Did I mess something up? 🤔

How is traffic and conversions compared to last year?

Are you using paid advertising or just SEO?

I would estimate with great certainty that the problem lies with the marketing, especially because you also have one-time payments. Do you track your traffic numbers and conversions? Maybe you can use this to make improvements in the marketing area (maybe even try out new marketing methods?)

A good starting point might be to compare the values in your marketing funnel with those of last year:

• Has the number of visitors to the site decreased? Where do they come from and where did they come from a year ago?
• Do visitors stay on the site or leave quickly?
• Of the visitors who stay on the site, how many go on to the purchase stage, and how many were there a year ago?

From there, it may be possible to pinpoint the heart of the problem:

• perhaps the site has changed and visitors no longer perceive the added value
• perhaps the purchase/registration process has become too cumbersome
• perhaps the site's traffic used to come from several sources, but this is no longer the case (advertising campaigns stopped, less activity on the social medias, degraded SEO, fewer buzz effects, etc.)
• perhaps the acquisition channels previously used are "exhausted" (if iCodeThis was known to small communities like Discord and Slack, perhaps the members of these communities who were the target have already made their purchases and the rest of the members can't be converted)

Hoping this is useful!

Google nuked a bunch of sites with an algorithm change around September of last year:
https://retrododo.com/google-is-killing-retro-dodo/

If a lot of your inbound was from SEO and your timeline looks similar, that could be the reason, sadly :(

You could also investigate structural or economic reasons for this. Are people less interested in getting started with coding now that the narrative is that AI will take over these roles? Is interest in coding as a career down with the carnage in US tech sector employment (see https://layoffs.fyi/)?