Product Update: Rewards Program, Test Results, and Mobile Curation for All

Update: the results on the rewards program are in! Now that all of the new rewards members have been notified, here’s a look at some of the awesome curators who benefited from it.

It’s pretty safe to say that it’s been a strong beginning to 2014 here at Scoop.it. We’ve been working, hypothesizing, testing, listening, and implementing pretty much since the clock struck midnight on January 1st. That said, I wanted to check in with you today to give you some insight into what’s going on over here – including some pretty big and exciting new announcements!

Announcing the Scoop.it Rewards Program!

With an extremely exciting and milestone-filled two-year anniversary last year and a fast growing community of awesome users, we just had to come up with a way to express our love and appreciation for your being so active and loyal. While everybody loves love, (and we certainly love spreading it!), sometimes it can seem a bit intangible. You deserve more than that, and we’re here to deliver. With that in mind, we’re extremely excited to announce the brand new Scoop.it Rewards Program!

Loyalty. Some of you have been active since the very day of our launch (and to our great pleasure, many private beta testers are even still here and kicking!). You’ve helped us grow, and it’s an honor to still be serving you: To express our gratitude, we’re offering a lifetime Pro plan to the most active curators who’ve been with us since Jan 1st, 2012 (Oh, and for those of you, amongst these top “historical” curators, who have already upgraded to pro: now, it’s on us).

Impact. We also want to reward our top curators, because you show the others way and you have earned our utmost respect. So every month from now on, we will be rewarding our top curators – those who’ve earned gold or silver badges and whose traffic over the previous months is among the highest – with a free 6 month Pro license.

Watch your email and look out for the notification popup on your Scoop.it dashboard: you might receive your reward soon. Thank you for being loyal and active Scoop.it curators!

Adjusted free plan

As we may have mentioned once or twice, we’re committed to delivering the best content curation platform out there, and based on our growing curator community and customer base, we believe we are on the right track. Additionally, as we all know, a basic requirement for pushing harder and longer is to make sure we’re looking at a sustainable business, which means continuously finding the right balance between what we offer as part of the free version and what’s in the premium plans.

So, based on numerous tests we’ve conducted over the past few weeks, we’ve decided to change the free plan’s features. Note that in doing so, it was important for us to not restrict any current curator’s existing capabilities.

The free plan now allows:

• To create up to 2 topics

• To connect up to 2 social accounts

• To use the basic version of our suggestion engine (find content related to any of your keywords, but the advanced tuning features are now premium).

Already above these limits? Don’t panic: you will be grandfathered and keep every benefit you already use. Free users who have already created more than two topics or connected more than two social accounts, and those who have already tuned the suggestion engine will keep these benefits. In other words, none of your topics will be deleted, none of your social networks will be disconnected, and none of your customized sources will be removed.

How were such adjustments decided? First, we discussed with our community (thanks again; all of your feedback, positive or negative, is useful). Then, we called on the most objective referee: A/B Testing. Tens of price and feature combinations were tested against each other and evaluated for short term and long term impacts on customer satisfaction, product usage and revenue.

This isn’t new, but during our latest tests, some of you who were impacted and upset raised a very valid question: why didn’t we communicate about these tests as we usually do?

Openness is one of our core values. That’s why we regularly share our problems, as well as our experience. However, it is genuinely difficult to communicate on A/B testing in real time, for a legitimate technical reason: due to their very nature, some tests would be invalid if they were communicated! Believe me, it’s not something that we like to do and we had a lot of passionate debates internally on this. But typically, measuring price and feature quantity falls into this category: unbiased results call for un-advertised tests.

The good news is that these tests generated fantastic results, which not only makes us confident for the future but also enables us to finally communicate about the above changes.

And if you’re among the users who’ve been disturbed or angry at us for our lack of transparency, we hope you reached out to us and we were able to address your concerns already. But if not, we want to also reiterate our apologies and share with you the whole picture on our internal operations and constraints, and reassure you about our objectives.

Mobile friendly Scoop.it for everyone

As you know, iPhone, iPad and Android versions of Scoop.it are available for curating on the go. But, many of you have also required a mobile-friendly Scoop.it experience, app or not. With the increasing importance of mobile to access and share information, we’re glad to announce our brand new mobile-friendly platform! Topics can now be accessed from mobile browsers (with no application) in a much more attractive and user-friendly manner than before. This of course is available to all users.

Information overload does not stop when you are away from your desktop; and your community still needs to be fed when you are on the move. With this new release, your curation has no good reason anymore to stay idle when you are mobile!

That’s all for today. Thank you again for your loyalty and for being the most amazing online community of curators in the world! If you have any questions, concerns, comments, criticisms, or simply just want to say hi, please don’t hesitate to comment, tweet, email, call, carrier pigeon, etc. We look forward to hearing from you and continuing this incredible journey with you.

Rate this post: (No Ratings Yet)

---

Loading...