CEO Keith Lee is at the sharp end of gamification.
US startup Booyah has become one of the hottest firms in the emerging social location space, announcing this week that it now has 3.1 million registered users of its MyTown game.
Those users have checked in more than 400 million times in the last six months, and startlingly spend an average of 70 minutes a day each using MyTown.
Meanwhile, Booyah has forged marketing partnerships with brands including H&M, Travel Channel and Microsoft. ME talked to CEO Keith Lee about the company’s growth, and what it plans to do next.
If you’re new to MyTown, it wraps Monopoly-like property buying elements around Foursquare-style check-ins, and recently started letting players check-in products too, by scanning barcodes – 350,000 such check-ins were recorded in the first week.
“We’ve built a lot of our technology to make it very flexible for brands,” explains Lee. “They can do anything from scavenger hunts to rewards when people scan in their favourite products – a particular cereal box, a DVD or a shampoo, for example.”
Lee says that Booyah is putting a lot of effort in behind the scenes into ‘UPC categorisation’ – assigning products (via their barcodes) to categories. The data could then be used to help target brand campaigns within MyTown – “If we know people like to scan games, we could give them trailers to God Of War 4, and stuff like that.”
Booyah is facing increasing competition from other social location startups in its efforts to attract brands – for example SCVNGR with its branded treasure hunts, and Shopkick with its retail rewards focus.
Lee says Booyah is keen to stay as flexible as possible, giving brands maximum scope to plot different campaigns.
“Not everyone wants a 2D badge or stamp,” he says. “Some want to do something more like a scavenger hunt, right through to showing a video trailer when someone checks in to a movie theater.”
Last week, MyTown launched outside the US for the first time, in the UK, Canada and Australia, with more countries to follow soon. Those launches aren’t reflected in the 3.1 million users figure announced this week, so MyTown’s growth could accelerate if the app picks up traction in those countries.
In the US, there’s a different challenge. Lee says that MyTown has now gone beyond the early adopters who’ve been playing it since the early days, meaning that Booyah has to decide how to add new features to the game to keep everyone engaged.
“Like any game, we have a primary set of users, then a second set who play more casually,” he says. “Some users are more social, some like the recipe system of combining items and trading them with friends… It’s like World of Warcraft where you have explorers and PvPers, and guys who stay in town to do their trading…”
Lee should know: before Booyah, he worked as a lead producer at Blizzard Entertainment, the developer of WoW. That background is clearly one factor in the upcoming evolution of MyTown.
“One thing we’re very interested in doing is putting in a questing system, or a set of challenges with strong objectives that you could complete,” he says.
“The problem has been that there are not a lot of validation techniques to prove that you’ve climbed Mount Kilimanjaro, or listened to a certain song! But we’re starting to hit that tipping point in mobile where not only is the technology available, but people are starting to get it.”
Booyah has become the first social location startup to work with Google Places, the API that lets developers tap into Google’s database of local businesses. It’s how Booyah populated the list of check-in locations for MyTown outside the US.
“We are working with Google very closely, and they’ve been incredibly helpful,” says Lee. “They have really good speed, and we didn’t have to worry about having the scale to work in different countries with multiple APIs and data partners. We wanted a company that would work across borders, be super fast, and give relevant locations to places.”
Lee says he’s not worried about big companies like Google – not to mention Facebook and Twitter – getting involved in social location, though.
“For the last ten years, their core competency has been in search and other areas, so partnering with people like us makes a lot of sense,” he says.
“This partnership helps Google a lot too: we can provide lots of information and data for them. Every time someone checks-in in MyTown, Google are getting better signal fidelity for a lot of their data points, which will help them improve their relevance and their search.”
What about MyTown’s business model then? Lee says the app’s revenues are roughly a third from virtual goods – in-app purchases – another third from location-based advertising and display ads, and a third from brand partnerships.
“Diversity is always good, since things can change overnight,” he says.
“eCPMs can change and you don’t know what the inventory is going to be, and even virtual goods can be tough, as something might happen with your app. We continue to explore other opportunities, like offers or hyperlocal self-service [ads]. As long as you build your foundation for your revenue, you can do a lot more to explore.”
When asked for the big factors that will define how Booyah grows over the coming months, Lee says that the key is looking beyond iPhone – the only platform that MyTown is currently available for.
“We believe in the convergence of the most popular platforms out there, which right now are iPhone and Facebook,” he says.
“Those two are going to converge over time, not just in terms of their user base, but the software and APIs and hardware too. You see it already with the iPad: your mobile device is going to be your computer, not six months from now, but two to four years.”
He continues: “It’s important to have a really strong foothold on social web and mobile, and ...
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It’s a tough challenge. Currently, Booyah has MyTown on iPhone, and social game Nightclub City on Facebook. The latter is doing rather well, with six million monthly active users, which Lee says has been achieved without any advertising or marketing spend.
But getting back to iPhone and Facebook converging. Surely this won’t go smoothly? They have different payment systems – in-app payments versus Facebook Credits – and their own agendas regarding who owns what data on their users.
Lee points out that technologies like Facebook Connect – updated for iOS last week – are already linking the two platforms. And he also says that Booyah has even worked on linking the two in other ways, such as rewarding MyTown players with Facebook Credits for checking in using the app.
“If both of those platforms become the two behemoths in the next couple of years, it’s more of an issue, but right now no one’s really thinking it’s that much of a problem,” he says.
