Dear members and partners,

We have lots of ground to cover since this letter is Saent's first partner update in many years. Still, I'll try to keep it somewhat short. 😄  

Topics in this letter:

• Saent's vision and mission in 2022
• Product updates (Lifeline)
• Product management partnership
• The Saent community and Find Your Focus
• Back to building in public
• Members and partners
• Tim's time

Saent's vision and mission in 2022

We believe the future of work values creativity, deep work, and balance. In this world, Saent is like Strava—a running and cycling app—for creative work. We create products and content that help you do the best creative work of your life through a rhythm of deep work and balance—more details in this post.

Product updates (Lifeline)

Some key milestones since the last update:

• We're about to start an overhaul of Lifeline's UX, its weakest aspect, in my opinion. I expect this to take two to three months.
• Despite its UX and no marketing, Lifeline has hit the 300 Weekly Active Users (WAU) mark.

• Downloads are up substantially since the beginning of the year, despite stopping our Google Ad campaigns at the end of January. This growth comes from opening up our community, running Find Your Focus, and doing App Store and onboarding optimization.

• We've passed USD500 in monthly revenue (from Lifeline) for the first time in January.
• Segment—a customer data platform—accepted us in their startup program, which gives us access to Segment, Amplitude, Customer.io, and other powerful analytics and marketing tools. For this reason, Lifeline finally has a solid analytical foundation, and I'll include more specific and consistent data in future updates.

Product management partnership

One lesson from all these years is that I'm not the best product manager. To let me focus on my strengths—writing, productivity, vision, marketing—we're testing a partnership since September with a party that would take over product management in exchange for equity.

So far, this cooperation has been pleasant and valuable. Our potential partner has generously shared their time and expertise, helping me decide what to prioritize. They're now also committing budget to the UX overhaul of Lifeline.

All of this is happening based on goodwill, without specific agreements or commitments regarding equity in place—a testimony to the spirit of the collaboration so far. I'll keep you posted on how this develops in the months ahead.

The Saent community and Find Your Focus

We've soft-launched a community and ran a focus challenge with over 60 participants. They valued Find Your Focus between USD100-USD200, so we'll explore how to offer this challenge and other ones in the future and at what price.

We'll further integrate these elements with Lifeline as part of the UX project, and I'll focus on expanding the number of challenges and other activities in the community in the coming months.

Back to building in public

We're returning to our roots of transparency. Like I used to do with En Route to Saenthood, I'll share as much as possible about our work in public going forward. This approach generates feedback and ideas and makes things like internal updates valuable as they double as member information and marketing assets.

Members and partners

I consider anyone who regularly spends attention on Saent a member. Someone might read our content, participate in experiments in our community, or use Lifeline—they're all members.

Partners have invested money, time, and expertise in Saent for shares.

Members and partners both contribute value to Saent—without one or the other, Saent wouldn't exist. For this reason, and with building in public in mind, I'll make these updates available to members and partners from now on.

Tim's time

Early 2021 I left my job as Marketing Director at KaiOS to become a content marketer at Animalz. It took some months to adjust to the new position, but I can do my Animalz work in 30 hours or less per week since the second half of last year. This arrangement gives me substantial time to invest in Saent.

This is about as short as I could summarize the past few years. As always, thanks for your attention if you made it this far. 😊

Tim