Stepping Back to Move Forward
TL;DR: The Coder Cafe is taking a pause to reflect and refine. Paid subscriptions are paused for now.
Dear readers,
I wanted to let you know that The Coder Cafe is officially paused starting today.
I launched the Coder Cafe less than 3 months ago, on October 7th. Here’s a quick look at this journey so far.
Top Five Posts
What’s Gone Well
581 subscribers, spanning six continents and 73 countries.
Over 66,000 visits, mainly on the free content.
Mostly positive feedback on the content itself from the people inside The Coder Cafe community; for example:
Challenges
As you probably know, the format is 1 recap and 4 posts (1 free, 3 paid) per week. One of the problems is that I have a very low conversion rate: 19 subscribers, which represents about ~3%. A low conversion rate isn’t necessarily a problem per se, but it means that most of the content is only seen by a tiny portion of the community, and this is a problem for me.
Another point is that next year, something (🍼) will definitely have an impact on my capacity to write a post every day.
Attracting people outside our community is complicated. My main strategy is to share the free post of the week on social networks and bring people from these channels. Yet, on many occasions, people outside The Coder Cafe community commented that the topic wasn’t covered in enough depth. I understand it, but to be able to produce one topic per day, of course, I cannot write a 30-minute long post every day. Instead, when a post starts getting too big, I split the topic into multiple posts. For example, I started to write about database consistency models, and it ended up being the content of a full week. But if someone reads only one post, they may think there’s a lack of depth.
Future
Creating a self-sustained community has always been a dream of mine. Writing, helping people, and sharing knowledge brings me joy. If The Coder Cafe could eventually become my primary focus, I would embrace it.
For now, it’s far from being self-sustained. It takes me on average between 15 and 20 hours per week to write the five posts of the week, which represents a massive time investment, as you can imagine. I will never cut corners on quality or (as suggested by some people) defer each post to an LLM. If it takes me so much time, it’s because I’m using different techniques to approach every topic such as lateral thinking to produce (hopefully) unique content.
However, for now, I need to step back and reflect:
Is the current format with one post a day the best possible?
Should I rather focus on one post a week?
Should The Coder Cafe focus on something beyond just written content?
I’m taking this pause to explore these questions and more, keeping an open mind about what The Coder Cafe could become.
If you have any thoughts, ideas, or suggestions, please share by replying to this email or commenting. Every insight is immensely valuable.
Thank you for being part of this community.
See you next year,
For the people who have a paid subscription, first of all, thank you for your trust. Starting today I have officially paused the paid subscriptions, which means:
The billing cycles for your subscribers will be frozen.
New readers will not be able to purchase a paid subscription plan.
Existing paid subscribers won't be charged.