Water Cooler Trivia
Weekly trivia quizzes to spark conversations
We made bobblehead trophies. To celebrate the weekly winner of your team's trivia contest.
Here's why. And how. https://www.watercoolertrivia.com/blog/trophies
Some highlights...
"At this point, we'd agreed to 300 trophies for $3.50 each, but we hadn't signed a contract or paid a single cent. So when Jonas sent through the mold images I was floored: this was actually happening."
"12 large, heavy boxes stacked neatly in the atrium. I didn't know how long the boxes had been there (I’d been out of town for over a week), but I was sure it'd confused my neighbors."
"Breaking 300 bobbleheads and re-gluing them in two different places with Gorilla Glue is not a quick one. My partner, my roommate, even my sister visiting New York all generously chipped in their time. In total, we spent about 30 hours fixing up the trophies."
Over the course of nearly three years, we've now had over 1 million trivia questions answered by more than 15,000 users.
We do free response instead of multiple choice, so this means a combination of human and robot effort for grading those responses. It also allows us to tag things like "funniest wrong response" on each quiz which gives our platform a more personal and human feel.
We've also hand-written and hand-researched over 5,000 trivia questions, designed and manufactured custom bobblehead trophies, and more.
Because we migrated our marketing site to Webflow a few months back, I've been able to start up a blog. I'll be sharing some of our blog posts here as updates. Like this one!
Here's the longer post where we dove into a bunch of fun insights from analyzing 1 million trivia responses.
https://www.producthunt.com/posts/water-cooler-trivia-for-slack
We built and launched WCT as an email-based platform ~2 years ago and increasingly heard the request from our customers for a Slack app. And, well, this is it! We’ve actually had the majority of new groups sign up via Slack instead of email in the past few weeks. It’s been a blast building in the Slack ecosystem.
We’ve seen an uptick in interest as folks look for ways to connect with coworkers while remote, and we’re adding new features regularly to foster even more trivia-sparked conversation and connection.
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Is this good idea to upload the project program on product hunt? I want to share my product to promote and get review, you can read here more about it https://www.rosystemguides.com/
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water cooler project is really good to go in that time. I'm working on the similar project for my water pool you can see here some details https://thehomebeasts.com/best-above-ground-pools
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Where have I read about this app recently? Have you posted this on reddit? Or appeared on any podcasts?
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hi @hubbion! good question. we posted on r/trivia a few days ago, but haven't been on any podcasts (that we know of). if you did hear about us on a podcast, would love to know which one! we are trying to spread the word with more folks as we think customizable trivia contests are a super lightweight way to engage a remote team :)
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Not really sure then. I'm sure it's not r/trivia or any podcast then. Anyway, it's good news then that your product is being talked about :)
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After we noticed that the Slack London team was creating a "hacky" version of pub trivia within Slack (writing questions, hand-grading responses, etc) we reached out to their team and let them know that we've built, well, just that!
They were excited to hear that we built on the Slack platform, and we actually had the Slack CEO tweet at us recommending we get mentioned in the blog post.
Honestly, this did not create a massive bump in traffic to our Slack app, because the blog had been posted for a few days before the link to our product was added. But still a fun little experience to get more exposure. We are now on the 2nd page for "Social & Fun" and "HR & Culture" categories in the Slack app directory. Hopefully climbing the charts to page one soon...
Here's the tweet from Slack CEO: https://twitter.com/stewart/status/1248007506015608832
Here's the blog post: https://slackhq.com/tips-for-nurturing-remote-team-culture
After we noticed that the Slack London team was creating a "hacky" version of pub trivia within Slack (writing questions, hand-grading responses, etc) we reached out to their team and let them know that we've built, well, just that!
They were excited to hear that we built on the Slack platform, and we actually had the Slack CEO tweet at us recommending we get mentioned in the blog post.
Honestly, this did not create a massive bump in traffic to our Slack app, because the blog had been posted for a few days before the link to our product was added. But still a fun little experience to get more exposure. We are now on the 2nd page for "Social & Fun" and "HR & Culture" categories in the Slack app directory. Hopefully climbing the charts to page one soon...
Here's the tweet from Slack CEO: https://twitter.com/stewart/status/1248007506015608832
Here's the blog post: https://slackhq.com/tips-for-nurturing-remote-team-culture
My last day of work at my “real job” as a product manager at a large each company was March 6th. I then began a long-planned trip around the world with my (romantic, not business) partner. We took a one way flight to Buenos Aires on March 10th. That didn’t last long. The US Embassy told us to come home, so we did.
I’m now in the second week of working full time on Water Cooler Trivia, but it’s from a suburban basement during a self imposed two-week quarantine rather than from an Argentinian coworking space. So it goes.
My two cofounders will continue to work on WCT part-time and I won’t take a salary, but rather will be “paid” in equity shares from the two of them. We wrote up a contract and signed it. We’re all in agreement that going full time on sales and customer service and email marketing and general elbow grease was the next step for the business, and I was ready to take a leap of faith.
Though travel plans were scuttled and the world is in a scary place of uncertainty and unexpected tragedy, I’m excited to be working full time on weekly fun for offices. Especially now that folks worldwide are remote and looking for those extra touches to continue feeling connected with virtual coworkers.
-Collin
We went from "let's embrace web brutalism" to "let's make a site that doesn't scare away potential customers." In total it was only a 2-week process. The two major pieces were 1.5 weeks working with an outside designer (friend from college) at a reasonable hourly price for the assets, and then a few days of frontend coding from my cofounder (1 of the 3 of us is technical).
Here's what we used to look like: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/water-cooler-trivia
And here's the latest: watercoolertrivia.com
A few weeks back we launched a new feature in which we can let users know if they made us laugh with a response to a trivia question. We added other emoji reactions as well. Learn more and check out the first few responses that made us laugh or made us smarter: https://medium.com/@watercoolertrivia/introducing-emojis-for-when-your-answer-is-wrong-but-you-made-us-laugh-587668696ab1
We've been meaning to do this for a while, both because we are generating fun data on trivia questions and because we wanted to share some of our leanings. For now, we've started with a post on the company founding: https://medium.com/@watercoolertrivia/making-a-company-out-of-our-passion-for-trivia-dd90e8637ae8
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