Development of SFW Categories, Update on Faster Hosting, and More

Scrolller Weekly Update September 30th, 2021

Intro

Hello and Welcome to our weekly update. This week's main highlight is the launch of shareable user collections, prioritisation of user experience issue tickets, pushing faster hosting for premium users one step closer to reality and content recommendations. If you are new to the newsletter, subscribe to keep up with our journey of building a 100 million MAU web application.

User Highlights

This week's spotlight is on all the users that responded to our call for help for DevOps Engineer. Our users not only sent us an overwhelming response but also they sent us very valuable suggestions regarding how we can make Scrolller CI/CD pipeline better and much more affordable. We want to thank you all for letting us know that we can rely on our users if we need any sort of technical assistance.

If you would like to share any feature feedback and contributions, don't hesitate to let us know. We greatly appreciate your taking valuable time to offer us feedback and support on the journey towards building Scrolller.

Go Here to help us with Scrolller Features testing.

User Accounts

269895 → 274234

User Accounts Growth

This week the artificial bump we saw in the user account generation was reverted back as soon as the login pop issue was fixed. This bump in user accounts really got us excited, but it was a poor user experience. We are exploring ways to get some of these benefits without the poor experience.

SFW Categories:

One of the most requested features from our user base was the categories page for SFW Scrolller. We are thrilled to announce that development for SFW categories is now completed. By next week we hope to launch it for our users on Scrolller for all users to try.

Our NSFW categories page helps to drive a lot of traffic to Scrolller. We believe that by the launch of SFW categories will have same impact and it will help in increasing traffic on the website.

Unlocking Categories Page

With the launch of SFW categories, we will direct our efforts on unlocking the categories page again for our users. Based on learnings we had with the last experiment of unlocking categories, this time we will strategically unlock the categories page so that it has a negligible negative impact on the new user experience while promoting account creation.

Please let us know in the comments what you think about how we can increase the user account creation rate on Scrolller.

Use of Pro-Metric Ads as User Guide

By tracking the Impact of pro-metric ads in the last weeks, it is established that they are very successful in communicating about new features with our user base. We have decided to create and utilise more of these Ads to introduce our users to the new features. This will allow users to fully understand and experience that feature. This will not only give more visibility to features in Scrolller but will also enhance the user experience.

The graph shows that on average 180+ users actively engage with the pro-metric ads every day. An engagement is recorded when a user watches the pro-metric Ad on full screen by clicking on it.

In the last seven days, no users subscribed via pro-metric ads. It is due to an issue with pro-metric ads not getting displayed properly on the Scrolller. Our developers are trying to resolve this problem as they think they know the root cause of this problem. After the fix is done and applied we will be able to see the impact of pro-metric ads again.

We will keep tracking the results and will share them with you next week.

Progress on Content Recommendation

This week our pipeline for content recommendation got completed. This means that now we can serve our users with great content recommendations according to their taste. The pipeline can now generate the SFW and NSFW content recommendations for any user on our platform. At first, we will start with content recommendation emails, but soon we will apply this to our website.

How it works?

Some specifics about the working of content recommendation pipeline are as follows:

• All users with a valid email address will be served with the content recommendations via email. We will test the effectiveness of our recommendations via email.

• Users’ privacy is the number one priority of the system, so the content recommendation produced for a single user is unique and will be sent only to that specific user.

• Content recommendation system analyse users’ favorites and follows and produces related recommendations for that user.

  • Users that don't have any favorites and follows will be served with random popular content.

  • Users with information get a selection of recommendations, based on the popularity of the content.

Challenges

The recommendation pipeline is developed but it still has some open challenges that need to be resolved before the general launch. Some of these issues are discussed below:

• Since the system is capable of producing the SFW and NSFW recommendations for any user. Scrolller still needs a preference control section on the accounts page. This will allow us to send the user only relevant content recommendations of their preference.

  • Users will have the ability to choose from:

    • SFW Recommendations

    • NSFW Recommendations

    • Mixed Recommendations

    • No Content Recommendations (Since we don't want to spam our users that are not interested)

• The pipeline currently has a small memory issue as generating recommendations for a lot of users at the same time create big data structures.

  • Our developers are confident that our servers are capable enough to handle those complex data structures.

  • If we had any issue with it we would break it down into smaller groups of users as it will have a lesser footprint on memory and processing.

NSFW Content In SFW Scrolller

We reached out to our users last week with a question about NSFW data sometimes showing in SFW recommendations. This issue is due to a large amount of data that has been mislabeled as SFW content. It will take time to sweep through and correct the labels.

The users sent an overwhelming response and all of them suggested that it is not that bad and we can have an option to "Report as NSFW" if any mislabeled content appears in the SFW recommendations.

We thank all of our users that showed their love and appreciation for Scrolller. They cared enough to answer our question. We are building Scrolller in the open and your valuable feedback helps us make important decisions.

Please let us know in the comments about what are your expectations with this new content recommendation system.

Completed Steps:

• Generate ten great recommendations for our users based on their likes for content recommendation emails.

Current Steps:

• Deploy the content recommendation pipeline on Scrolller servers.

• Create metrics for evaluation of success for recommendation emails.

Next Steps:

• Integrate the content recommendation system in Scrolller as a "More Like This" feature.

User Experience Issues

This week our topmost priority was to resolve any user experience bug related to shareable collections.

Scrolller's development team has been assigned with the task to resolve all the user experience issues first before we move on to the development of any new features. Adding any new features will add more complexity to the system resulting in degraded performance and more user experience issues. We want to focus on solidifying the base by squashing all known user experience bugs. Our developers are fully focused on resolving all the user experience bugs that are a high priority.

What Does Success Look Like:

• Make Scrolller experience smooth, fast, and enjoyable for end users.

Scrolller is on a mission to provide our users with the best experience possible and it is not possible without your help. If you experience any problem with Shareable Collections or Scrolller in general, please report it to us, and our development team will fix it on a priority basis.

User Experience Issues Fixed this week:

✅ Login popup on loading and navigating the Scrolller

✅ Enable Shareable Collection popup appears every time the user login.

✅ Fullscreen navigation: Shortcuts working while typing in a password.

✅ Error on visiting Favorites/Follows page without logging in.

✅ Incomplete link after the user has shared the collection.

User Experience Issues In Progress:

• Pro-Metric Ads getting displayed to Premium Users.

• Content tiles disappear while loading.

• The whole column stops loading if a video fails to render.

• Video playback failure

English To Russian Translator and Flo Hiring

Scrolller is a global platform with a user base from over 200 countries. A large portion of our user base is from Russia that makes up to 17% of our total traffic. To provide a more localised user experience to our Russian users we were looking for an English to Russian translator for a long time.

After seeing the efficient hiring process of Flo Hiring on our front-end engineer job post. We decided to contact Flo Hiring for the English to Russian translator last Thursday.

We are very pleased with their quick response and how they actually found out the best hire. They send out daily updates about where they stand in the hiring process and help us setting clear ETAs on the potential hire.

If your company wants to hire exceptional remote employees without getting sucked into hours of busy work, we recommend you reach out to them. They are currently in MVP mode and only work with companies via this link https://airtable.com/shrtHb5ffwxxhg4Up.

Roadmap for Growth for User Accounts

• SFW Categories (In Progress)

• Content Recommendation (In Progress)

• Pro-Metric Advertising (In Progress)

• Unlocking Categories plan (Design Phase)

• Scrolller APP (Back Log)

• Scrolller Extension and Enhancements (Blocked)

Revenue

Premium CTA popups and subscriptions

Premium CTA popups added a lot of value in driving premium subscriptions for Scrolller. Now that users have got used to it, we saw a decline in subscriptions which was previously seen on the launch of this feature. This week we are working on finalizing changes for these popups, as we expect this will help regain the attention of our users. We will revamp them in a way that they are not intrusive and gently remind users about the value they will get by subscribing to a premium subscription.

The graph shows the decline in the premium subscriptions with respect to when the premium CTA popups were launched. You can see a significant increase in subscriptions when the feature was first launched as well as the gradual decline in its effectiveness in driving sales.

Changes to Premium Popups

We have decided to experiment with the following changes and track the impact of each change.

• Changes in the design of Popups

• Changes in trigger locations and timings

• Changes in a copy of Premium CTA popups

Our UI/UX designer is working on the new Mockups for the new premium CTA. We will share them with you in the next newsletter to get your feedback on them.

Please let us know in the comments about what could be improved in the premium CTA popups to regain their effectiveness in driving sales.

Solution to Payment Processor Problem

This week we did very extensive research on our payment processor problem. We found out that we are not the only ones that have such concerns but every large online business goes through this while they are in growth phase, where they start to see massive decline rates or their payment processor bans that business due to various factors.

Once you start working directly with the payment processor all of the payment information of your customers is saved with that specific payment processor. You cannot access that information in any way and transferring that information from one payment processor to another may take a week. In this case, if you lose your payment processor you would have to ask all of your premium users to resubscribe to your service again.

• The global re-subscription rate is only 5%, which means 95% of your business can be gone overnight.

Data Vaulting:

• Leading online platforms to use a technique called payment information vaulting. Vaulting consists of storing your customers’ payment information outside of your payment provider, with a special provider called a Data Vault.

• Benefits include better management of data security concerns, reduced PCI compliance scope, and full payment provider independence.

• The user’s payment information is safe with a PCI DSS Level-1 Compliant data vault thus keeping your customers safe and keeping your business compliant with PCI.

Full Payment Provider Independence:

• Putting all eggs in the same basket could potentially put a business at risk. The same is the case with Scrolller.

• We are dependent on only a single payment provider**.** And if we get banned from it we will lose our subscriptions.

• We can use a data vault that can store the sensitive data of our subscription with a third-party vault. It will help us be PCI DSS compliant and we can integrate with multiple payment providers simultaneously.

• By using this method all of our subscriptions data will be saved with a data vault. This will allow us to switch the payment processor at will, without worrying about the subscriptions data.

ProcessOut - A Ready Made solution

• We researched on ProcessOut ****and found that it can not only store the customer payment information for us but also provides one-click integration with 80+ payment providers.

• It can easily integrate as a middle layer between Scrolller and any popular payment provider. It will save us the cost of development for building our own multi-payment processor solution.

• We can also control the flow of the transactions towards a specific payment provider.

• Since all of our users, data will be stored with the ProcessOut data vault, we can switch any payment provider freely, hence providing Scrolller Full payment provider Independence.

Next Steps:

• Meeting with ProcessOut to learn more about their infrastructure, solutions, and cost.

Let us know in the comments what you think about this solution. If you have any experience with ProcessOut do let us know how it went for your company

Progress on Faster Hosting for Premium Users

Our new infrastructure for premium users has been deployed on GCP. Our team is ensuring that the new infrastructure delivers what our premium users expect from Scrolller. This week our development team took the following measures to ensure we optimise on every front to make the premium experience smooth.

Front End Optimisations:

• Our team tried to use the WebPack to reduce the footprint of our front-end code. Introducing the web pack only saved us 10Kbs as our front-end code already has a really small footprint.

• We found out that on Scrolller, 6TB of bandwidth is being utilised every month just by serving front-end code.

• Our development team is working on eliminating any bugs on the front end that may result in increased load times.

Data Base Optimisations:

• Currently, our database is hosted on a bare metal server. The issue with the bare metal server is that it cannot be auto-scaled according to the load.

• Our development team has migrated the database to Cloud SQL.

  • This instance of Cloud SQL will only serve premium users, hence reduced the load on the database.

  • This instance can auto-scale according to the increasing / decreasing traffic on Scrolller.

• Our development team is confident that it will significantly boost the performance. To test this claim we are benchmarking the current Scrolller and the new infrastructure. This will give us clear results to compare and deduce a result

• In the next newsletter, we will share the result of these benchmarking tests.

Content Distribution Network:

• Currently, we are only using CDN to serve our front-end code as the cost to use a CDN for content on Scrolller is too expensive.

• Using popular CDNs we found that if we serve our content via them, we could be billed thousands of dollars per month. This is obviously not what Scrolller can afford right now.

• Our team started to research cost-efficient CDNs that have excellent performance.

• We found out one CDN (Bunny.net) that matches our criteria of fast performance and cost-efficiency.

• This week we will move forward with implementing a CDN for our premium users. This will result in a Dramatically Fast Hosting experience for them

Roadmap for Growth in Revenue

• Faster Hosting for Premium Users (In Progress)

• Multiple Payment Processors (Design Stage)

• Exclusive Features for Premium User (Design Stage)

Social Traffic

User Generated Collections

Last week we launched our shareable collections for our users. We are really excited as we saw over 1K user collections getting generated in a week only. The launch of the shareable collection turned out to be a learning experience for us as we found out what could have been improved to make shareable collections even bigger success. We are taking measures to make shareable collections even better.

Resolving Communication Gaps:

• We learned that there are many communication gaps regarding working on this feature with our end users.

• We are working to make the communication better on the following fronts with our end users.

  • Ensuring our users more about their privacy when they create a collection.

  • Communicating the benefits they might get by sharing their collections.

    • Free Premium Subscription

  • Guiding them on each step while they create and share their collection.

  • Video Ads for educating our users about this feature.

Leader Board as Discovery Feature:

• Our development team is creating a V1 of Leader board where we will display the top 100 collections, that users can access.

  

  In future versions (V2, V3) we will be focusing on turning this leaderboard into more of a discovery feature where our users can explore the user-generated collection based on their interests.

• In newer versions, we will allow users to sort and filter the collections.

• Scrolller will also use the content recommendation with newer versions where we will suggest to users relevant collections based on their interests.

Progress:

• Leaderboard (In Progress)

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

• Shareable Following collection (Blocked)

• Shareable Favorites collection (Done)

Social Media Update

Last Week in View:

Our social channels are picking stable growth with an increased number of followers. But we are still facing a challenge in developing an efficient way to build (and reach) our ideal audience. Followers don't have any value if they aren't engaged with our website.

Our overall traffic to the website slightly decreased on Facebook, which is a failure. We are working towards maintaining steady social growth and traffic to successfully deliver what people really like to see the most in our accounts and connect with them.

Instagram Challenges:

We also had a big struggle with Instagram's 2-weeks long limitation that interfered with our activity, which cost us a huge reach drop. Apparently, our Social media team was doing so many activities that Instagram considered them to be a bot. The team is now more conscious and will make sure they carry out activities in a more human way.

Now that the Instagram account is back, our team has come into action again and growth is slowly picking up.

Premium Subscription Give Away:

This week, we organized a giveaway for our social media followers where 2 lucky winners on both Instagram and Twitter will enjoy a whole month of the premium subscription for free!

We want all of our Scrolller users to enjoy our website in comfort. Even those that can't afford to pay. We consider that this giveaway could be a success or a failure depending on our users' interest in it. This is a powerful chance to try the premium feature, for free! So go ahead and join now

Follow us to not miss anything: 🔘 Instagram 🔘 Facebook 🔘 Twitter

Thank you for being our fans and followers on social media.

Do let us know anywhere if you have strategies that have worked for you on social media or have any valuable feedback so we can learn from them. Looking forward to hearing from you!

Roadmap for Growth in Social Traffic

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

• Facebook Automation (Blocked)

• Twitter Automation (Blocked)

Team Highlights

Team Updates

Scrolller Team Highlights for the week!

Nick — Set up new hosting architecture with auto-scaling CPU load features

Mannan — User experience redesigns and redirecting team toward the priority tasks

Karol — Working on resolving user experience issues. Also taking care of development of leader board

Valentin — Social media management & user support

Tim — Completed the tasks on content recommendation system. Enjoying vacations.

Matt — System performance analysis & metrics

Chris — Pairing sessions with the team, weekly team management & hiring for technical talent.

Have any feedback for us? Don't hesitate to share it with us in the comments sections. We like hearing any feedback you have for us.

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

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

• Faster Hosting for Premium Users (In Progress)

• Content Recommendation System (In Progress)

• Categories page for SFW collections + Unlock (In Progress)

• Exclusive Features for premium users (Back Log)

• New native advertisements (Back Log)

• Monetization Update and Optimization (Back Log)

• Turning off old Scrolller (Back Log)

• Enhancements to Auto Scroll Feature (Blocked)

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

Also: Sign Up To Help → https://airtable.com/shrrRkFqMSZBqF24Q us translate Scrolller to Russian.

To help us with Scrolller features testing, Go Here

Until next time, happy scrollling!