026 — Starter Packs Updates

Hey, how's it going? I'm Ryan Hefner and this is the All Play podcast. So

I didn't get a chance to record an episode last week, but I was able to do a Jam Session with Brian Casel. And one of

the things that we kinda. I guess we're focusing on during that episode is really just like, what are our, what are our plans for 2025? What are we committing to? What do we wanna see, you know, in

the next 3 months, 6 months at the end of the year? And I mean, really, it it kind of was a good forcing function to just have that kind of, you know, that conversation you're pa you're jumping between, should I do this? Should I do that? And even on that episode, I realized that one of the things that I was, I guess, like, unsure about was just what exactly to put my effort towards. And

actually, after a update from yesterday where I pushed a big update for starter packs, I kind of was downplaying or at least like not committing to starter packs and actually was looking at, moving on to more like focusing on open graphs dot com. But I had a change

of heart. I started thinking about where starter packs was and where the original vision was for it. And so I wanted to give a little update about the updates that went out yesterday, what I'm thinking about for that, what I'm still thinking about for open graphs, and we'll go from there. So yesterday I pushed out a big update for starter packs. So starter packs is at starterpacks.net .

Originally, when I launched it back in, I guess it was like late October, early November, It was there was a gap in in Blue Sky in general. So, Blue Sky started out as they have a big ramp up period. They were adding millions of people per day. And the one other big, I guess, like catalyst or or or reasons why so many people are coming in and so many people were were kind of like adopting the platform was through these starter packs. And so starter packs is basically a, a grouping of people that when you find a starter pack, you can click follow all on Blue Sky, and you can follow all those people in those starter packs.

But it's also just kind of a great way to kind of curate and share people without having to, you know, send individual profiles or have a big, like blue sky post of just a bunch of, profiles. You can kind of aggregate those into these, starter packs, which are basically just lists, and share those from there. So starter packs were kind of very popular, and I get I'd say that their popularity has kind of waned, and I'll I'll get on to some of the reasons, why I'm thinking that. And hopefully, how I can maybe kind of retain their value or or or reposition them, to be as valuable as they were in the beginning. But, essentially, Blue Sky had a big uptake.

They had these starter packs. There was no way to find a starter pack on the Blue Sky app without actually drilling into individual profiles and then go into a starter packs tab and then seeing those. So it was either shared in your feed or you had to do some digging to find them. So I felt like that was a little bit

of a gap, and that's where starter packs came in. Essentially, I got an app up and running pretty quick.

I did a quick spike on doing the Blue Sky OAuth because I was like, oh, if I'm gonna do this, I wanna make sure I have, like, the ability to OAuth someone onto the platform. So I kinda did a a general spike on that, but didn't end up using it for the initial version. I also set up a a fire hose consumer. So I wanted to make it a really easy way for me to be able to kind of, like, capture these starter packs when they're either being created or updated. And basically try to create the, you know, hopefully all encompassing.

I'm sure I I'm sure I've missed a few here and there, and I have some ideas on how I can kind of continue to kind of, expand the catalog to make sure that it's as almost all encompassing of all the starter packs that are currently on Blue Sky. So I set up the fire hose. I had those feeding in. So I'm basically creating my own catalog of all the starter packs that are on blue sky. And then I launched the initial version of the app, which really was like pretty straightforward.

Originally, it was a search field and the starter packs that I had, that I had had captured. And that's going that's coming from a Postgres database, and I'm just doing full text search on that right now. And then I ended up you know, I felt like it was a relatively quick win to also be able to while you're searching starter packs, you can also search profiles. And through the site, it offered a great way to be able to kind of explore the whole graph of people that are within Blue Sky. You can come from a profile and then, explore the people that they're following and the and and who follow them.

And then also, if they happen to have any starter packs, you can drill into those.

And so that was great. And traffic was awesome. I mean, the,

the rate at which Google had both indexed and the amount of just search, like, organic traffic from, like, organic keywords and and search from Google was amazing. Actually, let me see if I can go in and see what the peak was. And then also let you know where it ended up netting out. But

let me see. So the peak at one point oh, let me do it by let me see if I can do days. Ay ay ay. So let me go back to the beginning.

At the end of October

through to today. Let me see where we're at. So the most people who visited the site was, I guess the, the peak was about 5,000 on December 1st with a total of 12,000 page views. But, you know, granted, I,

you know, I launched this site early November. It wasn't really getting anything. Then all of a sudden Google must have got a hold of it. It quickly ramped up to that 5,000, and then it kind of sustained anywhere from, like, the high threes. And then it's kind

of took a little dip around December 16th for whatever reason. It started to kind of do a little dip there. I I guess I

should probably show this graph at some point. So maybe I'll maybe I'll include a little, image or something in the show notes. So that way people can kinda see what's going on here. And then it sustained that 2 and

a half to 3000 people per day until about January 4th. And then from there, it's just a steep decline. It bumps back up on January 7th January 8th, back up

to, like, about 2,000 people. And then it just took a dive January 11th. And then since then, it's anywhere from, like, 3, like, 2

and a half to 3 and a half, or or 250 to maybe, like, almost maybe, 300 or so people per day. So, you know, back in December, I really should have been making a go at at at getting, you know, some of these new features out. Kind of feel like I missed my window, and I am a little bit regretting it. And that's actually why I

think I was kind of backpedaling when I was talking to Brian last week, as far as which project to kind of lean into. But since then, I had a change of heart. I've kind of always loved an underdog story. And so when I saw that traffic dip down and I thought about where starter packs was and where I wanted to take it, the the amount of effort and the distance of that, you know, that chasm or the divide didn't seem too crazy, especially can say compared to what I know that I'm already gonna wanna do with open graphs. And that's kind of an interesting story because I feel like the stuff that I wanna do with open graphs is gonna feed into what I wanna do with, starter packs.

And it's kind

of this great cyclical cycle of, you know, basically efforts supporting other efforts and hopefully all tides raising all ships. So let me

go into a quick update. I can't believe I'm already at 9 minutes. I'm gonna do a do a quick update of what went out yesterday on starter packs and why I decided to lean into that and so forth. So I said that I had, done that quick spike on the OAuth. Well, OAuth went out live yesterday on starter packs.

So now you can log in with your Blue Sky account. And now as you're browsing the profiles and starter packs on on on starter packs dot net, you can follow people.

Right now, it's only on profiles. I will be adding a follow all to the starter packs page. So that went out. Just a

lot of little tweaks and stuff. When I first did the website, I I guess I was kind of in a dark mode mood. So I kinda locked in my theme, to dark mode and just went with that. I've opened that up. I basically kind of redesigned and retweeted everything.

And then now the site support supports both like light and dark modes or whatever system has a set to. Granted not a big change, but just kind of, you know, getting a little bit more to a real kind of product or or app feel. So that went out yesterday. The, the landing page actually is now featuring some starter packs, and I think that's looking good. I did some optimizations as far as loading of followers and following and all this other stuff.

But I'd say the biggest things was the OAuth and just, the general, some kind of design tweaks. And actually while trying to figure out the homepage, it started to make me think about what makes more sense as far as how can I can further evolve or expand the site? And I think categories is gonna be one

of the things I'll probably end up adding soon. So the ability to basically browse categories and see both profiles and starter packs that fall within those categories. I think that could be interesting. I think it's a little bit more, I guess from,

right now the site solely relies on search. And so we have 2 searches going on. We have the starter pack search, which is basically my search that is kind of a full text Postgres search. And then we have the profile search, which is provided from blue sky. Actually, both of them aren't that great right now.

So I'd love to figure out a way to kind of potentially unify those at the same time. I don't wanna have all, I think it they're up to like 28 or who knows, 29,000,000 people in my database right now and and trying to

do a search across that. But I think there might be

a smart way of, of basically trying to make those better as well as I definitely know I want the starter pack search to be much better. And so that is some future stuff that I plan on optimizing. I'm going along the I don't know. That's those are the biggest changes. I have more plans.

I've definitely am writing the script over this weekend that will start to pull in and show starter packs that people are in, in addition to the ones that they've created on their profiles. Now that I think I might explore making a premium feature just because I think it further expands your profile, further expands discovery. Hopefully, that'll lead to more followers for the people who have these starter packs displayed on their profiles. And that's another thing I wanna get to is, since the traffic has dipped so low, and not to say it's it's terrible. I mean, the site's only a couple of months old and it's getting, you know, 2 to 300 people per day.

I'd love to get that back up into the thousands range again. And so I'm gonna be exploring some tricks on how I can do that. The first thing I did was on the starter packs page, just the metadata, the, like title and description. I tried to flesh that out with both like the description of the starter pack itself, as well as a little info information about the person who created it. Hopefully, we'll see I'll see what how that goes and I'll let you know if that's boosting traffic at all.

But, you know, that's gonna be one of those slow kinda grindy game things, and we'll see where it goes. The other thing I'm gonna start doing is really just start talking about it more. I haven't really shared it that much. I mean, I've shared it mostly on blue sky just because obviously that's where it's relevant. I haven't really shared it on like LinkedIn.

I've done a few things over on Twitter. I actually am kinda keeping my Twitter account just in the meantime because I wanna use it as a way to pull people over from Twitter and get them on the blue sky. So I've been thinking about maybe some sort of challenge there, and I think starter packs will play a role in that. But, yeah, that's where I'm at. I am definitely way over it.

It's 14 minutes. So hopefully this is interesting. I'm leaning into starter packs. I'm definitely not, forgetting about open graphs. I think the stuff that I'm gonna be working on there will be used and consumed by, starter packs.

So I'm looking forward to getting on the getting working on that shortly. And, so I am committing to basically having both starter packs up with hopefully a subscription, before the end of the month. And then like I said to Brian on our jam sessions episode, which I'll also link to in the show notes, getting an initial version of open graphs out in March and who knows, maybe earlier. I'd love to get some people testing it. I'm doing, I'm gonna be using it on all my sites where I'm currently using my old app that I wrote, which is called link cards.

Open graphs is gonna be a little bit more broader of a, of a solution, but basically I'm gonna start out by having it just do the same thing that link cards is doing. And so we'll see how it goes. So hopefully this is

interesting. Definitely let me know what is interesting or, you know, if

you wanna ask more questions about why starter packs versus leaning into something else or, or what my plans are for trying to further increase the traffic to starter packs and try to get it back up into that 1,000 people per day. That's I mean, that's gonna be my goal. So I'm gonna try to share as much as I can as far as, like, things that are working and not working on that front, And we'll see how it goes. So I went way over. I'm Ryan Hefner, the All Play podcast.

Follow me on bluesky @ryanhefner.com. Obviously check out my website at ryanhefner.com. You can follow the podcast at on a bluesky @allplay.fm . And obviously the website's allplay.fm. Hopefully this is interesting. Follow along, check out starter packs, log in. Let me know if you have run any issues logging in or following people, via the site. That's at starter packs dot net.

And I'll, be catching up with you again soon.

Alright. Have a great one.

Later.