Update: Seed Account Re-sale, Free Users + Custom Styles

[mark]

Two things for you today!


Thing the first:

We have not been able to finish and fully test the new site functionality that enables people to purchase accounts without a PayPal account. Instead of finishing it up an hour before the first sale is scheduled and crossing our fingers that it works, we've decided to push the sale off another week.

The new time of the Seed Account re-sale is Thursday, May 14th, 9PM EDT and again at Friday, May 15th, 9AM EDT. In total 200 accounts will be available.


Thing the second:

People with free accounts have probably noticed that a few days ago we took away the Advanced Customization area of the site. (The pages that let you make a custom style.) We had never intended for it to be available unless you paid, and having it on was an oversight on our part. After we turned it off, we got to hear a lot of really good comments from people and we reevaluated the original decision.

We've turned it back on, but gave free users a pretty low limit on the number of styles you can create (1 custom style, up to 5 layers). Short story: you can once again go back to customizing and importing styles from other sites. Sorry for the trouble!

Comments

[gwenhyffar]

I've done the invite request thing :) Just waiting on a reply.

Thanks for the link, I'll pass it around generously!

[denise]

Yeah, invite code grants are totally manual, so we handle those requests on an as-we-have-time basis. I'll point out, though, that the number of invite codes we can give out to people depends entirely on our paid account percentage, so the best way to make sure that we can generate more invite codes is to encourage your friends to buy a paid account! If you make a payment of even one month for $3 USD, you bypass the need for an invite code, and since we do our invite code calculations based on what percentage of the userbase has paid accounts, it will mean more invite codes for everyone.

(I know that this can come off as sounding like a hard sell, and we totally respect, and even encourage, the idea of waiting until you're sure that you want to support us before making a payment. We'd much rather earn your trust over time than have you regretting that you supported us. But the reason we're using invite codes is to make sure that we keep the 5% paid account rate that we calculated would be necessary to support the site -- you can read dw_biz for more details -- and we do have to be hardasses about that, because if we don't hit that 5% paid account rate over time, we start to be in trouble. We built a lot of padding into our estimations, and the seed account sale did give us at least our first year's operating expenses in the bank, but we calculated it out: each active account costs us about $1.40 a year to support, so we need to hit and sustain a 5% paid account rate at our current paid account costs in order to stay sustainable.)

(Oi, pardon my tl;dr. It's a perpetual problem.)

[gwenhyffar]

Oh, don't worry about the tl;dr, I'm 43 (halp, 44 tomorrow!), I'm used to reading more than 10 words in a single piece of writing ;p

I fully understand your reasoning. For me and those of my friends who are indicating an interest, it's a matter of having been burned by LJ (joining when Brad was still saying "no ads ever" and paying on that basis), so we want to check you out for a bit first.

If you live up to what you've been saying, you're certainly going to get my money. So far, I've been very pleased with what I've found here.

[denise]

Oh, absolutely! And conditions can change, things might be different in five or six years, etc, etc. But I can say that right now, neither mark nor I have any intent to ever add advertising in any way, shape, or form. Not only are we both philosophically opposed to advertising on social media, the plain and simple fact of the matter is that it doesn't make sense.

But either way, I hope that we can be a good home for you and your friends no matter what. :)