Tenth month for gFam
Hi everyone!
So, ah, we had a massively huge month, our biggest month ever actually... and it broke us.
Before we get into that though... here are our previous posts if you want to nerd out on some comparisons...
We want to include everything that's happening in the gFam world to stay as transparent as possible. If you have any questions, please contact us on *Twitter*.
It all started with a little invitation from fellow Coil creator Matt Hamilton to be on his Twitch stream, the amazingly excellent RippleX Developer Channel with super builder Wietse Wind, an absolutely fascinating senior data scientist at Ripple Shae Wang and the incredible David Schwartz, the CTO of Ripple.
Being in such incredible company I expected to be shouted down by the crowd with chants of 'We Want David' but the session went really well and everyone was very kind.
The very next day gFam was featured on Ali G aka XRP Bags YouTube show:
We also found that someone had listed the platform on a site called Noise.Cash in a section that helps people earn extra income:
https://noise.cash/search?q=gfam.live
All this attention all at once was absolutely incredible... did this to our site...
[[Source]](https://media.giphy.com/media/KeipZLVdjPUJbV3V9Z/giphy.gif)
We've had 'move infrastructure to cloud architecture' on our roadmap for 6 months... but it's not a feature that creates much fanfare... our site was working fine, and certainly no one mentioned that it was sluggish... until we got too popular too quickly and then we were immediately filled with regret.
We had to perform immediate infrastructure surgery on the site and it's taken 2 and a half weeks, but we're pretty optimized and efficient now and running quicker than we ever expected.
It's one of those things that no one notices when it's working, but everyone notices when it's not... and if we're going to be taken seriously and compete with more established platforms we're going to need to be as quick as them... so we're really excited to have finished this work... even if literally no one else is.
Platform Stats
Stats from 1st June 2020 to date:
Users : 313 (+118)
Post count: 5338 (+841)
Tip count: 6409 (+611)
Total XRP tipped: 33371.82 (+1409.73) ~ $19906 USD
This doesn't include all the micropayments flowing through gFam from Coil subscribers to Coil creators... Brandon Wilson of Coil told us about Web Monetization Receipt Verifier, so that's going on the roadmap!
Project Update
This month has been all about fixing the bugs from last month's releases, and moving our architecture to the cloud.
Even though we tested the Gated Content feature a lot ourselves, once we released it and people started using it, we noticed a ton of little bugs pop up... including fixing one and deploying code to production mere hours before the Twitch stream. Stressful times!
As a result of Fixing March Madness I halted all marketing efforts. It just didn't make sense to try and onboard people while we were fixing so much... especially with the potential disruption of moving all our images into the cloud.
Excited to get back into it in April though!
gFam Analytics
You can totally see our analytics anytime by clicking on the Analytics hyperlink at the bottom of the main page panel.
In February we had 995 unique visitors and 4K site views... stats that we completely blew out of the water in March...
You can clearly see the day of the Twitch stream and the YouTube video... and while we lost a few creators with our slow site, we've had a good amount of increased activity continue.
It's amazing what just happens sometimes...
In February we earned 4 XRP and our total 263 XRP was worth $118 USD.
March was a lot more kind to us with 14 XRP earned throughout the month.
We also gained our first Coil affiliate this month, so that's really exciting. We'll see next month if we earn anything from it. If you're interested in taking on a Coil subscription to help reward creators, please look into gFam's affiliate referral link.
Most popular post in March was this post with 145 views from Yes2Everything:
I guess everyone just loves cleanliness.
Traffic sources are always interesting to us...
Really interesting that we got so much traffic from Instagram considering we literally haven't posted for a month. Social media definitely has a weird delayed lag effect going on.
We have no idea what people are searching on Google or DuckDuckGo to find us... but we're very pleased that they do.
Mobile devices is double desktop, Chrome is nearly double Safari and clearly the US is winning the war on gFam appreciation.
Our Twitter account had 462 tweets and 492 followers at the end of February, and we've grown a little with all the excitement earlier this month...
In February we only created 1 Instagram post, last month's project report ironically, and gained 6 followers.
We're excited to get back into the marketing game and start interacting with creators of all shapes and sizes. We missed it!
Pinterest, as ever, keeps on confusing us because we haven't posted there at all this month, but somehow have a more engaged audience...
We are really keen to get back into talking to creators and sharing the amazingness that is web monetization.
Please contact us on Twitter with any comments or questions!
Or click on this tweet to reply:
Thanks for reading!
