ClickASnap quarterly report April-June 2017

Time seems to be flying past at the moment, and only getting quicker! It is now 3 months on from my last quarterly report regarding ClickASnaps performance and progress, now, I present Q2:

In the conclusion of my last report we summarised what we expected to be completing in the second quarter:

  1. Marketplace home page, this will be a massive refinement on the marketplace landing page making it more compelling to buy products that are for sale
  2. Product search systems to make it easier to find products that you wish to buy
  3. A user shop, this will display all of your ‘for sale’ items in one easy place, which can be shared and browsed by your consumers
  4. Marketplace ‘open access’ this will allow users to play with the marketplace before committing t0 the £3 a month fee
  5. User profiles are to be updated and completed
  6. Free downloads are to be accessible with just an email address rather than having to sign up to the site to receive them, allowing easier downloads
  7. We will be limiting uploads of free accounts to 7 images per day, this is to help reduce the proliferation of junk photos from some new users
  8. £1 a month no ads subscription. Fed up of ads? Sign up to this to browse the platform ad free
  9. An automated algorithm that will enable new users to find people to follow to increase the following of existing users and to integrate new users into the platform more wholly. There will also be an option to promote your account through this system to increase the amount of followers you have faster.
  10. Addition of portrait photo printing options to the marketplace
  11. Various minor bug fixes

During this quarter we succeeded in carrying out the following:

  1. We refined our marketplace page allowing purchasers to easily download products without having to go through an onerous checkout process, as well as adding buttons to enable viewing of all the products in any particular category
  2. We added in new product search systems which can be found within the marketplace sidebar. This allows users to search by price and product
  3. There is now a user shop so users can promote their own products for sale, without promoting a whole marketplace
  4. We added Marketplace open access. This enables users to trial the marketplace and see what ia available to them prior to paying the £3 a month fee to put their products up for sale
  5. We limited uploads to 7 per day, this has helped retain a high level of quality imagery on the site
  6. We added a £1 per month ad free browsing option
  7. When users now sign up they are confronted with users to follow, and new followers can now be found within the feed page. This will help increase organic account growth. Users can also promote their account to gain more subscribers
  8. Users can now sell their products as portrait orientated prints
  9. We significantly improved our mobile offering, this has increased site useage significantly and is a healthy indicator to start looking at mobile apps towards the end of 2017, early 2018.

We also carried out a huge amount of bug fixes. We stopped development and went through the site with a fine tooth comb with the aim to fix as many issues as we could find. This cost many thousands of pounds to sort out, but I believe the investment is worth it as it has resulted in a faster, smoother and less frustrating site to use. It has also resulted in a huge increase in daily users, going from an average of 1,500 a day to 3,000 per day as can be seen below:

Marketing:

Mike Brown interviewed me for his Youtube channel and this video was released on the 7th May 2017. This resulted in a large influx of new users as well as considerable levels of extra investment. This extra investment will speed up considerably, the development of the site, particularly as no salaries are paid and all incoming capital is spent on technology and software.

We also started growing the ClickAsnap youtube account, growing to over a hundred subscribers and several thousand views. This account didn’t really exist 3 months ago, and with the addition of Mike Brownes tutorial videos is growing nicely organically.

Our Twitter and Meta accounts are also growing steadily, again organically and we are adding new blog entries to the ClickAsnap blog weekly to maintain it’s slow, but steady organic growth.

We have invested heavily in a new landing page which will be used with various CPC ad campaigns to increase our conversion rates and correlated growth. We have already managed to obtain hits at an average of ~£0.11 per click. During initial testing we are seeing typical conversion rates of ~9-10%. This is resulting in a cost per acquisition of ~£1.13, meaning that to expand to a million users through CPC advertising would cost about £1.1M, with a 5% conversion rate through to paid accounts this would net £250,000 revenue per month leading to a pay back period of 4 months and a profit of £2m per million spent on advertising upto saturation.

We have quite a few more features to add to the Pro accounts on the platformt to encourge a higher uptake of these features. Once these are in place we will likely push CPC advertising harder to further cement our lead on any potential competitors.

Growth:

The site is growing steadily, maintaining 300+ photos uploaded per day as well as 10-20 new organic sign ups per day. As mentioned in the marketing section there are ways of increasing this faster all dependent on budgets available to us. There is, perhaps, an argument here to attempt to raise a significant amount of capital to speed up the growth of the site. This shouldn’t be particularly difficult as it is growth financing rather than seed or experimental funding.

Total site statistics:

1,474 new content creators  (Vs +789 Q1) Total 8,985

47,955 new photos  (Vs +40,179 Q1) Total 265,419

164,108 total users (Vs +121,645 Q1)

2,498,585 image views (Vs +2,478,648 Q1)

Our uploaded photos per day have dropped slightly since the last report. This is due to us bringing in an upload limit of 7 photos per day to free accounts to prevent the proliferation of spam and junk content, whilst volume of photos has dropped, quality has increased. Total page views has dropped slightly and this is partly due to our successful discouragement of ‘like for like’ users. This was particularly important as these type of users resulted in TSU going bust as well as Niume having to stop revenue payments, and was certainly a cause for concern during the theoretical and early stages of ClickASnap. Whilst the discouragement of such users does slow site growth and potentially reduce some site interaction, it will result in a much more stable platform with higher quality content and therefore higher revenue streams and related payments.

Next quarter plans:

We are currently working through the following to have released during Q3:

Multiple bug fixes including:

  • Paypal IPN calls to ensure that when payments are missed or cancelled accounts are cancelled correctly
  • Further mobile design fixes and improvements
  • Further work on EXIF layout
  • Tags when editing photos
  • Titles and description changes

New features:

  • Two stage sampling system for imagery. This will result in much clearer and sharper thumbnails and display images
  • Incorporation of new display technology. This will allow the swiping of photos, zoom in and out, preloading of images to speed up display, as well as a myriad of other features
  • Further Feed work, including the ability to reply to individual comments, deletion and editing of existing statuses
  • Image URL masking, this will ensure photos found in Google and other search results go to the ClickAsnap image page and not the AWS bucket
  • Multiple vendors for a larger range of products and pricing for seller and pro accounts
  • The ability for users of free accounts to buy their own images as prints and products
  • Automated marketing system to help the users of pro accounts reach their audience 24 hours a day 7 days a week
  • Private galleries for Pro accounts, allowing the hosting of any (legal) images, as well as the ability to password protect and sell images within the galleries
  • Significant investment in the efficiencies of the site to decrease site response time as well as allow our existing infrastructure to deal with a larger amount of traffic prior to upgrading
  • Annual payment options, including discounts for Pro and Seller accounts

As you can see we have busy times ahead and alot of site features and improvements to bring out to give our user base every tool they need to create incomes and host their photography and art.

I hope you found this report useful, as always I am available to talk to and should you wish to invest and be a part of our world first platform, we do have a small amount of shares still available.

Tom Oswald

CEO

Tom@Clickasnap.com

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