Making Signing in Mandatory? + Weekly update 5/10
Do click bait titles make this newsletter bad?
This marks our first full month of updates sent out to our premium subscribers. We started this as a way to help make communication with stakeholders easier. Everyone gets a clear view of the current state of the business and our efforts as a team.
For this month we are upgrading the update to include write up from the whole team. With this change, we hope to offer an even more transparent view for the stakeholders and offer our team a platform to communicate with our users and followers. Please subscribe to follow all of our future updates.
User Accounts
128,911 → 139770: User account creation is leveling off and seems to be holding steady at 40,000 user accounts a month. Spent some time this week working on the metric tooling the graph below is the result
Strong durable growth is great news for the time being, but it is becoming more obvious that we need to continue to invest in developing methods to drive user account creation. Improvements to the funnels and call to action would be easy wins and are currently being developed, but won’t drive the growth we need to reach our 1 million user account goal. For this goal, we will need to drive 3500-4000 account creations a day.
One way we are exploring is making it mandatory to be logged in to use Scrolller, the only viable path we see for this would be to create an application and make it mandatory on that platform. Call To Action(CTA): Does anyone knows how to make an application wrapper for our website? Anyone who downloads the application would need an account to use it. Before we could launch we would need to make the successful transition from the current Scrolller to one with less of an emphasis on NSFW. Getting on android is easy, but next to impossible for iOS with NSFW focus.
There is an issue ticket in Github around updating the UI/UX to deemphasis NSFW, so we will be working on it maybe next week.
Still thinking implementing a form of content personalization is the next step product-wise that would really improve the experience enough to drive more account creation. We don't have this written up, but James is working on improving tracking around content, which will be a good first step regarding content recommendation.
Revenue
Consistent growth in premium subscribers sustained at around 10-15 new customer per day is driving sustained growth in our revenue even as our advertising revenue struggles. A few more weeks of data collection and we will see if the two revenue streams are correlated in some way.
The new advertising system has been discussed during last week’s team meeting and as part of preparing for developing it, we are currently refactoring the gallery view. The older version was created by a previous developer and the current dev team didn't understand it well. After a quick demo of the new refactored infinite scroll, I'm excited to see it get launched to production. This also signals that we are starting work on the new advertising system pretty soon.
While the new advertising system is being developed, we will be signing up and setting up a variety of ad platforms in preparation for launch. Expect to start seeing more varied advertising starting next weekend.
Social Traffic
We sit stubbornly at 0.6%. This week we are launching our first pro-metric ads for creating accounts, social sharing, following, and favoriting content. There was also a new feature added to the backlog for adding call-outs directly as part of the UI. The goal is to build a system that will suitably remind users of functions they have yet to use.
For the next week we will monitor the results of this experiment and continue iterating on the product.
Update
This week we introduce the rest of the team to the weekly update. As time goes we are going to continue to work their input into this weekly update. The goal is to have this be the source of reality and our current understanding of the business. Getting all the stakeholders to agree on what challenges we are facing and the actions we take as a team to build Scrolller is a fantastic product.
Lukasz:
This week I've been working really hard on optimizing our Gallery View. Right now some bugs sometimes make the experience of scrolling a little bit worse. Hopefully, with this refactor we will get rid of them and really make this core Scrolller feature impeccable!
James:
I have been part of the Scrolller team for a couple of weeks now, and it’s been great fun so far. I’ve been focusing on working with the team to refactor our codebase to give us a more solid foundation. This means that we’ll be able to ship out new features and bug fixes in a more timely manner. Thanks to you all for being part of our community and helping us to make something great!
Karol:
I'm new to the Scrolller team, so my contribution is not yet great. So far I can see how Scroller and teamwork and I'm glad to be a part of it. Hopefully next time You'll hear more about my work.
Chris:
I'm the guy who writes the weekly updates and answers most of the emails. Pushing Scrolller to the next level product-wise and making sure everyone is aligned.
Road Map
Introducing the product road map. We will include what is currently being worked on as well as what is on the backlog. This week we don't have all of the roadmaps worked out yet so will only show this week, but by next week we will be able to share more about the long-term road map for Scrolller. CTA: Let me know if you guys would like to vote on features.
This week
Refactor Gallery View
Improved Tracking for Conversion Funnel, Community Engagement, and CPA advertisements
Combine Auto-Scroll and Slideshow functionality
Video not loading bug
Implement an ad-block mitigation strategy
Remove Give feedback Button
Update Reporting System
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