I have every generation of Apple Air Pods and Pros, and they are worth always keeping a pair with me.

I like the Wyze Noise-Cancelling Headphones a lot because they have an impressive Bluetooth range. I can walk anywhere in my two-story house and never lose connection. Same for my downtown office I can be 3 or 4 offices down and it never drops.

Groups or topics might work well. That way people can share, post, join, or read about a particular subject that's more in line to their interests than the existing firehose format.

Have you seen home.omg.lol yet? I signed up for a 10-year account recently because the app works well, and it was $50 ($5/year).

I point it out to you because it does an amazing amount of community building as add-on value which I think is brilliant. Not sure how many of these are relevant to WIP, but I bet reading their offerings might give you some ideas.

I can't say I'm a fan. I stopped using LinkedIn because off their creepy, "show me who was looking at my profile" feature.

I know I'm weird because I don't really use WIP for my todos vs. WIP'ing status updates as I go. So I'd be +1 for optional private todos but I'd never use it anyways.

Not sure if you have seen collective2, but they have an interesting model. Basically, think social media for trading stocks, bonds, gold, etc. Everyone's results are public so you can see how effective they are and then you can pay them a subscription to see the details behind their trades and portfolio. So you can pay to see how a real gold trader beats the market and other cool stuff like that. (note: subscribing to someone does not give you access to contact them.)

So it might be a stretch but it would be kind of cool if that existed for makers so someone could pay you to see what your Stripe stats look like through the app and some other level of status messages worth paying for.

It all comes down to the basic question: What makes you want to buy a book?

If I want to learn about the subject, I will buy the book or, if I know the author, support them. I listen to friends and acquaintances recommendations too, but I will never buy a book about a subject that I am not interested in learning about.

Assuming the book isn't self-published, I lean more towards audiobooks these days because it's so much easier for me to put my Air Pods in and listen after I have dropped my kids off or while I'm doing errands or walking.

But how do you deal with one-off broadcasts like announcing a new product feature?

My advice is that if it feels like a newsletter, I would probably treat it like a newsletter and use Sendy or one of the pay-per-blast services. That way, people can unsubscribe without your servers getting a reputation hit because someone can't be bothered to click the unsubscribe link. Once you get flagged by Google's mail servers, you can never fully get it back.

I switched off of Mailchimp after many good years of service because they changed how their "constantly-changing-noun-for-groups" worked, and our $30/month plan was going to be $199/month or $299/month. This made zero sense for a list of 3k to 5k people.

For basic sending, I'm currently using Mailgun for my projects and it uneventfully just works.

Or are you saying just keep charging the $20/mo like we do now?

I'm +1 keeping a paid plan. I'd experiment with pricing to see if that's a barrier. May factor in purchasing power parity (big mac index) since ~$200 does not scale outside of US/UK/Europe very well.

But make it invite-only?
How would #3 work without #1?

I think invite-only free accounts are a decent model to avoid SPAM. I have invited several but I think that leap from free for a month to mentally ~$20/year or $150/yr might have scared a few off.

If you have a distinct line between paid and unpaid features, then that gives people an incentive to want to pay you. I'm that way with Twitter too. I would love to pay them but not for what Twitter Blue gives me when I'd pay to never see an ad.

All three are kind of meh to me. I'd recommend #3 + #2 and skipping #1. I like #3 so that there is money coming into to help grow/build the website. I don't think you need to do free if you go that route, #2 makes a lot of sense.

If people are not seeing the value, maybe change up the pricing to $89 or $99 for the first year and re-evaluate your pricing for the next year if renewals don't pick up.

I would use GitHub's code search for gpt3 prompts and/or OpenAI to get you started. I have dabbled, but almost everything seemed to be API-based and most websites have playgrounds you. Not sure if you'd call OpenCV AI really but I have been working on several small projects to use it more and more. It's worth checking out if you plan to do any kind of vision-baed work.

I'm late to the party but I think it makes more sense to rename it. You could always follow up later with a [ ] checkbox or something to let people set that a project turned into a product but I wouldn't stress it either way.