Faster Hosting: Failures and Way Forward

Scrolller Weekly Update October 15th, 2021

Intro

Hello and Welcome to our weekly update. This week's main highlight is progress on faster hosting, new designs for the leaderboard, and an opportunity to earn a free premium subscription on Scrolller.

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User Highlights

This week's spotlight is on "LatePigeon16" for providing us with great feature suggestions that will help to make Scrolller a powerful content platform. LatePigeon16 suggested introducing a new way to discover content on Scrolller by introducing a tinder style exploration of content where a user will be served relevant content that he/she likes and will not be shown any content relative to what he/she disliked.

Thank you LatePigeon16 for your valuable feature suggestion and we assure you that you will be able to see this feature on Scrolller in near future.

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 Experience

278959 → 284202

User Accounts Growth

Scrolller is committed to providing its users with the best experience. We believe that a great user experience will automatically result in an increase in the user base and hence account creation.

SFW Categories:

Safe for Work categories is now developed and in the testing stage. We want to roll out the SFW categories with our next release on Monday. These categories are dynamically generated from the content we have on Scrolller. Users will now be able to enjoy the content in specific categories that they really love. With the addition of SFW categories, we now want to focus on unlocking the categories for our users.

Scrolller Games & Chance to win Free Premium:

Scrolller has partnered with Coffeebreakgames to provide our users with a great opportunity to play mini trivia games and earn a free premium subscription. Our users would have started to notice a pro-metric ad explaining how they can earn a free premium via playing games.

Last week 121 users participated in Scrolller games. We are happy to announce that one of our users "Dipesh" has won a free 1-month premium subscription on Scrolller.

Congratulations "Dipesh", enjoy your free month of Scrolller premium. We are also sharing a list of our top 10 performers in last week's game.

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

User Experience Issues

Scrolller's development team is focused on squashing every bug in the system. We are making sure to set quality checks in place going forward so every new feature that is released is properly regressed and tested to make sure it doesn't impact any other functionality of Scrolller.

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 Scrolller, please report it to us, and our development team will fix it on a priority basis.

User Experience Issues - Investigation Complete:

• Content tiles disappear while loading.

• Video playback failure.

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

Investigation Results:

• Our team investigated these issues and found the root cause of all of these issues is the same.

  • One of the host servers that are responsible for serving the content has become tremendously slow. It is failing to meet the demand of the content, thus resulting in content not getting loaded properly on front end.

  • Our team is currently evaluating various solutions that can be used to fix this problem.

  • The team is working on these issues on a priority basis, as believe that removing these issues will increase the quality of the user experience on Scrolller tremendously.

User Experience Issues - In Progress:

• Pro-Metric Ads getting displayed to Premium Users.

Roadmap for Growth for User Accounts

• SFW Categories (Testing)

• 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

This week our development team was focused on investigating the issue with our host servers. The development work for implementing new design changes on the premium CTA popup is due next week. We have created new designs and copies so that they resonate with user pain points. The purpose of this redesign is to reduce the number of popups that our users currently get. We will only serve a popup as a solution to a user's pain point. This will allow us to regain the positive impact of premium CTA popups on subscriptions for Scrolller.

Solution to Payment Processor Problem

PCI DSS Compliant Data Vaulting and Full Payment Processor independence will ensure a consistent stream of revenue for Scrolller. It will also ensure that we don't lose our precious subscribers if a payment processor decides to ban us from their platform as they view NSFW content negatively. We reached out to ProcessOut for a demo, to understand how it best suits Scrolller needs. Since we didn't hear back from them even after two weeks, we started investigating similar services that will help Scrolller to gain full payment processor independence. We found out that "Spreedly" offers similar services and supports ready integration with 120+ payment processors.

This week we are evaluating their supported payment gateways. We will also keep looking for better alternatives for ProcessOut.

Next Steps:

• Investigate platforms that allow PCI DSS Compliant data vaulting with at least one supported high-risk payment provider.

Let us know in the comments what you think about this solution. Please let us know any better alternatives to ProcessOut.

Progress on Faster Hosting for Premium Users

Providing our premium users with faster hosting has been the topmost priority for Scrolller for the past several weeks. The journey to provide our premium users with faster hosting is full of failures and learnings. Let's visit what Scrolller has done so far for faster hosting.

Failures:

• When we first accepted the challenge to provide our users with faster hosting, our development team thought that using a faster server will resolve this problem easily. We hired a backend engineer that helped us to clone our codebase and deploy it using cutting-edge tech stacks as a container-orchestration system using Kubernetes, Google Cloud with auto-scaling and load balancing, and Cloud SQL. We spent weeks on these tasks, but when we compared the new architecture with the production, we found that it was only marginally better. We found that the root cause was not the hosting infrastructure but it was something else.

• We started investigating the bandwidth utilization on our host servers. We found that one of our host servers was getting slower and it was the main cause of breaking content on the front end. Our developers thought that since all of our ads are served from that host server, that might be the cause of high network bandwidth utilization and CPU spikes. We disabled all the Ads and monitored the performance again. There was no improvement, thus proving that it was not the cause of the issue.

• Our developers thought that since our servers are using HDDs as the content stores, They might be coming to the end of their life hence causing slower content distribution and CPU spikes. On investigation, we found that our HDDs were completely full. We disabled the scrapper and freed up some space allowing us to have some time to investigate the issue further.

Learnings:

• Everything is harder than it seems. We underestimated the challenge and tried to jump to conclusions very fast. We should be focused on finding the root cause of the problem before making a conclusion and start working on the fix.

• If we had proper metrics in place, we might not have wasted so much time in the development of new infrastructure as we would have known earlier if something is working or not.

Way Forward:

• Since it is established that HDDs are the root cause of this issue, our developers are spinning up a new server with SSDs so the most requested content is served through it. This will increase the performance significantly and will reduce the breaking of content on front end.

• At the same time, we are looking into ways to compress our content in order to reduce the data footprint.

• We are also setting up monitoring on our all host servers to make sure we get alerts if the storage is getting full or there is an issue with the server.

Hopefully, the new fixes that we are doing will resolve our issues with content loading and will result in significantly faster hosting overall.

Roadmap for Growth in Revenue

• Faster Hosting for Premium Users (Investigation)

• Multiple Payment Processors (Design Stage)

• Exclusive Features for Premium User (Design Stage)

Social Traffic

User Generated Collections

This week our developers are finalizing the enhancements in the leaderboard. This will allow our users to discover the user-generated collections. We are making sure we communicate properly with our users as we have learned that the success of any new feature depends on how you communicate that to end-users. Our Ui/Ux designer created some really eye-catching designs to communicate this new feature with our users. Since now Scrolller has hired an additional front end engineer, we believe that this added capacity will allow us to push these new features out quickly

Some salient features of the leaderboard are as follows:

• Users can see their ranking based on the number of followers they have on their shared collections

• Users can explore top-rated collections SFW and NSFW.

• The top 100 users in the leaderboard will be awarded Free Premium.

  

Progress:

• Leaderboard (In Progress)

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

• Shareable Favourites collection (Done)

• Shareable Following collection (Blocked)

Let us know in the comments what you think about these new designs for shareable user collections.

Social Media Update

Last Week in View:

Our team is focused on increasing the traffic on Scrolller from social media. This focus has resulted in a 22.4% increase in the traffic from social media to Scrolller. Our social channels are picking up steady organic growth.

Social Traffic Update:

Our overall traffic from social media channels to the website saw a considerable increase. This is the result of the new Hashtag experiment that our social media team is running.

Total Social Sessions 10,360 → 12322

FB, TW & IG Sessions 3890 → 5014 (22.4% increase)

Hashtags Test

Last week social media team started testing the efficiency of various hashtags on social media.

• The team posted 7-8 daily posts during a week with specific hashtags rather than generic tags.

• Specific hashtags resulted in increased impressions.

• Specific hashtags are proving to drive traffic to Scrolller successfully.

• The team is working on further optimizing these hashtags to produce favorable results.

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)

• Hashtag experiment (In Progress)

Team Highlights

Team Updates

Scrolller Team Highlights for the week!

Nick — Identifying issues with the host server, Setting up faster hosting for premium users.

Mannan — Working on resolving any blockers so team can perform efficiently.

Karol — Working on new host configurations, focused on removing Ux issues.

Valentin — Social media management & user support

Tim — Fixed the performance issues on content recommendation system.

Matt — System performance analysis & metrics

Chris — Working with potential investors and making sure Scrolller is covered in this growth period .

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: Leaderboard**(In Progress)**

• Content Recommendation System (In Progress)

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

• Faster Hosting for Premium Users (Investigation)

• Exclusive Features for premium users (Back Log)

• New native advertisements (Back Log)

• Monetization Update and Optimization (Back Log)

• Enhancements to Auto Scroll Feature (Blocked)

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Until next time, happy scrollling!