As some of you have pointed out, I let the monthly reports lapse - combination of business, natural laziness and some ‘bored with saying the SSiBorg isn’t ready yet’… 
But a fair bit has been going on, and it seems like a good time for an update. If my memory works, maybe one every 6 months would be a better fit (hint, I might VERY WELL need reminding…;-)).
So, SSiW 2018.
What’s coming down the pipes?
The SSiBorg
Next step with the SSiBorg will be this year. In fact, it should be fairly soon this year. Ifan probably needs a couple of months or so (and I’ve just pulled him off the SSiBorg for one other thing).
Don’t worry - the very second there’s any sign of life from the SSiBorg, you will hear us screaming from the rooftops 
The one other thing?
It’s a brilliant idea from Iestyn.
A new approach to SSiW: the 6 Month Welsh Speaker course.
It’s not new lessons - but it takes everything we’ve learnt in the last year or so of doing insanely intensive residential courses - and it makes it possible for people to get through everything we do on the 10 day intensives (without having to pay £2000) - and without having to travel or book time off.
We’re going to be delivering it via a mixture of emails, the forum and live group video calls/broadcasts.
I think it fills in the gap perfectly between ‘Hey, here are some free lessons, fill your boots but figure it out yourself’ and ‘Fork out £2000 to come on a 10 day intensive’.
If I’m right, and even a small % of our learners want this extra level of support, it might make it possible for us to increase our levels of advertising and development very, very significantly. Fingers crossed
Ifan is just kicking off the coding work on this now - I’m building the emails - and I’m hoping we’ll be ready to launch before the end of January.
What else?
The SSiW Pivot
After a lot of VERY helpful input from you lot, we are full steam ahead on changing how and what we deliver - so that we don’t just get you speaking, but we build a complete road through to genuinely comfortable fluency.
This isn’t going to happen until after we’ve launched the 6 Month Welsh Speaker course, and looked carefully at the numbers there…
But I hope that by the summer at latest, we’ll be ready for the big switchover.
The most important point
EVERYONE who is already subscribing will be grandfathered in at the same price - £3.95 a month - for life (unless they choose to unsubscribe, of course!).
We will NOT be strong-arming anyone into a price hike.
The opposite, in fact - we’ve already closed the doors to the Growth Club - and those wonderful people who kept us afloat during a very challenging couple of years will - before the end of this year - have their payments reduced to zero while retaining FULL access to everything we publish, for ever.
Once we’ve pivoted, though, we are going to be investing every penny we can in creating new, useful, learner-friendly material for all our subscribers.
At that point, the price for new subscribers will be £10 a month.
And the more new subscribers we get, the more we’ll plough back into increasing the amount of content.
We hope, if we get this right, that we’ll be able to create a genuinely valuable extra stream of income for a range of Welsh creative artists - writers, singers, video and film folk, poets, journalists, all sorts of stuff…
Those are the big things.
There’s other stuff going on, as always - I’m trying to grab a few seconds here and there to get to a full model for an ‘SSiW for kids’ - we’re talking about doing something specifically for medical professionals - and we’re hoping that the 6 month course will go well enough for us to put some supportive cash into pushing on with Manx and Cornish and getting started on Irish, Scottish and Breton.
But all of this stuff is secondary to the big 3 - the SSiBorg, the 6 Month Welsh Speaker course, and the pivot.
Buckle up - it’s looking like a lively year…
