The Glimcap Part 9

Published Tue Mar 30, 2021 by Heiwa & RibenaBerri

Welcome to week 9 of the Glimcap! This week there’s a lot to talk about, from new page designs for mobile, to our new events plan moving forward; we can’t wait to share all the news with you this week!

Glimesh’s Growth

Again this week we have seen our discord membership drop overall and twitter has also seen a slow week, the user side has dropped to 819, from around 1000 last week and our MRR is down $300. Support tickets are down but this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as this could be more of a reflection of people being able to solve problems easier, or just not having as many issues as they were - this is not a metric of success, rather is this number was growing week on week it would be worth investigation as to why this was the case to see where we could address issues.

We are still being supported and believe a bright future is ahead for Glimesh but from a business perspective we need to continue to grow and build up our user base across all platforms to help promote organic growth.

This week has seen the first steps towards pushing the growth after the initial launch focus on fixing issues with the website to get stability to the platform, which was a necessary evil, but it’s now time to shift out thinking towards the future and the growth of Glimesh.

Recurring subscriptions and Platform User Growth are still looking good, there is some teetering off with user growth, but those who are joining are sticking around to continue being a part of Glimesh which is great to see.

Traffic

Previous week (for comparison):

This week:

This week we saw a drop in unique visitors and page views while bounce rate and visitation duration remind about the same which is good news. This means that people are continuing to stick around, there’s just less people than there was before.

Twitter continues to be our social media leader but Facebook is fast becoming our second runner up, and we now have our events over on Facebook too which we hope will help continue that growth. We are working on specific Instagram posts and also launching a Tiktok to grow our audience further still.

Twitter Summary:

Twitter has been down on tweets but we are still riding that impression high from launch week. We are also down overall on profile visits and mentions, so if you want to help us grow please continue to engage with us on social media; tag us, tweet us, like us, retweet us, anything you feel happy with doing will all go towards helping us grow.

Bandwidth

We are starting to hit a very predictable cadence as you can see from over the last 7 days. Each peak represents a day, with streamer use at the top and viewer use at the bottom. There are some busier days and some quieter days but based on the survey we conducted early on this is normal, streamers are streaming as they normally would on the days that work from them, which is great as this will let us plan our server growth as we expand and grow.

Financials

We are approaching our first full month report on April 1st but for now this is as close as we can get to that. Our MRR is $9710, which is down from last week but was expected as our MRR from last week was including the time just before we launched with a higher rate of platform subs, as renewal approaches some people are cancelling those, however, it is much less than the 20% drop off we had predicted.

The churn rate (those who subscribe to either the platform or the channel, then don’t renew) is sitting at about 25% which is normal, and again is better than our initial expectations which were 30%.

Mar 1st-28th Glimesh Server Budget

Currently we are overscaled with more servers than we need as we wanted to make sure we had enough servers to handle any influx of traffic over the first month and make sure no issues were due to a server issue. However, now we know what our traffic is we are going to start scaling back a little, whilst still making sure everything is comfortable. We want to scale our percentage of revenue on servers to around 30-40% and should things go as planned we aim to reduce infra by 50% and bandwidth by 25%.Our Server Budget allows us to track and spend our money wisely as servers are the largest cost we have right now and they eat around 52% of our revenue. Digital Ocean has been kind and given us $10 000 of credit but you can see how much “budget” would be remaining if we didn’t have those credits and if that gets much lower we will really need to start paying attention to that.

Wins

Events

This week you may have noticed we have hosted a handful of events. This is something we want to continue making things fun, informative and interactive.

Our first ever streamer hosted event is this week for National Burrito Day with TheBRIX making burritos for all (maybe even blue ones!). Friday we had the Glimesh Roundtable which was a chance for 6 members of the community to get together in the same room and talk about the first month of Glimesh with what went well, what problems they encountered, what streams they have been checking out and where do they see the future for Glimesh - hopefully a chance for some really honest discussion.

If you want to be involved in future events keep an eye on our #announcements channel in discord and our social media pages where we put out application forms. People who apply are chosen at random but there will be eligibility criteria such as time availability and having already used the platform.

The events team is about more than just Glimesh hosted events though, keep your eyes peeled in discord and social media for information on how the events team can help you with the events you are running and organising! You can also reach out to us in discord if this is something you are interested in to help us plan how to best approach this going forward.

New Features

This week we have two major features to announce, so let’s get started!

Subcategories

We have implemented this feature to help combat the confusion over the tags system. We have tried to implement this feature in a way which allows us to continue what we want to accomplish with tagging, which is generic enough to support categories but also still specific enough to enable people to find the content they want.

One of the coolest things about this is each subcategory is unique to the category you are streaming in, so for gaming it is the game title, music is the genre and so on.

Mobile site overhaul

This week we have spent a lot of time working on improving the overall user experience. You can see a live demonstration of this on our youtube. The next update will bring changes to help the experience once you click to chat in a stream as currently that makes things a little messy.

Stream Issue Notification

You will now be notified if a stream is having network issues. In the past the video would pause and show a user’s offline screen, but now it will show a thumbnail of the stream so you know that streamer is still live. If there are any packet loss issues with the stream you will be notified with a yellow message below the stream, if this is a persistent issue you will also be able to pull up the debug info so the developers can look at what is going on.

Chat Scroll Bug Fixes

We have put out an update to attempt to fix the chat scrolling bug. This is hopefully working much better now and the chat scroll issue seems to be working more, but it’s not yet perfect. If you do happen to encounter this bug please let us know exactly what you were doing at the time so we can figure out how to reproduce this to fix it.

Challenges

Growth

We have already talked in this meeting about our next steps to help improve this. We are realistic and don’t expect huge growth overnight but we are aware of the need to combat the downward trend we are seeing.

Useless DDoSes

We have been hit with two so far and a minor DoS day one. This is when people are spamming the servers from a lot of countries and IP addresses at once, not to target anything in particular but to cause issues with the website. In some ways though, this is a good thing (remember this is not an invite to do this, in the US at least this is illegal) however, it helps us to plan for scaling of traffic as we go.

Persistent Bugs

We are continuing to work on chat scrolling issues, streaming going “offline”, and streams not showing as live.

What’s next?

Now we have finished Phase 1, it’s time to move forward into looking at what Phase 2 will look like for us. In order to do this we want to talk to our users and find out how we can deliver the features you want. So with this in mind, we will soon be launching a variety of survery’s, one of those who are still using the platform, and one for those who are no longer streaming. These surveys will allow us to find out what features are missing, and what we can improve upon.

Please continue to use the suggestions and questions channels in our discord as your feedback helps us there too!

GlimFact of the week

Glimesh is a completely open company. What does this mean though? It means that we aim to keep everything we can as open as possible. We have an open book policy when it comes to our finances, plans, and goals as a company. We also do our work in the open as seen on Github and invite anyone who wants to contribute to do so as well. But this doesn’t mean we are less secure. We aim to keep private and sensitive information as safe as possible by implementing some of the best security practices and methods we can implement into our code, practices, and company values.

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