2021 Year End Newsletter — Our Goals for 2022

4 min readJan 3, 2022

Hello Original Glazers,

I hope everyone had a fantastic holidays and a happy new year! We usually do monthly email updates that focus on our community (Featured Cosplayer of the Month), platform (bug fixes & new features) and occasionally, special events and news (highlighting specific conventions we are attending or sharing coupon codes from our partners).

For this year end newsletter, we will break away from the normal format and discuss what we have in store for 2022 and answer some of the most commonly asked questions the team has received from the community. If this is valuable to you, please let us know so we can incorporate more of this in our monthly newsletters going forward!

Goals for 2022

The Original Glaze team has 2 major goals for 2022:

Release the platform to the general public (no more alpha!)
Build useful and fun features on top of the foundation we laid in 2021

We spent the second half of 2021 onboarding over 10,000 new users, fixing bugs and improving the overall user experience. It has been an absolute rollercoaster speaking with so many passionate glazers who have provided so much critical feedback about how we can make the platform better.

As a token of our appreciation, we will be giving every user in Alpha a brand new exclusive ice cream cup badge in the next month or so. Check it out below.

Now in 2022, we will focus on properly scaling our infrastructure to handle hundreds of thousands of users and solve the problem of covering the costs of serving millions of glazes to those users when we finally go public.

After discussing with the community, we will be rolling out 2 subscription tiers in the coming months to help cover these costs. The 2 tiers will be named ‘Pro’ and ‘Founder’. With Pro, you will have an ad-free experience and a few advanced features like video glazes while the more premium Founder tier will include all the benefits of Pro and give exclusive feature roadmap votes so that we can build what you ultimately want to see from the platform. More information to come on these subscriptions in the coming months.

If you subscribe in Alpha, you will keep the monthly price forever even if more paid features are added and the tiers become more expensive in the future as long as you stay subscribed. It is our way of thanking you for being such early supporters of OG and building it with us!

Keep in mind that the platform will still be free to everyone but for users that want a bit more functionality or more involvement, they will help fund the project for everyone else! We are a small team and if you feel that Original Glaze should exist for the broader cosplay community, we urge you to support the cause by getting a subscription or donating through Ko-Fi. Again, all proceeds to straight to server costs and expansion (our team will make no money until we go public)!

For our 2nd goal for 2022, we will continue to build more core features for all users! Here is a shortlist of some of the features you should be expecting:

Blocking
Email & Push Notifications (if you have the mobile app) for glazes, comments and other events
A brand new Explore page that is more visual and easier to discover content
Expanded shares so you can share your glazes with context off the platform
and much much more

Stay tuned…

Commonly asked questions & answers

Q1: Can I change my username once I have requested alpha account registration?

A1: You can change your username once you are have registered and joined the platform under ‘Settings’ at any time.

Q2: Will video be supported on the app someday?

A2: Originally we planned to support video for all users in the near future. After speaking with the community, we have decided that video glazes will only be available for paid users because most users wanted to keep the platform photo-oriented.

Q3: I am really looking forward to buying/selling wares on the marketplace. Any idea when that will be coming?

A3: Assuming our two goals above are met early in 2022, it is one of the bigger projects our small team wants to tackle. Optimistically, second half of 2022 is possible but priorities are always changing!

If you have any questions you would like us to answer, feel free to send us a note at team@originalglaze.com or join us on Discord. We will pick the most common ones and highlight them.