By Charlie Patel
Happy Monday Tribemates! I wanted to provide a quick update to share what’s been happening behind the scenes here at Triberr.
Technology
Our team has been reviewing the Triberr platform to document and understand the technical intricacies of its many features. It’s been an intimidating task but absolutely necessary. We’re learning a tremendous amount and finding valuable nuggets in the thousands of lines of code (thanks Dan!). Though, the inevitable conclusion is that we will need to rewrite the app from the ground up for future scalability and sustainability. In short, if we want to rapidly test and release new features to the community while supporting millions of users, the existing code base simply won’t cut it. Sometimes, you just have to start over to move faster. We expect to complete our analysis and have a focused plan within the next few weeks, after which most of us will be heads-down in development.
- Thanks to one of our developers (Kyle!), we built a quick API for internal reporting that provides basic metrics on users, tribes, and shares. The reported numbers provide us a solid foundation to make key decisions as we carve our path ahead. I like to make decisions based on real data 🙂
- We’ve already made some improvements in fine-tuning our database queries for faster loading
- Expecting to do a massive overhaul to our server infrastructure in the coming months. It’s not surprising to learn that the infrastructure required to process thousands of rss feeds daily and hundreds of thousands of shares monthly is very expensive!
- Campaigns – We’ve been fielding influencer marketing campaigns from various agencies and brands. They’re excited to work with us and have provided great feedback on what they’re looking for in the future. This feedback will be baked into future development efforts for Campaigns. Our goal is to recreate Campaigns so that it is also an accessible marketing channel for our community members, as well as larger companies such as brands and agencies.
Fact: Triberr’s directly responsible for millions of shares every month.
Support
In my opinion, ‘Support‘ is everyone’s job on our team. We’re able to identify common patterns and problem areas by reviewing older support tickets as well as fielding the daily inquiries that come in via our support system. Submit your support questions there.
Thus far, our team has reviewed the last two years’ worth of support inquiries. There were consistencies in areas for improvement, where additional clarifications or documentation was needed, and feature requests. We’re working on improving on these fronts.
We also analyzed the Bonfire threads (the good, bad and ugly) to glean into what’s valuable to users and what’s not. While some threads were.. spammy, there were others that provided valuable insights into what users needed to be more effective. For example, better on-boarding process and ways to identify relevant tribes. Noted!
Fact: More than 95%+ of our bandwidth goes towards supporting free users. That’s a huge cost for any web business and we’ll have to tackle that problem inevitably.
Operations
As with any acquisition, the first few weeks are dedicated towards understanding how all the pieces work together. Luckily, I had a great introduction and hit the ground running. Now, we’re in the process of identifying the low hanging fruit that can be addressed quickly. I’ll provide more details on internal operations once we’ve gotten our ducks in a row.
With regard to talent, we’ve started tapping our network to find smart folks who fit the following profiles:
- Software Engineers (2x)
- Growth Hacker (1x)
- Business Development Associate (1x)
If you, or someone you know, is interested in helping Triberr become the go-to platform for bloggers and marketers, give us a shout on Twitter or via email.
Feedback
I’ve personally reached out to some of our paying users to hear their thoughts directly. I’ll be sending a short survey requesting additional input from a few hundred of the most active Triberr members to gather more feedback. Based on your collective feedback, my team and I will prioritize future development efforts.
I’ll keep the community in the loop on a regular basis with similar updates on Triberr. In the meantime, let me know if you have any questions in the comments below.
