200k accounts 🥳 , Instagram automation win, and more
Slight change to our format this week as we try to present our updates more organized
Hello and Welcome to our weekly update.
The Scrolller team is firing on all cylinders recently, and we have a long update for you this week. If you haven’t already, subscribe to follow along on our journey.
User Accounts
198774 → 207987
We are finally breaking 200k accounts! We are 1/5 of the way to our goal this year and have 6 months left to start growing drastically, improving the rate of new account creation daily.
Hot Linking Follow Up
This week’s user growth is back to normal levels and looking back, the lack of hotlinking didn't have much of an effect. While its effects are somewhat visible in the data, when looked at in context with data in other days, it’s clear it might have had a small effect. Still, we have decided as a team that hot-linking is not our enemy and that it might even become a friend. Last week, a user commented on our weekly post that discussed the possibility of adding watermarks to hot-linked data. This way, we get exposure for our site even when viewed outside of our site.
I really like the above idea, but we are unsure if that will be okay since most of this content doesn't actually belong to us. In my head, I've tried to justify it by our hosting costs, not sure if that would hold up in a court of law. Does anyone have an educated opinion on this?
Pro-Metric Ads Update
We have finally made progress on a few pro-metric ads, but we decided to make them even better after getting some mixed feedback from the team. Below you can see our V1 and the new V2 pro-metric ads. Most of you are familiar with V1; they were focused on converting people to be premium and launched months ago. V2 brings better design and a larger variety of videos highlighting many of our features.
You can see our first try at V2 Ads here. Starting today, a part-time video producer is tasked with improving our first attempts by adding music and eye-catching animations. The video editor will finish work by next week, and we will launch our new version of pro-metric ads then. Since most of these features require an account to work, we expect this work to lead to more account signups and more engaged users over time.
Our full list of planned pro-metric ads:
Push Following Behavior (In Progress)
Push Favoriting Behavior (In Progress)
Push Sharing Behavior (In Progress)
Show off Video Auto Play Control Feature (Backlog)
Show off Auto-Scroll Feature (Backlog)
Show Off search functions (Backlog)
Show Off Community (Backlog)
Collect Newsletter Sign Ups (Backlog)
Show off Filtering + Sorting (Backlog)
Content Recommendation starts again
This remains one of the features that we hope will add a ton of value to our platform. The content recommendation project was previously put into the backlog because we lacked the bandwidth to accomplish this, and now it is moved into "In Progress" due to a new team member that just joined. He recently graduated with a master’s in computer science specializing in machine learning and has decided to help Scrolller. We originally got connected via a call to action for help a few months ago, and he is a long-time user of the platform. The power of the Scrolller community will always amaze me.
Road Map for Growth in User Accounts:
Pro-Metric Advertising (In Progress)
Categories Feature Update (In Progress)
Content Recommendation (In Progress)
Scrolller APP (Back Log)
Revenue
There is a lot of work going into our new payments system to ensure it is ready for the influx of activity generated because of the premium pop-up we are launching. Not much to show for this work, so going to focus on some of our product learnings this week related to decided when and how to show the pop-ups, so they are most effective.
Our goal with the premium pop-ups is to convert normal users into paid users. If we are strategic with how and when we show these pop-ups, we can convert more with less negative feelings towards the product. In video games, they will ask you to rate the game after completing a level or two. They do this because a user that has just engaged with the game enough to pass a level is engaged enough to leave a review. We are applying this same concept, so we need to study our normal users’ engagement levels.
For Favorite items:
Total user accounts on Scrolller with at least 1 favorite item: 95137
The highest number of favorites for a single user account:Â 81440
The median number of favorite Items for 95137 users: 13
For Follows:
Total user accounts on Scrolller with at least 1 follow: 74000
The highest number of follows for a single user account:Â 5178
The median number of follows for 74000 users: 4
For us, we are using favorites and follows to measure a user’s engagement with our platform. Above is some data for our user base. With this data, we can be more strategic with our placement and achieve a higher conversion rate. When we figure out our final triggers, we will share them in the community for review.
The median numbers are low for what they are, but now that we know the numbers, we can track them and improve them. We are mid-way through the Pro-metric advertisement project that will educate users on our platform about different features, including but not limited to favoriting and following. Looking forward to seeing the impact that this has on our user base when we launch.
Road Map for Growth in Revenue:
Refactored and improved payment system (In Dev Testing)
All user direct premium pop-up (In Progress)
Ad Network Mediation System (Blocked)
Social Traffic
0.6 → 0.6
Our social accounts are 3 weeks old now, we have added social media buttons to our menu bar, and we turned on our automation for Instagram all in the last week; the results are above. We can tell the social media buttons didn't do much for Facebook or Twitter, and we will assume that result was the same for Instagram.
Luckily for us, our comment, like, and follow automation have significantly affected our Instagram engagement. We are using the open-source software InstaPy (https://instapy.org/) to build our automation. The InstaPy tool makes it easy to automate your social media interactions to "farm" Likes, Comments, and Followers.
Our current algorithm:
Randomly Pick From Popular Hashtags we are targeting
Filter all accounts (max following/followers, min Following/followers), so we have only "real" users
80% of the time like the content
Of the 80%, comment on the image 20% of the time
Of the 20%, follow 80%
After 300 likes, sleep until the next day
With this algorithm, we reach 100's of accounts a day and have been getting 10-15 new followers a day. We are going to continue with this automation for the next month and if we see similar growth. Since we target real users, we expect that anyone who follows will continue to engage with our account. So long as we keep posting content, we should keep getting engagement. The early result shows that the followers engage with our content even after they follow us.
User Generated Collections
We are nearly done with our Scrolller Figma clone, which we are using to design our new features. Previously our new feature design process was unorganized and caused many miss communications among our team. The goal is to make it easy to know what success looks like for any new features. Next week we will have a couple of designs related to the user-generated collections we would like your opinions on.
Road Map for Growth in Social Traffic:
User Generated Collections: Create and share (Design Stage)
Facebook Automation (Back Log)
Twitter Automation (Back Log)
Road Map
This week
Payment System (Dev Testing)
Improve quality and user experience of pro-metric advertisements (In Progress)
Categories page for SFW collections (In Progress)
All user direct premium pop-up (In Progress)
Scrolller Figma Clone (In Progress)
New native advertisements (In Progress)
Menu bar update and Quick Access buttons (In Progress)
Content Recommendation (In Progress)
User Generated Collections: Create and share (In Progress)
Email Verification (Blocked)
Monetization Update and Optimization (Blocked)
Enhancements to Auto Scroll Feature (Blocked)