1.2m
monthly active users reported in the original project
Technical leadership · Product delivery · UX · Platform integration
AWS · Google Cloud · Drupal · React · API Gateway
TrueDigital is part of the True Corporation, the leading communications conglomerate in Thailand. Their ambition is to transform Thailand and the region by leveraging advanced technologies that allow businesses to reach their full potential and let consumers enjoy digital lifestyles to the fullest.
As part of this vision, TrueDigital wanted to create a new User Generated Content and Editorial platform for the Thai market and beyond. Working closely with partners and True, Fluxus were brought on board to provide technology and project management leadership for the newly formed project team. Starting from scratch, Fluxus were challenged to prove product market fit, integrate the product to True’s infrastructure and scale the platform to millions of users within a year.
This is how we did it.
Working from nothing, Fluxus had the freedom and challenge to select the technologies and platforms that would allow the project to move at speed and prove product market fit as quickly as possible. A target was set of having the first iteration of the product into the market within 30 days.
Fluxus provided a small but senior team, including a tech lead, a senior project manager/scrum master, lead developer and UX resource to work closely with the project product manager to make this a reality.
To prove product market fit, Fluxus had to demonstrate that creators would create content in return for small monetary rewards, provide a platform where they could manage their content and a place where this content could be displayed. How the editors would be able to moderate and approve content for the project also had to be considered.
The decision was made very early in the project to look to create a product that could be built on and scaled without the need for a large refactoring of technology and tools once product market fit was achieved. This had to be balanced with the ability of the chosen technologies to be developed quickly and provide key features, such as creator log-ins and editorial and content workflows out of the box.
Given these constraints - and after investigations into multiple platforms - it was decided to move forward with Drupal as the core CMS, with a React front end to display content. This gave the project the functionality required to launch with the ability to scale and develop the product as envisioned by True.
After successfully launching “OnScene” to the market within 30 days, the rest of the quarter was spent iterating and experimenting with new features and improvements to the product. This approach allowed Fluxus to exceed the goal of having 100 published creators on the platform by the end of the first 90 days.
True were impressed with the speed to market which had been achieved and decided to proceed with the integration of OnScene into True’s ecosystem three months ahead of schedule. This entailed a number of elements, including the rebranding of the product from OnScene to TrueID In-Trend, which was led by Fluxus’ brand specialists.
The biggest challenge faced during this phase of the project was to establish close and strong relationships with True’s internal technical teams as the designs now had to integrate with numerous True services and teams. A senior technical working group was established to facilitate this and continues to work well to this day, meeting on a weekly basis to ensure the technical elements of the project stay aligned.
There were two key integrations that were required for OnScene to become True-ID In-Trend. The first of these was to enable TrueID’s Single Sign On service to the platform and secondly to integrate the content into the TrueID website. Both of these integrations needed to be delivered in less than two months.
Fluxus’ UX & Drupal experts took on the challenge of combining the True SSO with the existing sign-in system, developing a way for the creators to be able to easily migrate their accounts to the new system without any hassle. A further integration was made with True’s profile system that would lay the groundwork for building micro-influencers on the platform in the future.
Alongside the sign-in work, we effectively had to design and build a brand new front end for the platform as the reader site became part of the larger TrueID web platform. Usability research was carried out on prototypes before development started allowing us to identify and resolve some key issues before moving to build. Alongside the build of the reader site, Fluxus developed an API gateway for all our UGC content, plus True partner content that would allow the content to be displayed throughout the TrueID site if required.
Although the focus was on integrating with True’s systems, we did not want to lose the momentum we had developed with the creators and we continued to roll out incremental improvements identified by further usability research to the creator portal. These included location and category based tagging for our content with a view to the next challenge of scaling the platform.
Once successfully integrated with True’s systems, the focus was to scale the platform. This meant not just increasing the number of creators and content but also the number of people consuming the content on the Cities section of the TrueID website.
On the creators’ side, rather than just looking to increase the number of creators signing up to In-Trend, the decision was made to also look to improve the engagement of creators and how they could be encouraged to increase the number of articles they were submitting to the platform.
A gamification strategy was developed and a Daily Missions feature was implemented that gave creators extra rewards for writing about specific topics or events, such as Halloween. This proved extremely successful and, combined with a Facebook acquisition campaign, saw published creators increase by more than 900%, with an increase of 700% in average weekly articles published in quarter four.
In addition to scaling the creator portal, there was also the challenge of scaling the number of organic visitors to the UGC content on TrueID. Focus was placed on ensuring the Cities site was optimised for SEO and supported by non-technical SEO campaigns to drive more users to the site. Once more, the desired outcome was achieved with a 585% increase in organic and social new visitors to the Cities section of the TrueID website in the quarter.
These results naturally led to the final part of the platform that was needed to scale - the editorial processes. By scaling the number of creators and the articles being produced, the tools available to editors also needed to improve. Tools to allow Community Moderators were introduced as a first step in scaling the editorial team itself, while the first steps to automating elements of the moderation and payment processes were also started.
The In-Trend Creator Platform and the Cities website have become important elements of TrueID’s strategy for the coming year and Fluxus has been tasked to keep innovating and moving fast to see how far the UGC platform can be taken.
A number of exciting new initiatives are in the pipeline, covering all parts of the platform and as the project continues to scale, ways to leverage technologies such as automation, machine learning and AI are being assessed to see how they can help deliver a better product for creators, editors and readers.
Through working in truly cross functional teams and focussing clearly on the OKRs set each quarter, Fluxus have helped to create, train and lead a team of talented designers and developers that has consistently delivered against all targets that True set.
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