I recently questioned myself a lot how to grow WDRL and make this non-profit side project a bit more sustainable. At the end of 2014, 1 ½ years after its foundation I want to share a little bit more about it.

But first, I want to thank all my supporters, readers and all the people who wrote the stuff I’m linking to each week. You’re all amazing!

I wanted to change something

A few months ago, after more than a year spending many hours a month on this project, I recognized that this project as it was isn’t sustainable and I might not be able to continue my work on it in future if I don’t change something.

What I invest into WDRL

To figure out what I did and what to change I needed to do an anaysis of the current amount of work. Back then I counted about 5hrs per week spending on curating the content. That means re-reading the articles and decide if they fit into the list, sorting out articles, finding new content for sections that haven’t enough articles yet, writing the letter. It also means writing it for online, then converting all the links with goo.gl for the Newsletter service so it isn’t treated as spam (hopefully), send tests, review, send the email out and publish the new issue online, on twitter, etc.

Additionally I usually spend 1hr per month working on the website (mostly fixing stuff, reviewing issues for broken links, etc.) and 3hrs in communication (Twitter and replying to emails).

That makes around 25 hours a month I am investing into this project.

Money-wise I currently invest around 10 EUR per month for the domain and hosting. As soon as I hit 5000 subscribers I need to either search a sponsor for a newsletter service or need to pay at least around 80EUR per month for the service. This actually costs me money.

Seeing these numbers clearly showed me that this won’t work forever.

Make it sustainable

The first thing everyone thinks about when trying to make money from something ‘free’ is advertising. But there are a couple of reasons why I don’t like it on my project:

• I don’t have good statistics on my readers (TinyLetter doesn’t track much and I don’t want for privacy reasons)
• I don’t like having general ads in my front-end related letter
• I don’t have many subscribers (regarding what advertising companies say)
• I don’t like having ads in a high quality product myself

So I thought about other ways to get some money in. I added GratiPay and Flattr to the project to let people support me. Flattr is used by some people to support me but is making about 2-3EUR per month which is nearly nothing. GratiPay instead works better since I added clear statements about the costs on the website.

I now receive 19EUR per week from GratiPay, making 76 EUR a month (excluding Paypal costs to get the money). Adding the donation from Flattr and Bitcoin (which doesn’t make very much at the moment) this makes roughly 80EUR per month. This would still not cover my fixed costs when I need to pay for a Mailchimp account. But it’s a start and I’m glad that I could make the project nearly a not-loss project in only a few months.

The remaining problem

The biggest problem remains. With so many subscribers (for me 4.7k is incredibly much!) I have 12 regular supporters at the moment (GratiPay shares the total amount of weekly supporters), adding 3-4 irregular supporters who donate via Flattr or Bitcoin.

This means 0.31% of my subscribers currently support this project with money.

0.10EUR per month from each reader (only newsletter subscribers) would even pay ⅓ of my work time on the project.

0.50 EUR per month by each I could cover my work time and all expenses for services with my regular hourly rate so it would be completely sustainable business.

I know it will never happen that everyone pays for it but this calculation shows how incredibly low the amount would be if more people support such projects.

Start giving your help

This is not a crowd-funding, this is not the demand to give me money. This is a plea to you: If you profit from a service, from a resource, give back. Sometimes this can mean contributing*, sometimes this means money**. Whatever it is—if you love something, support it.

Finally, this doesn’t only apply to WDRL, it does to so many other services made by people like you and me.

Thanks for reading, please give me feedback (via Email or twitter) and enjoy Christmas holidays! ♥

—Anselm