Ad Block Mitigation Strategy Pays Off and How to Recover from Payments Issues
Not to mention our normal weekly update
Today I'm writing this from a beach in Puerto Rico. Work from anywhere is going to change every company if it already hasn't. I just don't see how anyone would choose to go back to the office after getting a taste of what professional life can be without the daily commute. Feel free to share their take on what the future of offices will be. I'm a sucker for good takes regarding the future of work.
This is the first post that will be completely open to the public. After a few weeks of building this content, I think we are ready to start sharing it more widely. Subscribe and follow along as we build a 100 million MAU product.
User Accounts
159223 → 169512
Our user growth has started to grow slightly and seems to be holding steady between 1000 - 1500 new user accounts a day. This is likely going to continue until we start to make a concerted effort to drive an improvement in the daily rate. I've listed the drivers for potential growth below.
Road Map for Growth in User Accounts:
Pro-Metric Advertising (In Progress)
Content Recommendation (In Progress)
Scrolller APP (Back Log)
Revenue
Our native advertising revenue is falling off a cliff, luckily this decrease is somewhat offset by our steady and increasing growth in our premium offering. Our main partner for native advertisements has not been able to deliver on their expected performance. They have explained that we can improve monetization by rotating our offers and updating the creatives. It is a bit ridiculous that we would need to do so much on our end just to keep pretty poor performance. We will start to update the offers and creatives as they suggest, but have already made progress in updating our systems to make it easier to update our advertising inventory between partners.
That progress has cumulated in developing an advertising meditation layer into the scroller. Now it is possible for us to split impressions based across our partners and more directly compare results and optimize for the best-performing partners. Expect positive effects on our ad-based revenue going forward.
On our premium revenue channel, we have seen increased growth from an average of 10-15 new customers daily to an average of 15-20. This growth has been mostly attributed to our new Ad-block mitigation popup. This simple call to action has converted well for us and we have currently set the popup refresh rate to be 1 popup every 3 days or so.
Social Traffic
0.6 → 0.6
The share of social traffic has not increased and perhaps is even declining over time as we get more traffic from search engines. We brought on a new hire and the onboarding has gone smoothly, you might have started noticing that a new person was answering the emails. Now that he is onboarding we can start working on our growth marketing strategy.
So far we have come up with a couple of solutions. First, we have many content niches that are likely to support small communities on social media platforms. Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Instagram are all potential targets for our growth marketing outreach. More details to come out next week about what our next steps are.
There is also this weekly update, which can be very valuable not only for our direct premium supporters but also for anyone who is trying to grow an online business. We have been successfully growing for the past 6 months by making real progress in our product. The lessons we learn and share on a weekly basis can be a powerful source of content.
Please share our new substack with anyone who might get value from what we are doing at Scrolller.
General Update
Recently we have been dealing with an increased number of issues with our payment system. Issues with users accidentally purchasing subscriptions twice while not common do happen. We apologize and will always go right by our supporters. That being said building a company is harder than it looks and things are often a work in progress. Your patience and feedback help us make scrolller better and ensure that it will continue to exist well into the future. We are in the middle of updating our subscriptions API, we'll try to prevent accidental double-purchase from happening.
While this will cover us for future instances of duplicate payments it does nothing to address the users who have had this happen to them. To solve this issue we have decided to go through every single sign-up and remove all duplicate subscriptions, refund any money that was gained because of this issue, and email the users to let them know this is all happening. It is not a process that is quick, but if we don’t take the time to do this we will lose our customer’s trust once they find it.
Below is an example of the email we sent out to our customers. The customer response so far has been very positive.
Road Map
This week
Collect Emails from older accounts that don't have emails
[Issue] Login Error - "Could not connect to database" at wrong password
[Feature] Update Content Reporting System
Refactor Gallery View/Infinite Scroll
[Issue] Users complaining that their favorites are not showing up
Combine auto-scroll and slideshow functionality
Monetization update and optimization
Refactor admin-panel to TypeScript
Improve quality and user experience of pro-metric advertisements
[Issue] Users complaining that their favorites are not showing up. <--- Educate users that NSFW content will not load anywhere until the Age Confirmation prompt is passed and the page reloaded with the cookie set.