December update - early access, user feedback, new features

By Jason Yavorska, Founder/CEO | December 30, 2022 | 3 min read

Happy new year, almost! It’s time again for another progress update. Now that we’re in early access, we have some exciting new goals each month:

1. Increase early access users by 20% every two weeks
2. Increase unique weekly active users by 20% every two weeks
3. Increase non-staff Discord members by 20% every two weeks

This month: our first full month of early access

During December we went from 0 to 81 users who signed up and are trying out the platform (from 0 to 68 in the first iteration, and 68 to 81 in the second - a 26% increase).

Unique weekly active users for weeks ending during the month were 17, 22, 6, and 14 respectively, and non-staff Discord members did not increase. Partly this was due to December being a relatively quiet month, but also because we haven’t yet established our community growth plan - see below for details on where we’re headed next with that. We are also tuning how we measure unique users in a privacy-protecting way, so this count is likely to slightly over or under-estimate actual numbers.

Apart from our metrics, we also delivered a lot of features in December. Our changelog has the complete details, including screenshots, but highlights for me were:

• Store your project brief in the extended description area
• Track documents or other reference material not stored in Synura
• Tasks for assets
• Improved background file upload experience
• Due dates for each phase of the production process

Finally, we have hired a front-end developer contractor who is temporarily helping us while another teammate is on parental leave, and we also hired a community manager to help us grow our early access community.

Lessons from this month

Entering early access during a relatively quiet month worked out well for us - it gave us a chance to gather feedback without an overwhelming number of people on the platform and allowed us to find and fix issues without impacting too many people. The team was able to take holidays and maintain the platform at the same time, while still delivering a ton of great features and gathering real user feedback.

Next month: growing the community

With our new community manager hired, we’re establishing our marketing strategy for audiences and channels, as well as defining our growth funnel, all to drive early access growth and collect user feedback. I’ll be partnering closely with her as exceeding our early access growth targets will be my primary focus for January.

We plan a second outreach in the next few days (after the new year) to our ~300 early access waiting list users who have not yet signed up. We’ll also be submitting a user survey to our ~80 users who have. In addition to setting growth targets for social media and early access signups, we plan to also start tracking how much user feedback we’re getting.

Finally, our content writer and video producer vendors will be completing their content for us to share this month, which will help us bring further attention to early access.

If you have any thoughts on this update, where we should head next, or if you’d like to chat about anything Synura related you can always reach me at jason@synura.com.

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