Launch of Shareable User Collections + Sudden Spike in User Account Creation
Scrolller Weekly Update September 24th, 2021
Intro
Hello and Welcome to our weekly update. This week's main highlight is the launch of shareable user collections, prioritization 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 Own3dcor3 for pointing out an issue with infinite scroll. Specifically, images seemingly loading only up to a specific limit. Thanks for your user experience feedback @own3dcor3. We're working on ensuring that all users have the best of experiences with Scrolller content.
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.
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User Accounts
262422 → 269895
User Accounts Growth
This week we launched shareable user collections. We observed a definite increase in user account creation, but the team discovered it was due to a bug after testing. Sometimes minor unintentional bugs help us understand the user behavior to a change.
Login Popup Issue
The issue was that the login popup started to appear on the first visit to Scrolller, and whenever the user tried to navigate to a new link or search something, it re-appeared. This issue didn't break any website functionality because you could close the popup, but it harmed the user experience.
Impact of Login Popup Issue
While the effect was a 10x increase in the number of new user accounts, it also increased the bounce rate of our users by a significant amount.
Login Popup Fix
Our main goal for Scrolller is the user experience and not user account creation. We immediately fixed the issue, and now users will not see that login popup every time they enter the site or try to search for something without being logged in.
Future Plans
Th increase of account creation to 2200 in a day is very exciting. A suggests that we should have a version of this login popup on Scrolller. However, the increase in the bounce rate translated to a loss of roughly 10800 users per day. So, an addition of 2200 new users accounts for a loss of 10800 doesn't like a great trade-off.
Our team is still excited about potentially increasing the number of user accounts. We will brainstorm how to create this experience that eliminates the negative user experience while keeping the positive impact of an increase in user account creation.
Please let us know in the comments what you think about how we can benefit from this popup and if it is something you might want to see on Scrolller.
Impact of Pro-Metric Ads
In the last newsletter, we talked about how our developers have added the necessary labels in Google Analytics. We have started to see some specific data about the return on our investment into the pro-metric ads.
In the last seven days, we found that 70 people subscribed via pro-metric ads. That adds approximately $140 to Scrolller revenue in just one week.
But this number matches with the number of users subscribed via the Hamburger menu. So our team is investigating if the data reported by the label is accurate or not.
We will keep tracking the results and will share them with you next week.
Progress on Content Recommendation
Over the last week, we discussed that the system generates good recommendations even if you only have one or two favorite items. There are still a few difficulties for users with little data, otherwise known as the cold start problem. To solve the cold start problem, we asked our users and worked with data scientists. We decided as a team to add random popular content in recommendations for the users who have little information at all in the system. The hope is we will eventually show a user some content that they enjoy enough to favorite.
In the process of choosing this random content, we discovered a significant issue with Scrolller.
NSFW Content In SFW Scrolller
There is a large amount of data that is NSFW and is getting displayed in the SFW Scrolller. Due to this issue, sometimes, the SFW recommendation recommends content that is NSFW. These mislabeled items represent another issue we will need to solve.
Leveraging Scrolller Community to identify misidentified NSFW Content
Currently, there is no way to report a single image as wrongly classified to resolve that we are adding a new option to our reporting system. Using that option, our users will be able to report any NSFW content displayed on the SFW Scrolller. Admins will have the ability to review and classify a single content or a whole collection as NSFW.
Open Question:
How bad is it if we recommend NSFW content to an SFW user?
Current Step
Generate ten great recommendations for our users based on their likes for content recommendation emails.
Create metrics for evaluation of success for those emails.
Next Steps:
Integrate the content recommendation system in Scrolller as a "More Like This" feature.
User Experience Issues
Scrolller believes that every time a user has a problem with the user experience, we lose an opportunity to convert that person to a premium subscriber.
Since we have launched the Shareable collections this week. Any issue related to that will be the highest priority. If you experience any problem with Scrolller, please report it to us, and our development team will fix it on a priority basis.
Scrolller's development team is currently investigating and working on these user experience issues in the queue.
Content tiles disappear while loading.
The whole column stops loading if a video fails to render.
Video playback failure
These problems are being worked on and will be fixed on priority. We want to give our users the best experience possible; therefore, before we begin working on enhancements, we want to create a solid foundation that is entirely bug-free.
Front End Engineer and Flo Hiring
Scrolller, like many other companies around the world, is dealing with hiring challenges. This issue is made worse because every new hire requires many hours of our team's time, which our team could better spend building Scrolller.
To focus more of our time on Scrolller, we have outsourced much of our hiring (except the interviews) to a fantastic hiring company Flo Hiring. They are a small motivated, and talented team working day and night to find a perfect candidate for Scrolller's open positions. Their customer support is constantly in contact with us and sends us informative updates on our active job posts.
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
Unlocking Categories plan (Design Phase)
Content Recommendation (In Progress)
SFW Categories (In Progress)
Scrolller APP (Back Log)
Scrolller Extension and Enhancements (Blocked)
Pro-Metric Advertising (Completed)
Revenue
Premium CTA popups and subscriptions
The premium CTA popup's impact on driving premium subscriptions has started to decay. We expected this behavior as our previous updates to this system generated solid returns and slowly reduced as our user base became familiar with the popups.
The decline in conversions from the premium CTA can be seen clearly in the graph below.
Premium CTA Popups
In last week alone, 16,885 clicks were recorded on premium CTA popups. Our labels recorded that there were no conversions from the premium CTA popup last week. We will keep tracking the conversions to make necessary improvements in these popups.
Hypothesis:
We started investigating what is causing this massive drop in the conversions and found that the analytics shows that the number of users clicking on the Premium Scrolller CTA on the popup is staying pretty consistent in the whole month.
This suggests that the users have got used to seeing these popups. These popups now require necessary changes to make them stand out to our users again.
Experiments to Validate:
Changes in popup triggers
Changes in popup Design and Copy
The graph below shows the consistent interaction of users with these popups over the last month.
We will compare this data with that of the Pro-metric Ads and will try to find out which one is driving the sales for Scrolller. We might want to add new pro-metric ads which will enlighten the users about the new features.
Payment Processor Problem
This week we started contacting the regular payment providers to evaluate if Scrolller is a high-risk business or not. Since we are only a content platform and not an adult entertainment website, we hope to work with those payment providers to secure Scrolller against any setbacks.
We are also contacting third-party PCI DSS certified vaults to store our customer data and support different payment gateways. This will allow us to remain PCI compliant while also avoiding the risk of losing our clients' subscriptions.
Next Steps:
We have started to lay out a foundation for a new NSFW experience on Scrolller. We aim to improve the NSFW experience so that we are not categorized as a high-risk adult business and can work with regular payment providers and high-quality advertisers.
Let us know in the comments what you think about our plans for dealing with the Payment Processor Problem, and feel free to share other payment processors you think will work well for our situation.
Progress on Faster Hosting for Premium Users
The enhanced premium infrastructure is running on GCP. There a several steps that need to be taken care of before we can launch to the public:
Database Migration to Cloud SQL
Front-end Updates (Reduce Load Times & Reduce Bugs)
Setting up a Content Distribution Network
After these last issues are taken care of, we also want to load test the new system before launching it for our premium users. The goal is to launch with 0 bugs and a dramatically better experience.
To measure how well we are delivering on a "Dramatically better experience" we have identified several metrics:
Number of failed tile loads per user session
Average content load time
Average number of errors
Time to first paint
Improve lighthouse performance index by 30%
Roadmap for Growth in Revenue
Faster Hosting for Premium Users (In Progress)
Exclusive Features for Premium User (Design Stage)
Multiple Payment Processors (Design Stage)
Social Traffic
User Generated Collections Progress
All the blockers related to Shareable favorites are resolved, and this new feature is launched for all our users. Users can now create their collection from their favorite content and share it with others.
Our users will see the popup encoring them to share their collections with their community easily. If you have not seen this feature, please visit your favorites, and you will be able to use this feature.
Blocker on Shareable Follows:
Our team is currently working on a complex query that is causing issues with shareable follows. Once that is resolved, our users will create a new collection using content in the following section.
Progress:
Shareable Favorites collection (Done)
Shareable Following collection (Bug Fixes)
Leaderboard (In Progress)
Incentives for top 100 users in the leaderboard. (Backlog)
Social Media Update
Our social channels are picking stable growth with an increased no. of followers. The top tweet on Twitter increased from 1,464 to 3,820 impressions, with total impressions reaching 77k from 42.5K. Facebook's reach doubled to 50.6k from 25.1k. Instagram dropped to 15k from 24k.
Instagram reach and engagement drop occurred due to a few days limit imposed on account activity, but it's picking up again. Luckily, our overall traffic to the website slightly increased from 0.41 to 0.43 percent. We are working towards maintaining steady social growth and traffic.
Check out our social page links 🔘 Instagram 🔘 Facebook 🔘 Twitter
Thank you for being our fans/followers on social media. Do let us know if you have strategies that have worked for you on social media.
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
Team Updates
Scrolller Team Highlights for the week!
Nick — Set up new hosting architecture with auto-scaling CPU load features
Mannan — Completed shareable favorites, resolving user issues, user experience redesigns
Karol — Successfully combined collections with subreddit collections on follows
Valentin — Social media management & user support
Tim — Analyzed the quality of content recommendations and added random popular content to the recommendation pipeline for users.
Matt — System performance analysis & metrics
Chris — Successful investor meeting, pairing sessions with the team, weekly team management pairing sessions & 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)
Content Recommendation (In Progress)
Categories page for SFW collections + Unlock (In Progress)
Turning off old Scrolller (In Progress)
Exclusive Features for premium users (In Progress)
New native advertisements (Back Log)
Monetization Update and Optimization (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.
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Until next time, happy scrollling!
Launch of Shareable User Collections + Sudden Spike in User Account Creation
I think there needs to be a switch to completely disable all NFSW posts
NSFW showing up in SFW feeds is a low priority in my opinion. If folks want to show their family and friends a slideshow of certain things that are SFW, they should be able to create a playlist that they have prepared and reviewed ahead of time. Any type of program that sorts them automatically usually throws the baby out with the bath water so I’m not a fan of even trying. Sure, keep tags and reset the ability to flag stuff, but that will never prevent 100% of the problem.