Chapter 4: “GawkBox is like glue”
This is the fourth 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.
Last week, we gave a short update on exciting progress since we successfully navigated Apple approval and pushed our app live to the stores — we started to see some incredible engagement metrics. In this update, we’ll talk about some of our learnings and feedback from creators using the product, product development updates and our rollout strategy for the coming few weeks.
This week has been a crazy week. As our momentum has increased there has been growing interest in what we’re doing — from investors, potential strategic partners and content creators. Amongst all the meetings, the draft for this update has remained an open tab in my browser for three days — and now is the time to complete it!
Product metrics continue to grow
Since our last update, engagement has continued to climb — our DAU has more than doubled week on week, while retention has stayed strong (early D7 retention data is above 20%). We’re also seeing engagement continue to grow, with more than 10 gameplay sessions per user per day (vs a 2.3 sessions per day benchmark for mobile games on Adjust).
These positive engagement metrics have also been reflected in how our creators are talking about the product — with the feedback we’re receiving being overwhelmingly positive. I wanted to share a few key quotes that really highlight the impact that our GawkBox is having on communities:
“GawkBox is like glue, it keeps my community together. The morale is has built in the community is great.” BuzzSlayer, YouTuber & Facebook Gaming
“GawkBox not only allows the community to communicate together much more than before, but it allows for a fun competition between different communities where they have an opportunity to win some awesome prizes.” BigHungry2x, Mixer Partner
While we’re seeing great metrics and incredibly positive feedback from our creators and their communities, we are still at an early stage and are pushing updates to the product multiple times per week. During the next few weeks we will thoughtfully roll out to more creators — ensuring that we gather feedback in each cycle to prepare for a future, broader release.
Helping creators earn more money
In last week’s update, I shared that our two primary areas of focus were:
1/ Adding more games, and
2/ Building better monetization for our creators.
During the time since, we’ve added many new games into our battle rotation and are excited that team members have much more game variety now. We’ll continue to add more games to our library in the coming weeks.
Having such close relationships with creators has also provided us with great insight into what we need to add to make their lives easier. While active creators are loving our product, we still have some development to do until we can solve their monetization challenges — the battle prizes we offer are great, but ultimately the product needs to provide reliable revenue for creators even when their team doesn’t win a prize. This feedback has been extremely consistent and we know that we need to create a monetization solution so our product can be ready for wider creator distribution.
Solving this has been where our focus has been in the past week. We’re close to fully releasing our creator monetization feature — and have crafted a way to integrate our donations infrastructure within our games layer. When this is released, we will be introducing the concept of energy into our battles:
- Each player will start with a certain amount of energy each battle.
- Each game played reduces the players’ energy.
- Once the energy is depleted to zero, the player is presented with different options to re-energize:
a/ Watch a video (we are integrating Vungle rewarded video here) for a small amount of energy, OR
b/ Donate G-Bucks to the creator for more energy.
Energy is based on a timer — if the player doesn’t want to watch a video or donate G-Bucks, she/he can also wait until it replenishes automatically.
Alongside the energy feature, we will also be integrating more free ways to earn G-Bucks on iOS. While our offer wall has always been active on Android, it is yet to be released on iOS. This feature will be implemented alongside the energy feature release.
We believe that the full rollout of this monetization feature set for creators will be a game-changer for our creators — over 99.9% of streamers earned less than $10k last year (Source: Streamlabs Q1 2019) and do not have a viable way to make a good living from all the hard work they put in.
What’s next?
The monetization feature will likely take up a lot of next week — in preparation for that release we’re busy talking to the creators to prepare for our next rollout phase. In the next update, we’ll be excited to share some early data from the monetization feature and what is coming down the pipe after that — as is par for the course in our world, I’m sure we will have more challenges to overcome!
