How To Build a “Gamified” Referral Mechanism for Your Startup

I worked with Kidas, an AI software company that protects children from cyberbullying and online predation during online gameplay, to design and implement a viral refer-a-friend strategy. Here’s what I learned.

Kidas.net

Background

One of the first projects I worked on at Techstars was designing a refer-a-friend mechanism for Kidas. As I considered similar mechanisms that I’d come across, my mind instantly thought of one in particular: Robinhood’s.

When I was a college undergrad, I received an invite from a friend to join Robinhood’s new service offering zero-commission trades. Excited by the idea, I signed up for the service, only to be greeted by the news that I was the 100,000th+ person in line and couldn’t access the beta until those in front of me did first. Of course, the catch was that I could advance my position in the queue by referring friends and convincing them to sign up as well. As Business Insider details in a retelling of the Robinhood launch, Robinhood’s inherently viral referral mechanism, aided by an anonymous post on Hacker News, helped the yet-to-be-developed app gain 10,000 sign-ups on the first day, 50,000 sign-ups within the first week, and almost one million in the first year.

Inspired by this example, I proposed to Kidas’ founder Ron Kerbs that we try to emulate and adapt this idea for our initial product launch, and with his blessing, I set out to try and figure out a way to implement it.

Option 1: Buy a Plug-In

One of the first solutions I stumbled across on the Internet was a “plug-and-play” option from a company called “Viral Loops”. I was impressed by the look and feel of their product, and the entry price felt doable. However, as I examined their product further, the biggest drawback was that absent upgrading to premium (and significantly increasing your monthly cost), you couldn’t remove their “Powered by Viral Loops” sticker. This ordinarily wouldn’t be a dealbreaker, but the fact that the actual company name was “Viral Loops” put out, what I would call, a “manipulative vibe” to me. This was more than inconvenient: it could be detrimental to Kidas’ brand image given how closely intertwined it is with trust, empathy and user protection.

So the new question emerged: how do you strike a balance between creating a referral mechanism that generates buzz while still preserving the integrity of your brand and playing to the top of the intelligence of your audience? As I considered this question, it became increasingly clear to me that simply trying to copycat another company’s strategy wouldn’t work — we’d have to create a strategy that genuinely fit Kidas’ story.

Reframing the Story

In order to tell an honest story, we needed to lean into the fact that Kidas’ product runs on a custom piece of hardware. Unlike the typical app, something that can be downloaded and re-downloaded repeatedly with no real barrier, Kidas’ product has legitimate, inherent scarcity: they can only produce so many actual units in the first production run. Inevitably, some waitlist signees will have to wait until the second batch.

With this in mind, we thoughtfully reframed our referral strategy to transparently convey our production constraints and offered to reward users who referred friends by moving them into the first production batch. In implementing the referral mechanism this way, we both laid the foundation for virality while still maintained authenticity, something crucial for Kidas’ brand.

Option 2: Coding our own mechanism

I ended up building the referral mechanism with JavaScript and the Wix Corvid API. I’ll spare you the actual code and instead tell you the high level steps I took to implement it:

1. Create a sign up form. For this I just used a simple Wix plug-in.
2. Create unique referral code. I just wrote a simple function that created a 6-character randomized string of numbers and letters. You need to switch to Developer Mode to use custom code with Wix.
3. Add user to database. Add the user info and the referral code to the database. Also include fields for their current position in line and who they were referred by. I used the length of the database as the original position when adding the user.
4. Write a piece of code that pulls in the referral code from the url. We wanted users to be able to use their friends’ links to activate the referral loop, so we programmatically added the code to the database from the url bar.
5. When a user is added, update their line position. We would increment the line position field of the referrer and decrement the person ahead of them in line in case of a tie.
6. Allow users to return to examine their line progress. The last piece was making sure the webpage also enabled the user to lookup their line position to know where they currently stood. This required a modest re-design of the UI and hiding certain pieces of content. We also automated emails to be sent out whenever someone’s referral code was used.

Results

Our referral mechanism helped Kidas double the signups on their waitlist over the span of a few weeks!

Shameless Plug

If you or someone you know has a child playing Xbox, check out Kidas as a great way to keep them safe during online conversations!