Content Recommendation Update + Diagnosing User Accounts Signup Drop
Scrolller Weekly Update August 4th, 2021
Intro
Hello and Welcome to our weekly update. This week's main focus was on Scrolller discoverability, developing user-generated content MVP (as shared in the last newsletter), and researching why our user account creation is still low. If you are new to the newsletter, subscribe to keep up with our journey of building a 100 million MAU web application.
User Highlights
We recently introduced User Highlights as a way to thank users who go above and beyond to help improve Scroller.
This week on User Highlights, we feature Bartek. He genuinely cares about the platform and always gives his valuable feedback on the features that we are developing in Scrolller. Recently, Bartek helped identify a problem with the Scroller auto-scroll feature and suggested a solution to this problem as well. His feedback gave us a good direction and knowledge of how our features are being used by end-users and whether they need improvements that will give users a much better product experience.
That said, we are also taking this opportunity to extend an invite for users who would like to help us translate Scroller into Russian. You'll be helping us expand our reach to a larger global community and economy. So, if you are out there and would love to offer your hand, don't hesitate to reach out and help Scrolller become a better experience for Russian users. We can't wait to meet you. Sign up below and Thank You in advance!
Sign Up To Help → https://airtable.com/shrrRkFqMSZBqF24Q
Another favor we would like to kindly request from our users is help with feature testing. The helpful feedback we get will help us know whether our product features fit their purpose in the first place. It will also help us know how we can better improve Scroller features for everyone.
To help us with Scroller Features testing, Go Here. We greatly appreciate your taking the valuable time to offer us feedback. Many thanks!
User Accounts
232486 → 235428
Hunt for the witch named as ACCOUNT CREATION DROP
For 3 consecutive weeks, our account creation has dropped. This is something that has taken a permanent shape, we decided to start a hunt for the root cause of this massive drop and resolve it.
1st Hypothesis
The primary hypothesis was that our site was down in the first week when this fall started, which might have affected the creation of user accounts. The consistent drop in account creation is much bigger than what we would expect from the site going down for some time.
The major problem in this whole scenario is that our analytics were down in the exact same week when this drop occurred so we are only left with manual tracking of the cause of this event. Two major items that were released in that week were
Email verification for signup on the front end.
Unlocking of NSFW categories (Previously Account Locked)
2nd Hypothesis
Our 2nd hypothesis was there must be some bots that were creating accounts on our website that might have stopped working because of email verification. Upon investigation, it was found that this hypothesis was also invalid.
3rd Hypothesis (Possible Cause of Issue)
3rd hypothesis was the unlocking of the NSFW categories page. On investigation, we found that the massive drop in account creation happened exactly 24 hours after this update was released. To understand it more, we started to look at the analytics to find a possible answer. Following were the findings:
16% of our traffic directly lands on the NSFW categories page.
~70% of that 16% are new sessions.
Previously as this page was account locked, users would have the tendency to signup to view this page.
Now that the page is unlocked, anyone can directly view it without having to create an account on scrolller.
A/B Tests to Validate 3rd Hypothesis
The intention to unlock that page was to put users’ experience first. We didn't anticipate such a huge impact on account creation by this update. The team has discussed two A/B tests to verify the hypothesis and decide on a solution.
Account lock the categories page again and see the impact on account creation. The team doesn't want to take a backstep on the decision they made on putting the user experience first.
Draw a relation between the number of signups and the number of premium subscriptions.
The team believes that the quality of people that sign up should be tested on this parameter. If the number of premium subscriptions remains the same even after the drop in new user account creation, we don't have to account lock the categories page again. The number of premium subscriptions added is more important in terms of the business model than the number of user accounts created that have less to no activity.
If anyone has a theory as to what is going on, please share in the comments below.
Impact of Pro-Metric Ads
After a couple of weeks, we are finally starting to display the new pro-metric ads in Scrolller. Educating our users with the use of creative pro-metric ads that shows several features of Scrolller and guides on how to use them in under 30 secs. After the launch of Prometric Ads, we saw that 437 users landed on the premium page by clicking on our pro-metric Ads.
Premium CTA Popups
Premium CTA popups are finally released and now users will be seeing 3 new types of popups while using the scrolller. We tried to design pop-ups in a way that they will not spoil the user experience on the website. We've also made sure that if a user ignores or dismisses the popup, all popups on the website will be disabled for that user for three days to guarantee that users aren't bombarded with popups.
Popup on N number of likes (14,28,54,...)
This popup will appear if the user likes multiple items on the scrolller. We calculated the average number of favorites for our user base and discovered the answer to be 14. It will appear for the first time on the 14th favorited item, and subsequently, the number will climb rapidly. The second popup will appear after 28 favorite items, the third on 54, and so on...
Popup on N number of follows (4,8,16,...)
When a person follows a certain number of subreddits on scrolller, this pop will show. Using the same method as with favorites, we calculated the average number of followers among our user population and discovered the answer to be 4. We utilized it as a starting point, and the number of followers would grow exponentially to trigger the popup. The first popup appears after 4 others. The second popup appears after 8 seconds, and the third appears after 16 seconds.
Popup on N number of views on Scrolller
When a user visits a particular number of posts on Scrolller, this pop-up will appear. To activate this popup, we initially set the quantity to 100 items anywhere on Scrolller.
A/B Testing Copies for Premium CTA Popups
We created a set of two copies for each type of premium CTA popup and we are displaying them at random to our users. 50% of users will see copy A, while others will see copy B for the same popup. We have added analytics to see which one performs better. Our hypothesis is that a better copy will convert more users. Next week we will share the results that we will get from our A/B test.
Please share your thoughts on our copies for Premium CTA popups.
Major Progress on Content Recommendation
We made excellent progress on the content recommendation side. We found out that we have excellent data for the NSFW content recommendation and it is producing some excellent 25~30 recommendations based on the subreddit. While the data for SFW is okayish and is producing ~10 very great recommendations. We used an algorithm that calculates the probability of two collections is liked by the same person. Which captures content similarity surprisingly well. The start of the recommendations list is very tight close to the initial content used as a start point, and then it slowly starts to deviate to other related contents that are not very tight close but still somehow relevant to the initial starting point.
By next weekend we expect to have a stable release for our content recommendation system.
Current Step:
Generate 10 great recommendations for our users based on their likes for content recommendation emails.
Next Steps:
Integrate the content recommendation system in scrolller as a "More Like This" feature.
Integrate a sexual orientation slider in the user account where users can set the desired preference and will be served with the content of their choice.
If you can think of any better application on our content recommendation on Scrolller. please let us know.
Roadmap for Growth for User Accounts
Pro-Metric Advertising (In Progress)
Content Recommendation (In Progress)
Categories Feature Update + Unlock (Blocked)
Scrolller APP (Back Log)
Revenue
Exclusive Features for Premium User
To provide more value to our premium customers, we are planning some exclusive features that will be available only for premium users. In this way, we will be able to provide better value for money for our premium users and also encourage the free users to convert to a premium subscription. Target is to provide base features to free users and then build exclusive options on top of it so that users can experience the base feature before they decide to unlock those exclusive options by buying a premium subscription. The design and MVP for this project will be shared in our next newsletter. Example:
Free users can create one shareable collection
Premium users can create multiple collections at the same time.
At the end of this project, Premium should feel like a great deal.
Roadmap for Growth in Revenue
Exclusive Features for Premium User (Design Stage)
Completing current Premium Feature Set (Design Stage)
Social Traffic
Social Media Update
On the social media front, we are making what we are calling baby steps progress when it comes to profile reach and growth. Our current fans and followers stand as shown in the graphic below.
We managed to reach approximately 3589 people on Facebook between Jul 26 and Aug 3. By reach, we mean the number of people who saw any content on our page or about our page, including posts, stories, social information from people who interact with your page, and more.
Reach is different from impressions, which may include multiple views of your posts by the same people.
On Instagram, we are up to 184 followers from the 174 last week and our profile reaches approximately 8908 people. Twitter gained 13 more followers. The total number of reach and interactions (retweets, replies, and likes) received for the tweets is growing but still very low when checking it against our social goals.
Generally, we realize that post engagement which refers to the total number of likes and comments received by either organic photos and videos for our social channels keeps going up and down. We are noting this down because knowing the reaction to different types of posts gives us the knowledge we need to create more content that our fans and followers like, which will then increase our brand, reach, and hopefully drive traffic to the website.
Currently, we are increasingly posting more content that our followers seem to like. We are also linking with different groups and pages that share similar content to ours so that we can expand our reach and henceforth, traffic and engagement to our social pages. The truth is that we will have to implement and test different social media growth strategies to grow our social and ultimately web traffic.
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. Let us know in the comments sections.
User Generated Collections Progress
On user-generated collection, our first step was the shareable favorites collection. The team is working at the full pace and we expect that by end of this week the development part of it will be completed and we will start extensive testing for that feature.
On the backend side, Karol has put a lot of effort into completing almost all the work and is currently working on getting the favorites from the user accounts now. We expect this work to be completed in the next ~2-3 days.
On the front-end side, James is doing an awesome job on creating the whole user experience and we expect it to be completed by this weekend
By next week, our users will start getting popups that they can now share their favorites as a complete collection with their friends, family, and on their social media directly.
Next Steps:
Shareable Following collection
Leaderboard
Incentives for top 100 users in the leaderboard.
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
You'll be interested to know what the Scrolller Team has been working on for Team Highlights this week. So, in their own words, here goes,
I'm working on enabling our users to share their favorites/follows SFW/NSFW collections. Since I'm doing it on the backend side you don't directly see my work. Hopefully, you won't notice my work, since it means that there would be some bugs in my code 😃 — Karol Lysik
I’m working on new UX/UI Scrolller features to inspire users to share their content and allow them to comment on posts in the near future — Marité Sganga
I have been working on making Scrolller a better value for our premium customers. So, I am designing some new exclusive options on top of basic features that our premium community can enjoy, and that will also encourage our free tier users to convert to premium. Please subscribe to our newsletter and share it with your friends as I will be sharing the details and design of such exclusive options in the next weekly newsletter for valuable feedback from our community. Here's a quote that represents my learning for this week: "Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing ~ Benjamin Franklin" — Mannan Sajid
This week I finished working on the 'Show Autoplay Feature' — Lavanya Sahu
I recently had a breakthrough in creating a recommendation system that can predict what content that you, our users may like. It will take another week or two until it is a bit more stable, but then we can start to plan, how it could benefit every user the most — Tim
What do you enjoy most on Scroller? Please let us know in the comments sections. We love hearing from our users!
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
Improve quality and user experience of pro-metric advertisements (In Progress)
User Generated Collections: Create and share (In Progress)
Content Recommendation (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:
Sign Up To Help → https://airtable.com/shrrRkFqMSZBqF24Q us translate Scroller to Russian.
To help us with Scroller features testing, Go Here
Until next time, happy scrollling!