Trell Cash: The new age social commerce gamification engine | Product Requirements
Imagine earning while binge-watching your favorite content on your go-to social media app and being able to spend it against an amount that is not exorbitantly high for you to make a purchase?
Sounds like a line straight out of a scam-ish commercial right? I won’t blame you but believe me, we at Trell have designed a gamification engine that lets you do exactly that and more.
But before we dive in deep about where exactly this fusion of deep tech engineering and the product came into play, let’s discuss the basics first, and mind you, this post is to set the tone for the business and strategic requirement of this product from the eyes of an engineer, if you are in for a system design of this engine, hold on for the next one maybe?
Note, this post is one of the 2 blog posts regarding Trell cash, you can find them here :
- Product Requirements (You are here)
- Architecture Design
What is gamification? 🎮
This one can be easily explained by the first search result coming in google :
A gamification strategy is the process of taking something that already exists — like a software application or online community — and using gaming techniques to motivate consistent participation and longterm engagement.
I mean, of course, it’s simply winning something monetary (could be in-app resources, credits, money in wallet, etc ) while using a certain application. The closest example would be
- Shopping at least 5 items worth more than let’s say 500 rupees to get a flat 20% discount coupon in the next sale. 💶
- Playing video games like Pro Evolution Soccer in which, to earn a player card and build a stronger team, you will have to win a certain number of games or score a certain number of goals to get a legendary/rare / gold/silver player card pack. (Yes, you can extend this to any other game you have played and you’ll find the same concept).
So, now you understand that Trell, being a social commerce application created a sort of gaming simulation… but why….
What does it solve? 🤔
Every product is built with a certain goal to achieve, and this one is no different. Generally, gamification is done to ensure higher user retention and engagement. In layman's terms, to make sure the users stick, at least as long as there is a game interesting enough to be played.
In every company, there are strategies in place on how to get new users on board, how to keep them aboard after D0, and how to keep them around long enough so that they become addicted and their services sell themselves. Yes, gamification helps a ton here. ✨
But while it sounds easy, there are certain decisions which are needed to be taken at the product level, and it depends majorly on what kind of stuff you are trying to get users to stick to but here are the general things to consider:
What aspect of the service is being gamified?
If the purpose is user retention in a way that users stay hooked to your core service, then it’s the core service that needs to be put into a gaming simulation.
- If it’s Tinder, what’ll they do? maybe you’ll get a super like every 60–70 times your profile has been viewed and rejected by a potential match (After all, why would you stay on board if you are getting rejected so constantly? So here, have a super like and shoot your shot 😉).
- If it’s a restaurant, a simple loyalty bonus or early access for every 3–4 visits would do the trick, no? Who wouldn’t love a 10% off on their next KFC bucket? (Btw, they brilliantly implemented it by offering a 10% off coupon for giving restaurant feedback, which expires after 21 days)
How accurate is your reward valuation? 🎯
The rewards at the end of achieving a goal, or completing a mission, are supposed to be as close to the level of difficulty of the mission. Sounds about fair right?
The smaller the gap between the rewards given to the user and the difficulty of the task assigned to the user, the happier your accounts department will be because let me be honest, giving away even 100 rupees for engagement is something that needs to be thought through and analyzed by the finance team, because the customer, in the end, is an organic metric judged in Daily-Active-User or Monthly-Active-User or High-Stick-User et-Cetra.
Extensive market research is done to make sure that you are not under or overpaying your users.
Are your rewards easy to redeem? 🤑
Your cashback offered is worth nothing if you can’t make your customer yearn to use it on something you are providing/selling on your platform.
What I mean is, you can’t provide a user a total of let’s say ₹500 and set the minimum purchase amount required to redeem their rewards at ₹5000. Trust me, that user will just save his ₹4500 and in the worse case, if the user checks out your minimum purchase amount required and it to be way higher, they’ll not play the game, at all, giving zero, zilch, nada, nil engagement.
Enough theory, what’s our game then? 💸
Our games are actually pretty easy so let’s not waste time and straight up understand them.
- You sign up on Trell and complete the basic details, you get 70 ( 20+ 50 respectively) Trell coins right off the bat and do know this, 1 Trell Coin = ₹1
- You invite 5 friends on our platform to the minimum step that they sign up to us, you get another 100 Trell coins, and yes, we’ll know if you try and invite yourself 😴
- You watch 25 videos for 7 days straight on our platform, you’ll earn a whopping 500 Trell Coins!
The question which comes to mind of an engineer must be that okay, the product team got me this requirement, but why is it needed in the first place?
- Offering Trell coins on signup and detail verification ensures that your user is unique and organic and not the result of a random bot sign-up.
- Now, this unique user will have to bring in at least 5 more unique organic users on Trell, hence multiplication in user onboarding efforts with a negligible cost of 20 Trell Coins per user.
- While the final reward goal is straight-up user retention, ensuring users stay onboard for a minimum of 7 days, hence user engagement for at least 7 days!
That’s the business perspective that an engineer is going to require, apart from the fact that designing a giant ass gamification engine is straight-up fun!
How is it any different than other rewards then? 🧑🏫
This is the fun part, here rewards are easily redeemable for any purchase involved of at least ₹1000 hence, no huge gap between the total earned amount and the amount you’ll need to add to redeem your rewards.
One important thing is we value every user equally, hence, no “premium rewards” can be activated by a certain section of users who have a premium subscription to a plan like Trell Gold or Trell+ or anything like that. Hence, you can earn rewards equally and spend them equally without any user bias.
Our watch videos goal is something easily achievable over a span of 7 days and you can redeem it as easy as you like, which in terms of its difficulty, is a profitable deal for the content consumer because similar other rewards exist in other services with several goals, but their investment to reward return ain’t good as this.
Parting Thoughts… 👋
To answer your question of “where’s the code?” It’ll follow in the next blog posts.
As an engineer when you are taking up the ownership of a project, it’s important to note down and understand, why is it being done in the first place?
Until the next post, adios!
