SCNX: Time to focus on growth

Simon -

Hello everyone - been a while.

Today, we're here to talk about a major change in how we prioritise work, handle our growing community and how we plan to approach SCNX in the future.

Growth on SCNX as stagnated in the last few months, meaning that the number of users using SCNX didn't increase as expected. This can have multiple reasons, but we identified the following issues:

  • Lack of marketing on our part (we mostly relay on Word-To-Word marketing)
  • Complicated initial setup rules
  • Confusing usage requirements
  • Lack of written documentation and limited availbilty of Customer Support
  • and more, less impactful issues

Why this is an issue

Currently, we are loosing money by working on SCNX: With thin profit margins, tons of customers on free plans, complicated (and expensive) hosting infrastructure and thousands of customer requests per month, the work and money we need to invest to keep the lights on at SCNX is huge.

Financially, offering SCNX doesn't really make sense. To make this business sustainable long-term, we need to scale and increase our customer base massively. A bigger amount of customers (even if only a small fraction pays for using SCNX) would mean more resources to re-invest into this project. This would allow us to actually pay people to work on SCNX and ensure the regular updates and quality increases our current customers love.
Failing to grow doesn't mean SCNX will be killed (we are not Google after all), but we'd need to scale back our investment massively, meaning that SCNX would receive less and less updates.

How things work right now

Right now, our team was focussed in making SCNX as attractive, as diverse and as feature-rich as possible - and our customers are loving it. Still, this lead to us making features over-complicated to allow maximum customisability or making new modules so complicated that even our great Helpers have issues understanding what the customer is asking them. Onboarding is confusing, commands can be used by everyone by default and customer suggestions got denied due to formal submission errors - all these issues created a negative user experience leading to users just giving up on trying to use SCNX, even if they saw other servers using SCNX without issues.

How plan to tackle this challenge

To solve these issues, we need to radically rethink our approach to building SCNX: Instead of focusing on the product, it's time make sure that potential customers are aware that SCNX exists and be introduced to its features and community.

To do this, we've created an action plan including, but not limited to, the following items:

  • Redesign parts of SCNX and the Modmail / Custom-Bot to allow easier onboarding, configuration and usage
  • Create a detailed documentation about everything on SCNX, allowing customers to find what they are looking for without needing to contact our friendly customer support
  • Create new guidelines for our team on how to handle customer issues, customer requests and customer interactions
  • Rework our current referral system and increase its rewards and advertise it to users more aggressively
  • Remove or rework the ads in the current free plan: Watching an ad every week is not a good selling point.
  • Create customer experience studies and surveys to measure pain-points in the current SCNX Dashboard and fix them
  • Create direct, easier customer feedback and suggestions paths
  • Redesing the SCNX Landing page (you can view a preview on the homepage of scnx.xyz) and make it more SEO-Friendly

We'll be publishing updates about these changes on our Discord, so stay tuned.

We've set ourself the goal of achieving an increase of our growth numbers by January 31, at which point we'll need to reevaluate our strategy again.

Final thoughts

Our mission hasn't change: Our vision for SCNX is a Swiss army knife for everything a community on Discord might need, allowing full customisability, great customer- and end-user-experiences and all that at a fair price (we should always be able to advertise it as "cheaper than a coffee"). We still plan on adding tons of new functionality and features, but we'll need to temporarily change our short-time approach to development.

If you are wondering on how you can help: Sharing SCNX with your Discord Admin friends is a great way! Any purchase on SCNX makes it easier for us to pay for SCNX, so we'd appreatiate that as always. This is also probably a good time to buy one of the Lifetime-Plans, as these will be removed in the future.

Thanks for sticking with SCNX!
We'd be happy to hear your feedback on our Discord - happy halloween 🎃!