The Glimcap Part 13

Glimcap Part 13

Welcome to week 13 of the Glimcap. This week we have a special update from a member of the team, news from our marketing team, and all the usual metrics and updates to keep you up to date with Glimesh!

Weekly Metrics

This WeekLast WeekDiff
Discord5,8555,93681⬇
Twitter9,2099,2063⬆
Reddit5895845⬆
Instagram1,1821,1908⬆
Facebook6146095⬆
TikTok42-42⬆
Users39,09938,759340⬆
MRR$7,735$8,160$425⬇
Support Tickets23221⬆

Discord has been down week over week for 6 weeks now, whilst we are getting new people in there are people are leaving at the same time. It’s possible some people are likely to be less interested in Glimesh now but also people do cycle through servers, and with the recent Guilded migration people may be leaving in preference for that. Either way this is something we are watching but isn’t of great worry at the moment.

For Twitter, we have grown by 3 new followers in the past week, we did lose followers but we did get enough new people to offset this and show a positive. Reddit grew by 5, Instagram by 8 and Facebook by 5. A new social media platform we are tracking this week is our new TikTok page, which already has 42 new followers and our first video has over 600 plays. Check out our tiktok: Glimeshtv

Other metrics this week: we have seen 340 new users on the platform and MRR is down $425.

This week there were 23 support tickets, which is now looking to be settling into a consistent flow for tickets and while this may seem low the consistency is what we measure, if there were a sudden drastic change that would be when we would need to be looking at why this is the case.

Traffic

Last week:

This week:

We are down on traffic from last week 11k last week to 9k this week. It’s important to add here that the way we pull this metric is a little confusing as we compare Wednesday to Tuesday before Tuesday is finished and are missing Tuesday afternoons metrics. We will look at how we can compare this better going forward and will probably start looking at a Monday to a Monday. However, we are down on the unique users to the platform.

Twitter

We haven’t been tweeting so not getting visits, not appearing on timelines etc however this week we have made a big change too that in interacting, pushing out more content, and we will discuss the ways our marketing has been working towards this later on.

Bandwidth

April Financials

We now have complete figures for April making this now our second full month of financials. So this week we will be showing you some comparisons between these first two months.

You can see our downward trend in MRR, but us losing MRR is not a huge issue. While it is not ideal we are still able to pay all the bills and continue as a service. A churn rate of 30% is normal as well but with both of these scenarios we will want to see growth and not regression.

MarchApril
Gross$12,550.00$9,510.00
Payouts$2,795.34$2,036.12
Revenue$8,761.10$5,531.40
DO Credits$8,042.78$3,123.86
DO Infra$2,285.04$1,483.81
DO Bandwidth$2,498.91$565.35
DO Expenses$4,918.92$2,049.16
Remaining Credits$3,123.86$1,074.70
“Budget” Remaining$3,842.18$3,482.24
Actual Remaining$8,761.10$5,531.40

*April includes Stripe Billing Charge for $1,306

This table only accounts for server costs as nothing else currently takes up much expenditure. In March there was a gross of $12,500 which was less than April but we took a look at some of our server spend and optimised our servers to get a 3 times cost saving on server expenses. The reason for reducing the server size is combined with less people using the site and also about optimising for where users are coming from.

Budget remaining is showing how much we would have left for the month if we were paying for servers, which is relevant because right now we are using Digital Ocean credits but we need to make sure we are profitable even when these credits run out so we can continue to exist so we look at this no matter what.

The bank balance or ‘Glimesh War Chest’ is approximately $14000 with about $4000 in Stripe.

We did get a Stripe billing charge for March for $1000 which we will be investigating why this was so high and how to reduce that going forward.

Phase 2 Updates

He’s a quick reminder of how we plan to take Phase 2 towards bringing in new viewers to the platform, few core features needed to make it more sustainable and appropriate for streaming sites so our phase 2 roadmap does focus on that vision.

  • Mobile app: Bring in new viewers and make access to glimesh more convenient.

  • Video improvements: Help support poor networks so there’s no need to worry about your stream loading for someone and making it easier for streamers who have poor networks, custom channel emotes.

  • Gift subscriptions: So people can give subs to each other, streamers can give away subs etc.

  • Raiding: Helping communities share and connect.

Currently in production we have the mobile app, video improvements (small rollout to this coming soon!) and early framework for custom channel emotes which will allow the team themselves to upload emotes directly, paving the way for streamers to be able to do this later on.

These features will roll out when they are ready, we won’t restrict one feature launching just because another is complete. You will have access to them as soon as they are ready.

There will be other things in between because we are still making improvements, just because it’s not on the roadmap doesn’t mean it won’t happen, these are just the main things we want to get out there and let you know we are working on.

Here is what one of our designers, Barcxde has been working on with how the mobile app will look like, the design system and how it will work, what features it will have and such. Now we have the design it is to develop the app!

We have a prototype working which needs authentication so we can have actual chatting and we will go from there. This will roll out via Discord first so people who are familiar with our community can try it. This is because the first iteration is likely to be very buggy and there’s a whole range of phones out there, so we want to make sure all of these things are worked out before we launch it to the whole world.

Other Improvements

  • New warning shows when chat messages are missing

If you scroll up in chat, or the chat scroll bug affects you, you won’t have to worry about missing messages, the system will now tell you when you are missing out.

  • Meta tags to stream page so you will have thumbnails when going live on social media

As seen here modelled by Masquemare your going live posts will now look mighty fine with a thumbnail taken from your stream, to really help your posts stand out.

  • Fixed bug where stream pages would randomly refresh

When watching streams you may have noticed chat and streams randomly refresh, this is especially noticeable when watching mature streams as you need to reconfirm to watch the stream. A fix has now gone out to potentially mitigate this and so far seems to be working well. If you do notice this still happening however, please let us know in discord via the #bugs channel.

Special Update

Paco1342 has announced huge news this week! He will be joining the Glimesh team as an official full time member (still in a volunteer capacity). We are really excited with this news as Paco will now be focusing his attention towards the events team, as well as working alongside Clone1018 to help really push the focus of Glimesh to give us that extra edge.

Marketing Team Update

Marketing has really taken a step up this week with a dedicated volunteer team coming together to brainstorm ideas and create actionable content.

The keen eyed amongst you who have been keeping an eye on social media will have seen some of the creations across the past week which have been going out across our social media, including our new latency comparison video.

There are 2 additional videos already planned and work towards them has begun, in addition to a third which is nearing completion thanks to Chris.

The content created by the marketing team is being rolled out across a variety of social media platforms including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Tiktok to help get the word of Glimesh out there, as well as beginning to look at advertising campaigns which can be run with this content.

If you would like to get involved, everyone is welcome, simply head over to #marketing in our discord channel!