Our user feedback to production system, new sharing landing page, and more!
Scrolller Weekly Update January 12th, 2022
Intro
Hello and Welcome to our weekly update. This week's main highlight is a detailed look at our user feedback to the production system, a detailed look at our current advertising inventory, social media updates, and a look at our new sharing landing pages.
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User Highlight
User Feedback
This week's user highlight goes to "Adam P". The summary of user feedback is as follows:
Several times now I've considered getting Premium and after Christmas this year I have the money to justify getting it. The one thing that makes me hold back is that I realized that around this time, the ability to right click was removed from the images and videos on your site.
I do a lot of sharing on the Discord app and the very best way to share your site's content with people, in my opinion, is to use the "copy image address" option in the right click menu rather than copying the link given by the share button. By doing this it shows a preview image right in the chat, rather than a blank link. I've attached an image that might help show what I'm talking about.
Additionally I think it would be great if there were a better way to save and share the links created by combining checked categories on the categories page.
Scrolller's Action
This is great feedback and we appreciate that you have taken the time to share it with us. We would love to get feedback from our user base about the feedback we are sharing.
User Experience
345828 → 351285
Going from User Feedback to Issue Tickets
We want Scrolller to be the best content experience on the web. To get there we need to respond to how our product is received and make improvements that improve the overall experience. Getting started means we need to fully understand the pain points, this is where issue tickets come into play. What is an issue ticket? It is a way to translate our vision of better functionality into small actionable steps that can be taken by the Scrolller team. Since Scrolller is a software product we use GitHub for version control and use their issue ticket system for task management and prioritization.
We want Scrolller to be the best content experience on the web. To get there we need to respond to how our product is received and make improvements that improve the overall experience. We need to fully understand the pain points, this is where issue tickets come into play.
What is an issue ticket? It is a way to translate our vision of better functionality into small actionable steps that can be taken by the Scrolller team. Since Scrolller is a software product we use the GitHub issue ticket system for task management and prioritization
Issue tickets need to be precise, so a clear What Does Success Look Like (WDSLL in short) is required. The less ambiguity there is on what we need to solve the better the end results. Another important part of good issue tickets is to share an image or video of the issue to make recreating issues easier. The last consideration is if the issue ticket is describing fixing something or creating something new. In short, we call it a bug or a feature.
The two-issue tickets shared above are great examples because the requirements for success were clear and it was targeted into a specific place in our codebase.
Once we understand the issue and have broken it up into appropriate issue tickets we need to prioritize to use our resources effectively. We have over 200 issue tickets and not enough resources to solve all of them. Luckily we have a flexible and diverse team with a lot of people willing to help out.
Utilizing our resources properly means understanding what type of developers are needed to accomplish any given task. Does the issue ticket require a front-end engineer, maybe it requires data on the backend, perhaps current hosting management is insufficient, or the feature needs design updates. These requirements are discussed and tasks handed out appropriately during our weekly estimation meetings.
With over 200 issue tickets and growing, we need to properly address them in a specific order. How to do that? Lead technical talent working directly with the product owner to decide how impactful the task is. This way we work on tasks in a way that balances business needs with user needs.
Each task differs in size of impact and the effort required in order to finish this task also plays a major role. Tasks vary from one-liners to creating a full new system. The process of turning user feedback into issue tickets is pretty complex we need great organization and follow-through to deliver on regular improvements.
Now that we fully understand the impact and effort required we are able to properly prioritize our tasks and are ready for our weekly estimation meeting.
Weekly Estimation Meeting
At Scrolller we don’t appreciate very many meetings and to accomplish this we have to work really hard in the lead up to have an effective meeting. Below is our meeting structure and we would love to get feedback from our readers.
When we have issue tickets written, it’s time to resolve them. Who, when, in what order? This is where Weekly Prioritization Meeting comes in handy, but before the meeting happens we need to take into consideration the effort and impact from each issue tickets, this way we prioritize issues that we need to take care of.
Structure of meeting
Prioritize new tasks
Every week brings new issues to solve, so we need to prioritize which ones should be taken care of first
This happens as preparation for weekly prioritization meeting
Ready to deploy
We sum up what is ready to deploy
This way we know how much progress we made last week
'In progress' from last week
We don't always hit the mark with setting the ETA of our tasks
This way we know how much time will it take to finish tasks from last week
This way we know how many issues we can assign to our developers
Assign new tasks
As we now know how big the workload is
we also know what new tasks we need to handle first
we assign new issues to our developers
Outcomes and results
We managed to improve our progress tracking on issues, no issue falls through the cracks
Our tasks are no longer epic tasks, which are tasks that take more than a week to complete
example of an epic task: Rewrite Ruby code to Typescript, as more of our developers understand it
Smaller tasks protect us from spending a month on something that is not doable, or we don’t have a way of implementing
How we launch to production
Testing Procedure:
Check-in Pull Request stage if functionality matches the description of the feature
Testing all functionalities of Scrolller on dev.scrolller.com according to the testing script created by the team
All Scrolller team members take 30 mins to use the site on dev.scrolller.com, checking all functionalities
After successfully passing the 3 points above, we deploy to production
User Experience
Content Recommendation (Testing)
Sort and Filters on Categories (In Progress)
Scrolller Extension and Enhancements (In Progress)
Scrolller APP (Back Log)
Pro-Metric Advertising (Blocked)
Revenue
Advertising
This week we wanted to share a bit more about how our advertising works and why we have been able to improve the revenue from this substantially over the last week.
When we say advertising we are really talking about a specific type of advertisement that shows up in various parts of the website. Below is a list of our current supported ad types
Top Banner
Banner (Native)
Banner (iFrame)
Below are examples of both banners. Top banners are located at the very top of every scrolling section. Banners appear along with other content every so often. Native banners will have a special UI and can be viewed in full-screen mode. iFrame banners can not be viewed in full-screen mode.
We currently focus on building advertising relationships with agencies and specific companies, selling blocks of 1 million impressions at a cost of $500 per million pre-paid. This deal is specifically for companies that want to advertise with us.
Another group of people we hope to advertise with are indie content creators. We can create a custom UI experience for creators to better integrate them with our platform and build relationships with people who can be a part of our content creator push over the next 3 months. For these types of advertisers, we will offer free 1 million impression blocks to everyone who signs up and is accepted into the program.
If you are interested or know anyone interested in advertising to your user base please email us directly at contact@scrolller.com
Roadmap for Growth in Revenue
Exclusive Features for Premium User (In Progress)
Monetization Optimisations (In Progress)
Scrapper Updates (In Progress)
Scrolller as Content Creator Platform (Design Stage)
Social Traffic
1.5% → 1.7% of our overall traffic
Outreach Team Update
This week, the team (finally) has a Social Media Manager hired! Our rockstar hire is now getting his hands dirty with the regular workflow of the outreach team right now, starting to take presence on our NSFW channels and building knowledge on the things we are already doing.
We want to keep improving in order to reach our goal of 1M users per month via the Outreach Team URLs. While these skills and knowledge are developed, we need to start building things from here, implement new methods or strategies to reach our goal.
Social Traffic Update
We just recovered from the little dump in traffic we experienced this week. The team managed to keep this traffic flow going for weeks now! Actually delivering +100k clicks per month from our outreach efforts on social channels.
Let the traffic flow!
New landing pages for shared links
We have designed 3 landing pages. The objective is to improve the conversion rate of this traffic from sharing function to be the best that it can be, combining the original content shared with similar content we have on our website.
The target audience are the people that come to our website from social platforms, having an engaging landing page for the people discovering our website is key for them to actually stay or create an account with us.
By improving the conversion rate we mean increasing the number of accounts created, average session duration, and pages per session. We now need to test which one of these 3 give better results out there. Which one of the 3 do you think is the better one for someone discovering our website? Comment down below!
Influencer Outreach
We now started to reach out to accounts that post content regularly that we have on our website with the objective of sharing the word about Scrolller as a reliable source of content to post, as many people on NSFW communities do.
How did we reach? We reached smaller accounts that followed us or left a DM before, get to know their accounts situation (whether they want to grow or not), share some tips on how to grow, and how we accomplished that goal as well.
Lastly, invite them to try Scrolller as a source of content to post. Adding value to their accounts through feedback, but also sharing Scrolller as a key of why we had success; people like Scrolller content.
Why? With our links being shared on social platforms, we have a lot of room for our outreach growing, which is our final goal. The amount of traffic you can manually generate is limited, that’s why we need more people to join our community and share it out there.
We reached 17 accounts so far but had actual conversations and mentioned Scrolller/shared a link with 10 of them. 4 of them were thankful for giving feedback on how to grow their accounts or because we shared a good source of content.
How are we measuring success for this task? People sharing Scrolller content and links on social media after our outreach session. This is just the beginning, as 0 of 4 actually shared a Scrolller link on their accounts. This means we are far from reaching success with this current approach.
Roadmap for Growth in Social Traffic
Implementing Reddit (In Progress)
Working with influencers to encourage Scrolller link sharing (In Progress)
Team Highlights
Team Updates
Scrolller Team Highlights for the week!
Nick — Making small updates to the recommendation email and fixing bugs
Karol — Fitting in to this new role as the dev team owner
Valentin — Building our outreach team, training Tomas, and improving our process
Tim — Updating model to use Negative feedback for training
Marite — Updating our designs to improve UI/UX
Gabriel — Improving our header bar components and implementing the new notification system
Hamza — Finalizing nav bar components
Mannan — Enjoying his vacation and wedding
Chris — Working hard to keep up while Mannan is away
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
Exclusive Features for premium users (In Progress)
Monetization Update and Optimization (In Progress)
Scrolller as Content Creator Platform (Design Stage)
Scrapper Updates (Design Stage)
Enhancements to Auto Scroll Feature (Backlog)
CDN for Premium Users (Investigation)
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Until next time, happy scrollling!
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