Gambit games used a KickoffLabs waitlist to drive audience growth and engagement in order to bring awareness and excitement to their new game's beta launch.
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Josh:
All right, we're recording. Can you hear me, Andy, still?
Andy:
I can hear you fine.
Josh:
Okay, great. Just as soon as I hit record, the audio went out and I was like, this is not a great start, but it is. So hi, everyone, welcome back to the On Growth podcast. My name is Josh Ledgard. With me today is Andy Magnus. He's the Head of Marketing for Gambit Games. They are a tokenized fantasy sports company, and they're in the middle of doing their launch campaign with KickoffLabs and launching their beta and getting people onto the beta of the game. Before we dive into that, I kind of want to ask you, what is your background? What led you to this space heading into Gambit Games? Are you technical? Are you more of business side? Where do you come from?
Andy:
Sure. So I've been working in the sports' industry for about 10 years, mostly on the sports gaming and fantasy sports and sports betting side. Prior to Gambit Games, I worked with Superdraft, which was Caesars Rewards' daily fantasy product. Before that, I worked at The Athletic, which is a popular subscription sports publication. And before that, I worked with Tropicana Sportsbook and with WinView games, which is an online sports' prop betting platform.
Andy:
So it brought me to this space was the daily fantasy and sports betting industry, especially in America is pretty saturated. And with a lot of the new Web 3 and crypto components that are really being developed and being brought to the world, this was a chance to bring fantasy sports to markets that have never really seen it, but have shown a bigger and bigger interest in sports in things like the NBA and things like soccer, European football and things like that. So Gambit Games really allows us to bring fantasy sports to places like Asia-Pacific, places like South America that haven't necessarily been exposed to it the way America has.
Josh:
So talk to me about that. From somebody who's, I've played some fantasy sports before I've been involved in some leagues, I've done some drafts and that kind of stuff, what does crypto bring to fantasy sports that you don't get maybe if you're just doing it on your own or with a group of friends or getting into the daily fantasies with the casinos and their books?
Andy:
Yeah. So when you think about fantasy in America, you're thinking about seasonal fantasy, which are leagues with your friends. And then you think about daily fantasy, which exists mostly because there was a carve out in gambling law that allowed for fantasy seasons and some genius a few years back realized what if a season was a day long and the daily fantasy industry was born. What crypto allows us to do is create a component of ownership in daily fantasy like contests.
Andy:
So when you're drafting a daily fantasy team, your lineup goes in and then when that contest is over, that lineup's gone forever and you either win your prize or you lose your entry fee. With us, you're purchasing tokenized athletes. We call them athlete tokens, and you're entering those into lineups and you're buying and selling and trading those assets. And you have ownership over them and you can play for crypto prizes in the contest, or you can just really invest well in those athletes themselves. And that tokenization of fantasy sports is what makes our platform really unique in the space right now.
Josh:
Cool. So just help me see if I've got this right. So in a traditional fantasy sports draft outside of crypto, I might draft a player for the season or trade, but the trades are enforced by the value that somebody else the fantasy league puts on the person. That's what that person's value is if I'm using them in a trade or something else. In this case, you're saying, because you're tokenizing the athletes, the market in that league itself is what's determining the value of that asset because there's a limited number of them and you want to own the higher value ones and you're letting the market drive the value of that asset.
Andy:
Well, there's an unlimited number of these tokenized athletes, but their value is driven by how valuable they are in daily fantasy contests. So if LeBron James is having an excellent week, his value's going to go up because a lot more people want to enter him into these contests. And so while I can have LeBron, you can have LeBron, everyone in our contest can have LeBron, different people are going to be able to afford LeBron based on how much of our token gamut they have in the system and how much they're willing to spend on that specific athlete.
Josh:
Okay. So you're using the tokens to buy and sell the tokenized athletes?
Andy:
Yes, absolutely.
Josh:
Okay. Got it. This is a really neat space, like you said, taking crypto. So you mentioned that it introduces this fantasy sports league to different markets that didn't exist in before. Can you explain to me how that's the case? How does it get into a different market than they were in before?
Andy:
Absolutely. So one big phenomenon of crypto in the Web 3 space in the Asia-Pacific region has been a category known as play to earn where users are basically able to play video games and earn crypto while doing so based on their engagement, based on the tokenomics that work within those platforms. And what that does is, it creates a pathway to accessibility for an audience that might not necessarily be able to afford these types of fantasy contests as they currently exist in America and in Europe.
Andy:
And so when you look at traditional daily fantasy, it might cost $10, $20 to enter a contest, that's going to price a lot of people out in countries like India and countries like Indonesia, Philippines, places like that. And so we've created a free ramp for people to play to earn, accumulate a lot more of our cryptocurrency in their accounts and ultimately access to a lot of these larger prizes without necessarily having a huge upfront cost. So the barrier to entry is a lot less. And for right now, it's actually free.
Josh:
Cool. So how long were you guys working on the platform before you got to the point of running the launch campaign? So how long has the platform been in development, I guess I'm asking?
Andy:
So we had an alpha platform that was a very limited private release that went out around the NBA playoffs from April, 2022 to June, 2022 when the NBA finals were. It took about four months to get to that point. And we took a lot of the lessons that we had from that initial campaign, reworked our game, and then launched our beta product a few weeks ago for the launch of European football, soccer in America. And the game's completely different. It's a lot more simple. It's a lot more easy to play, easy to understand, and it really focuses a lot more on a smaller group of tokenized athletes, so people can really understand the ownership component.
Josh:
So then talk to me about what made you guys decide to do a wait list campaign?
Andy:
Well, it's one of the best ways to attract a lot of people that are willing to put in some engagement for crypto rewards. We've seen that with a bunch of different platforms, a bunch of different projects out there. And our alpha campaign was actually through a wait list as well. And we wanted to get a tool that helped us get tangible users. There's a lot of fraud and a lot of bots in the space while also incentivizing a few different actions that were really important to us as we built this campaign.
Josh:
And then how did you find KickoffLabs?
Andy:
We looked at around 15 different tools and based on a combination of price scalability, because we knew we were going to scale this campaign pretty large and the features that we were looking for, KickoffLabs was a clear choice.
Josh:
All right. So when you guys set up the campaign, the way you set it up and KickoffLabs that I'm seeing, you have a fairly simple landing page on gamitgames.com. It's a kind of one pager. You've got a link to your app. I guess you do have a link to a fact page. You've got a fact page there and then how to play page as well from there. And then otherwise it's your social accounts like Discord, Twitter, you're linking to those. And then you're just say, and I'll have a screenshot in this, but I'm going to read it for the sake of the podcast audience, own your fantasy team, play contest to earn crypto, Euro football launches soon with a 400,000-plus Gambit Airdrop. And so did you guys test that headline? Have you done? Is that just what came out? The first thing you guys set the page, this is what we wanted to say. How did you arrive on the main headline on the page?
Andy:
So we did a lot of competitive research and we're a part of SuperLayer, which is a Web 3 venture studio. So we have a lot of data from the other projects under SuperLayer. And so what we did was, took a look at what worked, hasn't worked in the space and similar style wait lists, and then formulated around our specific product offering, our value propositions. And that's what we ended up landing on.
Josh:
All right. And then for people that don't understand, if you could explain it simply, what does it mean to say the football season launches with this 400,000 Gambit Airdrop?
Andy:
So Gambit as I mentioned, the in-app currency, it's a cryptocurrency that's going to be listed. We're hoping by the end of the year, but close to when we drop the beta and go full public launch. And so the Airdrop is allocations that we give to different waves of users that we're inviting into our beta. So the first wave got 75 Gambit each, the second wave got 50 Gambit and the third wave, which is going out right now is getting 40 Gambit.
Josh:
And how many people you're onboarding in each wave as you're going?
Andy:
It varies. One of the reasons why we use KickoffLabs and one of the things that we're really enjoying the most is, we're taking a look at a lot of the different contest scores, as ways to validate not only whether or not they're real people or not, but the engagement that we expect them to have in the app. We have a pretty complex economy with these different athlete tokens going up and down. We wanted to stress test a lot of those different mechanics with smaller groups and then open them out. So our first group was around 2,500 invites, our second group was around 20,000 and then we're letting it open a little bit further as we get more interest in the European football league and as we start getting more referrals from our existing users.
Josh:
And has that method of seeing if their engagement in the wait list campaign, in terms of seeing if that means there'll be sort of engagement as well in the actual app in the game, has that proven to be a true metric for you guys?
Andy:
It's definitely helped. I'd say that we've seen in... The term doubles really come up a lot when we've been looking at the analytics, but when we did our alpha campaign, which was also a wait list, we let in a lot more people at once and we hadn't really tightened up our funnel as much. And so the product sampling rates, so people that register to actually entering contests pretty much doubled from our alpha to our beta because we were really gating and taking a look lot closer at the users coming in. Also, so far, it's still pretty early, but the retention has been much better because we've been gating the initial group of users and then making sure that we're plugging some of the onboarding funnel holes as we start letting more and more users in. So it's definitely been working a lot better for us to let in these different tranches or waves, as we're opening up our beta, understanding our product, a little more understanding the different user stories and how users are interacting with our product and then tightening up the funnel as we continue to allow more and more people in.
Josh:
Mm-hmm. So is what you describe, I would define as an activation rate of people? They join your invite and then they participate in a contesting gambit, right?
Andy:
Yeah, pretty much. We've seen similar in the first couple weeks, similar average contests per user that we saw over the entire 14 weeks of the NBA playoffs. So that activation rate is great. The engagement rate is great. And as I mentioned, that just really leads to a great retention rate so far,
Josh:
Are those numbers you can share in terms of what the activation rate is? This is a question I get all the time in terms of what percentage of people from a wait list are going to activate on an app. I can tell you, I get great numbers from people who are doing a product campaign, like a physical product. And I'm curious about the app side of things.
Andy:
We're still also validating and measuring these numbers. We just launched our data. So those aren't numbers we're ready to share right now, but as we start fine tuning that, I'm sure there's stuff that we can share in the future.
Josh:
Cool. But you're happy with the rates, is what I'm hearing?
Andy:
So far, yes. I'd say that we'd like to see a much better invite to sign up rate, but once people are signing up, those real users have proven to be real, they've proven to be very active and engaged and we're exploring a few other tactics to increase that invite to sign up rate, like social retargeting ads and things like that. One of the best parts about KickoffLabs is we were able to get PII right off the bat. And that allows us to at least create a few other campaigns, create a few other ways and channels of retargeting them, getting the message in front of them if our emails aren't working.
Josh:
So when you invite them, are you just sending a one email or are they then in a series of emails until they activate the account? So how did you set that up? This is one of those outside of KickoffLabs process that people are curious about.
Andy:
Yeah. So initially we sent them an initial, you're invited, this is what your gambit allocation is coming in. And then we have a few, depending on what their actions are if they sign up, if they enter contests, we have a few funnel abandonment emails that we follow up with. And then we also have emails about the specific fantasy contest we might be having, some of the winner highlights we want to do, some of the testimonial highlights, things like that, just to try to push them across the finish line, if they haven't signed up, if they haven't played a contest yet.
Josh:
Any one of those strategies seem to so far be working better than others?
Andy:
When you're showing people, crypto is an industry where there's a lot of projects that are rug pools, they've taken people's trusts and abused it. And so when you show that people are winning, you show that people are getting rewards, I think for a lot of our users, there's that light bulb or aha moment where, oh, this is real, this is legit, now I'm willing to spend a lot more of my time in it. And for us sharing those winner stories, sharing some of our leaderboards and showcasing that they're winning actual monetary rewards has been the most effective for us. And then of course we've been doing some exploration stuff as well, just to try to drive some [inaudible 00:15:57].
Josh:
So, yeah, driving the urgency, but then also that personal story. So taking success stories from the app and saying, hey, this person won this much so it's possible. So you're making it as real as possible, which as you said, makes a lot of sense because the general sense I get is that there are a lot of people who feel like, wow, crypto just vanished on me or this token disappeared or went to zero and they're not thrilled with it. So the word has a little bit of a connotation there.
Andy:
It's one of the challenges of launching a product in a bear market.
Josh:
Yeah. So on your wait list, I talked about the signup page, when you get to the wait list page, the statement is basically really simple. Again, you're just saying, jump up the wait list. I've got my position when I joined, it tells me any points I have. And then you're asking people to take some additional actions like inviting friends, following on Twitter, joining Discord, tweeting, liking the tweet. Have you seen a jump? Are people joining the Discord channel? Have you seen a jump in followers or people taking those additional actions that you've noticed throughout the campaign?
Andy:
Yeah. We saw a huge jump on both Discord and Twitter. I think our followers on both are up about 40%, which has been great. The engagement on our Discord and on our Twitter has also increased so they're not empty followers, which has been fantastic. As I mentioned, we did an alpha wait list and that wait list announcement got about half the engagement of this one. So those engaged to score points actions within KickoffLabs have really paid out as well.
Josh:
Outstanding. So since you're in the middle of the campaign, how are you going about marketing the campaign? So this is another question that again, people can set up a KickoffLabs campaign, but if no one shows up at it, no one signs up and then the campaign's not going to look very good. How did you market the launch of the campaign? I know you had an initial audience. So you had for this campaign, you did have some people you could email already, but beyond sending out that one email saying, hey, jump on our next wave for the beta, what have you guys done to market the campaign?
Andy:
Sure. I'd say really our central hubs have been Twitter and Medium and Discord. We already had decent followings on Twitter and Discord. And then just to really get a good place to describe the mechanics of the wait list, mechanics of the contest, how people are going to be invited in, what to expect, things like that, Medium has been a great place to point people. And then once we got our own channels put together, we sought out and worked with a bunch of our existing partners to start getting the word out, start providing benefits to specific partners, and then making sure that we got relevant influencers to drive some users that made sense for this specific campaign. So most of it's been through friendlies right now, but we're certainly exploring additional influencer campaigns in the European football world, in the crypto gaming space and in the just overall Web 3 builder space as well.
Josh:
So the first thing you mentioned was kind of first party channels, your Discord, your Twitter, your Medium, on Medium, I heard that you were doing some customer education, what the product was, what the wait list was like, what the process was going to be like. And that's something consistent I've heard from other crypto projects that, that's really important in terms of making people feel safe. What kind of things are you doing on Twitter and Discord that you think were growing, that are helping successfully kind of grow the audience?
Andy:
Oh, a few things. On Discord, we started doing some meeting contests where we incentivized people to share specific memes around European football, around Gambit, around fantasy. And then we pick a few of them and share them on our socials and then reward those users with Gambit within our app. So, that's been one thing that we've been doing that's been very helpful. On the Twitter side, it's really a lot more about that credibility and that education. So we've been creating these small snackable infographics to share about our game, to share about our scoring system, to share about specific winners and things like that. And all of that, just across all the various channels we have.
Andy:
I mentioned email earlier, but doing that stuff on our social, especially Twitter has been really helpful in continuing to provide the credibility of this crypto projects for real. And, this is a game that you want to play, you want to get good at and you want to continue playing to earn and playing to own these crypto fantasy assets.
Josh:
And earlier in the conversation, you mentioned looking into doing things like retargeting once people were invited to the app, since you had some of that PII, you'd captured from KickoffLabs so you could upload a list to retargeting on Facebook or other tools and say like, hey, these people, can we get them into the app to engagement? Have you run any advertising just to get people on the list in the first place, or has the list been driven completely by that first party, then the partner influencer space?
Andy:
The list has been pretty organic. For us, we're a startup, we're in our beta. We're really looking to do things with as much earned media as possible. And that's really what this list has given us. We've incentivized users through various mechanisms to invite as many friends as possible. We're doing another giveaway right now to get five additional verified referrals. And all of that has been a lot more effective than just going out and getting leads through lead formats and things like that. So, we haven't been to the point where I feel like we've needed to really lean into paid media, but the retargeting is in my mind, just kind of expanding our channels past just email and our socials and Discord and things like that.
The turnkey capabilities, I think has been the best thing for us. We're a small team right now. And the ability to just plug in the tweet that you want someone to like and then that's immediately an action within your campaign, that type of thing has made setting up the campaign, monitoring the campaign and changing the incentivizations extremely easy.
Josh:
Awesome. So what's been the best part about KickoffLab for you guys throughout this campaign so far?
Andy:
It's got a lot of features out of the box. The turnkey capabilities, I think has been the best thing for us. We're a small team right now. And the ability to just plug in the tweet that you want someone to like and then that's immediately an action within your campaign, that type of thing has made setting up the campaign, monitoring the campaign and changing the incentivizations extremely easy. And then there's also a few just small features like getting the list started with a few fake leads, things like that, that we've really enjoyed as well as the ability to set up some of these lead tags where we can take, for instance, the number of contests that you played in our alpha and turn that into something that we can score on our leaderboard as well.
Josh:
Cool. So are you using the leaderboard behind the scenes then besides the wait list in terms of, is that something that your customers see or is that something just for you guys to help measure the engagement during the alpha and the beta?
Andy:
They see it in terms of their position on the leaderboard and the total leaderboard size. That's definitely helped in terms of people feeling like they're part of a project that is growing rapidly, that is getting a lot more engagement than their specific engagements can help them shoot up the leaderboard. And then, we're using the leaderboard behind the scenes to determine those invite waves.
Josh:
Okay, cool. Yeah. So, that's an interesting thing that you mentioned and we've had a couple other people do things like that, where they're running these private contests on the Discord server and then rewarding engagement for that. And that does become a great sort of self-amplification system for a campaign. So it's good to hear proof that there's somebody else using it, that technique successfully as well. So let's say I got an online consumer app, doesn't necessarily have to be fantasy sports or something, but let's say I've got an online consumer focused app that I'm looking to launch. What advice would you give to that person who's looking to bring a similar sort of online game system to life?
Andy:
Aligning your value props with your incentives is the best advice I would give when creating a wait list style campaign. If you're trying to incentivize referrals, making sure that your value props kind of align with that in terms of why you would want to bring friends onto the system and it's not just about the transactional monetary reward, I think is probably the biggest advice I would give there, because if you're going to just be incentivizing based on the transactional nature of a wait list or the transactional nature of your app, you're going to get transactional customers that aren't that loyal.
Josh:
Mm-hmm. Yeah. So I heard say, have incentives that align with your goals and your audience's goals, that they're more excited about it, as opposed to just something where you're being really transactional. You could just run this campaign and say, we're just going to give you 75 Gambit and that's it in at the campaign, but you're trying to make it more like a game. They get early access. They get in, they get to give you feedback. They get to join the Discord channel. They're part of the community. You're trying to turn it into something like you said, that's more than just a transactional join now and get access.
Andy:
Yeah. And, by getting specific access to special contests by getting in early and getting access to early player pricing, that aligns these users a lot more with the game mechanics that we're building out, not just trying to get another user just on your account.
Josh:
Great. I want to go back because I missed this question, so we touched on earlier what you were doing to help activate people that you were bringing off of the wait list onto the app. Are you doing things for people during the wait list who aren't in the app yet, besides the discourse that we talked about, are you sending emails during the wait list to encourage, hey, there's still time to move up before the launch or there's still time to get into the next wave? Are you sending those kind of emails throughout the campaign?
Andy:
Yeah, I actually just sent one last night. That's around a lot of the invite five users and you get entered into a separate crypto giveaway and then you would also get an instant invite. So things like that, just to try to get people across the finish line where they feel like they're not stuck on the wait list, because we do recognize there's an attention half life. You get on a wait list and if you kind of wait too long, the person's going to lose interest and go somewhere else. The wait list isn't the center of their universe. So we want to give them a few tasks that they can do to move up, to get some instant rewards and stay interested in your project.
Josh:
So, you're kind of highlighting tasks on, say, a weekly basis to encourage people to stay engaged on the list.
Andy:
Yeah, absolutely. And the most important task for us is inviting your friends.
Josh:
Yeah. That's-
Andy:
Inviting verified friends, I would say.
Josh:
Yeah, inviting verified friends. Me and 100 bots showed up for brunch.
Andy:
Exactly. And you'll always come through some of the emails and see name 01, name 02, name 03. And you kind of just go down that @gmail.com. We did a manual comb through as well, just to make sure that the users that we were inviting were going to be less body, a lot more engaged in what we're building.
Josh:
Yeah, absolutely. I imagine too, you even have that concern within the app itself in terms of people trying to gamify, once they're in the app outside of the wait list, the system to a certain extent, right?
Andy:
Oh, since day one. And we've certainly put a lot of tools in the system to try to prevent that kind of behavior, but we're always looking at our data and when you see something that looks a little funny and you investigate it further, it's usually going to be someone figured out a new way to exploit your system.
Josh:
They never do it an obvious way, it seems like even today. I remember a way long ago conversation because I'm older than most people and one of the moderators on Flickr at the time when it was still its own company said, oh, it's really easy to flag porn on Flickr when people upload photos and everybody's like, oh how? Because, at the time, there wasn't these AI algorithms scanning things and looking for things. He's like, oh you just look for pictures that views that spiked a thousand times in one day and that's always porn. He's as soon as the views spike, they're just like, we just have to cut it off. He's, no individual photographer gets that.
Andy:
Yeah. We've seen similar, just weird types of behavior where if the same 200 users have the same lineup three weeks in a row, the odds are that's not going to happen. So those types of things we can flag and we can figure out all right, ah, they're all coming from the same IP address or the same city and then hone in from there and figure out how to build something to prevent that behavior moving forward.
Josh:
Cool. What's next for you guys? So you're doing these bigger waves, letting people in the app, about how much longer do you anticipate that lasting and then what's the next step?
Andy:
Well, we enjoy that there's at least a little bit of a gestation period of getting on the wait list and then we can follow it up with some product marketing to make sure someone's ready to play when we're letting them in. And so I anticipate we're going to have the wait list open a bit more, although it's going to be a lot easier within the week to get into a product after you've seen some how to play and what we're about style content. Moving forward, we have a pretty busy fall ahead of us. European soccer's heating up and there's the World Cup in November, NBA returns in October, which I'm extremely excited about as a Knicks fan.
Andy:
And we are going to continue expanding different sports and listening to what our users want. And right now, we're talking about things like cricket, things like eSports. And one of the great parts about Web 3 is that these users have a stake in your project. They have voting rights and we can really get a great feedback loop from them in order to determine the feature course of our product.
Josh:
Awesome. Anything I didn't ask that you kind of think maybe we should have touched on? Anything that you thought you were expecting to hear about that I didn't ask, I guess?
I thought the verification process and the fraud controls were really great. We like the fact that you can really specify down to the number of users you want from a specific IP address, was a great feature that we had because you have a lot of families versus bot farms kind of competing with ourselves with that.
Andy:
Yeah. I thought the verification process and the fraud controls were really great. We like the fact that you can really specify down to the number of users you want from a specific IP address, was a great feature that we had because you have a lot of families versus bot farms kind of competing with ourselves with that. So, that was definitely a feature that we utilized a lot and kind of compared the different lists based on those thresholds. But other than that, I think we covered everything.
Josh:
Cool. Well, Andy, it's been great having you today. I know I learned a lot about the space and about how you guys are managing your wait list. And I know this will be beneficial to other people out there listening, so thanks for your time today.
Andy:
Glad to hear it. And yeah, thanks for building KickoffLabs. It's been great.
Josh:
No problem.