Appreciate the feedback!

Clickable:

1. Sign up: http://www.boldfaced.net/signup?code=BOLDHN

2. Sample profile: http://simon.boldfaced.net/

Agreed, and some great points. We kept that in mind when building the new flow. You can still cancel in a few clicks and without having to type anything.

(Answered the first half of that here: http://hackerne.ws/item?id=4229632)

On the second half, it's a fair point. It's too early to say, but certainly worth keeping an eye on.

> since every month is different, it may just take one cycle to get them happy again

That's one thing I'm also interested in exploring: What can we do to buy us one more month to help them find real value in the service.

I've also been previewing what is coming up in the next month's bag, so they have an idea of whats in the pipeline. At first I wanted to preserve the surprise of what shirt is actually coming, but decided we might as well show the main item and surprise subscribers in other ways.

"Give them a free month of service" is an obvious possibility, I would think, although you need to engage with them afterward (though email, probably), and make sure they're looking at your service.

That's awesome. What's interesting though is that (in my experience at least) you get a fair amount of "cancel my account ASAP and delete all the data" users. I wonder if there's any data on how Step 2 plays out in that situation.

We'll see! I have a hunch we'll have to tune this offering quite a bit based on the user's usage history, account age, and anything else we feel can help make things better for them and keep them around. There's also a good amount we're measuring that would alert us to an unusual number of cancels that involve that discount, etc.

Thank you. You're very right -- it's so easy to get discouraged at the apparent lack of activity in any early product, no matter how jazzed you might be about it. It's also easy to get caught up in the "if you build it they will come" mindset. Sadly, this seems to be rarely the case, even for the best of products. (Though as adamtmca notes, it's certainly possible!)

The first few 100 users of Forrst were all my friends and colleagues, and theirs as well. I invited folks I trusted would give me raw, honest feedback, and I trusted them to invite similarly-minded people. The next ~1,500 users came from this post: http://thinkvitamin.com/design/forrst-finds-designers-who-co...

Initially I was thinking no more than a dollar or two, maybe with a free/preview version which would include a few selected chapters. On the other hand, I think this hopefully will be highly valuable to a lot of folks, so it may end up being higher. (And thanks to Alex for helping me see the light on that.)

Please don't undervalue yourself like that. This kind of experience and insight is worth much more than "a buck or two".

Appreciate that, Alex. I think you're probably right.

Set the minimum to one or two dollar and let the reader choose to pay more. You will be surprised how much are people willing to pay for good content (They know its great content, because of the great free preview.).

Off the top of my head I'm not sure if this is part of Markdown proper (or maybe GitHub's "flavor") but you can do fenced code blocks, like so:

~~~

// your code // goes here // and here

~~~

That's GitHub flavor. You can also use back ticks and specify syntax highlighting, e.g:

    ```python

    from functools import partial

    def foo(a,b,i):
        if i >= a and i <= b:
            return i**2
        else:
            return 0

    print reduce(lambda x,y: x+y,map(partial(foo,3,7),xrange(1,10)))
    ```