Toyboy Warehouse: A social networking platform case study
A branded dating website with an exciting twist.
Key web app features
1
Real-time notifications
Instantly know when a member has engaged with your profile
Whilst on the site, users receive real-time alerts for events such as members visiting their profile, sending a message, winking, and so on. Email alerts will be sent while the user is offline, helping user retention by giving a reason to return to the site.
2
Premium subscriptions
Recurring subscriptions unlocking additional features
Several subscription packages of varying lengths, offering discounts for longer periods purchased. Recurly and PayPal integration provides users with payment type choices.
3
Real-time chat
Chat with members
Exchange messages with other members to form relationships. Chat is limited to premium members, incentivising free users to upgrade in order to read and respond to their messages.
Seen a must-have key feature?
Get in touchThe Project
Revamping a legacy web platform
The Toyboy Warehouse team approached us with their existing dating platform, established in 2006, with the goal of vastly improving the user experience, retention and revenue. While the platform was profitable at the time, revenue was declining at around 35% a year. The existing software possessed a large amount of technical debt, resulting in slow page load times and many bugs. Adding features to an aging platform was becoming a costly and time consuming process.
Being a social networking site, the feature-set required was very rich. It was to include: real-time messaging and notifications; a responsive design that allowed for mobile users and web users to communicate with ease; a voting system to allow users to vote for their favourite person to be featured; e-commerce with free/premium user accounts; it was to be linked up to a WordPress site that served as a news portal that provided easy content management for the admin staff; a custom administration panel that allowed staff to approve user profiles and provide customer support; and automated emails for a wide-range of customer service functions.
Investor mindset approach
The team wanted to make major improvements to the legacy software, which would have been time consuming to implement due to the technical debt.
We identified the opportunity of rewriting the software from the ground up, taking advantage of modern technologies and best practices, in a similar amount of time to making the proposed improvements on the legacy software. The new software would also reduce the costs and timelines of implementing new features in the future, further improving the value of the investment.
Success of the web platform
Having support for mobile-friendliness in the design was a key factor in the decision to improve the platform, allowing the site to be opened up to a much wider audience. The new platform saw total mobile users rise from 24% in May 2013 to account for 41% of traffic in August 2014.
Toyboy Warehouse achieved revenue growth of 1,800% in two years from May 2013, as well as winning multiple awards. The site saw a 500% increase in users, as of November 2015.
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Get in touchThe web application
ToyBoy Warehouse is a branded dating website, and was developed as a mobile-friendly web application and launched in April/May of 2014, with mobile applications coming in the near future.
In order to protect the privacy of the site's users, we've used stock images and omitted usernames in our screenshots. Click here for image attribution.
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Social features
- Individual user profiles
- New profile information approval system for administrators
- Real-time desktop & mobile messaging
- In-site notifications & emails for received user interactions
- Featured user voting system
- A range of one-to-one user interaction features
- Friends/blocked users list
- Account visibility options
- Multiple levels of membership (free/premium)
- Administrator account privileges
- Recommended partner discovery algorithm
Behind-the-scenes features
- Automated promotional emails
- Automated account-related emails
- Payment/subscription service integration
- Automated emailing and extension of voted winners' subscriptions
- Real-time API providing notifications and messages to multiple devices
- WordPress CMS integration
- Encrypted browsing and messaging
- Feature-specific & traffic analytics
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Get in touchFeature breakdown
TBW
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Premium subscriptions
Recurring subscriptions unlocking additional features
Several subscription packages of varying lengths, offering discounts for longer periods purchased. Recurly and PayPal integration provides users with payment type choices.
TBW
Get this feature
Real-time chat Popular
Chat with members
Exchange messages with other members to form relationships. Chat is limited to premium members, incentivising free users to upgrade in order to read and respond to their messages.
TBW
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Broadcasts
Send a single message to multiple members in your area
Targeted users, such as new members, receive the opportunity to send out a broadcast message to multiple users in their area. This helps to increase user retention, the message recipients are notified by email of a new message - they may also need to subscribe to see the message.
TBW
Get this feature
Real-time notifications
Instantly know when a member has engaged with your profile
Whilst on the site, users receive real-time alerts for events such as members visiting their profile, sending a message, winking, and so on. Email alerts will be sent while the user is offline, helping user retention by giving a reason to return to the site.
TBW
Get this feature
Analytics Popular
Monitor marketing campaign performance and user behaviour
In-depth user analytics, providing insight into the effect that marketing campaigns, user-types, and platform updates have on behaviour. This information can be used to increase conversion rates on premium subscription upgrades.