🛠️ Subscriber growth chart script

💡 Use Case

• Draws one chart: subscribers at each month end, as a line, with the goal of 🎯 Reach 2,500 newsletter subscribers as a dashed line above it. That is all it draws and I have refused to add to it.
• Written on Tuesday 24 June, five days after 📝 Issue 42 - Your backlog is a stock, not a list went out and three days into refreshing the dashboard every hour. The script was the cure: look once a month, at one picture.
• It reads the export described in Quillstack export format and counts who was subscribed on the last day of each month.
• The monthly number goes into 📂 Slack in the System - 2025 issues and nowhere else.

⚖️ Pros & Cons

Pros

• Monthly points make June look like what it was, one step, and not like a trend.
• It follows my own chart rules: grey line, one coloured point, axis from zero.
• Running it is a ritual with an end. The dashboard never had one.

Cons

• Month-end counts hide the people who arrived and left within the month. After issue 42 there were some.
• The dashed goal line was motivating until November and faintly accusing after it. The year ended at 2,460.
• A chart of subscribers says nothing about whether anyone read to the end.

🔄 Alternatives

• The platform's dashboard: live, colourful and bad for me.
• A column of twelve numbers in the project note, which is honestly enough.