WSO: What Do You Hate and/or Love?

Dearest Fellow Primates...I feel like it's time for another assessment on WSO and hear from you where you think we should be focusing our efforts the most. Before we talk about where we should go, let's recap what we have done recently:

New Server & Software

This past Saturday we upgraded our server and more importantly made the jump from PHP5 to PHP7 and Ubuntu 14 to 16. As a result, all of the logged in users should be experiencing dramatically faster page load speeds...I say should because we're still in the first few days and not out of the woods yet. Our Varnish cache is rebuilding, so if you're a lurker the site may have felt a touch slower the past few days, but that should go away soon...

New Interview Courses - Redesigned Guides & Webinars

We have started a major initiative of a major redesign for all the WSO interview guides (long overdue). As a reflection of the fact that these have become less like "guides" and more like actual full on "courses", we'll also be changing the branding there...the is really simply because they became courses a while ago. (TON of great video content with purchase)...

Related to this, we have doubled down on our webinars and based on the # of members that attend and how many people are starting to rely on Wall St Mentors to help prep them for interviews, we will continue to try and create great cases and webinars that are helpful to you.

New Formatting in Body Fields

Maybe not such a big deal but we finally made is much easier to bold, insert headers, bullets, images, etc into the posts with the formatting bar...any feedback there, let me know!

Next Steps?

We plan on continuing to put our educational and entertaining content, host happy hours around the world and continue to see the WSO Community grow, but I know we could be doing better and I'd love to hear how...here are some of our thoughts.

Mobile App?

This has been on the list and we've resisted for several reasons. If I'm being honest, budget and time compared to the incremental gain. I realize that mobile is becoming more and more important (I can see our mobile traffic is up over 1/3 of our traffic by now), BUT what does the mobile app do that the mobile site doesn't?

I realize push notifications are a big deal (we've recently implemented those). So if we made an app we could push notifications to your phone when you get a new private message or are awarded a silver banana (for example)...but what else would the mobile app do. Is it necessary to survive in 10-20 years? If we do bite this bullet, I assume we need one for iOS and one for Android?

More Quality Content - Other Avenues?

I feel like WSO is at its best when there is a good mix of helpful AMAs and fun/quality content. It's great to see @Eddie Braverman" back in action, but I'd like to do more of this. Anyone know where @Midas Mulligan Magoo" is at? ;-) What type of content do you enjoy most and how do you think we can get more of it for you?

What about a Podcast? What if we released the audio of our webinars onto a podcast and gave like 50% of them away for free to drive subscribers? How does this work?...do you just create a channel on iTunes and promote it? clueless on the world of podcasts...

Other ideas?

Thanks guys & gals....let me hear it! Love or hate :-)
Patrick

 
Best Response
  1. The post formatting tools are a great update. Very well done.

  2. The mobile site is still a bit frustrating. Can't tell if you have any messages, bananas/shits, etc. and it's hard to navigate through. I have enough apps on my phone too - a more usable mobile site would be my preference.

  3. As every year, I'm still on team "be able to give shit to as many awful posts in a day as I want."

  4. I think there is an opportunity to expand on the subforum "Hall of Fame" to cover popular topics in the form of a wiki-type page or a FAQ. On reddit, for instance, most subreddits have a wiki or FAQ that has a lot of good info and covers the most popular topics ahead of time. It cuts down on the same basic posts being repeated again and again.

  5. More contests. As someone who knows nothing compared to some of y'all, that trading contest over the summer was fun, almost in the same way fantasy football is. I definitely think there needs to be an official WSO ESPN.com March Madness bracket challenge, but things like this in general would be fun.

Commercial Real Estate Developer
 
That's interesting. You probably see a spike in traffic during that period (which is good for you), but when you're saying the site is watered down half the year, that's not ideal.

I don't know if Eddie is still around or not, but he's #1 from a content request standpoint. I'd read anything that guy writes.

After that is news/discussion around current events. I really feel like WSO used to be a source of current events and intelligent debate. Especially since I'm in Corp Fin, it was a way to keep up on some more wall street- centric news. In your defense, this is mostly political these days and will (hopefully die down). Nothing you can do there because it's insufferable everywhere.

Maybe I'm just not keeping up enough on WSO, but none of the featured content is drawing me in like Eddie, MMM or even the guy who did the really good book reviews years ago.

Also, I know it's not the focus of the site, but I think corporate finance has even more potential than focusing primarily on IB/PE. I think a separate site is more ideal, but I've approached you on that a few times and I know you don't see it that way. Even if it's incorporating it into WSO, there's a lot of room for content/advice there.

accountingbyday thanks for the comments... yes, it's not ideal for there to be a major influx of young monkeys every year, but it is one of our main goals as a business...to help educate/inform the new generations coming up :-)

Eddie Braverman is still going strong. If you click on his username, he made a comeback in 2016 and has been going strong with about 1 interesting post/week...

As far as the current events, yes, it's been tough with all the political crap. Agreed that every 4 years it gets very annoying...not much we can do here as we try to limit it / not let it take over every thread where we can without over censoring either.

We are in the process of recruiting more professionals for AMAs, interesting webinars, etc, so I still feel like we can provide great content. I would, however, like to start bringing on more varied personalities -- guys and gals going through MBA programs, podcasts, etc...I think having more angles / higher quality content is always something we should strive for.

Consider myself re-energized to find those people :-) AndyLouis

 

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