Monetization and Props
Caffeine
Caffeine wants to monetize its live streaming platform without defaulting to subscriptions and ad revenue.
My contribution
Product strategy
User research
Sketching
Team
3 x designers
1 x engineer
Year
2021
Understanding the Problem
Less than 1% of users were purchasing gold and sending props during live shows. The props were random, not conversational, or relevant. Props were priced too high in gold (Caffeine’s currency), making the barrier to entry hard for users to justify. Lastly, the pipeline to create and drop new props was too long, taking up to 6 months to release a new prop.
How might we encourage more users to purchase and drop a prop in the live interactive chat?
How might we introduce new props quicker and design them to be more culturally relevant?
Opportunities
Prop Audit
Our current props have a high barrier to entry (on average x gold) making it expensive for users to send multiple props during a show. It also takes on average 6+ months to design and launch a new prop. Lastly, our props consist of items that aren’t relevant to the shows or chat (ie donut or cake)
Design props that are culturally relevant to the show content
Our approach to improving props:
Create a better and quicker system to design and launch new props
Drop the barrier to entry so users send more props during a show
Research & Ideation
The design team of 3 collaborated in research and ideation sessions to brainstorm ideas for the prop creation process and designs.
After some mood boarding and rough sketches, we had ideas for a path forward.
Test prop designs that are custom to show content as well as some universal designs that can be used in place of words/ideas
Make the 3D prop designs simpler with less animation and outsource to a design contractor to improve pipeline speed of creation to launch
Learnings
First Launch & Results
It took our team around 6 weeks from beginning conversations to the initial drop of our new approach to props.
The results 2 weeks after the initial launch:
The number of users sending props during a show increased from less than 1% to 5%
Prop creation timeline went from 6 months to 2-4 weeks
Revenue from props increased by $16,000 in the first two weeks
The average cost of entry to drop a prop was lowered by 90%
Outcome
The team watched the live chat during our shows overflow with props since our users were enjoying having conversationally relevant props to send based on the content. Props continue to be a successful source of monetization on Caffeine.
