We gave away $1500 and got hundreds of leads

We pulled off a completely harebrained marketing scheme, and had a blast doing it. We built a devious little social game for a conference, gave away $1500 to the winner, and got a ton of bang for our buck.

(See a short video of the game in action here)

We are a small agency. Like, two full time partners small. Neither of us has time or energy for traditional sales. We thrive on inbound warm leads. So we need to have a strong brand and lots of personal relationships.

Laracon is a conference packed with potential leads for us. Other agencies have a huge presence at conventions. They fly dozens of people in, have cool booths with cool swag and matching t-shirts, etc. These are great companies with great brands. Competing directly with them is a fool’s errand.

Last year at Laracon we tried to meet people the old fashioned way: firm handshake, big smile, a little on-the-nose pitching. But it didn’t scale. Most people aren’t likely leads. This was an inefficient random walk. We made friends, but didn’t land leads.

Strategy is about being different. As Aaron Francis says, “embrace your weird, see where it goes.”

I (John) make games. That’s why I learned to write code. That’s the origin story of Thunk. Daniel, Jacob and I built a big complex social game along with our friends. We are weirdly very good at making little asynchronous web-based social games. I also make board games. So I did what I do best, and designed a game.

The game was simple: every hour you can upvote and downvote people. Whoever is at the top of the scoreboard at the end of the conference wins $1500. You can resign at any time, and give your score to another player. So there is lots of room to coordinate with a voting bloc, backstab, and connive.

There were twists and turns that made things more interesting. One twist prompted players to go find a randomly assigned player to earn extra upvotes. This provided some unexpected social lubricant for folks to connect with strangers. They ate it up.

People played hard. Whole companies banded together and treated it like a team building exercise. I walked around with a ridiculous bag of 1500 $1 bills for the whole conference.

Twitter popped off. Friends became enemies, enemies became friends. One team promised to make it rain from the balcony if they won. Some guy walked around paying people $5 to resign. The winner convinced a bunch of people to resign by promising to donate the money. You better believe we’ll be coasting off their good PR when they do.

The tone of the game was very jokey. We aren’t always comfortable shilling. Marketing schemes can feel so disingenuous. So for us, the only way to do it was to be honest about it, and kind of make a joke of it. We called it The Thunk Pyramid scheme, and was full of jokes about how we’re only doing this for lead generation. We even gave players extra upvotes for recruiting more players.

In other words, the game was distinctly ours. It had our voice. It felt funny, indie, and irreverent. It felt different.

Daniel spoke at the conference, and talked about the game. We built it with his new event sourcing package called Verbs. So he used the game as an excuse to teach everyone why Verbs is so powerful. Of course, signups spiked during his talk. The talk, the game, the open source package, and the brand were all singing in harmony.

Most of all, this was fun as heck. We established ourselves as "the fun Laravel agency" to thousands of people.

But how about real numbers? We got 350 signups. That’s 350 new emails on our newsletter. The official source of game announcements was my personal twitter account. That netted me 250 new followers. These people are either leads, or people who can make referrals for us.

We had dozens of conversations where it was natural to talk about Thunk. Players had to speak to us in person to join the game, so we had a reason for folks to approach us. While admitting them to the game, I’d say, “Gotta shill for 10 seconds. We run an agency, we do great work. Seriously, call us if you ever need Laravel dev work or product consulting. Ok, shilling is over, enjoy the game.”

This was the best $1500 we’ve ever spent.

Several people asked if they could hire us to run a game at their conferences. Not sure if we can turn this into a fully fledged product, but it sure sounds fun to do this again. I have a few new versions of the game in the works. Reach out if you want to play one of them at a conference or corporate retreat!