Built for User Incentivization at Scale

While building any new product, a common question most businesses end up asking themselves is if they can continue focusing on their core product alongside building solutions to keep their existing users active.

Having spent over 5 years building and scaling a fantasy sports startup - our experience wasn't any different. Fantasy sports or real money gaming has the entire user-incentivization piece at the front and center. You get a joining bonus, rewards for playing more and for consistency, bonus for referrals, coupons for higher deposits, coupons for not withdrawing, bonus to get you back if you have dropped out.

The entire user incentivization piece in real money gaming is as big as the rest of the product itself.

Often, building a user incentivization system from scratch is a potential havoc for internal workflows, with restrained time-to-market, extremely cost heavy and unstable.

Building a scalable user incentivization system from scratch can be extremely complex.

Let's take something as simple as a referral bonus and a few of it's attributes:

1. A basic referral bonus is very easy to build, until you realise how much you are burning. For limiting burn, you might want to put a check on usage and spend that money only based on certain actions of the user you referred.
2. You want to control fraud (same person making multiple accounts) so you need to put in device fingerprinting and other checks.
3. You want to give different referral amounts based on various factors such as location and other unique characteristics of a user.

With an endless list, you soon enough realise that the time you spent building just the referral engine costs you a bomb- both in terms of time (man hours worked) and money.

To begin thinking of other incentivisation or promotion campaigns for users on top of a basic referral program requires scale, time and money that no business can afford to take away from their core product.

There is barely any scope for experimentation, once the promotion campaign is built

The other issue that really came to the fore was the fact that “business” always wants to keep experimenting with different ways to incentivize a user. This means, for each variation we had to go back to our tech to make any changes. The process always took too long. And, going back to tech every 3 to 4 days to make even a simple change to a coupon, or bonus code results in making each effort very short-termed and rather chaotic.

With the constant need to internally scale a promotion, we often wrestled with the fact that our expensive and scarce tech team is spending a decent amount of time configuring and rolling out coupons and bonuses - all this, while they could simply work on building the core product of the business.

Tailoring a user incentives program is time and cost heavy

As we moved onto our next startup shopr.tv (live commerce), it wasn't long until we faced the same issues again. We wanted to tie our rewards program to multiple user-actions. In an early stage business, you generally have a limited tech bandwidth. 8 months into building our live commerce platform, we still did not have a referral program in place. We launched coupons, experimented with them but did not have the heart to keep going back to tech to keep changing them because the tech that was working on mission critical stuff.

One can only imagine what developers felt when marketers attacked them with countless requests to add, remove, activate, deactivate, edit, expire, and count specific coupons. On top of that, they had been coming up with new business rules, e.g., a coupon is valid only for a particular region or it should be valid only on Thursday. The time spent on coupon management (a non-critical part of the business) is just off the charts.

And that is when Rehook was born.

Rehook is built to-

1. Allows the business/ marketers the flexibility to quickly test, customize, launch, track and optimise all user-promotion campaigns, without code.
2. Relieve tech teams from managing promotional needs. Integrate once using simple APIs and enjoy the freedom to run any promotion, without any tech effort.

Run coupons/bonuses, referrals, loyalty, streaks, giftcards, rewards, wallets- just about any promotion you want to, by simply creating rules on rehook's intuitive rule engine. Experiment with cohorts, geographies, demographic and any user segments to run personalized campaigns- without ever going back to tech.

We are confident that with rehook, businesses/ marketers can seamlessly engage and retain their users with right rewards, at the right time- without taking away the attention that their core product needs.

P.S: Starting this week, we're conducting 1-0-1 product demos. If the solution we've built piqued your interest, we warmly invite you to book a slot for yourself here!

Cheers!!
Akhil