Viral times at Hang Five

It's been a busy week at Hang Five. I've written about this a little in the Hang Five newsletter (yes, there's a Hang Five newsletter, please subscribe) but I've got more of a behind-the-scenes take here.

We have been trying to figure out a way to approach media to spread the word about Hang Five. We took a bit of a break over Christmas, and hadn't really gotten back onto the promotion track. But the promotion track found us!

A while back, one of my friends shared Hang Five with a group of her friends. One of them subscribed to Shit You Should Care About, an immensely popular (although unknown to me at the time) newsletter and Instagram account that digests news and culture to a primarily gen Z audience. Luce, who writes the newsletter and runs the independent media company, has been playing it with her family for the last wee while and decided to share it with her Close Friends list on Instagram.

So my friend saw that Story, and shared it with me. I checked all our dashboards and we started to see an uptick in traffic. This was last Thursday.

I emailed Luce and thanked her for playing and for sharing. And said she could suggest a topic if she wanted. She immediately came back with the BEST topic for her audience. It was a coincidence (or was it) that we're both NZ-based as well.

Fast forward to this Thursday, and the unofficial Hang Five x Shit You Should Care About collab went live. And traffic skyrocketed! Over 4,000 played yesterday's game. That's insane!

Our new audience is a bit different to our traditional one. Most people who have arrived at Hang Five have found it from a personal recommendation. Friends who play it and have recommended it. There's a real social aspect to it. There's a Share button, and around 20% of players tend to click it each day.

On Thursday that share rate dropped to 8%! And I think that's due to the relationship between the person that recommended it and the new player not being as strong as if it were someone you saw every day.

We're eagerly awaiting the next few days to see how many of those 4,000 people stick around and keep playing!

We've run test ads on LinkedIn, Facebook and Google in the past. Retention of those groups is nowhere near as good as the retention of the word of mouth players. I expect that retention of our new SYSCAhood players will be somewhere in the middle.

Some other experiments I've been looking at are to do with new user onboarding. I noticed this with the ads, that a lot of people weren't finishing their first game. I built a little walkthrough to see if it would make a difference.

It did. But not much. I've still got it running in an A/B test, but it's probably time to switch off the little tooltips because they don't make too much difference. The funnel is Start game -> Choose first letter -> Finish game. I've found that the first step conversion is better with the tooltips, but the whole funnel's conversion is almost the same.

Next time (not sure when that will be) I'll write a bit more about the technology behind Hang Five.

Have a great weekend!

Arun