We admit it—we still suck at providing public updates. We’re working to be better at them, but while our public-facing updates have been lacking, our updates within Submit have significantly improved. Today, we’re drawing from those updates to give you a public overview of what we’ve been doing and how things are going.
This year has been transformative for Submit. We’ve reached major milestones and rolled out significant features that have made Submit a fully functional social network. Here are the highlights:
In addition to these major releases, we regularly update and improve our existing features and roll out smaller ones on at least a weekly basis, if not more frequently.
One of the most significant milestones for Submit is the Frontend Rebuild, or what we call the SPA (Single Page Application) release. The SPA release of Submit is a ground-up, 100% rebuild of our front-end—how you interact with Submit. It’s designed to make Submit better in every way: faster, easier to use (though we still have plenty of work here), more convenient, better secured, and just as important, much faster for us to develop on.
Our focus is and has been on development. As stated on our landing page from day one, we’re in phase 1: core development. Yes, it’s taken us longer than expected for plenty of things, but we think that we’re starting to hit a healthy cadence of major releases here in 2024. We still have some major releases left; here’s what we’re focused on in the coming weeks and months:
We are very close with those first three items, though we’ve delayed Relationships a bit to make sure that the experience is something we can be proud of. As we work through these major features, we’ll start to shift some of our focus and energy to something new for us: getting the word out about Submit (something we’ve never actually focused on before).
Over the last few weeks, we’ve released a couple of features that have driven our user engagement, discoverability, and activity up. Submit’s user activity metrics have grown roughly 18% month-over-month for the last 5 months. In the last 48 hours since we released the first version of Explore, we’ve seen user activity explode over 400%. We’ve heard our users loud and clear: you want more ways to discover content, find new and exciting things, and engage with other folks similar to you. We’ll be continuing to improve upon Explore and expand it further.
Community development is a lot more than just software, and we are grateful to our incredible community who regularly participate on the platform and are laying the foundation for our future.
Yup, we still have a waitlist. We are slowly getting ready to get rid of the waitlist, but today it’s still a valuable tool in helping us manage growth, costs associated with growth, and the impact of major feature releases. The good news is, the wait time on the waitlist is almost always less than 48 hours and usually closer to 24. There are some exceptions to that if we’re in the midst of releasing a major feature, but after the recent SPA release, we don’t expect there to be any upcoming exceptions.
Please make sure you check your spam folder when checking for your invite!
First, Submit is free for everyone and always will be—backing is never expected or required. That being said, platforms like this are extremely expensive to build and run, and ultimately we live or die by the support of our communities. If you’d like to learn more about backing, please check out the backer details page.
With our Backer code system, these make great gifts too! Backers also get unique profile badges and achievements, and upcoming additional features. We’re always working on finding new ways to reward those who do decide to back.
If you do decide to support Submit, thank you ❤️!
The very first event in our system will be a Fireside Chat, livestreamed directly on Submit (you’ll need a Submit account to participate). This event will be a great test of our new system, allowing us to connect, discuss the platform’s future, and engage with our community in real-time.
Stay tuned for more details on the Fireside Chat, and, more importantly, how to start creating and sharing your own events. We can’t wait to see you there and share more about what’s coming up on Submit.
Thank you for being part of our journey.