Kick
Run gaming giveaways that actually reward engagement.
Got approval from the mods on the Twitch subreddit to advertise Kick!
Post: https://www.reddit.com/r/Twitch/comments/cyby1u/im_trying_to_build_a_giveaway_tool_for_stream/
Some great feedback from the community, but overall, a perpetuation of my initial fears about the market/product: streamers generally aren’t used to or inclined to paying for software. Having been in this market for few years now, this has always felt like an uphill battle. Kick costs $19/m with a free plan, and yet the predominant conversation in that thread is about pricing being exorbinant.
A couple of the commenters make very solid points about marketing the holistic value of “community engagement” over the tool; which is something I’ve actually tried regularly before - but hasn’t resonated with the market. Mainly because, in my opinion, most streamers don’t think that sophisticatedly about their marketing strategy. I’ve gone for the “giveaway tool” message to anchor the software to something people already understand instead.
Lots to think about. I’m reaching the end of my tether with this market, but will push on for another couple of months and try to iterate my messaging.
Exactly on my deadline day, and just under a month after beginning construction, I've finished my complete rebuild of Kick! It's running on a stack that I'm currently in love with (Nuxt, Adonis & Postgres), features a really handy WYSIWG giveaway builder and has a free + paid plan (hacked with Gumroad).
Haven't updated my landing pages yet, but have rolled the platform (https://my.kick.gg) out to my paid user + beta testers. If you want to run a giveaway, you can check it out too!
Next steps are to fix bugs, build the landing pages and execute a proper launch strategy. The hard work begins.
After two months of working with 2-3 beta users on my first MVP, I've now embarked on the process of entirely rebuilding the app from scratch.
Why from scratch? Because I learnt a lot about the functionality and complexity involved in Kick, and believe the way I initially architected my back & front end was horrible.
First and foremost, I used MongoDB for quick development. I regret this decision and feel like I ultimately paid for the downfalls of no-SQL, despite the fact it made for quicker initial iteration.
Secondly, rather than use server side rendering, I created an SPA using prerender.io for SEO. I didn't have experience using SSR at the time. This has a huge impact on load speed, as well as ultimately SEO - so I think rebuilding the front end with SSR is important. Not to mention, it gives me a chance to refactor a bunch of loose UI ends.
In only a couple of days, I've made a lot of progress on V2 - so I feel very optimistic that I can get this iteration out within the next fortnight before moving onto acquring users 5-20.
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Hi! I'm really curious, what downfalls of NoSQL did you hit after only 2 months of work? What problems did you run into already?
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My guess is that the data is highly relational... which is hard to deal with in NoSQL.
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Yep, you've nailed it. Found myself writing so much code (and using more transactions), that relationships in SQL would have made extremely easy. Using Mongo was good initially because I didn't understand what my data would look like.
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We got somebody to preorder a year, at a discount, before we even had mockups. This really encouraged us to keep building this product, while providing us with the ideal test user through early stages of development.
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I worked on an app that had a fair amount of success in the giveaway/sweepstakes arena.
Granted we didn't get very deep into the gaming / live streaming space, I learned a lot and could probably help you address some of the questions/concerns brought up on your Reddit post. Feel free to ping me if I can help!
(btw - your privacy policy has a single mention of Gleam in the first paragraph)
Will get in touch! And ha! Sprung. Cheers for the heads up.
Update: first customer from this reddit post. Huzzah!
Update update: second one. Yay!
Congrats on the customers!
Keep talking to customers and let them guide you to better marketing :)
People generally don't care how much of your time it takes you to make a product when it comes to pricing. As a passerby who has built many free and freemium producta, I'm also very skeptical free users cost you that much either.
If you want to charge $19/month, the important thing is to make something people gain more than $19/month of value from having, not something that has high costs to yourself!
Yeah, agree with this advice in general. This was mostly me coming in ultra defensive because I knew the streaming community would be very vocal about pretty much any paid software (everything they use is free, VC backed), and I was trying to asuade some of those comments with a more personal plea. Not sure if I nailed it :P
I think the pushback is more about the offer than the pitch. From the thread, it seems like nobody felt the free version provided value and the premium version was priced way beyond their budgets.
I have to admit, I'm confused by your pricing page. What kind of "team" of streamers is it you're targeting at $149/month? Do many individual streamers actually do giveaways every month? Does monthly billing even make sense for them?
Do you know any teams you could talk to and learn from? If you have contact with an organization making serious money from streaming, then the subscription shouldn't be a problem as long as you can help them earn more.
I feel like the issue here is that I really don't want to build or market Kick to the streamers who want the Gleam-style free plan. Gleam (the competition) don't even make money off streamers, and focus all of their efforts on other verticals.
I think what I need is to scrap my free plan altogether, and just create a free trial for the paid plan. I believe there is a small but growing niche of streamers who easily see $19/m of value in Kick, because of how differently they use giveaways than most people. They run monthly giveaways to engage their existing community, rather than as marketing stunts. Kick is a very different product to Gleam for that use-case. I'm happy to bide my time slowly collecting those streamers, rather than trying to appease the wider market with a free plan equivalent to Gleam's.
I feel like a lot of my poor communication about the product and its value comes from me being slow to realise that I need to really focus on a very small market for now, and hope that the market grows alongside the product.
Where do you think those streamers hang out? That would be the place to share your offering and ask for feedback.
Haven't figured that out, but working on it :)