To everyone who’s part of RailJournal,

Real time occupancy charts are live. RailJournal News is back. Both features you’ve been asking for are finally on the app, and I couldn’t be more excited to have them out in the open instead of stuck behind a policy queue.

But I want to use this post for something bigger than a feature announcement. We just crossed a year of building this together, and I want to take a moment to look back before I tell you what’s next.

A year, in numbers

When we started, RailJournal was a handful of railfans trying to build something that didn’t exist. A year later, here’s where we stand:

  • Monthly active users up 234% year on year, now past 60,000
  • Daily active users up 176% year on year, now past 4,000
  • Data accuracy holding at 94%
  • Platform uptime at 99.6%
  • Support SLA down to 6 hours
  • Our WhatsApp channel went from 0 to 3,600+ followers in under 8 months
  • 1.6M total website visits, ranked #19 in Travel & Tourism (Ground Transportation) in India, and #4,539 across all websites in the country
  • 2.89 pages per visit and an average visit duration of over 5 minutes, telling us people aren’t just landing here, they’re staying and exploring

None of these numbers happened because of a marketing budget. They happened because railfans told other railfans about a tool that actually understood them. That’s the only growth engine we’ve ever had, and it’s the one I trust most.

Where this is headed

I’ve said before that our long term vision is to give the Indian railfan community what FlightRadar24 gave the aviation world: one shared place to track, connect, and belong, instead of everyone scattered across WhatsApp groups and Telegram channels that never talk to each other. The numbers above tell me that vision is starting to take shape. What’s ahead is what makes me most excited.

The roadmap in front of us is full. Deeper real time tracking, richer train level insights, tools that let the community contribute and verify data together, and features we’ve been quietly building with generative AI that will make finding and understanding information on the platform faster than it’s ever been. Some of it is close. Some of it is still early. All of it is being built with the same principle we started with: this platform belongs to the community, not the other way around.

You’ll also notice a new logo at the top of this article. It’s rolling out across the app and all our channels soon, a small visual refresh to match where the platform is headed.

More from the Founder’s Desk

This won’t be the last of these. I want Founder’s Desk to be a regular space where I talk to you directly, not just about features, but about where we’re headed and why. Expect more of these, more often.

And soon, we’re doing something we should have done a while back: an AMA with the community. I want to hear what you love, what frustrates you, what you wish existed, and just get to know the people who’ve made RailJournal what it is. Details on timing coming shortly.

Thank you for the last year. Every login, every share, every message on the WhatsApp channel, every bit of feedback that made us rebuild something twice, it all went somewhere. Here’s to the next one.

Founder, RailJournal.in