🏗 Increase in Revenue, Upcoming User Experience Upgrades & Resolving Issues
Scrolller Weekly Update December 17th, 2021
Intro
Hello and Welcome to our weekly update. This week's main highlights are the impact of the download button and its future with Scrolller, resolution of performance issues, and new upgrades to enhance user experience.
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User Highlight
This week's user highlight goes to all of the users who decided to support us by subscribing to premium. Your support is a huge encouragement for us.
We would also like to thank all of our users who reached out to us with issues that they were facing. It helped us in immediately resolving these pain points and making Scrolller better for everyone. We value each one of our every user as they are an essential part of Scrolller Family.
If you would like to share any feature feedback and contributions, don't hesitate to let us know. We greatly appreciate you taking valuable time to offer us feedback and support us on this journey towards building Scrolller.
Go Here to help us with Scrolller Features testing.
User Experience
323109 → 329457
Impact of Download Button:
This week Scrolller introduced a new feature on the website for downloading content easily on any device. This feature was exclusively designed for our premium users and was supposed to be adding value to our user experience. Instead, we recieved a huge push back from our users.
What Went Wrong?
The feature was working only 50% of the time as the content that was hosted from our partner’s website was not being downloaded.
The right-click disabling produced frustration among users as they could not open the link in the new tab.
On top of that, the performance of the website degraded.
How Team is Working to Resolve Issues?
Our team dedicatedly worked on all issues and have resolved every problem with the download button. It now works for all content on Scrolller. The major issue was with the CORS policy. As soon we had a fix deployed for it, the stats show that the download button started to work 100% of the time. Now our users can download any content that they love from Scrolller. The below graph shows how the download failure has reduced down to zero after the team fixed all issues.
Right Click Enabled for Users
The major pushback we recieved from our users was due to not being able to open content in a new tab. The right-click has now been enabled for our premium users. Nonpremium users can still use short keys to open content in a new tab.
For Mac users - CMD + Left click on content will open content in a new tab
For Windows users - CTRL + Left click on content will open content in a new tab
Impact on Premium Subscriptions:
Our valuable supporters welcomed the addition of this new feature and our premium subscriptions per day have almost tripled. This new incoming revenue will be spent on upgrading our servers, hiring new development resources, and setting up a globally distributed cache for all users that will be able to enjoy the content at high speed. The support we recieved from our valuable users
Future of Download Button:
Our team is working on further enhancing and refining this feature. We intend to add two new options for the download.
Ability to Choose Quality (Resolution)
Ability to Choose Format
This will give our users the flexibility to download the content in desired quality and format, that they can use as per their needs.
Site performance issues
One of the key user experience metrics is the content load speed. Being a content serving platform, it is even more important for Scolller to provide users with great performance and fast content load speeds. What good is a content platform if the content fails to load?
Reason for the increased page/content load time
One of our servers that were serving as a cache for Scrolller was flooded with errors. Plus our daily active users increased by many times. The configuration was correct but still, the errors were slowing down content served from the cache. Loading the content directly from our HDD servers takes alot of time hence, users were facing increased page load time.
Is Scrolller Degrading Performance to Push for Premium?
Since this issue is from the content server, every user, whether they are free or premium is affected by this issue equally. The premium users are also facing the same degraded performance. Scrolller never intends to degrade its own performance, In fact, we want to provide faster hosting to everyone regardless of whether they are free users or premium.
The below graph shows how page load time started to vary for all of our users in the past week. Now as a team is fixing all the issues the page load times have started to reduce. Our target is to bring them down to a max time of 500ms average page load time.
What Measures are we Taking to Resolve this Issue?
The immediate action that the team took was to resolve the cache server issues. As soon as they were fixed the performance started to return to normal. Now our development team is looking into setting up distributed cache in various geographical locations across the globe. How this will help?
The Scrolller will detect from which country the user is accessing the platform.
Scrolller will automatically detect the closest cache server to that user.
The content will serve from the fastest and closest cache to the user, ensuring faster content load speed and a smooth scrolling experience.
This will increase the infrastructure costs of Scrolller many folds. The incoming revenue from the new premium subscriptions will be spent on this new infrastructure.
Improved User Interface for Scrolller
Scrolller is working hard to provide its users with the best users experience. We always listen to what our users have to say about us and what are their pain points. We believe that resolving the user’s pain points is the fastest way to improve the user experience of the platform. On-demand from our users we are working on following new UI upgrades that will make Scrolller much more enjoyable for our users.
Home page redesign
Our development team is working on redesigning the home page for our mobile users. ~80% of our users like to enjoy Scrolller using their mobile devices. Some of the salient features of the new redesign are as follows.
Addition of new filters
Easy access to filters via the new navbar
Notification icon.
The login/log out button is easily accessible throughout the experience.
Easy access to Search
Addition of New Filters
Every user has a different personality and has a very distinct taste in content that they like. Providing the facility to our users to further refine the content that they want to view will increase the engagement and interest of users. These new filters are a further enhancement of what we used to have in the old scrolller. Users will be able to easily select what type of content that they would like to view. The whole scrolller experience will be reloaded according to that user’s preferences.
Ability to Hide Unwanted Content
Our team is also working on ensuring that users can easily hide unwanted content. This feature will be available to all users but we took it one step further and have tied these preferences to the user account.
If a user is not logged in. These filters will work but will reset once the session ends.
If a user is logged in. These filters will be saved in users’ account settings. Every time user login, the Scrolller will detect these settings and will only serve content according to these preferences.
These preferences can easily be accessed via the filters option in the navbar and also from the account settings.
Please let us know what are your thoughts on these new upgrades. Your feedback will help us make Scrolller better for every user.
Roadmap for Growth for User Accounts
Unlocking Categories plan (Testing)
Content Recommendation (In Progress)
Scrolller Extension and Enhancements (In Progress)
Scrolller APP (Back Log)
Pro-Metric Advertising (Blocked)
Recording User Experience Metrics (Done)
Revenue
Increase in Revenue from Premium Subscriptions
Since the launch of the last release, our users have shown their trust in Scrolller by subscribing to a premium subscription. Scrolller saw a 206% increase in subscriptions in these 5 days. The support and love of our users motivate us to do even better in providing an ultimate user experience. This newly generated revenue will be spent on making Scrolller better.
Utilization of New Generated Revenue:
Since Scrolller is supported by our users, it is our duty to be transparent with those who are supporting us where we will utilize their money. Following are the key areas that need immediate attention.
Infrastructure Enhancements
The hiring of new development resources
Infrastructure Enhancements:
To provide our users with the fastest content loading we need to upgrade our servers. Currently, we are running our storage servers on HDDs. The performance we can get from them is very limited and we cannot optimize it. The upgrade to SSDs will increase the content load speed. It will increase our options to further optimize the performance of our servers.
We also want to set up a distributed cache on multiple geographical locations. Our servers are currently hosted in Canada. Scrolller has users from over 128 countries. It is not possible to provide everyone with a fast experience only serving from Canada. So, we want to set up servers in many countries to provide our users with optimal performance.
These new upgrades will cost Scrolller alot of money.
The hiring of New Development Resources:
The development speed of new features is very slow on Scrolller. The reason is the limited number of developers that can work on the Scrolller currently. With the addition in revenue, we can hire more resources to work on multiple features. This will increase our capacity to work on user-reported issues faster.
The main feature that we want to develop is the Content Creation System. With that our users will be able to upload their own content on Scrolller and start earning. This will allow us to give back to users who are contributing to making Scrolller successful.
We also want to integrate more payment gateways so that our users can easily pay for the premium subscription that doesn’t own a credit card. Accepting payments through PayPal and crypto is our first priority at this moment.
We would love to hear your feedback on these priorities. Your comments will help us set the right direction for Scrollller.
Roadmap for Growth in Revenue
Exclusive Features for Premium User (In Progress)
Monetization Optimisations (In Progress)
Scrapper Updates (In Progress)
CDN for Premium Users (Investigation)
Multiple Payment Processors (Design Stage)
Social Traffic
0.8% → 1.2% of our overall traffic
Outreach Team Update
This week, our single-person-army outreach team keeps dedicating time to our NSFW channels & on Reddit which caused a spike in the traffic coming from social channels this week.
Social Traffic Update:
The outreach team decided to start tracking all their URLs, the team wanted better visibility Into how the outreach team is performing. With the new tracking URLs, we can see all of the traffic that this team is responsible for.
ALL Social Sessions 17,585 → 27,195 (54.6% increase)
TW Sessions 3,195 → 3,952 (23.6% increase)
Outreach URLs Sessions 19,798
Reddit Tests Done
The team started posting the "Scrolller version" of more than 50 subreddits which led to promising results, giving us hope that this is one of the most powerful outreach tools the team has right now, along with the NSFW content. So the team definitively needs to strengthen their muscles on it. These are some encouraging insights coming from Reddit.
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Thank you for being our fans and followers on social media.
Do let us know anywhere if you have strategies that have worked for you on social media or have any valuable feedback so we can learn from them. Looking forward to hearing from you!
Roadmap for Growth in Social Traffic
CTA Test (In Progress)
Implementing Reddit (In Progress)
User Generated Collections: Create and share your favorites and follows (In Progress)
Hashtag experiment (Done)
Team Highlights
Team Updates
Scrolller Team Highlights for the week!
Nick — Working on refining the email system for content recommendations.
Karol — Fixing all potential user experience issues, making sure Scrolller is up and running 100% of the time.
Valentin — Scored a perfect homerun on increasing traffic to Scrolller from Social Media.
Tim — Content recomendations are finally ready to be delivered to our users. Running final quality checks to ensure everything is up to the mark.
Matt — Had a surgery and resting. We wish you a fast recovery Matt.
Mannan — Identifing issues with last release. Making a plan on how to avoid those in next one.
Chris — Working on bringing investments for Scrolller development.
Have any feedback for us? Don't hesitate to share it with us in the comments sections. We like hearing any feedback you have for us.
Road Map
You can share feedback with us about any of the new features below. Using this Airtable Form. Looking forward to your comments
This week
Content Recommendation System (Testing)
Exclusive Features for premium users (In Progress)
Monetization Update and Optimization (In Progress)
Enhancements to Auto Scroll Feature (In Progress)
Scrapper Updates (Design Stage)
CDN for Premium Users (Investigation)
P.S. As a reminder, subscribe to our newsletter if you are yet to walk with us on this Building Scrolller exciting yet challenging journey.
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Until next time, happy Scrollling!
It would be really great to have the ability to hide specific posts. As I am curating favorites from a few specific subreddits, I want to be able to hide posts I have already seen (or even favorited), so I am only seeing new posts that I haven't reviewed yet.