During COVID the income for RunPee dropped to about zero for 18 months. We’re more fortunate than most businesses because our overhead is only about $250/month for hosting and such, assuming we’re not seeing any movies. RunPee is a family business, so we didn’t have to fire anyone, or close up shop altogether. We’re very grateful for that.
During COVID my wife and I rebuilt the RunPee app from scratch to make it look and perform better. Once that was done we started looking for work as mobile app developers and found part-time remote work. Now that theaters have reopened we’re back to a full schedule of watching movies, and working on the RunPee blog, and working on app updates, and customer support, and oh yeah, our day jobs.
RunPee takes up too much time for me to work full-time as a developer. But RunPee brings in less than $2,000 a month, which is far less than what I’d make if I just worked full-time. So basically, RunPee needs to make at least $5,000/month to break even with what I could be earning if I worked full-time.
We offered the option to subscribe to the RunPee app for $1/month back in October. Since then we’ve gotten up to 383 subscribers—as of 2022/04/15. That’s about $325/month income after Apple/Google take their cut.
I talked with a handful of RunPee fans and most of them agree that making the Timer exclusive to subscribers/Infinity Peecoin users was the most reasonable path to take. This way the core feature of the app—providing Peetimes—is still available to everyone, but the icing on the cake—the Timer—would be reserved for fans who support RunPee via subscriptions.
If we don’t reach enough subscribers
Don’t fret, we won’t stop updating the movies and Peetimes in the RunPee app. We owe it to our Infinity Peecoin users to continue to make the RunPee app relevant. If we don’t reach our subscription goals then we’ll probably scale back our movie schedule a little. We’ll always see the blockbuster movies, but some of the movies that don’t attract a large audience might get skipped, or won’t be added until the opening weekend instead of opening night. Conversely, if we do reach our goals I’ll have the capital to pay our Peeps more money and hopefully grow our team so that we can cover more movies, and hopefully add some movies in local markets like the UK and Australia. We might even be able to spread into non-English speaking countries. That’s our goal.