This marks the second weekly update about the business side of scrolller. The first update was well received and the team is grateful for the support that we continue to receive. If you would like to follow us on our journey as we build Scrolller into a 100 million MAU application please subscribe.
This document might not look very similar from week to week, but that is because I'm constantly experimenting to find the right tone for this. Feedback and interaction from you guys will help make these updates an amazing read. Let’s get started
User Accounts
We have grown user accounts from 102,664 to 119,945. We are on track to meet or exceed our 1 million user account goal by the end of the year
This week we have not done much to build off of our previous improvements targeted at our user account goal. This week we watched the output from our previous experiments. So far the previous improvements have proved to be durable and we can expect them to drive new account creation for a long period of time which is a huge plus. You can see a clear upward trend on total logins.
After the success of driving users to sign up for premium accounts using internal Ads, we might create a few ads to also drive behavior in our other goals like user accounts or social sharing.
Revenue
This week we are renaming this section from ARPDAU to Revenue. I wanted to open up a bit more about the current revenue streams of scrolller and how each stream affects ARPDAU. Below is a graph that shows the revenue breakdown. Each number is not a RAW revenue but rather an out rolling 30-day average. This does a good job of showing the trend of revenue growth and decline while smoothing the volatility in revenue.
Advertising is very volatile and can swing up and down pretty wildly. The Scrolller team doesn't expect much change in ad revenue for the immediate future, our longer-term plans would make this update way too long. Premium scrolller however, continues to be a driver of growth in our revenue immediately and for the foreseeable future. Of all of our income sources, it is the most stable and best quality revenue (Ads remove from the scrolller experience). We thought we could boost the number of sign-ups for premium, so we launched our own ads (See below).
Before we started using our own ads we could expect around 10-15 premium sign-ups, after launching we are seeing 40-60 sign-ups a day. It's not clear yet if this will be a durable revenue improvement. My bet is that 40-60 is temporary but we can expect 15-25 new premium subscribers a day after this settles down.
All of this has improved our revenue situation, but our ARPDAU still dropped. This drop is due to the number of daily active users (DAU) used in calculation has grown from 243k to 262k.
Social Traffic (0.5 → 0.8%)
Finally some progress on expanding the percentage of traffic that is coming from our social channel. Over the last week, it has improved by a large amount. Hopefully, this is going to be a durable improvement.
The trends in google analytics show us that this is driven by how users are interacting with the share button. It seems like there is a spike in the number of shares are completed from an average of 2 shares per hour to an average of 30 an hour. This doesn't fully account for the bump from 0.5% to 0.8% social share of total traffic and we will be investigating this more next week.
Whatever is driving this improvement, it seems to have a big impact and I hope it continues.
Business Update
This weekend we had an outage that took us offline for over 10 hours. We believe that this was caused by a memory leak. The team is looking into it and for now, we have a hotfix in place. Overall this was a pretty big defeat for us, we had the same issue before and nothing was done to prevent it from happening again. Automation and patching things so that they can't fail again in the future is important and should never be ignored.
While we were dealing with the outage I was reminded about how important hiring is to the success of any team. Before any company or service can truly take off the right team needs to be built to make sure we can deliver on an excellent service at the scale we are aiming for.
The Scrolller team is constantly hiring new amazing people to join even if we go over budget on HR. This is what is called the hire and fire fast approach. It allows you to meet many different people and get a better sense of who would be a good fit for the role you are trying to fill. This gives you the most chances to find that perfect match, but can be expensive and emotionally draining.
We are committed to building an amazing team and then iterating on the product to get us closer to our goals.