HATCHLINGS

Overview

Hatchlings is a Facebook and iOS gaming company based out of Des Moines, Iowa. Hatchlings was founded by Brad Dwyer when he was a sophomore at Iowa state university. I met Brad while I was working at Coaching Actuaries and in discussions with how I'd set up our email marketing, he was interested to know how he could create an email marketing strategy to reduce new user churn, which at the time was close to 95%. in other words, for every 100 new users on day zero, only five would return on day one. 

During my first hour of consulting at Hatchlings, I informed Brad that he was about to hit a million users on the newest game launch, and with that we were able to create a year-long email campaign giving out $1 million in-game currency. The strategy of determining how in-game currency was doled out was in direct proportion to how frequently in-game users played and purchased existing premium features. Not having significant user experience, user design and research experience, I consulted with the author of the book, The First Five Minutes, an expert in tutorial design, to identify how to make the game more enjoyable for the users. In one paragraph, he summarized that the game was inherently not fun, which was a result of changes in Facebook's API, which led me to begin querying user behavior data and purchase behavior to identify which users were spending the most. And with a survey, we discovered an intense close knit group of users who had found the forums as a place to feel comfortable, find community and build value to enrich their own individual lives.

Armed with this information, we re-engineered the tutorial design for the game and gave responsibility to key users to welcome new members and create a higher sense of community, which had, until that point, been the only feature for which we could attribute sales. Part of this included my responsibility in determining methods of increasing caught revenue per user and we were able to double the average annual revenue per user with two key strategies. The first, mentioned earlier, was through a daily email announcing the previous day's winners. The second was to build an in-game notification system on top of existing technology, which notified all online users of any purchase through the system that had been made. We discovered that we were able to lift sales by 20% within 60 seconds of any purchase being made, a direct result of our in-game notifications.