I'm here writing my Long form publication on LeoFinance.
I have no idea why I use the word publication instead of using the normal post, or article term for my Hive and Leo content, I guess I want to sound fancy, I guess I'm a moron for thinking that using fancy terms gives me some sort of allure, but I like that word, I'm going to keep using it, deal with it, dear 3 readers.
Anyway, I am here writing my long form publication on LeoFinance. I used to write al my money-related publications through the old Leo User interface, and my non-money-related pieces from Ecency.
I was never a fan of Peakd, and as a matter of fact I was a hive.blog user for a long, long time, perhaps too long considering the other options for content writing on Hive.
So, LeoFinance for money related content, Ecency for non-money content. It worked fine, I liked my routine, I liked my habits.
New LeoFinance user interface
Then, the new user interface came around. It was glitchy, it wasn't user friendly. I, being part of the team, forced myself to use the platform for long form publications and find glitches, bugs and ways to improve the platform, but it was hard as hell, I was actually, literally, forcing myself to use it. I can't imagine how normal users felt when the UI launched. Well, I have the numbers, I don't need to imagine.
In March, we had 60 content creators and 23 content consumers on LeoFinance in the long form side of things. April wasn't much different. I get it, the User Experience was not ideal.
Along came some updates and we are now hovering around 400 long form users, and 350 content consumers, almost back to our previous numbers before Threads became a thing on LeoFinance. Before Threads, we were 500-600 Monthly Active Users for long form content, we are now 1,300 Monthly Active Users.
Threads and the new UI made LeoFinance almost 3x in userbase in a matter of months, sweet.
But writing habits are a tough nut to crack
The user interface is awesome, the user experience for publishing long form content on Leo is flawless - and there's a lot more to come soon - and yet, when I got a publication idea I opened my browser, and instead of going to LeoFinance to write it, I opened hive.blog.
I realized what just happened. I was in automatic mode, I didn't think, I just let my brain and my muscle memory do their thing and it struck me: Why am I not posting this from LeoFinance?
Because if you want to change a habit you have, you must do it actively and consciously.
I can't imagine how hard it must be for other users to get other frontends off their mind. I get it, I get that migrating from using another frontend into using LeoFinance for everything might be hard, but it's a challenge we were fully aware of when we decided to rebuild our user interface from the ground.
We knew we would face backlash. It was obvious that some users would refuse to try new things, it always happens. We were more than ready for this uphill road, but we were also certain than once adoption started happening, it would mean a snowball effect, which is already happening on LeoFinance.
Writing habits are a tough nut to crack, but LeoFinance owns a nutcracker factory, and we're giving them out for free to anyone who wants one.
This post turned into something very different than what I was going to write, but I still like the outcome. I also love the fact that this is my second post in two days straight. Am I going back to my golden days where I posted one, sometimes even two posts per day? I'd love to say I am, but odds are, I wont, we'll see.