Launching New Social Media Accounts and how to build a customer-obsessed company
Hint it starts by listening to customers and treating them as a valuable part of your businesss
Hello and welcome to our weekly update. If you're just seeing this for the first time take some time to subscribe and follow our startup story.
For the last two weeks, we haven't been able to launch new updates to the site. Being a small company with modest revenues we can't necessarily afford to have all of the software engineers needed to support and keep up a site with the traffic that Scrolller has. We have needed to make sacrifices in order to make it work, but these have caused us issues recently. Mostly having to do with the lack of expertise in DevOps.
Right now our automated deployment doesn't work very well (blocking future updates), our server infrastructure is very optimized but we don't have the skills to update it, and we can't offer better hosting because no one on the team understands it well enough.
All this points to us needing to find outside help! We are looking for someone to join the Scrolller team and help with our DevOps and Hosting. What does success look like for a potential partner?
The successful candidate will work together with our software development team to automate our deployment and server infrastructure. Enabling our team to focus on software development and less on keeping the website up and performant.
Our website is a single-page web application built using React and TypeScript. Our back-end hosting system is built using Kotlin (Java) and runs on 4 bare metal servers. Enabling us to host and serve our 6.7 million MAU user base for $200/month. It would be interesting to explore what are our other options are in terms of hosting. We are open to systems that offer better performance for our users at higher per-user costs.
We are looking for people we can work with for the long term. Looking forward to hearing from you and if you decide to reach out and help us.
If you or someone you know can help please reach out to us at contact@scrolller.com
User Accounts
169512 → 179923
Content recommendation is coming along, we recently updated what data we store about user-content interactions in preparation for us launching our own 'for you' page. The team wishes it had more to show you at this time, but we are not at the point where we have a working MVP. We also can't launch these changes until we find someone to help without deployment and hosting issues.
Road Map for Growth in User Accounts:
Pro-Metric Advertising (In Progress)
Content Recommendation (In Progress)
Scrolller APP (Back Log)
Revenue
Ad revenue is rebounding after a slow week and our premium subscription channel is continuing its steady growth. Wish we could offer a more substantial update than this, but a lot of the changes we have been making recently are refactoring parts of the codebase that the current team didn't really understand and that were built very quickly.
Our updates to the subscription page are a perfect example of this. It was built poorly, which caused users to get charged multiple times. This subscription page was built using ruby on rails, by a teammate who disappeared recently (Working with a remote team makes it easy for people to just slip in and out). He was the only one who wrote ruby on rails and the rest of the site is built using React! This refactoring work isn't very visible, but it needed to fix our past mistakes and get us ready for Scrolller V3.
Social Traffic
0.6 → 0.6
Obviously, the lack of movement on this number is pretty frustrating for us, but we haven't been doing much about it until now!
After some training, our new hire has started getting to work on building our social media presence.
We launched accounts on:
The goal is to post some of the best content and get others excited about what we are doing. We could use your help. Please follow our accounts and engage with the content we share. Starting these accounts is just step 1 in our plan to improve our social traffic metric. Another way you can help us by sharing this post on your social media accounts.
General Update
The Scrolller team really believes that product success depends on a great relationship with customers. A strong relationship with the customer offers us a continuous loop of improvement, allowing us to get clear feedback from customers and act on it. So how do we do it at Scrolller?
Monitor and incorporate Customer feedback into the product
Customer feedback is considered valuable at Scrolller and every team member cares about it. We always are open to honest communication one on one with customers on any issue, bugs, and glitches they are facing during their experience on the website and resolve them on time. The customer success team communicates issues openly with the whole Scrolller team and responds directly to customers to understand the pain points and resolve them. We try to never use templates, strive for authenticity, and hope it shows.
Measuring Success of Product in Real-Time
On a more procedural note, the customer success team helps cross-functional teams with a mission of helping customers adopt the product and use them in a way that will ensure the success of the product.
Set up a regular opportunity for Customer Success to feed into product roadmap thinking, at an appropriate time in the planning cycle.
Work out a process for Product Management to communicate why things made it onto the roadmap.
Empower development teams with a framework for fixing small issues, and empower Customer Success to communicate directly to the teams.
In a crisis, focus on communication. Try to be clear, succinct, and kind.
Hold cross-functional retrospectives after major issues.
At Scrolller we are obsessed with building the best content experience and our users are the ones that make it possible. We believe our strategy of customer obsession will make Scrolller's long-term growth possible and so far it has been paying off. With Recent growth exploding to 8% monthly. Sometime next week we will pass 300,000 DAU. Keep offering your feedback and we will keep making Scrolller better!
Road Map
Do you have an opinion on our road map listed below? Leave a comment below.
This week
Adding New Banner Ad Networks (AdAstra and Evadav)
Adding new native advertisements and add functionality to call modules with URL parameters
Improve quality and user experience of pro-metric advertisements
[Issue] Videos not loading
Update content reporting system
Refactor media component + Tile component
All of these blog posts are of quality I'd expect from major companies, yet they seem to get no replies, I'm only here because of the popup on Scroller.
Is this github accont yours?(nice pfp) If so is there any chance of the scrolller repo being updated?
https://github.com/mRtyu/scrolller
Given time I think that a 'for you' page work as well as tik tok's, If that happens I'd like to request that the user is able to manually control how some subreddits/keywords are weighted. This could be done with a not interested button, or access to sliders for each subreddit.
It seems that you're trying to keep server costs down, If so I'd probably stay away from an ML 'for you' page and attempt to rank subreddits/keywords based on user feedback (an up/downvote, double tap to heart, time spent on a specific post etc). That combined with what other users with similar like could be enough to make a very decent for you page.
I'm in now way qualified to comment on any of this, these are just some ideas.
you have a pretty great product here that works quite well, if you can do better than reddit in reccomending posts to users then I see no reason Scroller can't do relay well.
Good luck with Scrolller!