We Helped Micro-Influencers Make $50K In Our First 6 Months After Launch
Hello! Who are you and what business did you start?
My name is Dima Okhrimchuk, I’m the founder and CEO of Drope.me, an AI-enabled influencer marketing platform that connects gaming companies, micro-streamers, and their communities in performance marketing campaigns. I am responsible for providing strategic direction for the business, overseeing day-to-day operations, making sure we have enough runway, and leading a talented team of professionals.
We launched the beta version of the platform in June 2023 and, since then, hosted over 170 campaigns for game developers and publishers on Steam, as well as creators on UEFN and Roblox. We have already paid out over $50K to micro-influencers and hosted dozens of giveaways for influencers’ communities.
Our goal was to validate our product-market fit and now we’re looking for opportunities to scale the product further. I am proud of the team for pushing it through and building a product that creates added value both for gaming companies and micro-influencers.
What's your backstory, and how did you come up with the idea?
I am a gaming enthusiast born in Kyiv, Ukraine, and later moved to Los Angeles, USA. I hold an MBA from UC Berkeley and a degree in international economics from the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv.
Dima Okhrimchuk, founder and CEO of Drope.me. Photo: Drope.me:
Before founding Drope.me, I had been working in corporate finance and tech for almost 10 years, but after doing an MBA in Berkeley realized that power suits weren’t my thing. In 2020, I co-founded a CS:GO (Counter-Strike: Global Offensive) organization. But eventually, I had to dissolve the team due to the funding problems. Yet, at this point, I started to look for other options, so these players could continue to do what they love, competing in esports tournaments and earning.
One of the ideas was to launch a platform that allowed pro players and influencers to make money while playing or engaging with their followers during live streams on Twitch. Basically, viewers would either get a free ticket or donate to increase their chances of paying for an opportunity to play together with the gaming celebrities during show matches.
Our platform would take a small commission of the donations generating an additional revenue stream for creators. The idea looked intriguing, so I gathered a small team and launched an MVP before we raised our first funding for the project. That’s how we started Organization.GG in 2020-2021.
After about a year of work on Organization.GG, we realized that the project was not very scalable. The majority of celebrity streamers and pro gamers didn’t like the mechanics of making money from their followers. We have noticed that they gradually started asking their followers not to donate at all. Instead, they were more interested in collaborating with gaming brands through sponsorships. So we decided to pivot and started to look for angles in that space. That’s how Drope.me was launched.
In February 2022, when the Russian Federation invaded Ukraine, the platform refocused on charity initiatives, raising over $60,000 for UNITED24, the fundraising platform initiated by the President of Ukraine. Everyone on our team supported that, and it took us just 6 weeks to launch this initiative.
This was probably one of the most challenging periods for the company, our team, who was based in Ukraine, and myself. Today, we continue to run charity initiatives. Just recently, we partnered with Games for Love, a leading children's charity dedicated to making a positive impact on the lives of children through the power of video games. We developed a custom integration into Drope.me to help them raise funding for the social initiatives.
Staying flexible and customer-focused has been advantageous in refining our platform, ensuring it remains a valuable tool for our users.
Take us through the process of building the first version of your product.
We can say that the first version of Drope.me was the Organization.GG platform I mentioned earlier.
Meet Organization.GG. Video: Drope.me
Then we pivoted to the initial version of Drope.me, which also worked in a bit different way. It was a giveaway platform created specifically for gaming companies where they could run giveaways or set up Drops with tasks that participants needed to complete to win prizes.
We integrated unique CTAs tailored for the gaming industry. It allowed our clients to automatically track wishlists and purchases on Steam, app installs, in-game events and achievements, engagement in socials, and much more.
The problem was that companies still needed to promote these giveaways. So we decided to focus on the feedback that we were getting both from the companies and influencers, including 1-1 interviews and more. That cycle of feedback and the development of new features brought us to where we are now.
Then we realized that gaming companies struggled to engage influencers at scale to reach their specific marketing KPIs, so there was an opportunity on the market. On the other hand, there was this long tail of smaller influencers that were overseen by brands, and they wanted to make extra income. It pushed us to shift our focus from a gaming-focused giveaway platform to a marketplace where we connect gaming companies and micro-influencers in performance-based campaigns.
Today Drope.me is an AI-enabled influencer marketing platform that connects gaming companies, micro-streamers, and their communities. We empower gaming publishers and developers to engage with streamers in performance marketing campaigns. At the same time, Drope.me helps micro-streamers start monetizing their activity through collaborations with gaming brands.
90% of streamers' income, and even more, comes from sponsorship contracts with brands. Companies tend to integrate with one or more well-known streamers because they can immediately cover a large audience. Also, it is easier to agree with one streamer, brief them, measure the result, and make payment. But the problem is that there are not many such streamers on Twitch – about 0.5%.
The rest of the streamers with large audiences are out of reach for brands because they don't have the resources to manage ad campaigns that will include hundreds of streamers. After all, it is necessary to monitor the performance of each of their tasks, conclude contracts, and resolve some issues. The Drope.me platform has a framework that allows you to automate all these processes. Most importantly, companies pay only for the result, unlike traditional sponsorship contracts, where the brand can measure performance only after the campaign is completed.
As for the AI component – it’s no secret that AI plays a pivotal role in shaping the gaming industry. To streamline manual work for clients and optimize processes like content review and revision, we've just integrated a unique functionality into Drope.me. Now, UEFN publishers and developers can leverage AI to assess player-submitted content.
For instance, if a campaign involves reaching a specific level and playing on a particular Fortnite map, community members should submit a screenshot of their gameplay on Drope.me to prove that this action is completed. AI will efficiently review these submissions, providing prompt feedback to the company and saving valuable time.
While we currently focus on testing this concept for UEFN, our plan is to extend this feature to other titles and include influencer actions in the future, such as automating reviews for lengthy streams or multiple videos.
Describe the process of launching the business.
We have been working on today’s version of the platform before the “big” relaunch for about six months. Reevaluating the users’ feedback, brands’ and streamers’ needs, and more. Eventually, we came up with the current version of Drope.me as we imagined it to be and announced it in June 2023.
Starting a marketplace is always a challenging endeavor since there is this classic chicken and egg problem. In our case, we knew that we had to focus on growing the supply and demand sides simultaneously. If we bring the gaming client to the platform and there are no influencers, they’ll be disappointed.
The same for the influencer side: if there were no relevant campaigns on the platform, they would not return. To get the wheel spinning, we decided to substitute the demand side by launching campaigns on behalf of our virtual gaming clients.
We allocated thousands of dollars to promote games that could potentially become our clients someday. This allowed us to build case studies and discover bugs on the platform, but what’s more important we had started to build up a decent amount of returning influencers. At this point, we started to actively reach out to the gaming companies to gradually substitute our own campaigns with the real paid campaigns from our clients.
We continue to utilize a multi-channel approach, leveraging direct outreach, paid advertising, SMM, and email marketing, and also engage in PR activities and participate in gaming conferences. Customer acquisition is driven by providing user-friendly onboarding, word-of-mouth referrals, and targeted marketing campaigns tailored to gaming communities.
Launching the business came with challenges, including initial outreach to influencers and convincing brands to adopt our performance-based model.
Momentum became evident as we observed a growing number of successful campaigns, positive user feedback, and increased interest from both influencers and brands. Our first brand deals were secured through proactive outreach, emphasizing the value of our platform's unique features and the success of previous campaigns.
You need to stay sure about your vision and believe in your product even if things don’t go smoothly all the time. There are different stages in any product development, but you, as a founder, can help the team survive the storm.
Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?
It’s worth mentioning that there are 2 types of customers Drope.me works with: gaming companies (this is the monetization segment of our business model) and micro-influencers on Twitch, TikTok, and YouTube with their communities.
After the first six months since our launch, we set up over 170 campaigns, paid out over $50K to the influencers, and now have more than 2,500 active influencers with a 10 million user reach in total. We earn by commissioning brands (30%) while they launch influencer marketing campaigns on Drope.me, helping streamers to earn by participating in these campaigns and engaging their audiences.
There are some platforms on the market that provide similar services, encompassing game key distribution and the option to determine how influencers promote the product. Lurkit or Keymailer, for example. However, what sets Drope.me apart is its utilization of a performance-based model.
This is particularly essential for marketers seeking to monitor campaign outcomes and make adjustments while the campaigns are ongoing. Drope.me places a strong emphasis on performance metrics.
As for the unique proposition for influencers – Drope.me offers not only a way to earn but also engage and support your community members while streaming. This is a very important factor for all content creators, especially smaller ones because they are deeply in touch with their viewers.
To attract gaming brands, we find these things the most efficient for us:
- Email marketing.
- Content marketing.
- Direct outreach.
- PR mix: events, interviews, creative initiatives, and campaigns.
For example, after the launch, we started to prepare Drope.me to launch on Product Hunt – an international online platform where users discover and share new products and services. It was the first big PR “campaign” for us in the sense that it took several months to build awareness around our product within the PH community.
As a result, Drope.me has been recognized as the #3 Product of the Day and #3 Marketing Product of the Week. This important milestone helped us to share our platform within the engaged community and brought us leads.
Also, we partnered with the Ukraine pavilion at Gamescom 2023 in Cologne, Germany, and organized our first-ever offline mixer. It was a great case for leadgen: we rented a venue, had over 50 guests, treated them to drinks and snacks, gave away branded merchandise, and took pictures with a professional photographer.
As Gamescom is a huge international event for the gaming industry enthusiasts and professionals, attracting relevant leads in such an atmosphere was a logical step.
Indie Roadshow is one of the initiatives that helped us engage relevant customers, too. It aimed to empower indie game developers by granting them $12K+ so they could promote their games with 17K micro-streamers on Drope.me for free. We selected 65 game developers and gave them grants for their first campaigns.
This project was a success, so we even prolonged it and added a budget for more participants because of the high interest from the community. Over 300 companies applied and over 890 streamers engaged in their campaigns.
By launching this initiative, we basically gave a trial of our product, and those indie devs who took part in it started to consider using the platform for their future promo campaigns. Three of them had already launched new campaigns on Drope.me. We also provided discounts for the next setups for those who weren’t selected for the project to retain users.
Drope.me Indie Game Awards 2023 is our latest Christmas campaign focusing on showcasing the best indie games 2023. It is a community-driven initiative, meaning we invited all the gaming enthusiasts to tell us about their favorite indie games, nominate them, and vote afterward.
This project helped us interact with indie devs, streamers (as they promoted the initiative via their followers), and players. Lots of prizes to everyone, two partners engaged (Lorgar and Indie Games Devel), and fun and excitement during the festive season!
To retain all of our users – game devs, streamers, and players, we keep them updated on our company news, product updates, and new campaigns through socials and emails. But the most important is our Discord community, where we’re not just sharing those updates and pushing users to get back to using the product but also keeping live dialogue with them.
How are you doing today and what does the future look like?
Today we’re looking for ways to scale the product further by adding integrations with UEFN and Minecraft and further expanding on Roblox and Steam actions. To date, our revenue is over $100K and growing by 60% MoM. We are also looking to raise our Seed round to accelerate our growth and become the leading influencer marketing platform for the gaming industry. Our vision is to fully automate influencer marketing for gaming companies and unlock the potential of micro-influencers. AI is playing a major role in helping us achieve those goals.
Considering the predicted trends in the gaming industry, there's likely to be a shift towards performance marketing, an increased role of AI in fostering relationships, a rise in paid user-generated content, and a continued focus on micro-influencers. In this landscape, Drope.me, with its performance-based model, aligns well with the industry's evolving marketing needs. The platform's ability to connect brands with micro-influencers, facilitate user-generated content campaigns, and leverage AI for enhanced relationships positions it favorably in a future gaming industry driven by these trends.
Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?
Starting Drope.me has been an incredibly enlightening journey. One key lesson has been the importance of adaptability and responsiveness to the evolving needs of both gaming companies and micro-influencers. Staying flexible and customer-focused has been advantageous in refining our platform, ensuring it remains a valuable tool for our users.
Another one of my personal learnings is that building a successful business is a marathon rather than a sprint. Perseverance and an ability to learn from your own mistakes are crucial on the micro level. As well as having a team that is more professional than yourself but also motivated and shares your values.
On a macro level finding a fast-growing market and a niche opportunity within could be a shortcut to success.
What platform/tools do you use for your business?
There are numerous tools we find useful for our day-to-day operations, yet the most important are:
- Slack and GSuite - for communication.
- Jira, Notion – to synchronize the team’s tasks.
- Hotjar – great to evaluate the user engagement in the product.
- Reply.io – a must-have for direct outreach.
- SendPulse – for email marketing campaigns.
- SullyGnome – to look for new streamers to reach.
What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?
The book that I am currently reading is The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck by Mark Manson. It is one of the books that I can recommend, although I am not a big fan of the genre. It resonates with me since it gives you a chance to take a step back from your business or life routines and prioritize things in your life to have a more meaningful life defined by your own values.
Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?
For those starting out in entrepreneurship, here are some tips:
- Don’t overthink too much in the beginning. Just start with whatever idea that you are passionate about. Most likely, it will change in the process.
- Know your audience and understand who you're serving and their needs.
- Learn from challenges. View challenges as opportunities to learn and grow.
- Stay adaptable, be flexible, and adjust your approach based on feedback. Also, don’t be afraid of making improvements based on market changes.
And last but not least, passion matters. You need to stay sure about your vision and believe in your product even if things don’t go smoothly all the time. There are different stages in any product development, but you, as a founder, can help the team survive the storm.
Are you looking to hire for certain positions right now?
No, at the moment, we’re not hiring. But after we raise the round, we’ll be expanding our team to boost our growth even more!
Where can we go to learn more?
If you have any questions or comments, drop a comment below or ping me directly on Linkedin. I am always happy to connect!
If you have any questions or comments, drop a comment below!
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