New User Generated Collection Feature and a User Account Growth Mystery
Scrolller Weekly Update July 19th, 2021
Hello and Welcome to our weekly update. If you are new to the newsletter, subscribe to keep up without the journey of building a 100 million MAU web application.
Another position opened for a part-time position at Scrolller focused on DevOps. We are looking for someone who can level up the team and help improve scrolller as a product. If you are a technically minded person, who enjoys working in a small team, and is excited about Scrolller, we are excited to meet you. We have a few requirements and bonus skills listed below.
Must-Have Skills:
Linux(Debian), Nginx, Docker, GCloud
Bonus Skills:
Configuration knowledge of TypeScript with React
Java(Kotlin)
SQL(Postgres)
Apply using the link → https://airtable.com/shrQFgzS9HOH84A1y
Introducing user highlights, a way to thank users who go above and beyond in helping to improve scrolller. We want to invite other excited community members who would like to help scrolller become a better experience to sign up as a volunteer.
.Zero helped identify an issue we had in the frontend, and his bug hunting skills will help improve the site for everyone. Thank You! If you don't see your name up there and feel you have helped, don't worry; we will have this weekly.
Sign Up To Help → https://airtable.com/shrrRkFqMSZBqF24Q
User Accounts
224569 → 228776
Weird Mystery + Outage Explanation
Due to an outage with our analytics, we are pretty blind during this event! Ever since the outage on July 14th, our new user signups have dropped in half. A drop like this could be expected for that day of the outage, but to have the drop continue for the past 6 days is a bit much.
This would be terrible news in a normal situation, but once I checked out traffic on Cloudflare, I noticed something very off. Our traffic remained roughly the same during this period and the number of requests actually increased. What could be causing the drop-off in user signups, if not a corresponding drop of users?
If anyone has a theory as to what is going on, please share in the comments below.
New User Experience Metrics
We have been attempting to put these numbers together, but every time we tried, we noticed our user journeys. None of the user journeys made sense. Users favoriting without having logged in and other impossible situations. After some debugging, we remembered a trick we used to keep us from going over the google analytics limits. We can't afford Analytics360, so we were forced to do this. Our solution involved sending only 10% of events from users. This was perfectly fine while only looking at the growth of these numbers in aggregate. Still, when viewing this data on an individual user level via user journeys, it is clear that this solution caused a major problem.
With only 10% of a user’s events, we could only get a crude understanding of what this user was doing, and it limited our ability to segment users. We are currently fixing this issue and will be working on these updated user experience metrics once we have 100% coverage.
Avg. Session Duration
Current: 6 min 51 sec
Goal: 8 min
Avg. time to Account Creation
Avg. Time to first Like
Avg. Time to first Follow
Categories Feature Update
The categories feature has been unlocked, and the SFW version is almost done. The code is being finished up, and we hope to update you by next week's weekly update.
Pro-Metric Ads
After some trial and error with a few video production specialists, we found someone we can work with long-term, and that gives amazing results. We have an example to show you on Twitter! If you have any feedback, please leave it below in the comments.
Road Map for Growth in User Accounts:
Pro-Metric Advertising (In Progress)
Categories Feature Update + Unlock (In-Progress)
Content Recommendation (In Progress)
Scrolller APP (Back Log)
Revenue
Premium Pop-up + Payments System + Admin Panel Delay
After a tough 3 weeks, we finally wrapped up the huge update to payments, admin panel, and premium pop-up. You can check out a demo of our premium CTA in the loom below. We have 3 different types of pop-ups that will show up
https://www.loom.com/share/ab109c2eeda94ec8a81e6f9a0c960ce6
Road Map for Growth in Revenue:
Ad Network Mediation System (Blocked)
Improved Premium Feature Set (Design Stage)
Social Traffic
0.6 → 0.5
Instagram Automation Failure Part 3
We have been banned again! This time for 13 hours. Social media automation is giving us some real trouble. When we can successfully execute our social media strategy [See this week’s update for more on that algorithm], the results speak for themselves. Every 20 directed comments on other people's content get us 8-13 follows. We want to continue growing our Instagram and hope to start growing more organically as we optimize the content we share on that channel. The goal is to drive traffic and interest directed to the website.
We decided to turn off the automation for now and found someone to help us do this process manually for the time being.
New UI/UX Designer + User Generated Collections
In another episode of "Why community is amazing," we've just onboarded our new UI/UX designer, who found us via one of our active community members. We are excited to be working with her and look forward to her skills and experience in improving Scroller. Already she discovered that our Figma clone was not built systematically and is making changes that will make future work easier.
Her first project will be to take the requirements and convert them into some new designs. Our previous designer created some initial designs that were not to the standard we are trying to build at Scrolller. Thanks to some quick work, we can share the user flow for user-generated collections (Favorites).
User Flow 2 - User-Generated Collections (Favorites)
You will notice a little trophy that shows how you rank among others collections. You can share your collection online to increase the number of likes/follows, and your collections will appear like any other collections in Scrolller. Great collections will float to the top. Anyone in the top XX (we haven't figured out a number) will get free premium, maybe other prizes/swag. Would you please comment on any feedback you might have? Honest feedback helps us make Scrolller better for everyone!
Road Map 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)
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
Payment System (Completed)
Email Verification (Completed)
All user direct premium pop-up (Completed)
Improve quality and user experience of pro-metric advertisements (In Progress)
User Generated Collections: Create and share (In Progress)
Categories page for SFW collections + Unlock (In Progress)
New native advertisements (In Progress)
Menu bar update and Quick Access buttons (In Progress)
Content Recommendation (In Progress)
Monetization Update and Optimization (Blocked)
Enhancements to Auto Scroll Feature (Blocked)