Chapter 3: Building Momentum
This is the third chapter of Choose Your Own Adventure: GawkBox Edition: a series of posts following our company, GawkBox, as we navigate our way to building a platform for content creators to engage and monetize their communities. We’re a nimble startup, and I look at our bank balance daily and ask myself if we have the funds to make it — this blog follows our journey.
In chapter two, we talked about how the ‘social media world’ is evolving, the difference between an audience and a community, (they are very different!) and what we built most recently. In this chapter we discuss some of the exciting momentum we have building since our last post (in 6 days we‘ve seen over 60k games played on the platform) and some of the challenges we’ve had to overcome to get there.
First of all, I owe everyone reading an apology. When I set out to write this Choose Your Own Adventure series, I had hoped to write an update on our progress each week. What has actually happened is a very sloooowwww sequence of posts — and here we are, 6 weeks after the first post, with my third post.
Given it’s been some time, I wanted to start with a short reminder of what we do at GawkBox. We set out to solve two major problems facing content creators today — they are overworked and underpaid. Our vision is to create a world where creators can build and engage communities without having to be there 24/7, and create more effective ways for them to monetize via free to play game mechanics. We have created a destination where creators and their communities gather to compete in a team based global game battle — with the winners taking home both pride and prizes.
Since the last update, we have continued to work hard on developing the product and made great strides, but issues navigating approval on iOS delayed us getting the updated app in the hands of our creators and their communities. Building a groundbreaking product sometimes doesn’t fit exactly within Apple’s guidelines (in particular we were coming up against their html5 games policy) and we had to spend weeks working with Apple for them to be comfortable with our approach. If there are any others reading who have experienced app store approval issues — I’d be happy to connect on how we overcame those. It was a long, at times deflating, process that we weren’t sure we’d ever get through, but we kept persevering and finally made it on Tuesday 23rd April and have not looked back since. Before I write any further, a few folks on our team deserve particular kudos for pushing this through — my cofounder Tony and two of his team, Chase and Ramyya. We wouldn’t have got approval without them.
Now we’re finally live, I feel like it’s a great time to get moving on the series that I set out to write back in mid-March.
Behind The Launch
The approval last Tuesday actually came as a surprise. We’d been pushing on every angle possible with Apple but it felt like we were getting nowhere. To try and create more momentum, the previous week we had made a call to push out a second ‘alpha test’ on the legacy GawkBox app, that was originally approved in February. We moved quickly to bring 25 creators on board for 48hr long game battles in our app — the legacy app was not ideal but it would work.
Maybe our friends at Apple took part in the first day of the tournament, or it was fate — just one day after launching alpha v2 battles, we received the approval notice from Apple! We chose to get our updated apps public as quickly as we could and chose the end of the first alpha v2 battle at noon PST on Wednesday to do so.
Building Momentum
We decided to take a phased approach to open up the product to more creators — and for the first week we controlled at 25. So far, we’ve been really happy with the early results:
- D1 retention close to 60% (too early for D7 numbers) — vs a 27% D1 benchmark for mobile games on Adjust.
- Avg 7 sessions per user per day — vs a 2.3 sessions per day benchmark for mobile games on Adjust.
- 42 minutes avg time spent on platform per user per day — which exceeds that of Facebook, Snapchat and Instagram.
- Over 60k games played in 6 days (from <50 to more than 19k per day in that period!)
It has been even cooler to see the competition growing between creators and their communities — the activity we’re seeing so far certainly validates our thesis that team based competitive casual gaming serves as an incredible way to build and engage communities. Here’s a few excerpts that we’ve seen:
Creators were also hyping their battles up on Twitter…
…And stoking the fire by challenging each other on Facebook.
What’s next?
Since we got iOS approval last Tuesday, we are 3/3 on approvals — submitting in two rapid cycles later last week to integrate incremental improvements. Now we’ve hit our ‘approval stride’, we’re focused on pushing out app improvements regularly. For this week we’re aiming to accomplish a lot, amongst them:
- One of the most important pieces of feedback we’ve received from creators and their communities so far is that they want more games. Currently we have 4 games rotating in the app, we submitted with an extra 2 today, and are looking to integrate a further 9 (so we have a total of 15 in rotation) by next week.
- Helping our creators monetize is core to the success of our platform. We are working on integrating our donation infrastructure (that has processed over $1M in the past two years) into our game battles in smart ways — more to come there!
As you can see, there’s A LOT that’s been happening over here. In addition to all of this we’ve been talking to investors that can support our vision and help make it a reality. There’s a lot of interest in what we’re doing and the progress we make as we expand our footprint amongst creators. We’re excited to talk more about some of the growth and engagement — tune in next week!
