One Step Closer to Faster Hosting for Premium Users and Content Recommendations
Scrolller Weekly Update September 9th, 2021
Intro
Hello and Welcome to our weekly update. This week's main highlight was the fast-paced progress on Faster Hosting for premium users, Shareable collections, and the work started on multiple payment gateways and progress on content recommendation emails. If you are new to the newsletter, subscribe to keep up with our journey of building a 100 million MAU web application.
User Highlights
In this edition, User Highlight features Minekot for his feedback and contribution. He shared how content began to load faster after purchasing Premium Scrolller. In terms of features, he made a suggestion to add functionality to enable users to select and manage high-quality content of their choice. This contribution helps us understand users, their experiences on Scrolller, and how we can make it an even better product for everyone.
If you would like to share any feature feedback and contributions, don't hesitate to let us know. We greatly appreciate your taking the valuable time to offer us feedback. Many thanks!
Go Here to help us with Scroller Features testing.
Also, we'd like to meet you if you can help us translate Scroller into Russian. Please get in touch by signing up below. Thank You in advance!
Sign Up To Help → **https://airtable.com/shrrRkFqMSZBqF24Q**
User Accounts
252471 → 257447
User Accounts Growth
In last week's newsletter, we shared details on how the categories page was account locked again. We saw a clear spike in user account creation but we are still halfway to our previous user account creation level and we are still striving to regain the pace that we had before the massive drop. But account locking categories comes with its own challenge. We found that a large number of users are getting bounced off which are directly landing on the categories page via search engines.
Unlocking Categories plan:
In last week's newsletter, we discussed a couple of ways that can be used to unlock the categories and which will ensure that users don't get bounced off when they try to directly land on the page but also make sure that it doesn't negatively impact the new user account creation on the platform.
Based on those ideas our UI/UX designer created some wonderful mockups.
Mockups for Ideas:
First "X" visits of the user, categories are unlocked.
Lock other visits and show a CTA popup to educate users that they need an account to unlock this feature.
We have two potential designs with these ideas and would love your feedback on which one will suit best according to the Scrolller theme.
Show limited number categories and blur the rest for non-logged on users.
Potentially show the high-level category and blur the sub-categories.
In the next newsletter, we will show you some mockups of these potential ideas. Please let us know in the comments what do you think about these ideas to keep the categories page unlocked.
Impact of Pro-Metric Ads
In the last newsletter, we discussed what measures are we taking to evaluate the impact of pro-metric ads in terms of the dollar amount generated from conversion via these ads. Our developers have added the necessary labels in google analytics and we are waiting for the week to see the results. The addition of these new labels will help us to measure the true impact of pro-metric ads in terms of the dollar amount.
Below are the graphs that show the number of users that clicked on pro-metric Ads and landed on the subscription page. By next week we will have data about how many of those users actually subscribed.
Progress on Content Recommendation
Over the last week, the computation time and the nature of the generated results of the recommendation system were evaluated. All the blockers were removed and the system can now be finalized.
We tested the system speed for the generation of recommendations and did the certainty analysis. The system can now generate 2,000,000 recommendations under 3 minutes. We are further scaling it for our 250,000 users. These recommendations will be based on the user interests which will be evaluated from the likes and follows of the user.
With the machine-learning backbone of the email recommendation system nearing completion, it is also important to think about the best way to present our suggestions to the user. We decided to launch our recommendations as an email newsletter. The team had a fruitful discussion and as a result, our designer created an email concept that aims to maximize user engagement. Yes, we will support NSFW emails, but you will need to Opt into it.
Above is a mockup for our content recommendation email and would love to see your feedback on how we can further improve it.
Current Step
Generate 10 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.
Loss of Front End Engineer
This week our front-end engineer decided to leave the Scrolller as he wants to focus on his own venture. We wish him the best of luck in his future endeavors. With that being said Scrolller is looking to hire a full-time front-end engineer that is proficient with React, TypeScript, and MobX. Familiarity with Kotlin is a plus, but not needed. If you know someone that might be the best fit for Scrolller please recommend them to us.
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 the premium subscriptions has stabilized at 30+ new subscriptions per day. with an all-time high of 63 new subscriptions in a single day. We saw some reduction in its impact last week as our average for a week came out to be 27 subscribers per day. We will keep experimenting with the copies to see which one outperforms the other and will investigate how can we further enhance the impact of premium CTA popups. Below is our graph of new subscribers in the last 4 weeks period.
A/B Testing Copies for Premium CTA Popups
This week our developers have added the necessary labels in the google analytics and we are waiting for the week to see the results. The addition of these new labels will help us to measure the true impact of Premium CTA popups in terms of the dollar amount.
Payment Processor Problem
In the last newsletter, we discussed a potential hazard that might become a very big blocker for Scrolller to flourish. We run the risk of getting blocked by payment processors that view NSFW content negatively. Now that Premium is our main source of income. Getting our premium revenue cut off would deal a massive blow to our goals. The team started brainstorming on how can we reduce the risk of getting blocked by our payment processor.
Scrolller is working on getting in contact with multiple payment processors. On reviewing and researching various payment providers Scrolller got in touch with 3 new payment processors.
Segpay
InstaBill
CCBill
Our developers have started a POC on which of these payment gateways can be readily integrated with our current system and DB configurations. The current target is to enable multiple payment processors in the backend and is PCI DSS compliant as well.
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 feel will work well for our situation.
Progress on Faster Hosting for Premium Users
In the last newsletter, we discussed the biggest challenge we are working on right now that is Faster Hosting for premium users.
As a long-term fix and to provide our premium users with a faster experience our developers are setting up a new server that will only serve the premium users. Separating the servers for premium and non-premium users will allow us to provide a faster experience to our premium users. The improved infrastructure will be ready for dev testing end of this week and we want to stress test it to make sure it is ready and actually deliver what we promise to our premium users.
Our developers are working with our data scientists to come up with the essential metrics that can be used to evaluate the performance increase. We will share details about that metric and our testing in our next newsletter.
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
Shareable favorites along with sharable follows is now in the testing phase and we are refining these two features so when we launch it is absolutely bug-free and is ready to be used by end-users.
Testing progress:
A new bug was identified that the shareable collection was not behaving as regular collections. We want to provide our users with a homogeneous experience throughout the Scrolller. Our developers are working tirelessly to resolve that issue. Once it's tested the shareable collections will be released to our end users for use.
Any users that have more than 10 likes will get to see a popup about the ability to share their collections publicly. The popup is shared for your valuable feedback.
Progress:
Shareable Favorites collection (Testing Phase)
Shareable Following collection (Testing Phase)
Leaderboard (In Progress)
Incentives for top 100 users in the leaderboard. (Backlog)
Social Media Update
We have been keen on tracking our social media growth and performance. We created a social media strategy to drive the users from social media to Scrolller. We did a couple of new experiments, and as a result of that, all of our channels are steadily growing, rather than stagnant or declining. Instagram profile reach this week is 9.8k from 2.4k with impressions reaching 14k from 11k. The page's engagement hit 6.1k.
Facebook's reach hit 50.5k from 42.6k and had 10.5K engagement. Profile visits on Twitter reached 10.8K from 5.4k and tweet impressions hit 67.4K from 66.1K. Thank for you being our fans/followers on social media. If you are yet to, check out our social links below, LIKE/FOLLOW or drop a comment, we'll greatly appreciate it.
🔘 Instagram 🔘 Facebook 🔘 Twitter
What strategies have worked for you on social media? We'd love to hear any social media growth strategies that have worked for you. You're welcome to share with us in the comments section.
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
Here's what the team was working on for the week
Mannan — Extensive dev testing for shared collections, customer service, and experience support as well as extending our payment gateways.
Nick — Got started in DB migration and stress testing tools and environments
Karol — Was able to setup prod postgres for collection and create a leaderboard script
Valentin — Social media management & strategies
Tim — Writing the pipeline to generate a selection of recommendations for each user
Betty — Social media management & strategies
Marité — Improving user design experiences, recommendations, and templates
Chris — Prioritizing issues tickets, still on interviews, team management & pitch decks, and meetings with investors.
Matt — Finished impact analysis and started finding metrics to measure backend performance
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
Improve quality and user experience of pro-metric advertisements (Completed)
User Generated Collections: Create and share (In Progress)
Content Recommendation (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)
Categories page for SFW collections + Unlock (Blocked)
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 Scroller exciting yet challenging journey.
Also:
Sign Up To Help → https://airtable.com/shrrRkFqMSZBqF24Q us translate Scroller to Russian.
To help us with Scroller features testing, Go Here
Until next time, happy scrollling!
One Step Closer to Faster Hosting for Premium Users and Content Recommendations
Love these weekly updates. Really excited about the faster hosting that is coming soon. Keep up the great work! :-)
Is there an ETA for faster hosting? We have been waiting for months for this update