For the month of September, starting now, we’re offering lifetime memberships for $300. For as long as both you and Nebula are alive, you’ll have access to everything monthly and annual subscribers get. No catch.
Back in April we did a test run of lifetime memberships. We were already planning on ramping up Nebula Originals in the second half of the year, and we wanted to test to see if lifetime memberships could be a way to front-load revenue and spend more on content development. We assumed that we could probably sell about 1,000 over the course of the month.
In reality, we sold just over 1,500 in a week. Lifetime memberships were so popular that we decided to pump the brakes, look over the data, and try to figure out what it all means.
The big question: would this cannibalize ongoing revenue? Logically we knew we were playing a game of balancing revenue against cash, but the exact implications are important. To our surprise, over 50% of the people who purchased lifetime memberships were brand new customers. Of the folks who were switching, less than half were direct subscribers. Even more surprisingly, we actually saw monthly and annual subscriptions increase.
Lifetime memberships are a net positive in every way.
The only thing we’re changing this time is the price point. $300 more fairly represents the long-term value of Nebula without cannibalizing our revenue. If that’s not worth it for you, we totally understand. Lifetime isn’t intended to be the best short-term value. You’ll have all month to decide if this is right for you. If not, we’ll probably do another round eventually. No guarantees on what the price will look like if or when we do, though.
Last time, despite spelling out our intentions, we saw some well-intentioned-but-misguided speculation that this must mean some kind of trouble. Nope. We just want to build bigger things without losing autonomy.
Our primary focus right now is increasing Nebula Originals budgets. We wanted to ensure a balance between paying the creators (one third of the money goes to whichever creator whose code you used when you came in) and building amazing new things. There are other ways to get this money. The most traditional path would be to go take funding. Venture capitalists hit us up constantly. We don’t want to do that. We’re much more interested in building this with you.
