Power of Community to Help Deal with Setbacks
Every startup has it's challenges and that what makes it so much fun to run them
Hello and Welcome to our weekly update. If you haven’t already please subscribe and follow along in our journey.
The power of community is asking for help and getting a lot of support. We recently reached out via this newsletter asking for help with our backend technical issues and the support everyone showed was fantastic. We were introduced to a couple of people who could help directly and several who wanted to help out in other ways. If you are starting a business I would always recommend trying to write a weekly newsletter about your progress and share it. Turns out it can be a powerful ally in your battle to build anything.
Personally, this experience has been so powerful I will never build something again without a weekly update style newsletter started alongside the project. Anyone else inspired to do the same?
User Accounts
179923 -> 190261
We are surprised at how well our user account sign-ups have held steady at around 10,000 new users a week. We haven't done anything differently and yet we are holding steady. My guess is that this steady growth is powered by our 8% growth in MAU. If we didn't have that our daily account creation would start to creep lower.
Update on the Pro-metric advertisements. We now have the ability to show modules based on URL parameters. With this update, we will be able to have it so that our native advertisements can have a more direct call to action to sign up for an account. Expect to see the first examples later this week.
Every week we post about what we are working on and the effect that it has on our core metrics. Should make for good reading for anyone working on a consumer content website.
Road Map for Growth in User Accounts:
Pro-Metric Advertising (Launching this week)
Content Recommendation (In Progress)
Scrolller APP (Back Log)
Revenue
For the last couple of weeks, we have been working on refactoring the admin panel and payments systems. We get a few complaints of people getting duplicate charges, people getting charged after they delete their account and other strange edge cases. That refactoring should be done this week and with it will come a host of fixes that will solve these edge cases.
When we launched our ad-block mitigation pop-up and immediately we improved our daily new premium subscriber metric by 50%. This increase has been helped us get to break even, but it only showed up to users that had ad-block on. Maybe 30% or so of users. This is serving as inspiration for us to launch another popup that will show up to all users.
We imagine that this new pop-up will grow premium revenue growth again by 50% (New daily customers), but have held off on launching it because we don't want to end up with an increase of customer complaints about payments. This is a sensitive issue and every negative user interaction is a vote of 0 confidence in our ability to grow Scrolller.
The new pop-up will likely launch in the next two weeks assuming our payments system is done in time.
Road Map for Growth in Revenue:
Refactored and improved payment system (Launching this week)
All user direct premium pop-up (In Progress)
Ad Network Mediation System (In Progress)
Social Traffic
0.6 -> 0.6
So we have started our social media accounts, but as you can see we are not doing so well so far. We have given ourselves a month to get to our goals, but it is going to be an uphill battle. As a way to boost the number of followers on our account, we have added our three social media buttons to the main menu.
We won't post any NSFW content to our social media platforms so it will be safe to follow us!
Again here are our accounts:
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.
After this month we will start testing out automation to grow our social media following and presence.
Road Map
This week
Launching Admin Panel Update
Enhancements to Auto Scroll Feature
Improve quality and user experience of pro-metric advertisements
Duplicate Subscription Hotfix
Update content reporting system
New native advertisements