The unifying theme this February was my focus on selling, and the difficulties associated with that.

Trophy

As mentioned in my January post, sales has been the main bottleneck for Trophy. There are only so many people actively searching for gamification APIs and finding us in any given month, so we've had to go outbound. This has proven to be an uphill battle, as we often have to not only convince a potential customer that Trophy is a good product, we also need to convince them that gamification generally is a good solution to their problems (churn, lack of engagement). And that implementing this solution is a top priority, not something that can be kicked down the road until next year.

This is painful and difficult, and we haven't had very much success with it.

In March I will change course and focus on monitoring the web and product communities for people already talking about gamification and asking questions about how to implement it. Hopefully this will be a higher leverage move for us.

Aside from sales, I also shipped the Points Boost feature.

Campfire

Campfire has also struggled to sell of late. Our MRR is steadily decreasing, and attempts to reverse that trend with paid advertising haven't gone our way yet. The most recent of such attempts was a large investment in TikTok videos, which have generated over a million views. Unfortunately those views have translated into very few purchases of Campfire so far, but we're only halfway through the campaign so perhaps our fortunes will change.

On the development side I shipped a variety of bugfixes and quality-of-life improvements, and on the design side I began thinking through how the social and gamification layer will look for Campfire.

Lastly on the marketing side I created a video ad that we can run as a pre-roll YouTube ad soon.

Distractions

I mostly kept up my new habit of playing a video game once a week for about an hour, until the end of February when I didn't have much time for this. I didn't work on the worldbuilding MMO unfortunately.

In general it is hard to do anything but work when both Trophy and Campfire are falling short of my targets for them.

Next Month

In March I hope to finalize a social/gamification design for Campfire and monitor the launch of some Google ads to drive growth. For Trophy I'll build some new features (points levels, streak customization, new email template manager UI) and focus on inbound sales.

I doubt I'll touch the worldbuilding MMO but maybe I'll manage to play a few sessions of a video game.