Autoplay Updates + Cultural Changes at Scrolller

Scrolller Weekly Update August 25th, 2021

Intro

Hello and Welcome to our weekly update. This week's main highlight is the completion of development for Shareable Favorite collection for users, Roadmap for Designs for Exclusive features for premium users, Account locking categories resolved the user account creation drop, and Disabling Autoplay for users. If you are new to the newsletter, subscribe to keep up with our journey of building a 100 million MAU web application.

User Highlights

In this weekly update edition, we are featuring "RitzMenardi" on user highlight. He shared how it would be a good thing to have a category lists feature on Scrolller since it would make it easier to manage user content. We like hearing our users raise issues and challenging experiences they are having with the website. As we have mentioned before, our aim is to make Scrolller a great product for all users. So keep the feedback's coming! @RitzMenardi thank you for your contribution.

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To help us with Scroller Features testing, Go Here. We greatly appreciate your taking the valuable time to offer us feedback. Many thanks!

Only Fans and what it means for Scrolller

The hot topic for last week was OnlyFans removing all adult content... which they walked back shortly after going public with that bombshell. While their business model is saved, their reputation as a platform with creators is destroyed. 10,000's of creators overnight found out that in as little as 3 months their main method of making money was potentially going to be cut off.

The majority of creators I've spoken with have decided to continue looking for another platform that will let them host their content. This presents an opportunity for scrolller to offer new high-quality content and expand our monetization. Scrolller wants to step up and fill this gap for the original content creators by launching new features that will allow them to continue in their journey and keep posting original content while getting incentives for their hard work.

In the next newsletter, we will share the details of such features. Please let us know in the comments if this is something that Scrolller should invest in?

User Accounts

241043 → 246885

Account Creation Returning to Normal

In last week's newsletter, the team decided to take a more direct approach and decided to account lock the categories page again for a few days. As soon as the categories page was account locked again, we saw a clear spike in user account creation and now it seems like we are almost at the pace where we are at when the drop started. That means that our third hypothesis that unlocking the categories was responsible for the drop is validated and proved correct.

Impact on New Premium Subscribers

Previously we estimated that a drop in the number of users signing up had no impact on the number of new premium subscribers per day. But a study conducted by our data scientist concluded that the unlocking categories caused a drop in account creation and the number of premium subscribers per day as well.

Analysis of Premium CTA

Our data scientist also analyzed that the impact of the premium CTA may have been understated (the drop due to unlocking categories reducing it). Controlling for this drop in accounts, it seems that the premium CTA has been increasing premium subscriptions by 72%.

Unlocking Categories plan:

Now that we have the results and we clearly know what is the reason for the account drop. We have started to brainstorm on how we can keep the categories page unlocked and also not have any negative impact on our user creation. We are refining some ideas that might prove to be a win-win for both scrolller and our users.

Please let us know in the comments what do you think could be done to keep the categories page unlocked and not have any negative impact on scrolller growth?

Impact of Pro-Metric Ads

In the last newsletter, we discussed that in order to really pinpoint the impact of pro-metric ads, we want to evaluate it in terms of the dollar amount generated from conversion via these ads. The work on calculating this metric was blocked due to our team swarming to complete the Shareable Favorites. Since that feature is ready now and is in the testing phase, our developers can now focus on adding these important labels in Google Analytics so that we can measure the true impact of pro-metric ads in terms of the dollar amount.

Progress on Content Recommendation

Over the last week, we set up the evaluation and fine-tuning of the recommendation system. Unfortunately, the DevOps guy that we hired decided to not move forward with the company and now are looking forward to hiring another candidate. Anyhow team managed to run Spark locally and now the trained models can be loaded and saved successfully. We are now confident that the created recommendations are as accurate as currently possible. Before we can deploy the system we still need to assess for which users it is functioning reliably and what recommendations are most interesting to the users.

Roadmap for Growth for User Accounts

• Unlocking Categories plan (Design Phase)

• Pro-Metric Advertising (In Progress)

• Content Recommendation (In Progress)

• Scrolller APP (Back Log)

• Categories Feature Update + Unlock (Blocked)

• Scrolller Extension and Enhancements (Blocked)

Revenue

Premium CTA Popups + Notification

The premium CTA popups continue to be a major success as our daily number of premium signups has trifold and continue to be stable at 30+ new subscriptions per day. with an all-time high of 63 new subscriptions in a single day. In the coming weeks, we will keep experimenting with the copies to see which one outperforms the other.

Impact of Disabling Autoplay:

Last week the autoplay was disabled and set to only one video at a time for all users. It not only improved the load speed of the Scrolller but also improved the uptime. Disabling autoplay has been a beta feature for premium users as a data saver option. Our experiments resulted that disabling autoplay save up to 90% of data for a single user at Scrolller. Premium users can go to Account and enable the auto-play again if they feel the need for it. Our team is working hard to provide faster hosting for our premium users and the work is started on it a priority basis.

A/B Testing Copies for Premium CTA Popups

In last week we discussed how we decided to serve A and B copies to our users depending on their user's id in the database.

• All the users with an id that is an even number will be served with copy A

• All the users with an id that is an odd number will be served with copy B

Our end goal is to find out how much impact premium CTA popups are adding in dollar amount to the revenue so we can compute its success in a quantifiable manner. Our team was swarming to complete the Shareable Favorites. Since that feature is ready now and is in the testing phase, our developers can now focus on adding these important labels in Google Analytics so that we can measure the true impact of premium CTA popups in terms of the dollar amount.

Road Map for Exclusive Features for Premium User

In the last newsletter, we discussed what measures are we taking for making our premium community stronger. We decided to introduce some exclusive features that will make our premium users feel much more valuable. Our UI/UX designer took the task and started to design some mockups for how those features would look like for our end users. Some of the designs are as follows

• Account recovery in case of deletion

  All favorites follows, and Albums will be restored on signup again.

• Custom Charge Code

  Custom Charge Code (Statement descriptor) to reflect on the bank statement.

• Pin Protected Favorites and Follows

  Adding a layer of security so you can leave the Scrolller open without fear of anyone going through your favorites and follows.

  

• Download Button for downloading content

  Premium users can download content directly from Scrolller with a download button.

  

As you guys are part of our Scrolller journey. We would love to hear out which ideas you liked the most and which features should be included first.

Roadmap for Growth in Revenue

• Exclusive Features for Premium User (Design Stage)

Social Traffic

User Generated Collections Progress

Regarding the shareable favorites, we made great progress in terms of development. Shareable favorites along with sharable follows is now in the testing phase and we are refining these two features so when we launch it is absolutely bug-free and is ready to be used by end-users.

Testing progress:

A few issues were detected in the testing phase and the issue tickets have been made and assigned to developers. We are trying to get this feature out to our end users by the start of next week.

Progress:

• Shareable Favorites collection (Testing Phase)

• Shareable Following collection (Testing Phase)

• Leaderboard (In Progress)

• Incentives for top 100 users in the leaderboard. (Backlog)

Social Media Update

Our social channels are making progress, the same progress we have referred to as baby steps progress. Weekly reach for Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram was at 6,049, 5,157, and 8900 respectively. We are currently working on a social strategy that will capture both short and long-term goals that we need to implement and test towards helping us drive traffic to the website. Like a baby soon learns to walk and jump, we hope to progressively grow the social channels.

Once again, thanks for checking out our social media profiles. See the links below and help us spread Scrolller by sharing with your networks.

🔘 Instagram 🔘 Facebook 🔘 Twitter

If you can share and help us with any social media growth strategies that have worked for you, you are welcome and we'd love to hear from you. Looking forward to it in the comments section.

Roadmap for Growth in Social Traffic

• User Generated Collections: Create and share your favorites and follows (In Progress)

• Facebook Automation (Back Log)

• Twitter Automation (Back Log)

Team Highlights

Pair Programming at Scrolller:

Ten years ago, pair programming might have been a novel concept outside Silicon Valley. But today, it’s well known in technology circles, as Facebook and many other technology companies were built on it. Scrolller is a young, fast-growing company and is now adopting the idea of pair programming and has found that it not only improves communication but also the efficiency of work. The most important reason is that pair programming helps define the company culture, as it can help establish a sense of teamwork and accountability, which are critical for young, fast-growing companies. It boils down to the idea that software development is about people. It’s an endeavor that’s typically done best when people work together. No matter what detractors of pair programming say, it can’t be denied that it’s fundamentally rooted in teamwork.

The team has welcomed such change and is not only adapting but also enjoying it. We are hoping that pair programming will help improve team dynamics, Knowledge of this product, and productivity in the team members.

Team Updates

Here's what has been happening with the team this week!

Have been into product and dev testing to ensure consistency in finding any potential bugs. Specifically, I was able to test the shareable collections feature. Also been pushing exclusive features for premium users — Mannan.

I finalized functionalities for shared favorites and follows and successfully deployed them — Karol

I achieved show-off filtering, sorting as well as rendering and compressing all the necessary video content — Lavanya.

Finalized A/B tests which are geared to bring insights into our analytics — Matt

Well, I finally completed tidying up our code this week. Clean code is fast, easy to maintain, and helps us contain bugs that could easily bring us system challenges — Tim

Still working on improving and enhancing our user design experiences. We sure want the best UX/UI for our users — Marité

I recently joined the team and got to work. I was able to look into slow query logs and started working on fixing them — Nitesh

I also recently joined the Scrolller team. I was able to get started on back-end API and testing environments — Nick

Happy to report that after a rigorous set of interviews, I found some great people to work with and they've joined the team. I was also able to meet a few investors, and finalize exclusive features for premium users — Chris

The Scrolller Team likes hearing and always looks forward to any feedback you have for us. Don't hesitate to share it with us in the comments sections.

Road Map

You can share feedback with us about any of the new features below. Using this Airtable Form. Looking forward to your comments

Notice - Old Scrolller Turning Off:

The team has decided since all the features of the old scroller are added and enhanced in the current scrolller, running the previous version is using the necessary resources which can be utilized in the betterment of the current scrolller.

• By August 31, 2021, old.scrolller.com will be turned off

• All the traffic that is landing on the old Scrolller will be redirected to scrolller.com on the respective page that they're trying to access.

This week

• Improve quality and user experience of pro-metric advertisements (In Progress)

• User Generated Collections: Create and share (In Progress)

• Content Recommendation (In Progress)

• Turning off old scrolller (In Progress)

• Exclusive Features for premium users (In Progress)

• Categories page for SFW collections + Unlock (Blocked)

• New native advertisements (Back Log)

• Monetization Update and Optimization (Back Log)

• Enhancements to Auto Scroll Feature (Back Log)

P.S. As a reminder, subscribe to our newsletter if you are yet to, walk with us on this Building Scroller exciting yet challenging journey.

Also:

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To help us with Scroller features testing, Go Here

Until next time, happy scrollling!