We are seeing a dip in active users, which we attribute to school being out for the year and general summer slowness.

The dropoff seems to be limited to around 25-30%, and we are taking some active steps to address it:
1. "This week's top decks" autoemailer, which just started going out this past week
2. Blogger outreach initiative -- toolkit, including signup form, complete and active outreach will begin in earnest in the next 2 weeks
3. Focus on Haiku Deck for conferences and events, which was successful for ISTE and seems to be getting traction

This KPI is closely tied to the dip in MAUs -- we are actually encouraged that the dropoff is slightly less than for MAUs in general, which indicates that are active uses are creating more decks.

It's exciting to see that even though total social shares dropped off a bit, conversions have remained so strong that we're well over the desired 1:1 ratio.

Basically, every share of a Haiku Deck leads to 1+ people liking it enough to click "GET HAIKU DECK."

Our overall launch strategy is guided by two key themes: rewards and scarcity.

We will reward our community and our superusers by making them feel like rock stars and offering tangible incentives to feed our engagement cycle by sharing decks.

At the same time, we will create a real and perceived feeling of scarcity with a waitlist to enter the closed beta.

This will allow us to keep our hand on the throttle for optimal load and user experience, while also building anticipation and excitement for the reveal.

It's also important to note the constraints we're working under, with minimal external marketing spend.

We'll be focusing on and building on strategies that have worked well for us before.

We just rolled out our alpha testing program this week, and we can decide when to activate each subsequent stage as we assess user feedback, stability, and other factors.

In general we are shooting for our PR push in early September.

Our waitlist has actually been growing about 20% faster than we projected last time, so here's an updated look at where we stand.

We do plan to revise the current GET HAIKU DECK modal to direct users to either app store or web beta signup, moving the "request a new platform" survey collector to Zendesk. These numbers might come down a bit as a result, but at minimum we will have 5,000 people who would like to use Haiku Deck to invite to the closed beta.

Here's a snapshot of the platforms requested to date.

Nearly 3/4 of the respondents should be excited to try the Haiku Deck web app.

We are working with our PR advisors to craft a story that moves us away from pure product news.

We plan to include a small group of handpicked journalists in the closed beta, about 2 weeks before our official launch date.

We'll be going for both new coverage (NY Times, Huffington Post, GigaOm, The Verge) and reprises of cornerstone stories and features (AllThingsD, Fast Company, Lifehacker, Mashable, TechCrunch)

Separately, we'll be inviting select influencers to actively participate in the closed beta, perhaps through a series of guest curator features.

As we do our blogger outreach, we'll capture targets who might like to use the web version and invite them to join the closed beta.