly development roadmap for 2023 that we spent weeks putting together – I'm so excited!
With all that said, you all are the most important part of what makes Journaly such a delightful, warm, and encouraging place to be, and what makes it valuable through meaningful content, genuine human relationships, and helpful feedback – and so I also want to do whatever I can to truly bring back the wonderful vibrance that the Journaly community once had through:
- Being more active on the platform myself
- Doing a much better job using tools like social media and our email list (hence this new series!)
- Doing fun things like community challenges & our book club
But I can't do this without you and would love your help – let's work together and make a big push this year to make Journaly the best platform and community it can be!
One Last Thing ♡
I always try to be very transparent with you all. One big goal this year is to make some progress in making Journaly financially sustainable. As I mentioned, I do still pay my own money every month right now to keep Journaly alive and freely available for everyone. I believe I've probably spent well over 10,000 hours on this project over more than 5 years, so one day it would be wonderful to be able to earn an income from this work, but the main financial priority is just making sure the platform can sustain itself. Thankfully, we built the app in a way that makes it relatively cheap to maintain, so we don't need that many subscriptions to pay all the bills.
So while most of our development goals for the year are still on things we'll be offering for free, we will be adding some exciting new premium features and I will also try to do a much better job of marketing Premium and making it more visible – we tend to be so shy about promoting it that most users probably don't even know it exists!
Of course, if any of you love Journaly, have gotten significant value from the platform, and can afford it, we would really love and appreciate your premium support ♡
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Thanks for reading and as always, thank you all for being here. I promise future entries of the Journaly TL;DR Weekly series will be much, much shorter! :D
Robin
(Ryan says hi, too!)
Headline image by iamromankraft on Unsplash
Thanks, Robin :). Appreciate your hard work and can't wait to start actively again with Journaly. I did all the book club rounds and have read everything you've come up with and really loved it. "L'ombre du vent" has been my first book that I have read in French and I would have never discovered it without you.
such cool news, i love the website so much and have been here since literally day 1. excited to see where you take us this year
I just got a premium subscription <3
I recently started to earn a little bit of money with the game mods that I have been creating (so I can sympathize with what it's like to work for free) and it makes me happy to pass this money along to Journaly <3
Hey @Dustin! Thanks so much for coming back to being an active Journaly user, and it's really nice to read your feedback about the book club rounds! I can't wait to finally have our first new round of the book club, I have a couple of very exciting features we're working on building right now that I think would seriously elevate the next book club experience!
Thanks so much for being here all this time, @juliana! It's honestly amazing to see users who have stuck with us since the beginning and have watched the platform grow over the years. I promise that this year is going to be huge – we've been doing well so far with a few new features and improvements, but the BIG stuff is on the way now!
Ahhh thanks so much for joining premium @flauschtrud! <3 That's so kind of you so give back to us now that you're earning some money yourself with your game mods – and by the way nice job, I think that's really cool! We're so lucky to have you in the Journaly community, thank you thank you! 🙏🏼