September 2020 — End of the Month Update
Hi everyone 👋
We’re at the end of September. Yet another month down! And now the seasons are beginning to change :)
September has been a busy month for NativShark. Lots of work happening. Let’s get into it✨
What we’ve been up to
Development
Lots of content fixes ^_^ As well as a couple of tricky bugs early on in the month. For the second half of September, the development team has been working on a total re-work of our theming system in order to massively improve site speed and performance.
That update is set to come out very soon. Be sure to keep an eye on our twitter and discord community for updates. Our testers have been saying things like:
So that’s a feels good :) NativShark will now be buttery smooth, just as it should be.
In addition to the performance improvements, there are some other highly requested QoL changes (e.g. Premium students can now adjust their minimum Shadow Loops looping defaults to below 3). Take a read of the patch notes for full details on the update.
Students
We’ve seen many students maintain their perfect streaks for 6 weeks straight, quite exciting.
And over 3 million student events have transpired on the site with nearly 3 years total study time! Keep up the good work everyone, you’re nailin’ it.
Additionally, we’ve received even more fantastic feedback on our feedback site. It’s lead to some great conversations in the community and on the forums regarding how students are enjoying the platform and in what ways we can make it better.
Our feedback site: https://feedback.nativshark.com/
We had our first students hit their 30 day streaks and join the “Torch Club” this month:
That was really exciting!
Content
We released the first 7 Units of Phase Two this month, with more set to release next month.
Additionally, we began firing up the extra content production & community engagement engines. We started a couple new series on our Instagram:
We started some chill hangout streams on our Twitch channel, NativSharkTV:
https://www.twitch.tv/nativsharktv
Made a lo-fi beats mix:
And Chengaiz started a Study Vlog to document his learning progress:
Lastly, we put out a press release:
Management
Hoping that the world opens up ever so slightly so that some of our long-lost team members can re-enter Japan… Will just try to remain optimistic that things will improve in that regard :)
In the mean time, we’ve gotten pretty good at being a globally dispersed remote team haha. I talked a bit about that on stream the other day, chat was asking about it — good conversation.
Additionally, as an ever-evolving product and company, we’ve been closely analyzing the usage of the pace slider and have determined that we need to remove the ability to turn it off. We’ve removed the 1 year pace as well.
There is a full post coming on this pretty soon, as it deserves one of its own… but in short, it ended up not working well for students, and sort of broke NativShark. We put those options in from the start as a test, and we learned a lot. Very exciting that we’re able to adapt to data and feedback and tune the platform in response!
Having come from teaching in other ways and through 3rd party platforms... Having our own software platform really is a dream :D
Another thing we’ve been monitoring closely is our pricing as we’re on the ever-important startup quest of hitting profitability💪
We’ve received such a fantastic overall response to the product that, now as a management team, we’re settling in and thinking long and hard about how to optimize things such that we can continue to grow our subscriber base. Both through better awareness and outreach around NativShark, and in making the pricing be rewarding while making sense.
Much like with learning a language, there’s always ways to improve!
What’s coming up
This past month, after reviewing all the usage data and tons of student feedback, we’ve managed to come up with the direction we’re taking the platform over the next 6 months and let me just say — I’m SO excited about where we’re going.
The DesignOps team got together and had an Architecture Sprint where we essentially built the “blueprints” of what we’re internally calling “NativShark 2.0,” as it is that much of an improvement. I can’t give away too much yet but… Just saying it’s amazing. In the coming monthly updates we’ll be sharing more and more about where things are headed.
For the time being, with NativShark 1.0 we’ll continue putting out QoL updates and making things better for students while we lay the foundations of NativShark 2.0.
Our main development focus as part of this will be on a massive improvement to our Content Management Platform (CMP). It needs to be re-worked so that the content team can properly publish Units at a faster pace. On the current CMP... well, essentially, it “works” and that’s all there is to say about it. That needs to change before Phase Two content and beyond can come out quickly.
Additionally, we need to get the CMP updates in so that we can introduce the new review tools and such that we’ve been designing. These new review tools should drastically improve the “I finished my Units for today but I want to study more” experience, along with generally helping new content stick in the mind easier. More about this as we get closer to their release…
In short:
- Continued QoL updates on the platform
- More phase two Units
- Dev team to focus hard on new content management platform (CMP) to unlock the future.
- More community content, events, videos, etc.
Thanks for reading this month’s update and I’m really looking forward to what October has in store.
Keep up the good work on your studies~
