Speaker Deck

Recently I did two small tweaks to increase traffic to our /pro page. The /pro page is where people can upgrade to get our paid features.

We had links in the header and upsells when freemium limits were hit. But nothing fancy or eye catching.

When we launched Pro accounts, I put a banner at the top of every page. We launched with a sale and I wanted to get the word out.

The banner worked great. When the sale ended, the banner went away. I noticed a downturn in pro signups, which made me curious.

Was the down turn due to the price increase or the missing banner? I figured this was an easy thing to test. Add the banner back, but with our normal price and a few pro features included.

The banner is small and unobtrusive to the viewer of the deck. But is visually interesting enough that you notice it.

The text of the banner is "Upgrade to Pro — share decks privately, control downloads, hide ads and more …" since sharing private decks is the #1 reason people go pro currently.

I'm happy to report the small change made a big difference. We jumped from 30-50 /pro page views a day to 120-150. Revenue is also back up to what it was during the sale.

I also added a specific call to action on the home page. But as the previous graph shows, it did not have much of a difference.

One of the things sorely lacking on SpeakerDeck.com is any attempt at SEO. We do the basics like good markup and what not, but that is pretty much where it stopped.

In an effort to increase our value to search engines and make it easier for people to find content on our site, we launched transcripts.

Now when you upload a presentation we automatically parse the text from the PDF and save it with each slide. We also ran a background task to populate all the public talks on Speaker Deck over the weekend.

To see what it looks like, you can go to a presentation (like https://speakerdeck.com/keavy/principles-of-awesome-apis-and-how-to-build-them) and scroll to the bottom.

For now, we only do automatic parsing, but I can see a day where we allow people to add their own notes for each slide as well.

Again, the primary goal of this is to increase the content search engines can easily get from us, but I think it also has a nice side effect for users. Because we turn PDFs into images, links on slides are not clickable. This means if you do see a link, you have to type it letter for letter into your browser. Now you can drop down to the transcript and copy/paste. Not a huge thing, but more handy that it was.

I'll update here in a few weeks or months as to whether this approach has helped our search traffic.

We've been around for a while and were owned by GitHub for a bit so spam has always been a problem. We have an automated system, that we refer to as the robots, which scores accounts based on many different things (email, application used to create PDF, location, # of recent uploads, # of slides, etc.) and automatically flags them. It does a good job at catching uploaded presentations that are spammy, but it doesn't do a great job of identifying spam accounts with no activity (a tricky thing to do).

The past few weeks I've built a bunch of tools to fight them, mostly revolving around a combination of email address domain (dns records like mx records) and flagged 700k accounts (in addition to the 100k that were already marked). The tool has a report of top domains used for email address and allows me to view information like MX Records and website headers/content along with samples of users and talks.

Using the tool, I went on a rampage flagging accounts which not only removed spammers from the site but also reduced their ability to complete signup. I've cut signups more than in half, which is a good thing, because now the percentage of real users in signups is higher.

We originally created Speaker Deck at Ordered List, Inc. Ordered List, including Speaker Deck, was acquired by GitHub in December 2011. There were a few pushes at GitHub to turn Speaker Deck into something more, but for various reasons they failed. Speaker Deck chugged on, but mostly in maintenance mode.

At some point in 2017, I (an employee still at the time) offered to buy Speaker Deck back. As the original creator, GitHub knew that I would take good care of it, which reduced their need to vet the buyer. Additionally, I was the only internal maintainer of Speaker Deck, so I had the most knowledge of what was necessary to keep it running. I was already doing most of that maintenance on the side, so it just made sense.

It took over a year to complete the transaction mostly because it was low priority for GitHub, but a few days before the Microsoft deal went down they were suddenly ready to close. I started a company, Fewer & Faster, with a few friends to help and we've been running the app ever since.