Reflections from Parsertime's Launch Week

It's been a week since we launched Parsertime, and we wanted to take a moment to reflect on the journey so far. The response from the community has been amazing, and we're grateful for all the feedback and support we've received. Here are some of our reflections from the launch week:

The community's response has been overwhelmingly positive

The response from the community has been overwhelmingly positive. We've received a lot of feedback, feature requests, and suggestions for improvement. We're grateful for all the support and encouragement we've received, and we're excited to continue building and improving Parsertime based on the feedback we've received. We wanted to talk about some of the analytics we've seen so far.

We received about 160 unique visitors on launch day, and interest the next day was still high with 144 unique visitors. While we've seen a slight decrease in traffic since then, we're still seeing a steady stream of visitors to the site.

Most of our traffic has come from Twitter, with 187 visitors coming from the platform. We've also seen a good amount of traffic from Discord, with 66 visitors. The most popular country for visitors has overwhelmingly been the United States, with 116 visitors, followed by Canada. We've also seen visitors from countries like the United Kingdom, Germany, and Australia. We're excited to see the interest in Parsertime from around the world and look forward to continuing to grow our community. In the future, we want to expand our reach and make Parsertime accessible to users from all over the world by providing translations and support for different languages.

We weren't fully prepared for the amount of traffic

One of the biggest surprises for us was just how much attention Parsertime received on launch day. We are, of course, grateful and excited about the interest in Parsertime, but we were not prepared for how the traffic would affect our services. The Tweet below from our announcement shows the community's excitement, but it also shows the amount of attention we received.

At the time of writing, this Tweet received about 14k views and 200 likes. This might not seem like a lot, but for a mostly one person project, this amount of traffic can be overwhelming. The biggest issue was our email infrastructure. We use Twilio Sendgrid to send emails, and we quickly hit our free tier limit.

A warning from Twilio about reaching our email quota for the month.

To keep platform costs low, we had to quickly pivot to a new provider while avoiding downtime for our users. Our solution was to use Amazon's Simple Email Service, which was a bit more complicated to set up but allowed us to send emails without incurring additional costs.

AWS SES showing our new email quota and usage. We expect this to suit our needs for a long time.

There's a lot of moving parts and dependencies in our project, and the email quota went unnoticed throughout much of the development process due to not being a priority. This experience taught us the importance of tracking quotas and making sure our service can scale to meet demand. Luckily for us, due to being hosted on Vercel, our website was able to handle the traffic without any issues and we remained at 100% uptime.

We need to improve our onboarding process

Another area we identified for improvement was our onboarding process. We saw from the initial uploaded data that many users were confused about how to use Parsertime. We had a few users who uploaded incorrect data or didn't understand the value that Parsertime provides. To address this, we've put work in place to improve our onboarding process, scale up documentation, and provide more resources to help users get started. We made a previous blog post that shows how to use Parsertime with a real-world example. Additionally, we provide support via the Community Discord and help users figure out how to use Parsertime for their needs.

Our documentation needs improvement

We also identified that our documentation needs improvement. We've received feedback from users that our documentation is lacking in some areas and could be more comprehensive. To address this, we've started working on making improvements and clarifying unexpected behavior. As we add new features and functionality to Parsertime, we'll continue to update our documentation to ensure that users have the information they need to get the most out of the platform.

One such area that we've improved since launch is the log collection process. We've added more detailed instructions on how to collect logs from Overwatch and upload them to Parsertime. We've also added new features for scrim management and reflected that in our documentation. We're committed to providing comprehensive and up-to-date documentation to help users get the most out of Parsertime.

Please do remember that we're a small team and we're working hard to improve Parsertime based on the feedback we've received. We appreciate your patience and understanding as we work to make Parsertime the best it can be. Additionally, while the platform is still in beta, our documentation may not be as comprehensive as we'd like. We're working hard to improve this and appreciate your feedback and suggestions for how we can make Parsertime better for you. If you have any feedback or suggestions, please don't hesitate to reach out to us via the Community Discord.

Conclusion

Overall, the launch week has been an exciting and rewarding experience for us. It's been a long five months of development, and we're thrilled to see Parsertime out in the world and being used by the community. We're grateful for all the feedback and support we've received and are excited to continue building and improving Parsertime based on the feedback we've received. We're committed to making Parsertime the best it can be and look forward to continuing to grow our community and provide a valuable service to users around the world. Happy scrimming, and thank you for your support! 🥳