Building a +100 million MAU application
or working on something you love and finding validation through your users
Hello and welcome to this week’s Scrolller update. For a long time, I've been tinkering with the idea of building something in the open, and given that I've recently resigned from my daily position at Yodo1 I figured now I would have enough time to actually write these updates things down.
If you are getting this you are either working at scrolller, have expressed interest in keeping up to date on scrolller, or you are a premium subscriber that supports us. Thanks all around to everyone on that list. You guys make Scrolller possible.
This is likely one of the first times you might have seen this type of document. Mine are usually broken down into KPI updates, Business Updates, Questions, and calls to action. This is a living document and I encourage you to add content where you feel it is necessary. That helps make the document a springboard for new projects and initiatives, it will also help us keep the majority of our work asynchronous.
Keep up to date on our progress by subscribing down below.
User Accounts (77,121→102,664)
There are several things that we changed in order to boost the number of user accounts this week. We were able to add 24,000 users over the last 4 weeks.
The first bump is from when we added a "Login" button to the front of the website, which had the effect of boosting the conversion rate of our "login" goal by 80%. It also has boosted the conversion rate of the "Create Account" goal.
After removing the categories feature we received a lot of emails from users asking us to add it back. Eventually, we added this feature back, but in order to boost user accounts, we made it so only those logged in would have access.
Overall we have 5x the number of user accounts being created on any given day.
This week I'll be working on mapping out the idea for an Omni bar that will always appear at the bottom of the screen to incentivize our SEO traffic to explore the rest of the site.
Revenue
This week our ARPDAU is down from what was reported on the slide deck, but this was expected since that number was an estimation. Now that we have had some time to collect data we can get a reliable measurement of ARPDAU. You can see the breakdown of where revenue came from by clicking the link.
Premium scrolller is bringing in around $780 a month in recurring revenue. Not as high as we hoped, but this is still day one. This MRR will continue to grow as long as we make a compelling premium experience. Advertising revenue is stable but still very low given our traffic.
Lukazs is currently working on improving the advertising system such that we will get more control of the distribution of advertisers. The goal is to monitor ECPM and prioritize AD networks that offer the highest payout.
We have also started the process of cleaning our front page of references to NSFW content in order to try to join tier 1 ad networks. The CPM (cost per milli) that we would be able to get with those platforms will help improve our monetization.
Social Traffic
We recently updated the website so it is easier to share content from scrolller on to the most popular platforms. This hasn't had an impact on the frequency of sharing and our social traffic continues to below. My hypothesis is that people are not quick to share porn and since most of our traffic is still in porn we don't get a lot of sharing from that.
We might need to try highlighting the social sharing function. We can have an outline this week. Hopefully, we will see a boost in shares, if not then we need to go back to the drawing board.
General Update
Scrolller is building a sustainable business with its recent investments into a premium system and further improvements meant to maximize its main goals, but we are still months away from break-even. We are going to need to experiment, optimize, and build to reach that.
We need to raise money for two reasons
First is we need to hire a great team that can work together and builds towards our Scroller's success. Those on our team show great promise, but I've always been able to build a great team as long as the team can hire and fire fast. Hiring is not cheap.
The executive team at scrolller is lacking key skills and can’t pay for it. Investors offer us access to a valuable network of resources that we can utilize usually for reduced or free
Call to Actions
If your reading this, congrats you made it to the end! The Scrolller team is made up of users who love the application, if you would like to continue with our journey please subscribe down below and share our update with those who you think would be interested.