From my good friend (and early reader) Johnny Fitton, in response to Statistically Insignificant:
Hey man,
Not to contradict your zen approach to personal growth – but as a guy who looks at retention charts all day, yours is not bad!
Throw out April – you have a back catalog of things to read, inflating stats with so many people coming onboard. And then July is not over – just eyeballing it, you look likely to come in right around June. That’s a feat!
Customer / reader retention is mathematically less than or equal to 100%, no matter what you’re offering or how great it is. When do the bulk of people fall off? Immediately, which is more a fact than something you can solve.
(For perspective, from the people who have invested in many of the greatest consumer businesses ever – https://www.sequoiacap.com/article/retention).
It might be they don’t like the quality of your writing (you can work to improve that), it might be that your writing isn’t a good fit for them (harder to solve – but think about who might be a better fit, and how you might find them), it might be that they can’t remember to check your blog among a million other sources (email is one convenient channel – what are others? I for one would probably forget to check your blog if it wasn’t in my feedly and being emailed to me), or maybe they just don’t read much at all (then you’re S.O.L.).
Now on the personal growth side, moving forward I would focus on 1) improving engagement amongst your readers that do stick around (keep in mind this might get complicated to pull out as you start adding new readers, and your writing volume varies), and 2) finding readers who are a good fit (it will be interesting to see if this improves as new readers become more ‘organic’, rather than potentially just your close friends).
Putting this all together, it will be interesting to see how things play out amongst your ‘core’ readers – if they start to read and engage more and if reading your writing becomes a habit to them.
Near term, you might see some spike as you open the ‘floodgates,’ followed by another crash as many of them don’t stick around (and they might be an even worse fit as you’re not hand selecting them) – but don’t get down.
Hopefully as this thing grows (IF that is the goal) – and referrals go from ‘favors’ to ‘hey I think you’d find this interesting,’ everything starts to improve. Your writing gets better, both for you and for readers, and the right people start to find you, rather than the other way around.
Of course I hate giving paragraphs of unsolicited advice – but you opened yourself up to it when you said engagement is a win, and when I saw your melancholy reaction to that chart, I thought I’d let you know I disagreed!
-Johnny