How Esports One Mobilized a VIP Influencer Program to Crush Their Launch Goals

Josh: Hi, I'm Josh Ledgard and welcome to this episode of the On Growth podcast from KickoffLabs. My goal with this podcast is to help you grow sustainable businesses through the stories of our customers and our team. In this episode ... try that again. In this episode I interviewed Sharon Winter. Sharon is the co-founder of Esports One. They're going to be launching a new daily and seasonal fantasy sports league for the League of Legends game and are in the middle of a wildly successful launch campaign.

Josh:They're blowing away their launch goals and Sharon shared specific tactics they've used to get there with KickoffLabs and without spending a dime of company money on advertising. You'll learn the sweat equity involved in generating the initial buzz by targeting specific customers online and talking personally to each and every one of them. How they combined a contest with prizes for topping the leaderboard while making sure there were still rewards for everybody else. Why they created a VIP group of influencers they discovered early on through KickoffLabs and how they grew that list into amazing brand ambassadors.

Josh:I don't want to give it all away, so you're going to have to listen to the interview. Don't forget to check out the link to the full show notes. We'll have all the tips, images, and emails used to create this campaign. If you enjoy this episode, subscribe to KickoffLabs On Growth in Apple podcasts. Write us a review and send any feedback to josh@kickofflabs.com. Finally, if you want to run your own contest, just like this one, sign up at kickofflabs.com and see how easy it is to get started. On with the show.

Josh: All right, so I am online now with Sharon Winter. She is the chief operating officer and co founder of Esports One And your team is running a campaign to generate some leads for... ?

Sharon: Our E1 Fantasy platform.

Josh: And can you tell us a bit about what the E1 Fantasy platform is?

We're the first and only all in one fantasy esports platform. So think like fantasy football, but it's for League of Legends, and other titles are coming soon as well.

Sharon: Yeah, so we're the first and only all in one fantasy esports platform. So think like fantasy football, but it's for League of Legends, and other titles are coming soon as well.

Josh: Awesome. So I can sign up and play fantasy sports with the all stars of esports online against other people online?

Sharon: So, the way it works is we're combining daily and seasonal fantasy. And we're kicking off with League of Legends, and so how it works is we have a first inaugural league and it's closed off to 10,000 people. The 10,001st signups are the highest on the leaderboard and we'll get into that. And users can go on there and each week set their lineup and play against the community and play for big prizes.

Josh: That is a great concept, and it's always amazed me how fast esports in general took off and so to adding the fantasy component to it is certainly an expected and good next step. I want to get into the campaign you mentioned, because you guys have had some tremendous numbers in terms of your conversion rate and sharing, which tells me that there is a lot of interest in the fantasy component to this. And those are always things we look at, like are people converting and are people sharing and telling their friends? And if you have the combination of those two, it really tells me that you guys have a hit product on your hands that you're working on, and we will get to the campaign. I want to go back, if you could tell the listeners a bit about your background and what led you to this moment here.

We're the first and only all in one fantasy esports platform. So think like fantasy football, but it's for League of Legends, and other titles are coming soon as well.

Sharon: Yeah, absolutely. So my background, I am an LA girl. I ended up finding myself in Pittsburgh going to Carnegie Mellon, studying industrial design and robotics and I was always really intrigued by kind of human psychology and physics, and how do you ... kind of the human-computer interaction kind of element, to an angle. I'm a third time founder. I have a few ventures in my past that are still alive and kicking today, and profitable. And I started off at Esports One ... I wasn't one of the first people here, I wasn't a co-founder from the very beginning. I started off as a kind of interim COO, helping them build their team, helping them build their product and finding a product market fit. Throughout the process we started looking at, what ways can we apply our technology? So the technology that was built, the company's been around for about three years and we really are the leaders in stats and data on the professional scene in esports.

Looking at the amazing tech, the computer vision, the deep machine learning and the data science that we built, we stumbled across this opportunity of fantasy.

Sharon:So that means we can really tell player performance and know everything about kind of their evolution as players and even predict how their performance will be moving forward. We have a handful of clients who use us for data insights and license our data. And so taking a look at the amazing tech, the computer vision tech, the deep machine learning and the data science that we built, we stumbled across this opportunity of fantasy. And bringing our insights and our knowledge of this space, and building a platform that is very, very data heavy and data science heavy. And yeah, and that's kind of where my journey began, where we drummed up this concept, saw there was a total market gap. And that's where my journey began here about a year and a half ago and we started building this out.

Josh: So why do a prelaunch campaign before you're ready to go?

Sharon: Great question. I've been warned and told it doesn't just kick off from day one. If you say we're launching on X date, you're not going to get ... it's not like you're opening the floodgates and everyone's going to rush through. You kind of have to build momentum. I got advice from another founder who, or it was a handful of founders. We were doing a collaborative chat and they were all saying they'll have B to C products and they're saying, "You know, you're going to be doing seven, eight, nine mini launches and you're going to find different reasons to relaunch and relaunch and relaunch throughout." Yeah, throughout the whole period, and start sooner rather than later.

Target every audience as its own launch... we broke down the gamers into like who likes specifically League of Legends, who follows the pro scene, which is the LCS, who loves the stats and data component of it all. We focussed on each segment separately for their own launch.

Sharon:Target every audience as its own launch, and so that's what we did. And so you can scan our campaign, everything came in waves. We used the same landing page but it all came in waves. Where it was Like first we targeted the general audience who loves fantasy or fantasy football. That was more like a little test to see if our campaign was solid and understandable. Then we went to the gamers themselves. Then we broke down the gamers into like who likes specifically League of Legends, who follows the pro scene, which is the LCS, who loves the stats and data component of it all? And so we kind of went down the pipeline and targeted each one as their own official launch and it allowed us to kind of tap into each audience and focus on each one of them in a very targeted manner.

Josh: So I really like that, and that's not something I've heard often in these interviews, is that you broke down what ... to repeat what you just said, you have kept basically the same landing page, which I can see and we'll post an image of with the interview. We were talking about the only seasonal League of Legends platform on the as the headline, right?

Sharon: Yeah. The only all in one platform and the all in one, just to kind of bring in a little bit of an explanation, all in one is the idea that you can compete ... so you can play, you can research, you can chat, you can watch all in one place and it's not fragmented.

Josh: Yeah, that's a good point. And then, but what you did to have these waves throughout your campaign was you broke down, you said, "Let's look at the potential customers who are already playing fantasy sports online," and you market to them. And then you looked at people who were into video games, but maybe not fantasy sports and you marketed specifically to them, right?

Sharon: Correct.

Josh: And I think that's a great tip for anybody listening, to segment your audience and to go after each of those segments separately. So can then you dig into how specifically you went after, maybe pick one of the more interesting audiences, how you went after each of those audience, like how did you market to them?

Sharon: Absolutely. So a very unique case. The history of fantasy esports, right now as it stands, or specifically fantasy League of Legends, which is what we're focusing on at launch. Currently, the market, it really doesn't exist in a legitimate way, in a way that's authentic to the actual space and to the gamer community. It was built a few years ago by the actual game publisher and then taken down for different reasons. They weren't passionate about it internally. And so there's a lot of uproar from the community.

(We reached out by) taping into a pain point or a need by the community, reaching out to each one of those who've expressed that need and letting them know what we're building, asking them for feedback and their opinion and getting them passionate about the product.

Sharon:The community was very upset that it disappeared. And there are lots of articles, a lot of kind of Reddit posts, and disgruntled community members that want it back. And so that was one of our target audiences, to tap into like a pain point or a need by the community, and reaching out to each one of those who've expressed that need and letting them know what we're building, asking them for feedback and their opinion and getting them passionate about the product. Once we got them passionate about the product in that way, by making them feel like it's not just making them feel it was true, making them heard. It was much easier to get the initial set of referrers to kind of spread the word for us.

Josh: So I want to want a drill into that, because I think it's something that people often overlook. When you say reached out to individually, so it's a great concept, you know that there's a pain and a need in the community. You found places like Reddit where people were discussing like, "Hey I'm frustrated that this happened and I really wished there was a way to do this." And then did you just go and buy ads on Reddit, or what did you do?

You know, we're building this, we're in the process, come learn more on our KickoffLabs page or on our landing page.

Sharon: No ads. So we didn't do any ads for this campaign, so everything you're seeing here is with no ads that we put out. We did have some of our kind of like campaign members who put out ads on their own accord, but we went out, we did what was unscalable. So in the beginning do stuff that's not scalable. That was kind of our motto and we reached out individually or addressed them individually, if it's on Reddit. And we very publicly just asked them like, what do they want to see? You know, we're building this, we're in the process, come learn more on our KickoffLabs page or on our landing page.

We had six of us sitting in our conference room and just finding all these opportunities and all these kinds of pain points that people were expressing and individually reached out, made it very personal.

Sharon:And so we did that, I mean, we had six of us sitting in our conference room and just finding all these opportunities and all these kinds of pain points that people were expressing and individually reached out, made it very personal. The motto of our entire campaign was let's find 50 very passionate people, then find 5,000 people who are going to sign up and tell their moms, that's it. So we were [inaudible 00:11:51] our goal and had a whiteboard with this, kind of ticking the marks, or with the mark tickers, you know, let us get to these 50 very passionate, very enthusiastic, very excited individuals who will be our ambassadors moving out. And that concept has evolved throughout our entire launch process. We built resources for them and that's something we can get into as well, we built a whole VIP program. And it was a full kind of like hand holding process where we helped them achieve their goal of, you know, getting the word out there.

Josh: Okay, this is really interesting. So do you have a sense of how many people or how many personal posts that you guys made. When you said there were six of you in a conference room sort of working on this, do you have a sense over a short period of time, like how many people you were reaching out to?

It (individual outreach) must've been a hundred per person, maybe a little bit more. And it was a lot of Twitter DMs, a lot of Discord communication, reaching out to bloggers, and emailing journalists.

Sharon: We did an hour a day for a week and it must've been a hundred per person, maybe a little bit more. And it was a lot of Twitter DMs, a lot of Discord communication. Discord is like Slack for gamers. It's the messenger for gamers. And we did a lot of outreach on Discord and we try to find these people. We reached out to the blogs and the journalists who wrote about it in the past, we've talked to the game publisher and let them know we're building it. And they tweeted about us saying, "You know, this is a legitimate option you guys should check out." And so all these supplements for people who are already familiar and missed it, these all kind of helped help, help lead the community, define it.

Josh: Yeah. And so, you're talking about hundreds of posts over this time. And then you mentioned the concept of having 50 VIP. So how did you identify the 50 VIPs, or the people that were in that category that you wanted to really push to promote you guys?

It (Building the VIP List) really had to do with the Kickoff leaderboard. You would see that (people on top of the leaderboard), first of all, I guess it would start by us reaching out to them.

Sharon: We're using the Kickoff leaderboard and it really had to do with the Kickoff leaderboard. You would see that, first of all, I guess it would start by us reaching out to them. Them being responsive was the first thing, them being excited about what we were building and also the referral campaign, and then tying in their actual referral code. So KickoffLabs offers, you know, it gives every individual a referral code, and that's unique to themselves.So every time they're asking their friends to join or whatnot, they're using this referral code. And so seeing that process of it converting from us communicating with them, then seeming excited and then actually them then referring it to two to three people or more. I think this is one of the strongest things that helped us.

KickoffLabs gives every individual a referral code, and that's unique to themselves.So every time they're asking their friends to join or whatnot, they're using this referral code.

Sharon: We built out a referral program or sorry, not our referral program, a VIP program and we did it on Discord. So the way we thought about it is, how do we find people who are specifically gamers and we'll generate the most relevant leads for us? And so these people should have a Discord account and should live on Discord. We also dealt with the idea of Twitter, but Discord really allows this community chat and we built a private chat for our VIPs in there. We were able to have these 50 people ask questions, talk about what they're working on and us individually can have a very personal relationship. We had our CEO on there, I was there, multiple members of our team on there and everyone offered resources as far as design, content pieces, ways to run your ads.



Sharon:We checked everyone's ads, if they were doing ads. And I highly encourage doing that because we found three of the multiple people who are running ads, they had broken links, some of them kind of had the wrong information on there and all that. So being able to actually double check their work and help them improve their conversion, also ours in turn. So really handholding, but they appreciated it. And there's been a little bit of a relationship built between us and these 50 passionate people by now. And I think that those people will now turn into our future campaigns or our future initiatives to actually hold retention. And you know, with every feature we release, these will probably be our biggest advocates.

Josh: This is perfect. So you guys did this seeding online to get 600, 1,000 posts. Somewhere in the 100s of posts that you guys made, you started seeing people signing up to the KickoffLabs campaigns, started starting to make referrals and then you're using the leaderboard in the in KickoffLabs to say, "Who of these people are really potential influencers?" And you identified them, the top people there, and you invited them into this private community and gave them access to additional resources to make them feel more connected. And not just to make them feel more connected, but obviously you cared about their feedback. You thought that they'd be people that were worth listening to as you're building the product and getting them engaged, which then turns them into more active participants online referring more people.

There's been a relationship built between us and these 50 passionate people by now. With every feature we release, these will probably be our biggest advocates.

Sharon: Absolutely. And some things we offered them and ... any company can do, we offered them, we converted their referral links to Bitly links. Just short links with their names in it. We gave them a media kit with a bunch of content in there that they could use both ways, too. And we drilled it down all the way to, you know, "Are you targeting your family, this is how I would approach it to your friends and family. This how I'd approach it for an ad. This how I'd approach it if you're a influencer or if you have a publication, here's our press release," and we gave all the tools that they needed and even offered to customize those tools. We were like, "If you're a journalist, here's our press kit, but if you want us to help you write the article, reach out and we'll have it to you in 24 hours." So we really worked with them, it was no work on their end other than their enthusiasm. And it was still able to shine even though that we helped them with a lot of materials.

Josh: And so for people that aren't in the private group, what rewards are you offering for people to sign up in the first place and then in general for sharing and how did you come up with those rewards?

So we were really inspired by the jet.com story. And we decided to award company shares top 10 performers. The top place got or is getting 50,000 shares of Esports One.

Sharon: So we were really inspired by the jet.com story. And we decided to award company shares top 10 performers. The top place got or is getting 50,000 shares of Esports One, and Esports One as a whole, the parent company. So we have multiple different sites as well as our new E1 Fantasy platform. And then the 2nd through 10th place got 5,000 shares each. And so that was the original motivator and that's something we actually marketed a ton. We put it on LinkedIn, we tried to tailor the story based on what the audience was. So, For the gamers we told them about the platform and entice them that way. On other platforms, I'm involved in several founder kind of communities and other startup communities and to them we market it as, be a part owner or become an investor in Esports One without spending the money, that sort of a thing. And so that was really the big draw.

We made sure that it was incentivized for every single person (Special access, founder badges, etc), even if your number, you know, 30,000, still had a reason to keep inviting people even though you'll never make it to the top 10 or top 10,000 in your head.

Sharon: And then we had a long conversation, a long meeting in the office, about how do we make everyone a winner? And so even if you're not in the top 10 people, like what else can you get and earn? So the way it worked was the top 10 people got equity in the company or get shares in the company, the top 1,000 people get access to the platform. Or top 10,000 people can access the platform, as well as the founder's badge. So there's also ways to gamify and create some sort of kind of elite group or connected group, a badge. And then everyone who referred people were getting credits to our platform. So for every referral you got three credits, $3, whatever it is to spend on our platform once you get into the platform. So we made sure that it was incentivized for every single person, even if your number, you know, 30,000, still had a reason to keep inviting people even though you'll never make it to the top 10 or top 10,000 in your head.

Josh: Yeah, and that's really important, I think that's the best practice for anybody that's out there considering running a leaderboard campaign where there's a couple of, maybe first or even fifth prizes, or 1 through 10 prizes, is I always get asked, "Well how do you keep people excited if they're not going to make the leaderboard?" And you have perfect answer, which is well there actually has to be something that motivates them to be excited because it really is like if I joined your campaign today, I might be really demoralized to like, "Oh boy, there's no way I'm ever going to catch those people on the top two spots." But if I'm getting credit along the way then it's perfect.

So really, being more attentive to the leaderboard on behalf of your users instead of expecting them to do it, and reaching out personally, I cannot stress. It is so helpful. And them feeling connected to the brand and connected to the actual leaderboard.

Sharon: That's another good point. More recently, I mean our campaign ends in a few days or regenerates, because we will be doing another campaign to kind of continue the process. But we reach out to people on a daily basis telling them, you know, if there's anyone on the cusp or it's kind of low hanging fruit for them to jump up the leaderboard, we message them and let them know how many. Because people, you'd be surprised or not paying attention to leaderboard. Their life doesn't revolve around your product or the leaderboard. And so we're messaging people daily saying, "Hey, you're only two away from being in the top 10," or, "You're only 18 away from getting into the platform, let me help you." Or you know, "We think with just one tweet you can jump that step." So really, being more attentive to the leaderboard on behalf of your users instead of expecting them to do it, and reaching out personally, I cannot stress. It is so helpful. And them feeling connected to the brand and connected to the actual leaderboard.

Josh: Yeah, absolutely. And that's definitely something that I'll pull out of this interview, that follows along with some of other customers that have had this best practice is, really getting personally engaged with ... especially the people that are sharing, and then motivating them to share. Because like you said, I think that's perfect. People are not paying attention to your product. And I know I've talked to people that have a fear, other customers have a fear it's like, "Oh well maybe I'm reaching out to too much and I don't want to overwhelm them." They've already been sharing. They probably are highly interested in what you're doing anyway and you're not going to overwhelm them. And if you are, then they'll tell you and you're going to create a relationship that's going to help you well beyond this particular campaign.

Sharon: Absolutely. And I would say the threshold is, if they've done two or more referrals hat's a green light. They somewhat care, and they won't be bothered by you reaching out to them and constantly kind of giving them feedback and advice, and helpful to them to grow. I will say also as far as KickoffLabs themselves, the support that we've gotten from them, sort of the personal touch, also kind of worked for ... and this is not an ad, but we did two design reviews and they're both super helpful and that same personal touch that we're talking about, how we addressed our users or our community. I think that KickoffLabs did that so well with us and we learned a ton. We had at some point we had a 70% Viral Boost.

KickoffLabs did a design review with us and they found two things that made a ton of sense and actually improved our conversion even more. So that handholding support was really helpful!

Sharon: They did a design review with us, it was nice. They prerecorded them just going through it. It was this lady, she had her dog on her lap, it was very cute, right? It was so funny. We were laughing, we watched it as a team. I'm in the conference room and she was pointing out her, kind of going through it and we could watch where her mouse went, and her eyes went. It was two items that stood out, and I don't remember what they are, but there's two items that stood out to her and we didn't even think about that. And we've been staring at this landing page for so long and asked for so much feedback from our own friends and family, and she found two things that made a ton of sense and actually improved our conversion even more. So that handholding support was really helpful, even if we thought we didn't need it kind of a thing.

Josh: Yeah, that probably answers the question I was going to ask about, the best part about using KickoffLabs has been for you. So I'm going to guess that answers the best part because that kind of shift is important.

Sharon: Yeah.

Josh: So what's been the most challenging part of the campaign?

People will always try and cheat the system or prod the system, and KickoffLabs was super helpful with that by flagging these people in the system.

Sharon: Oh, most challenging. It's not at fault, the campaign, but the holidays. You'd think that even though I'd say it's a recreational kind of fun product, people really shut down on the holidays. They don't care if it's a fun item or what. So I think we saw a little bit of a pause during the holidays, which was Christmas and New Years. I'll say something early on that kind of threw us off. So, people will always try and cheat the system or prod the system, and KickoffLabs was super helpful with that. And I don't even want to tell anyone your secret sauce. Not that I know it, but we didn't really reveal it to people what it was graded on. But the idea of some of the referrals were flagged because they were fraudulent or they weren't verified or kind of didn't adhere to your guy's standards. And that was super helpful because we did see a little bit of people trying to cheat and trying to game system in order to get the equity in the company.

Sharon: And the community noticed it, too. We got some messages of people saying, you know, "There's no way that guy has 500 referrals." Like, "I've been working on this every day." And so the community was disgruntled, and we got on a call with KickoffLabs labs and they explain the whole process to us and then we were able to call out those people and actually cut them out. So that was a challenge that we didn't know we had support for until we really dove into and looked into it. And then lastly, I would say if I had to do this over again, or if you're out there debating what you should do to launch your product and what are the best steps. We did this in the very beginning. We were looking between a milestone approach and a leaderboard approach. And we decided to go with the leaderboard because we wanted to show that, sort of other people are climbing up above you, and create a limit.

Sharon: There's only 10,000 people who can enter, so there are certain reasons why we went with leaderboard. But moving forward I think we're going to go with milestone approach where if you have some sort of passion for the product, just show it to us and you'll be part of the family. So it's just different, if the prize that you're putting at the end of the day has a certain type of value and you want to equate it to referrals, then I think milestone approach would be better. You want to create some sort of exclusivity, then it's the leaderboard approach.

Josh: Yeah, that's a great way to think about the two.

Sharon: Yeah.

Josh: So a couple last things, because we're about to wrap up. Did we miss anything in terms of advice you'd have for people with our goals in terms of building a list like this?

Set all of your KickoffLabs Campaign automatic emails. There's the automatic reply and then there's the reward level emails, and then there's influencer emails. All of them. There's no scenario where any of those should be blank, set them all.

Sharon: I have two that I guess remain, is set all of your auto emails. I forget what they're called on KickoffLabs, but-

Josh: There's the automatic reply and then there's the reward level emails, and then there's influencer emails. Yeah. Set all of them.

Sharon: All of them. There's no scenario where any of those should be blank, set them all. I would say also utilize the plugin banners onto other sites, create partnerships. We did it on five different sites and we saw a good bit of traffic coming from them.

Josh: That's a really good tip.

Sharon: Yeah, three of the sites we own. But we loved the top banner, that was less invasive. The bottom banner that is, I don't know if I'm using the terms correctly, the bottom banner is massive and that we love for our campaign. -text in there and that was really nice, it's really in your face. And then there's the in line signup or that little box that you just put into ... we put that on our blog. So really everywhere where you have any other access to any other site, put one of those plugins in there because it does convert.

Josh: Okay, great. All right, so last five questions. These are meant to just be really quick walking through things. And so first answer off the top of your head, how do you personally get into the work zone?

Sharon: Oh, I do an hour of quiet time in the podcast room to really focus and write a list for the day.

Josh: Perfect, so kind of planning out your day. Favorite vacation destination?

Sharon: I think tropical.

Josh: Okay, warm weather. Recent favorite book or podcast?

Sharon: I've been listening to this one the past few days, preparing, but I love the Startup. It's a good one. Podcast.

Josh: Which one?

Sharon: The startup or Acquired?

Josh: The Startup, okay.

Sharon: Yeah, those are my two favorites.

Josh: Something that you learned new in the last year you didn't know before?

Sharon: Oh my gosh, there's so much. I'm trying to talk like even though I'm an operations person, I'm not as dialed in with all the productivity tools. And so there's a bunch of new productivity tools that actually the team helped me kind of learn and absorb and add into my daily routine. So now I'm also very up to date on all the apps and tools that help me communicate with my team the more efficient way.

Josh: Do you have one example of something that you guys use?

Sharon: We just transferred over, so we've been on the hunt for a good product management tool. That we went from Asana to Click Up, and now we're on Monday and I absolutely love Monday. It is very easy to manage and I think that's the most important part of it.

Josh: Yeah. It's got to be easy to get people to do it.

Sharon: Exactly. Oh, convincing people, all day.

Josh: And then we'll, finally, someone you look up to either in business or personal.

Sharon: It just sounds generic, but my dad. When we hang out, we brainstorm startup ideas for fun and we do this on a weekly, if not daily, basis. We'll call each other with ideas and his different perspective on everything is very helpful and even helps me here at the office kind of come up with new and creative ways to tackle different problems, so he's my number one.

Josh: Oh, perfect. I want to thank you for being here today. There are a ton of tips and best practices that I heard in this interview that we'll be able to tease out and pull out in the recap, when it gets posted. If anybody has any questions or follow up questions they'd like to ask you about what you said today or the product, how could somebody get in touch with you?

Sharon: Email me. I'm very responsive to email, or LinkedIn. My email is sharon@esportsone.com.

Josh: Perfect. All right. Again, thanks for joining us and I hope you have a great rest of your week.

Sharon: Thank you so much. Likewise, stay warm.

Josh: Thanks for listening to today's interview. If you enjoy the On Growth podcast, please write us a review on Apple podcasts and don't forget to hit that subscribe button. If you'd like to run your own viral campaign or set up a wait list for your upcoming business like they did, check out kickofflabs.com. We can provide the landing pages, referral tracking, leaderboards and reward level emails required to make your next product launch a complete success.