Starting this week, and for the entire month of August, the Virtue Poker team will be focused on assessing the performance of the application. Our team has been hard at work “under the hood” improving the stability and overall performance of the application, and we want your help to evaluate the current state of the application as we prepare for our fall marketing push.
Beta Period Summary and Key Learnings
Our Beta period from November 2023 - today has been a great success. We’ve established poker clubs and partnerships with groups like Pudgy Penguins, Neo Tokyo, ETHDenver, Rug Radio and with many Base communities.
We’ve scaled our user base to over 15,000 players, and have received lots of extremely positive feedback on the application.
However - we noticed throughout these events (and our own MTTs) there were several bugs that we felt would be blockers to our platform growing successfully. As we attract new users and communities, it’s really important that they have a positive experience. Therefore, for the past 3 months, our team has been working to address the majority of these issues, and we’ve reached a point where most of them are fixed.
In addition - we noticed that many poker clubs became dormant after the initial excitement (and free rolls) were completed. And moreover, we haven’t noticed “organic” growth - meaning most poker clubs we’ve attracted to the platform came from more outbound reach outs versus organically coming to the site and simply setting up their own tournaments and events.
Product Strategy
Based on these data points, we decided to retool our product strategy focusing on:
- Fixing all major bugs and improving the stability of the application architecture
- Adding the ability to utilize onchain assets in poker games inside the app (pair tokens to chips)
- Adding the ability to utilize smart contracts for single table cash games (and tournaments)
- Updating the front-end (UI) of the application
- Allowing the application to be added to a users phone screen (PWA)
- Updating the website structure, and making the flows to create tables, tournaments and clubs easier
- Produce content guides and recorded “how-to” videos and embed these on the website
Completed Major Feature Releases
- Use multi-signature wallet (SAFE) to manage club funds and pair with chips in the club
- Add multiple tokens across multiple networks and pair with chips inside a club
- PWA: Add Virtue Poker to Home Screen on andriod/iOS (instructions coming)
- All-in animation glitch fix
- Use of betting buttons when you’ve timed out
- Delay for auto-fold when you’ve timed out
- Improved MTT scalability (up to 500 players)
Upcoming Future Releases
For the immediate future, the focus for the application will be on:
- New Front-end
- Website re-architecture adding more content guides
- Smart contract system for utilizing tokens + chips on cash tables cash tables
- Continued architectural improvements
Marketing Strategy
As mentioned earlier, Virtue was successful in scaling the user base rapidly by attracting new external communities to host events and build clubs on the application, however the overall retention of these groups was extremely low. To address these points, we felt that the application needed to be more performant (bug fixes), have more unique features (token pairing), and more easier to use (improved UI/UX).
We’ve learned from our past experience that spending lots of money on marketing promotions without seeing either (a) organic growth or (b) revenue growth is a recipe for disaster. Therefore, we’ve been doubling down on the above before resuming our marketing efforts.
Our goal is to resume marketing beginning in September and increasing our marketing push come October 2024.
Acquisition
Following these fixes and improvements, our team plans to resume our marketing in a “blitzkrieg” fashion - activating all existing communities on the application, white simultaneously actively recruiting communities across Ethereum, Base, Polygon, Solana and more to begin growing our user base again.
Retention
Following acquiring these new communities - we will more actively follow up with community organizers around how they can turn on token-pairings inside their clubs so allow members to utilize on-chain assets inside poker games.
In addition, Virtue will push for more cross community events and battles to keep communities active.
Crypto World Cup
Virtue Poker plans on running a series of (8) poker tournaments invite 8 different NFT/token communities from multiple blockchain networks to compete in MTTs.
The top 8 players from each community will then face off in a final MTT to crown “The World Champion” - crowing an overall world champion.
$5k Bug Bounty Program
For the entire month of August (next 5 weeks of promotions), we will be hosting (2) weekly special MTTs. We encourage all players to participate in these programs to help our team assess the current state of the application:
$500 Bug Bounty Special MTTs
Players who record their sessions and discover and submit bugs will earn an entry to a (4) special $500 GTD freerolls (Sunday August 4th, 11th, 18th, and 25th) at 16:00 UTC. Any player who submits a screen recording of a bug (must have occurred in a VP event or cash table after today), will be entered into all 4 MTTs
How to Enter
Submit a screen recording of any bug you experience to support@virtue.poker by August 2nd at 23:59 UTC and you will be whitelisted for the special $500 MTT. Please make sure to include your player display name.
$500 “Survey” Special MTTs
In addition, we will send out a short product survey later this week and all players who complete the survey will be entered into a $500 free roll this Saturday August 3rd at 16:00 UTC .
We will send out another survey in (2) weeks and will host another $500 Special MTT on Saturday August 17th at 16:00 UTC.
$1000 "Max" Special MTTs
Our team also would like to push the limit on our MTTs this month - we will announce (2) special MTTs through the course of the month. The goal for these MTTs is to reach a minimum of 300 entrants.
Conclusion
Thank you again to our community members for their patience while our team has been hard at work improving the stability of performance of the application while we prepare for our next marketing push this fall.
We believe our success lies in the quality of the product, and unlike in years past, we've been listening to community members feedback and have been working to improve the overall experience which we believe will allow us to scale to the broader web3 community (and the web2 poker community) come this fall.
The Virtue Poker Team