Happy New Year, everyone!

This report is going to be much shorter than the usual one. I hope to summarize our progress and reveal our new strategy for early 2020.

TL;DR

• Wins: We earned our First Dollar in December!
• Challenges: Community growth
• Plans: Shifting from community growth to Hackathons
• Action Items: Continue being awesome!

Development Progress

The following is a shortlist of our development achievements this month:

1. Dev server is back online
2. Re-enabled our Continuous Deployment Pipeline
3. Significant advancements with our Auth Service
4. .NET Core 3.1 upgrade
5. Discord and Slack integration for Patrons

Our most exciting news is Patreon page has earned us our Very First Dollar. Well, to be honest, there were nearly 60 of them, but who’s counting? I cannot begin to express how excited I am about this. It is only a tiny fraction of what we need, but it’s great to see so many of you showing such faith in us.

The Numbers

Community Growth continues to be our Critical Number. This number drives success for us at so many levels. In December, we’ve averaged a little fewer than two new subscribers per day. We knew this was going to be a huge challenge. We have a couple of irons in the fire, which we hope will make a significant change, but for the time being, we need to acknowledge the reality of this.

Chart 1: December Newsletter subscriptions

Chart 2: Community Growth Trend vs. Forecast

We’ve relaxed our targets for January to be more in line with our current trend. In February, we hope to have a more significant uptake in interest. We talk about this more in the Plans section below. As always, we welcome as much help in this area as we can get. If you’re up to this, please help us spread the word.

Forecast and Trend

This month we are bringing our plans back in line with reality. We have struggled to make our community targets and we expect that struggle will continue for a short while. Instead of planning for unrealistic growth, we’re anticipating another slow month of growth. With this in mind, we’re going to refocus our efforts in a different direction. One that we hope that everyone will be excited to hear.

Discoveries:

• Continued slow community growth

Adaptation:

• Matching the Trending and Forecasting dates
• Pushed the Kickstarter to AFTER the First Playable
• Moved the First Playable UP a month
• Lowered expectations for community growth until after First Playable is ready.

Chart 3: Overall forecast vs. trend

Here is our December Summary.

• Income: $73.35
• Expenses: $148.29
• Balance: -$4,547.27

• Forecasted community size by the end of December: 1822
• Actual community size by the end of December: 1560

• Forecasted Community Growth: 800/mo
• Adjusted Community Growth: 30/mo

Plans

So, I’ve already hinted at this, but I would like to announce our new plans formally. Instead of focusing on Community Growth over the next couple of months, we’re going to double down our efforts on development. We hope to build a minimum viable product for everyone so they can use it in their actual games. Before you get too excited, I want to stress this is going to be more minimum than viable. Our goals are to get something out there where you can upload a map, move a token, and share this with your friends.

Why now? Community growth is low. At the current rate, we would lose a lot of time waiting for enough to justify a crowdfunding campaign. Putting more effort into this is not seeing much in return. Also, we’ve made a lot of progress on the tech side as a result of our volunteer developers. This change in direction will be an experiment to see if we can move the needle a little further with some focused effort.

All of us on the team are working fulltime. Most of us have families, and more have additional commitments. Finding time to work on feature development is going to be hard. The result will be slow progress, but we believe this is the right direction, and we are confident it is the right direction.

Thanks for your support and patience, please, and wish us luck.

--Marc
Mythic Table Foundation Director