Board Meeting 09/2021

Board Meeting 09/2021 September 10th, 2021 / 6:00 PM EDT

Company Attendance

Luke Strickland

Agenda

Executive Report

Greetings folks! Welcome to the September board meeting for Glimesh. During the month of August we had some rather large changes that were made, and for the first month since launch we saw growth on both social media and our website traffic. More and more people are continuing to give us a chance, and try out a new experience.

This month was unique because it was the first month where I was not working full time on Glimesh. Around this time last year I left my full time position to dedicate all of my time to building Glimesh, and we’re not yet at a point where we can afford to pay salaries. Due to not being able to dedicate my entire days to Glimesh, the development has slowed down slightly. However we’re still making progress and getting core infrastructure changes out. Thankfully even though I have been consumed with other things, Paco1342 and the rest of the GCT have really continued to step up to keep building a strong community.

Our priorities are still clear: deliver the mobile app and introduce low latency RTMP to ensure all of our streamers and viewers have a great experience. In order to continue to deliver those goals we have opened up our first paid contract to find a software engineer to help us finish off the RTMP project and currently we have one applicant. The mobile app at this point requires some bug fixes and tweaks before we can start testing it.

Another important topic is safety. We’ve built this platform from the beginning focused around providing a fun & safe environment. Our Rules of Conduct were very thoughtfully designed to provide a solid foundation and our Glimesh Community Team continues to act as a conduit for our community. With the recent harassment and violence we’ve seen on other platforms it’s important to not let down our guard and continue to focus on providing a safe environment.

On the people side of things, one of our priorities for August was to do an in-depth check in and review of our GCT processes, practices, and day to day operations. I put together an anonymous survey for our GCT members to collect their honest and true feedback in order to help prioritize and understand any ongoing concerns. We consolidated and summarized the feedback and then came up with actionable ideas to help continue to move the team forward. Overall the most positive feedback was how well the GCT team works together and the quality of the tools they have to help manage their processes. On the flip side, the GCT wanted to see more focus towards holding members of the GCT accountable both for being available, and actually performing their volunteer functions. Additional concerns were brought up around decentralizing and being more inclusive of the decisions the GCT makes. As a team we’re putting in some new tools, processes, and requirements to make sure we can continue to provide a great experience for our dedicated volunteers, and we’re going to be regularly collecting feedback going forward.

On a final note, I continue to be enamoured with the amount of goodwill our community continues to pour into this project and I want to thank everyone for the support they continue to give us both emotionally and financially.

  • Luke Strickland (clone1018 on Glimesh)

Metrics

We had a nice social bump this month due to the increasing intolerance of Twitch’s business practices. However the usual concerns continue to ring true: stream stability, features, and longevity are common concerns.

We saw an uptick in streamers & peak viewers heading into the middle of August. We’ll need to continue to be active on social media & start working on email, Twitter, and other campaigns to get users continually invested in using the site. We’re still continuing a very light approach to social media, but with the launch of the mobile app and RTMP we’ll really want to crank the lever.

March 2021April 2021May 2021June 2021July 2021August 2021
Social Media
Discord6,1985,9365,6525,2964,9814,839
Twitter9,1319,2069,2649,2389,1339,607
Reddit564584606613621632
Instagram1,1671,1901,1761,1781,1701,195
Facebook581609624636642648
TikTok67758187
Guilded174177191193
Website Traffic
Unique Visitors199,00063,00038,80030,30025,60025,800
Total Pageviews2,600,000484,000316,000219,000184,000211,000

Finances

Our finance categories are split up into two categories: Software as a Service (generally recurring) and Physical Sales (generally one time). This financial spreadsheet breaks down those two categories, in addition to providing a traditional P&L itemization. We donated to several charitable causes in August to continue helping underserved communities.

March 2021April 2021May 2021June 2021July 2021August 2021
Software as a Service
Gross Subscriptions$ 12,550.00$ 9,510.00$ 7,540.00$ 5,960.00$ 5,075.00$ 4,060.00
Streamer Payouts$ (2,795.34)$ (2,036.12)$ (1,665.89)$ (1,451.03)$ (1,044.30)$ (838.70)
Charges Fees$ (892.05)$ (672.37)$ (538.23)$ (429.08)$ (360.70)$ (288.98)
Refunds$ (30.00)$ (40.00)$ (30.00)$ (5.00)$ -$ (5.00)
Connect Fee (prev month)$ (71.51)$ (1,230.11)$ (1,074.47)$ (916.02)$ (772.94)$ (668.77)
Subscription Expenses$ (3,788.90)$ (3,978.60)$ (3,308.59)$ (2,801.13)$ (2,177.94)$ (1,801.45)
Subscription Revenue$ 8,761.10$ 5,531.40$ 4,231.41$ 3,158.87$ 2,897.06$ 2,258.55
Physical Sales
Merch Sales$ 1,627.00$ -$ 135.00$ 56.00$ 56.00$ 28.00
Printful Fee$ (1,133.29)$ (43.97)$ (91.78)$ (46.77)$ (65.17)$ (16.92)
Shopify Fee$ (30.74)$ (30.74)$ (30.74)$ (30.74)$ (30.74)$ (30.74)
Merch Expenses$ (1,164.03)$ (74.71)$ (122.52)$ (77.51)$ (95.91)$ (47.66)
Merch Revenue$ 462.97$ (74.71)$ 12.48$ (21.51)$ (39.91)$ (19.66)
Expenses
DO Credits$ 8,042.78$ 3,123.86$ 1,074.70$ -$ -$ 0.34
DO Infra$ (2,285.04)$ (1,483.81)$ (1,459.07)$ (1,438.24)$ (1,315.69)$ (1,332.00)
DO Bandwidth - Overage$ (2,498.91)$ (565.35)$ -$ -$ --
IaaS & PaaS Tax$ (86.29)$ (78.94)$ (79.90)
Vultr Expenses$ (40.00)$ (40.00)$ (50.90)
Total Infra Expenses$ (4,918.92)$ (2,049.16)$ (1,459.07)$ (1,564.53)$ (1,434.63)$ (1,462.80)
Recurring Services$ (323.84)$ (389.75)$ (296.34)$ (585.68)$ (473.34)$ (443.34)
One Time Services$ -$ (250.00)$ (300.00)$ (247.89)$ (275.07)$ -
Domain Renewal$ -$ -$ -$ -$ (98.65)$ -
Charitable Donations$ -$ -$ (50.00)$ (1,000.00)$ -$ (629.55)
Totals
Total Income$ 14,177.00$ 9,510.00$ 7,675.00$ 6,016.00$ 5,131.00$ 4,088.00
Total Expenses$ (10,195.69)$ (6,742.22)$ (5,536.52)$ (6,276.74)$ (4,555.54)$ (4,384.80)
Total Profit$ 3,981.31$ 2,767.78$ 2,138.48$ (260.74)$ 575.46$ (296.80)
Stripe Balance$ 2,289.51$ 5,707.27
Checking Balance$ 9,281.91$ 12,601.60$ 15,940.30$ 17,981.84$ 18,035.83$ 15,283.62
Complete Balance$ 9,281.91$ 12,601.60$ 15,940.30$ 17,981.84$ 20,325.34$ 20,990.89

Migration away from AppSignal has been completed, and August will be the last month it is included.

Team Reports

Team reports now are aggregate summaries of the work being done on the Building Glimesh forum. Want to see your work here? Be sure to use our new forum!

  1. Product Development Team
    1. OAuth migration successfully rolled out, still dealing with some change management challenges, but it’s working well.
    2. Paid contract opportunity sent out to continue major work on RTMP ingest.
    3. Pronoun preferences pull request submitted, pending review.
  2. Design Team
    1. Prototypes and ideas for adding pronoun preferences to users.
    2. 10 new Glimdrop shirts have launched on the glim.shop!
  3. Community Team
    1. Successfully hosted GCTalks, a live event where our GCT connects with our community to bring them new features, updates, and answer any questions they may have.
    2. Implemented new policy for username reclamation.
    3. Started building a new process for emote guidelines and removing emotes that no longer represent our ideals.
  4. Marketing Team
    1. Previous marketing content is being recycled to help inform our newer community members.
  5. Test Twitter campaign for $207 to help promote our subscription model to streamers. 141,469 impressions and 36 new followers.
  6. Events Team
    1. 12 hour stream promoted for TheBusRide, supporting Extra Life on August 21s.
    2. 6 more events in the pipeline!

Previous Business

No previous business.

New Business

No new business.