Dear reader,

At some point, we'll need to lift our heads up from our current work and start thinking more about Readup's long long objective, which has something to do with total revenue, minus costs, being greater than zero. Profitability. Sustainability.

But for Readup to fulfill its destiny, for now it needs to just keep growing, a lot. Growth is, and always has been, the first — and often only — order of business.

When it comes to growth, we’re okay with noise, ups and downs, as long as the overall trends are good. And to make sure we’re always thinking big, we try to think in terms of orders of magnitude: How can we get one more zero?

With overall commenting activity, a key metric for Readup, we just got one more zero.

We went from single digits in the beginning of December to double digits by the end of the month. And a few days ago, we hit our all time high:

Let's hit triple digits by the end of the January. Go tell everyone you know about Readup!

Commenting activity is easy to quantify, to measure, and an obvious indicator of overall site activity. Growth — going out into the world (wide web), finding people, and getting them interested and active on Readup — is a whole different can of worms.

Next week, I’ll report back on our overall marketing objectives (and how we measure success) but in the meantime, check out the spiffs we made to the Readup homepage, including these helpful explainers so that new users can understand Readup’s core mechanics:

It’s also now possible to sign in with Apple, which, as you might imagine, is the first of many integrations we’re excited about:

And, finally, we put some new marketing in spots where polish was greatly needed. Stuff like this:

Leave the noise behind.

Read on Readup


Last thing: Huge congrats to Alexa the new Top Scout on Readup, who's been posting reams of incredible stuff. The forces are strong here, people. Onward!

-Bill