PLAYR
Austin Walper, Co-founder • Engineers and Product team
UX Designer
The group-giveaway experience designed for small streamers that opened up a new revenue stream for PLAYR.
Giveaways are a great marketing tool for gaming streamers. But most small streamers can’t afford to raffle away huge prizes. They also found giveaway platform subscriptions, like PLAYR's, too pricey for their limited budgets.
We experimented, prototyped, and tested an à-la-cart group-giveaway solution. Allowing small streamers to pool resources and better grow their followings. We launched a usable, lovable product. We were quicker-to-market than any of our competitors. It helped us double our monthly-recurring revenue through 2020. And we came out of it with a user-informed roadmap.
E-sports is a volatile industry, but hey, we got this
PLAYR is an early-stage startup, always trying to find the right product-market fit. It's on the cutting-edge of influencer marketing. And at the risk of sounding like painfully millennial, it helps streamers BLOW UP their followings with FIRE gaming giveaways 🔥. It's a fun place to work. And as you can imagine, its short history has been flexible to the whims of an ever-changing market.
Starting a career live-streaming games? The road ahead could be difficult
It's known across e-sports and entertainment there's a massive barrier to entry when starting a live-streaming career. When you've got a small following, and not many average viewers, it's hard to grow. You won't get on the front page of Twitch, and you won't get the donations you need to pursue streaming full time.
PLAYR has been a good tool for streamers to run popular, consistent giveaways. As a part of a bigger marketing plan, it's genius. But we found our subscription plans were more appropriate for streamers with established and semi-established communities. An ongoing plan can add up if you're not earning much. And unless you have a sponsor, you'll need to cover the cost of the items you're raffling. Gaming equipment, gift cards, merchandise, or great experiences.
Most small streamers can’t afford huge prizes. And many don’t have the network needed to run a giveaway with a group of their peers.
We "designed" an MVP based on niche market behaviour
Our CEO Austin Walker had run collaborative giveaways in the past. He'd get groups of streamers to pool resources, buying a bigger prize than they could on their own. And seeing more growth than they could on their own. With cross-promotion and higher stakes.
Collaborative giveaways aren't uncommon among tight-knit groups of gamers. It seemed like a good of an MVP as any. But this time we figured we'd run some big ones. Not just a game or a gift card. Consoles, peripherals, PCs. And we'd learn if there was margin enough to be worth our time recruiting, organizing, and promoting.
Austin recruited streamers from his Twitter community, sending them a PayPal link and a short form to fill out their social channels to promote. The giveaways were a success on quite a few levels, small streamers grew their followings by the thousands, and we profited for doing all the heavy lifting. A bunch of people got Animal Crossing. And new gaming PCs. And Nintendo Switches. And PS4s. We ran a few.
Not very scalable, not very user-friendly, but it tested the market. And the market looked good. We ran a dozen giveaways, filling 25 spots per giveaway, at anywhere between $15 and $65 a participant.
And to learn even more from the experiment, I built an exit-survey to share with all the participants. Trying to gauge initial points of friction were, what met or didn't meet their expectations, and how they would improve their experiences. The results would later inform our prototypes.
Sketch it, test it, build it, scale it
We wanted to get a scalable group-giveaway tool to market quicker than any competitor, but still have it be usable and trustworthy. Tested by real users. I got to work prototyping a "storefront" for what we called Community Giveaways.
We wanted to make the experience feel like joining a group rather than buying a lightbulb. I knew to take cues from a pattern in video-games called "looking for group," or LFG. We didn't have official personas, but having worked with streamers for so long, we'd become familiar with their tools and ecosystem.
I had an easy time recruiting testers from the participants in Austin's giveaways. By recruiting from early-access users, we not only test a prototype, but could learn more about their initial experience than we could from a survey.
We discovered more than just usability issues
In conversation, most were satisfied with their experience with Austin's group giveaways. But all found it suspicious. Twitter and PayPal don't exactly scream professionalism and trust. With 6 participants we learned what they wished they knew before signing up. We learned the things they wished they knew after. We learned what they found annoying and sales-y. And we learned what worked for them.
The most immediately helpful findings from our tests were about content strategy. Users wanted to know details we didn't clearly provide for them. How long does a giveaway last? When does it start? When do they get their refund if not enough people join?
We discovered a dozen possible features. Beyond the MVP, users had great ideas. Without being too leading, we could gauge their needs by listening intently and asking questions. "It would be nice if..." is when we learned about their preferences. But following-up with, "why would that be nice?" is how we learned about their motivations and needs.
Participant: "It would be nice if I could see who else was joining these giveaways."
Moderator: "Why would that be nice?"
Participant: "If I knew there was a big streamer in one of these, I would be more likely to join"
Moderator: "Why is that?"
Participant: "Maybe their community would learn about me and view my stream. I could even reach out to the streamer in hopes of growing my network. We'd have something in common. Who knows, maybe we'd collaborate and grow our communities together!"
We launched a little and improved a lot
In early development, we launched the feature to a small group, testers included. To see if any issues came up in the first while. We had a waiting list for interested potential customers. It kept streamers excited, and made them feel special when they got in. We were able to make some small improvements based on their ongoing feedback as well.
Our team today is working from a prioritized list of those "nice-to-have" features I mentioned earlier. Just the other week we added the ability to modify social details after joining. Something users expressed a want for during their test sessions.
In a big update, we added more social media options to promote. Like Facebook, Instagram, and Tiktok. Also adding the ability to promote additional channels for a small fee. Because we were quick-to-market and flexible to our users' needs, we carved out a profitable niche. With a tool that's easy to use and a concept that's easy to buy into.
Since launching publicly we continued to learn from our users
We launched Community Giveaways to all users. Running an exit survey to gauge their experience ongoing bases. Even since beta it opened up the product to thousands more repeat customers, and has helped PLAYR more than double their monthly revenue since earlier this year.