Kizzy Rewards, the right way. Part 2.

Heard rumors about Kizzy’s new changes? Read about what’s coming in the next series of updates to the Kizzy bonus system. Here’s how we’re bootstrapping the app with bonus currency in order to allow for bigger and bigger rewards.

Kizzy is changing rewards, and this is a sneak peek into today and what’s immediately next.

We’ve learned a significant amount in the first quarter of mainnet, and this post is about what’s coming next in the Kizzy bonus system, more on why we had to iterate after Monad Momentum Wave 1, and how we’re thinking about rewards going forward.

Why does Kizzy reward players?

In order to innovate and build social media betting, we require a dedicated community of players who spend smart and bet daily.

Betting by definition is a debatable financial decision, and to invent a new category with a roadmap of novel games that take patience and feedback to create, the Kizzy business requires a community of players who have a real incentive to stay and spend their hard-earned cash on the app.

Without our community of real money spenders playing actively and sharing feedback with our community and team, Kizzy would not be able to collect the valuable feedback that steers the company roadmap in the direction of growth.

None of these learnings would have been possible without a community that had a reason to play. So our next focus is to iterate the reward system in favor of incentivizing even more play.

And before getting into the rest, shoutout Vincenzo and a number of the major community guys who kept showing up, spending, sharing feedback, and helping us understand what players actually want.

Why iterate in the first place?

3,400,000 $MON was sent direct to players in the form of a traditional airdrop, after just 1 month of running the platform on mainnet. This was huge amount of funds for our small team to give away. But, we wanted to do right by our Monad community and carry out what we thought would be the most exciting $MON airdrop.

However, in our nascency, we never fully suspected what would happen next…

Kizzy had huge excitement and was growing in volume every day. We were convinced our players loved the initial PvP game, which was simple and frankly filled with difficulty for many new entrants. We actioned Monad Momentum Wave 1 and a cascade of liquidity hit our markets. The amount was equivalent to nearly half of all volume wagered in the first month, despite our heavily restrictive KYC (which we are scrambling to remove - more on this soon).

At the time, we thought this was what we needed to do to continue the explosive growth.

What went wrong

The result was that everyone left.

Unknowing that our customer base’s hype was for the rewards and not the core product, we suffered a severe drop in stickiness, user count, and volume after players correctly realized that they no longer needed to play in order to earn their rewards.

It’s easy to understand from the customer perspective. Why bet on Kizzy, when there are so many great platforms, with smooth working games not to mention offering huge bonus programs for betting elsewhere?

No other betting platform could do an airdrop at the same level of traction that we did. Most platforms wait until they have a significantly high-valued token to do an airdrop, with cash reserves in revenue to last for years of new development. Meanwhile at Kizzy, we naively took our entire bonus budget and blew the entire amount for the love of the game and the community, frankly because that’s what we thought we needed to do to continue the growth trend!

But the first principles played out far differently, revealing a serious experience gap in Kizzy’s GTM.

What we learned

We came away with a few hard learnings.

Bonus rewards are a great carrot, and badly structuring them is detrimental.

Did customers want to stay? No. Kizzy was not in a state worth sticking around for. Did the structure increase the probability for more? No. We thought it did, but quickly realized no one wanted to stay. Pure cash rewards are great for the player, but detrimental for your app’s proclivity to do more.

So we had to go back to the drawing board immediately. The lesson was not that rewards do not work. The lesson was that rewards work extremely well, but only if they are structured to increase the probability that the player comes back and keeps playing.

Thus, we decided to focus our efforts on the product and getting it to a state worth sticking around for and sharing, and then come back to rewards.

What’s changing with Rewards

Ok, back to rewards. Here’s what’s changing.

Purple K will become easier to earn after next week, but will stay almost as scarce. Just slightly more easy to access, for a temporary amount of time.

We’re going to conduct an update to the mission center, where we reward critical habit-building stickiness behaviors and volume generation. Players will see spend requirements come down.

What we realized is that if you review the data, the vast majority of mission center rewards were going to an extremely small group of high-spending users. While that was intentional, the severity of the gap was not.

But why wait? Why not change this a month ago?

Because we had a number of changes that completely shifted our roadmap. We were comfortable going down in metrics and conserving Purple K to wait for a rebound before turning on the gas and promoting it.

That time where we announce the changed rewards is now.

Bonus Chips

But this isn’t all.

The major feature change that’s coming is another currency to Kizzy.

We’re rolling out Bonus Chips, a 3rd currency to Kizzy.

Bonus Chips are our platform for all cash reward funds on Kizzy. If you get bonus rewards on Kizzy, they will be paid in the form of Bonus Chips now and in the near term future.

Bonus Chips are a second balance of liquidity that is delivered to users not like rakeback, but completely airdropped. Bonus Chips will expire and must be bet, but they can be played through and convert into KESO.

Why do it this way?

Because Kizzy requires volume to grow, and as we’re bootstrapping, we’re looking to offer bigger and bigger bonuses to players. The way we do that is by moving more volume through our platform and scaling, and then investing directly back into fueling bonuses to acquire and retain more users.

Bonus Chips must be spent to withdraw, thus benefiting the platform and allowing for larger rewards. This is the key change in structure.

The old reward model delivered value, but it did not sufficiently increase the probability that the player stayed and kept playing. Bonus Chips are meant to do that. They are meant to let us offer bigger and bigger bonuses, while also creating a system that drives more play on Kizzy instead of ending the cycle once the reward is received.

How will you earn Bonus Chips?

You’ll earn Bonus Chips by collecting Purple K.

We’re planning for multiple campaigns of back-to-back Bonus Chip airdrops all tied to Purple K. Your earnings of Purple K will be the direct input for your Bonus Chip distributions in the first version.

This is the most transparent bonus program in the game for an early platform, and we can’t think of another game that’s planning like we are. There’s one truth to how much Bonus Chips you get, and it’s just Purple K.

Get more Purple K, get more Bonus Chips.

What about games?

Why prioritize rewards over core games? They are not mutually exclusive. You can do both.

It’s just that we believe we may as well kick-start the storm right before we start to really shake things up at the game level.

We’ve tried a few different games, and all faced substantial product problems and are truthfully not the silver bullet. It took us time to realize that parimutuel betting was not working as we wanted it to. The truth is 2-sided markets work quite well, and AMMs or LPs just require volume, but our pool betting models are slightly different.

Users can’t cash out for a gain, which has confused a lot of prediction market users and frustrated them. And the lack of base liquidity deterred a lot of adoption, as users were staring at empty pools.

But all of this is heard loud and clear. We’re moving to add initial liquidity (more on this soon), and now looking to drastically change the game and bring back a version that our testnet users know best, but with an exciting twist.

What happens next?

Well a lot.

• We’re going to iterate missions in a simple patch.
• We’re going to keep giving out wake-up call rewards, awakening every user who was earning Purple K after Monad Momentum Wave 1.
• We’re then going to officially launch Bonus Chips.
• And then parlay this all into the re-launch of the new Kizzy with an updated platform, and then continue launching new games, but this time with a new model that’s wilder than before.

Bonus Chips will be the start of something new, and we expect new acquisition and retention strategies to become possible with it. Huge first-time deposit bonuses, seasonal airdrop strategies, sustainable cash rakeback rewards programs, and more.

With new games, onboarding changes, and KYC becoming completely unrestricted, we see a new launch for Kizzy ahead. We had to let everyone know, and that’s what this blog is for. There’s more detail coming. We’re just giving the most dedicated players something to believe in.

But why do all of this?

We had a lot of supporters over the last few years. We all want to get bigger and stronger and recover growth from our product so we can bring rewards to everyone who supported us from testnet to mainnet.

We can only do so by growing into a stronger product with the most compelling reasons to stay versus anyone.

Better games. Faster payouts. Deeper liquidity. And a tighter community of VIPs who have a real reason to keep winning.

That is the objective.

Massive rewards. Stronger product. And a much better reason for players to stay close as Kizzy enters its next phase.