State of the Union - March

State of the Union!

It's become clear to us that we're not doing a good enough job communicating our goals, and how that's impacting decision-making.

This is our first "state of the union", where we will update you on what happened, where we went wrong, where we can improve, and what we see as priorities in the future. We plan on doing this monthly.

Before getting into the meat and potatoes, I want to announce that we plan on running office hours every Friday at 10 am EST onDiscord; feel free to drop in and share your thoughts with us.

What is Sweeps?

Sweeps is an early-stage startup run by Oisin (Quilly) and Myself (Owen, aka Monz), that's why we move fast and make mistakes.

Our goal is to be the first sports game that builds savings instead of debt.

We're trying to find investors who want to take part in that mission.

The nuts and bolts of what we were planning on doing are covered by the American Savings Promotion Act 2014. Essentially it enables US companies to offer prize-linked saving.

What this means is that in the future, we will offer FDIC-insured savings accounts where you can deposit money, and as a reward for saving this money, you will earn points. Basically, save more, play more. Our goal is to make saving money the most exciting part of your day.

What Happened

• Implemented the ability to watch ads to earn points
• NFL season finished
• Referral Raffles
• Changed entry points to be generally lower
• Implemented "Result" Raffles where you can route for a win, tie or loss

What Went Wrong

There were two clear mistakes this month.

After the NFL Conference Playoffs, we entered a drought of content. One could say this is due to the scheduling of the time of year, but I think that misses the point. The biggest issue was that most of our single-game pools cost too much or had too few entries. That's just not compelling. We noticed a slight stagnation in daily active users because of this.

Implementing the ability to watch ads, this was our first time doing this, and we hit some road bumps. Firstly we let people watch ads unrestricted, so you could potentially watch thousands in a day. This nuked the value per ad, which meant that the people who only wanted to watch a few to get some more points were impacted by our initial set of restrictions. At first, we restricted by the minimum value per ad. Which caused many users to see the error around the eCPM floor. Then we realized that we should limit around watch rate. We're still figuring this out.

Additionally, on Android, we learned pretty quickly that this functionality is not allowed, so we disabled it. This will be the case indefinitely; we don't control this decision; it's Google's.

We're still tuning these systems and hope to have a real alternative soon.

What Went Right

I have to say that the implementation of ads, at least on iOS is a huge win. We recognize that people want more points, this allows us to give you additional points without sending us out of business quickly. I wish there were more opportunities like this in the app.

Oisin, "aka Quilly" has up-skilled and started killing it by creating new raffles and formats, all of the better-priced entries and new raffle formats are thanks to him. Gotta love that.

Plan for March

We're launching College Basketball in preparation for March Madness. Expect promos!

Next up is golf; we have a lot of ideas for this space.

The other thing is we're trying to speak with journalists, businesses and partners who want to help Americans save money via the passion of sports.

‍

If you have any thoughts or suggestions, please contact me at owen@sweeps.fyi and I'd be happy to talk it over.