SquidFace Games

We used Fiverr to create this awesome video that shows how SquidFace works. We're planning on running some Facebook ads with it was well as posting it around and using it any time we need to quickly explain SquidFace. Would love any feedback on it!

https://youtu.be/cHi9jO6tvfo

We ran our second Facebook campaign and had our first customer purchase of Paparazzi.

The campaign was very interesting. I first ran ads that were identical content and audience as before but I used videos instead of images. After 2 days we had acquired zero users so I paused that campaign and re-ran the old campaign (with the addition of a new ad for Paparazzi). The results were not as good from an acquisition standpoint (CAC went up to $6.89) but from an engagement standpoint they were WAY better.

• 25% increase in new players per user (Users invited more people to play)

• 128% increase in rooms per user (This is a big one. Users created 2.5 rooms on average!)

• 614% increase in games started per user! (we made a lot of improvements to drive users to actually start a game and it looks like that paid off!)

• 21% increase in games started per room created. (fewer users abandoned rooms without starting a game. 1 in 3 rooms created resulted in a game starting)

For our first paid game we put a lot of extra energy into creating something we thought people would pay for. We launched an early version in August and used the feedback we got from friends and family to really go all in. It was a LOT more work than our previous 2 games and felt more like Kraken, our first game from an effort standpoint. Mike put a ton of effort into getting Stripe set up so that we could sell games from our marketplace and Jeff had to battle a number of bugs to get the game to work on all browsers/devices.

In Paparazzi, players use photos from their phone to create tabloid articles. The first version was pretty basic. You were given a couple tabloid-y topics and asked to find a picture from your camera roll that fit those topics. Then someone else would write a headline to go along with the photos and we'd pull everything together into a tabloid at the end. It was kind of fun but as we played it with other people we could tell it was missing something. First off it was pure Co-Op so there were no winners. Second, it was kind of confusing. Players didn't get what was going on.

We went back to the drawing board and created 3 rounds. The idea is that you are being tested to see if you are "tabloid material" :-) This allowed us to teach players how to play the final round in 3 steps (getting rid of the confusion we were seeing before).

It was a lot of fun but we also found that capturing photos through a browser is TRICKY. We found all kind of bugs especially in Safari but with a lot of effort Jeff was able to fix them all. We are definitely proud of this release and feel it's well worth a couple bucks!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ioX2Fuj5pQs&feature=emb_logo

Our Facebook campaign helped us pass the 100 user mark which was a big accomplishment! It's always fun to look at your user base and see the majority being people you don't know. It's great to have the support of friends and family but it's even better to see that people who don't know you and aren't signing up just to make you feel good are actually using your product.

We got MailChimp up and running and will use that for communication with new and existing customers.

Right now we're on the free plan which limits what you can do automation-wise but I was able to set it up so that when a new user signs up (through Auth0) we get a slack notification with their contact info. I then manually add them to a Mailchimp list and have an automation set up that sends a welcome email out to every new user added to that list. It's pretty clunky but it's also free and that is what we need right now!

With 3 games live, we decided to officially launch our product to the public. We started sharing with friends and family and also spent $150 on Facebook ads. Being bootstrapped we couldn't afford more than that but we were very happy with the results. We had 79 new users sign up at a sub $2 CAC. The best part is, because the nature of our product is that you invite friends to play games with you, each user introduced an average of 3 people to SquidFace. We call non-signed up users "players". We had 235 new players from the campaign (in addition to the signed up users).

Our usage wasn't great though and return visits were almost non-existent. On average each new user created a room (which is how you invite others to play a game with you) but only 1 in 10 users actually started a game from their room.

Our next goals are:

• Get Mailchimp set up so that we can create some re-engage campaigns.
• Create our first paid game and get everything set up on Stripe so that we can take credit cards.

We knocked this one out even more quickly! I'm so grateful for Jeff and Mike and all the work they put into building platform that makes scaling easy.

In Geezer, one person is assigned as the Geezer. The rest of the players are "Whippersnappers". The Whippersnappers choose the meaning of a made up verb and the Geezer tries to guess what that crazy new verb all the kids are saying means.

Watch the How to Play here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATL1ADya-G0&feature=emb_logo

It took us over a year to build the platform as well as our first game. Mike built everything in a way that it is very easy for us to create future games and that has proven to be super valuable (more on that to come!). Playing that first game with a real group of friends was amazing! We ran into plenty of issues but it was clear that what we had built could actually be a thing and everyone had a lot of fun!

We also got a third co-founder, Jeff, who is also a developer. So our team is now:
Mike: Platform, Ruby, Javascript
Jeff: Ruby, Javascript
Jesse (me): Design, HTML, CSS

Our first game, Kraken, is based on werewolf. We decided for our first game to basically start with something well known so we could spend all of our time focusing on the platform and not have to worry about the game mechanics, etc. You can see a "How to play Kraken" video here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jE_cFqhvus&feature=emb_logo

After pitching a FinTech product we were building to Y Combinator in Mtn View and getting turned down, my co-founder Mike and I decided to rethink how we wanted to spend our time. "What do we really want to build?" We both decided that although maybe not as lucrative, building a gaming platform would be more fun than another Fintech company (we were both fresh off of 5 years in an early stage Fintech startup).

We liked the idea of building something that would use technology to bring people together IRL and started playing with the idea of a gaming platform similar to Jackbox that wouldn't require anything but your phone. With that, SquidFace Games was born!

You can read more about our Y Combinator experience here:

https://medium.com/@jdawg/my-experience-interviewing-for-ycombinator-w2019-and-what-i-would-have-done-differently-bbcd38684c44