Skribit Blog

Last Thursday was a red letter day for Skribit as we officially let the flood gates open — okay well they were always open.. we just started telling people about it. As our first real marketing move, TechCrunch got the exclusive of our launch complete with some promocodes, a system we initially built for our appearance at WordCamp Birmingham. Several people have been wondering (a la Skribit suggestions) how the launch went from a stats perspective and if we had to deal with any performance issues and so on.

Here goes.

Promocode Mixup

Right before the TechCrunch article went up at 9am PST, I had been searching for Skribit on Twitter as I usually do, and saw a tweet about us from Dr Peter Meyers (@dr_pete).

I sent him a direct message, offering him the promocode we created for the TechCrunch launch post, which was set to give a completely free Pro account (usually $24.95/year), and mentioning how we were set to launch a bit later that day.

I tried it myself and while the promocode registers on our end and shows a $0/year price, it’s when the transaction must be completed through Amazon Simple Pay that I noticed this issue:

Input parameter promotionAmount is too low (Minimum promotionAmount is USD 0.01)

Doh! We use Amazon Simple Pay in a subscription role so that’s why we don’t bypass Amazon completely when using a complete discount promocode. In short – when the promocode system was built we didn’t think we would use it to offer completely free Pro accounts.

At this point the TechCrunch post had just gone live and the best thing I could do was temporarily alter the promocode to show a $1 price (the lowest we can do otherwise, it doesn’t like cents) as well as manually upgrade users to the promised free Pro account.

Sorry International Users

Another issue we noticed during the launch was that non-U.S. residents could not purchase Pro accounts as Amazon asked them for a U.S. address. At the time I decided to manually upgrade the affected users to a free Pro account. Before the launch, we had paying Pro account customers but I guess none of them were outside of the United States!

So, did your server catch fire?

Prior to the launch, we made sure to employ some basic performance tweaks to Skribit (a Ruby on Rails application). First and foremost, that included simple page caching of the homepage and making it static. Initially we had signup via Twitter OAuth do a callback to the homepage, triggering a dynamic, server-side element on the page which page caching broke. We changed the Twitter callback to use the signup page instead and we were able to continue page caching the homepage, along with some static pages like the About and FAQ pages.

For the record, entire page caching in Rails is fairly easy. It’s the pages that need to be selectively dynamic based on the current logged-in user that are a bit trickier. We’re still working on that aspect with some fragment caching, and looking into Rails plugins like Cache Money, Cache-Fu or Interlock that can cache Rails finder lookups, serve as “intelligent fragment caches” and so on.

I moved all of our images to Amazon CloudFront, which we had already been using in some capacity for hosting the javascript used by our widgets, and most javascript used throughout Skribit has been hosted by Google for a while now.

Back to launch day: our servers did not explode or catch fire. We have a 2 VPS setup served up by Media Temple. Each VPS has a custom install of Ubuntu with Rails done by Apache and the lovely Phusion Passenger. However, mid-way through the launch we hit the daily limit on Google SMTP and Skribit was unable to send automated emails (new account, et cetera). That was taken care of by delayed_job and they all started getting sent the next day. We are currently looking into moving our email system onto SendGrid (a TechStars startup that just received $750k of funding).

The next day however I was woken up at 5:40am by a downtime notification text message from Are My Sites Up (I also use Pingdom religiously but do not pay for SMS notifications through it). I SSH’d into both of our servers to find that the database server was running 6.0+ load averages (100% load would be a 4 load average as it is a single processor, quad core machine), but had lots of memory to spare. Lots of poking around and I solved it by editing ~/etc/my.cnf and changing innodb_buffer_pool_size to give it more memory. We had left innodb_buffer_pool_size it at the default which only gave MySQL a few paltry megs!

After that the database server went to around a 0.1-.2 load average and the app server a bit higher.

Show me the stats

Even with that being said, our site survived the TechCrunch traffic without a hitch. The TechCrunch post created just shy of 20,000 pageviews from 3,500 unique visitors that day.

If I could have changed anything, it probably would have been better to launch on a Tuesday instead of a Thursday. While it is to be expected that traffic from such press will spike then fall back down to more or less normal levels, we could have received slightly higher residual traffic had the weekend not arrived two days after the launch. That traffic also turned into around 300 tweets mentioning Skribit (mostly bot/automated RTs of TechCrunch to be fair), 33 new bookmarks on Delicious.com (although skribit.com has a total of over 700) and various conversations on sites like Hacker News and Facebook.

Here’s what that turned into:

168 people redeeming our promocode through TechCrunch, 18 people redeeming a different promocode from my blog post and several others from Lance’s blog post. Then a separate 35 or so accounts I manually upgraded to a free account after responding to their tweets, emails and comments. More impressive is the total number of new accounts during our launch period alone: 938 new users. All starting from a TechCrunch post. I’m eager to see what numbers we can get from more substantial marketing efforts.

New Users and Blogs (timeframe: Aug 09 – Dec 09)

We make it easy for users to register for Skribit by using Twitter OAuth (in addition to OpenID). It turns out 34% of new users during our launch made use of that and signed up through Twitter:

I was planning on showing off some pretty screenshots from KISSmetrics, which we are beta users of, but unfortunately they have a large volume of data to process through so we do not yet have any up-to-date information to show off our launch day conversions and such. Below is our signup flow as captured by KISSmetrics with everything from the beginning of the month to a portion of launch day traffic, defined as people first hitting the homepage, making it to the plans page and then finally the signup form.

Data from beginning December 09 to part of launch day. KISSmetrics still processing..

What’s Next (aside from continuing to build out useful features)

TechCrunch was the first “getting the word out” initiative as they generally won’t cover you unless you give them the exclusive. The next steps involve doing more of the same with blogs in different niches and doing one of a few things: helping them start using Skribit on their own (there are quite a few large bloggers I believe would benefit tremendously from Skribit – the type that are usually inundated with tips/requests from their fans) or offering them a set of free Pro accounts to giveaway on their blog, and do interviews with bloggers blogs as a way to promote Skribit. Here are a few recent interviews on some blogs:

• Israel Startup Weekend: An Interview with Skribit Co-Founder – Paul Stamatiou
• “On the Couch”: Interview with Paul Stamatiou – Co-Founder, Skribit.com
• Your Hidden Potential: My 100th Interview: Paul Stamatiou, A Georgia Tech Graduate Talks about his Start-up Skribit- A Website that helps bloggers cure writer’s block

And all along the way we’ll keep making changes from user feedback. Most recently, a new user was wondering if Skribit was compatible with WordPress.com blogs. We had an FAQ page floating around but I went back to it, restyled it and am in the process of building it out and linking to it more prominently on the homepage and elsewhere.

I also have yet to work on a big email marketing campaign about our launch (thanks for the credits MailChimp!) but I’m not sure sending an email to thousands of people right before the holidays will lead to a good open rate.

Checkout my other blog posts about working for Skribit here.

Questions or just want to show that you enjoyed this post? Drop a comment below!

Edit: For some reason our server thinks it’s yesterday – but launch day is today, the 17th!

Here at Skribit we’ve been waiting a long, long time to really see how high Skribit can go. And by waiting I mean, we’ve been constantly developing and developing to get things right before we start marketing it. We still have a ton of ideas (and a few fixes) left to make until we are happy with it ourselves but it floats the boat and we’re ready to bring on more people to check it out.

The latest addition to Skribit is the ability to sign up with Twitter or pair your existing account with your Twitter account. This makes logging in as simple as clicking on the Twitter button. We utilize secure OAuth for the connection and only request read access so we’ll never be able to tweet, DM, autofollow or do anything sneaky with your account.

Most of our other updates are just polishing up current features or adding some little bits of new functionality here and there. For example, Pro users can now set the order in which suggestions are listed on the widget and suggestions tab, as well as the ability for an advanced install of the suggestions tab, allowing you to use your own link or graphic for the tab.

And then we baked in some small buttons for helping people share their blog profile or suggestions on Twitter. This after we noticed a lot of people using Twitter to ask their friends to suggest topics for them to blog about.

So in short, this release has had lots of polishing and is just the beginning of what we really want to do. I hear Calvin is working on expanding our WordPress plugin… more on that later. Thanks to all of the early users that have helped us find issues, see what needs tweaking and help with the user experience!

Update: Checkout the TechCrunch coverage!

It has been a few busy weeks since our last post here and we’re happy to announce that we have redesigned a few of the front-facing pages of Skribit in hopes of making it easier for people to understand what Skribit is, how it works and how it can help them cure writer’s block. I just came back from WordCamp Birmingham 2009, where Skribit was a sponsor, this past weekend and had a blast.

Updates

First off, we added the ability to sort your manage page (based on feedback on our Get Satisfaction support page). We also revamped the actions. Instead of having lots of icons, we just ended up with a simple mouse hover-activated menu.

When you complete a suggestion, you can now link up as many relevant posts as you want. Great for bloggers that answer a suggestion with a series of posts, or if you want to refer to some older, yet still related posts.

You can now change your blog’s public profile URL as well as that of your user profile.

So what’s the next step? Aside from the typical development and fine-tuning we’ve always been doing, we are going to start marketing Skribit. To this date we’ve just been working on building out a product and now we’re ready to start telling people about it. We still have a ton of development to get to the picture of Skribit we have in our minds but that doesn’t mean we can’t have you guys ride along while we get there.

I (Paul) will be at Blog World Expo in a few weeks so please let me know if you’ll be there and want to meetup (and get some Skribit swag!). I will be in San Francisco after that as well.

Our sticker printers, StickerGiant, just made a quick video of them testing out their new digital press. These are the new Skribit stickers being cut! Enjoy.

The stickers will make their debut at WordCamp Birmingham, and whatever we have left we’ll be sure to find a way to get them in your hands.

Yup! As the title says, Skribit is a sponsor of an upcoming WordCamp, held September 26-27th, in Birmingham, Alabama.

What’s a WordCamp you ask? The main site puts it best:

WordCamp is a conference that focuses on everything WordPress. WordCamps are informal, community-organized events that are put together by WordPress users like you. Everyone from casual users to core developers participate, share ideas, and get to know each other.

Considering that most bloggers use WordPress, and therefore most Skribit users, we figured it would be a great event to support (and spread the good word about Skribit). WordCamp Birmingham will be especially interesting as WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg will be there! If you’re going to be there, let us know and look out for Paul (me!). I’ll have some new stickers, printed off by the awesome StickerGiant, to hand out.

See you there!

Last week we rolled out several updates and a few features. Not a huge release but still some things you’ll notice around the site. Rather than keep talking, I’ll just show you what we’ve been doing:

You can now follow users! We are working on an activity stream feature for a next release, so it’ll all make sense then.

A new security feature – we can automatically move suggestions with bad words into your spam bin on the manage page.

Ohh pretty! There’s a new icon under actions now. The icon with a user and a red delete? That lets you ignore suggestions from a particular person or IP. Just another feature aimed at helping control the quality of your suggestions.

Submit a suggestion (“unclaimed” as we call them) with no particular blogger in mind, and let anyone add it to their blog. You’ll be notified of updates and when bloggers write about your suggestion.

We’ve changed the pricing structure for our Pro accounts. From $5/month to a one-time $24.95 for a year. More than 2x cheaper now!

As usual, thanks for using Skribit and we have some cool stuff in the works!

We recently rolled out several substantial changes to Skribit.com and I’ll take this time to briefly show them off a bit. First off, the homepage has been restructured. The point of this update was to help new visitors easily understand what Skribit is all about as well as help direct users to the signup flow. Below the fold, we show off some featured blogs and recently active blogs while highlighting their recent posts. This is contrasted to our previous layout that listed popular and recently blogged suggestions. We think the new layout should help bring bloggers more visitors and fans!

In addition the main menu navigation was updated to promote some of our pages that had previously been only linked in the footer. Our about page is one of those pages. We want to promote Skribit and tell our story to show you guys that we’re not just some random startup, so prominently linking to our about page is a great way of doing that.

Tooltips!

This is one of the tiny new site features that I loved implementing. Throughout the site you can hover over certain links (for example a blog name, user, status indicator) and get more information in a little window that appears next to your mouse. Quite handy and makes browsing the site much more enjoyable.

Here are a few live examples:

User Dashboard

Instead of logging in and seeing the homepage again, Skribit users now get redirected to our new dashboard. Admittedly, its utility is currently a bit on the low side but we have big plans for the dashboard in the future and hope to make it easy for Skribit users to control their suggestions and find other great blogs and content through it.

Explore, PRO accounts, Groups, etc

Last but not least with this feature rollout, we made an Explore page to highlight some of the content throughout the site and make it easy to find more of that. We’re still tweaking the layout and pondering how to best present that information so things might change on that page.

One of the biggest reasons for the homepage update was to grow awareness about our PRO accounts. Previously they were somewhat hidden among upgrade links, but now they are on center stage and people more readily know that their account can get more features with a quick upgrade.

And one small note – we have currently removed Groups functionality from the site pending a complete overhaul. We hate to admit when we’re wrong but Groups just wasn’t working out and was getting more spam than actual usage. That being said, we are planning a relaunch sometime later in the summer of a feature called Topics where topics/groups will automatically be formed around popular areas of interest, so they don’t have to explicitly be made by any one user. That’s the idea at least. Final execution will vary. If you have any ideas about how we should build out Topics, please let us know! We’re always open to new ideas and feedback.

I think that’s it for this blog post. There are of course many tiny updates throughout the site, as always. For example, the login page was restructured a bit and forms were made larger.

Once again, thanks for using Skribit!

If you’ve been to your manage page recently, you might have noticed a new “status” button. Clicking this will give you the window below, and allow you to update the status of your suggestion. The logic behind this is that you can inform the author of the suggestion with your plans for the suggestion; maybe you need more information about the suggestion before you can write about it, maybe it’s not a good fit for your blog, or perhaps it’s brilliant and you’ve just started working on it. This will give the suggestor a better idea of what you’re doing with their suggestion; they’ll receive an email every time you update the suggestion status.

In addition to this new feature, we’ve tweaked a little suggestion tools bar that appears on all pages of suggestions for your blog. Just click the “Manage »” button. This should be more convenient than always having to go back to the manage page and finding the suggestion you wanted to edit or update.

If you have been experiencing some odd Skribit behavior, including but not limited to random short bursts of downtime and 500 errors on our homepage, we are aware of the issues and actively working to fix them. With our new servers we have been working with a new setup with Apache, Phusion Passenger (“mod_rails”) and Ruby Enterprise Edition. Passenger occasionally takes down Apache until we can come up with the perfect configuration, for which we have employed the services of Matt Manning, another local Atlanta startup guy.

Bear with us a little while longer and we hope to have these issues sorted out and have Skribit running faster than ever! In the meantime, you can keep tabs on our Twitter updates on @Skribit.

Thanks for sticking it out!

Skribit had an hour of downtime yesterday evening, as we mentioned on our Twitter account. I’m happy to report that our new 2 server setup, provided by the always helpful Media Temple, is flying along. The new setup will give Skribit all the headroom it needs to grow and test out new features. Should you spot anything funky happening, please report it to us. Thanks.