July 2022 Update

As anticipated, there have been some pretty nice developments since we introduced challenges a month ago. Monthly page views are up 61% to 57k.

We also started tracking events using Google Analytics: more specifically, we now measure how many games are played and how many challenges are created. This also allows us to better measure session duration. Wondering why?

A common user flow is to visit the website, play a bunch of games and then leave. Sometimes this would get tracked as a 100% bounce and a session duration of 0 seconds, which is obviously inaccurate.

As of writing this article, our session duration is exactly 5 minutes, which means that we reached our engagement goal that we set out for challenges.

Below are our goal completion stats since we started tracking them.

Also it was nice to notice that the blog page views increased from just 7 in June to 107 in July! So it appears that some of you guys like reading these articles, which makes writing them a bit less tedious :)

We also released 10 new gaming guides for people looking for advice on how to get a higher score. Interesting fact: a lot of people are looking for tips on “gaming the system” instead of improving their scores via hard work. We are happy to write guides of how to game the system when playing the Chrome single game (which is single player, so it doesn’t really matter), but we made sure those methods don’t work on our website, so as not to ruin everyone else’s experience.

We also experimented with ads to cover increasing server costs, but we ended up removing them because they were hurting the user experience and they generally just looked bad.

In the future, we plan on experimenting with other monetization strategies that won’t hurt the user experience (hopefully, we can find something that even improves UX — we have a few ideas in this regard, but it’s too early to talk about them).

In other news, we finally reached (and quickly surpassed) 100 members on our Discord server. If you’re reading this, you should probably join the server as it’s getting more active by the day.

In terms of marketing, we still haven’t done much. Our Twitter account is still empty and so is our subreddit.

Oh, and we got our first serious acquisition offer, which we of course declined. Given the amount of effort that we put into the website, we’re not looking to sell anytime soon. Fun fact: the amount offered kept increasing as we were declining each offer. While we do appreciate acquisition offers because they show that we’re building something valuable, we definitely don’t enjoy haggling, so if you’re gonna do it, give us your best offer from the start!

We are instead considering the option of opening ourselves up to sponsorships, so if you feel like the dino game is a good fit for your brand, reach out on Discord or via email (see the “contact” section in the footer).

What’s next? Our first immediate goal is to reach 100,000 page views in a month. We believe that should be doable within two months or so. After that, 500k and then 1M. We still think 1M is doable by February 2023, as originally planned.

Until then, keep jumping!