Unlisted Team Channels

Driving bottom-up growth through a freemium user experience




Business Problem

SportsEngine has access to hundreds of thousands of potential DTC customers through Sportsengine HQ and the SE mobile app.

Initially, SportsEngine Play Creator (an application used to capture live streams and upload game film) was only available to use by organization admins that worked with our sales team to set up an official channel.

That meant that we were not tapping into a large potential customer base of parents who might want to give live streaming a try.



Challenge

How might we create an opportunity to get existing SportsEngine parents onto SE Play Creator, give them a chance to bypass sales, create their own team channel and test out our live streaming product?



Hypothesis 

By creating a freemium experience, we would give users the ability to start live streaming right away without an official connection to a team or organization.

We hypothesized that this would convert more D2C customers because…

1. When a free user live streams a game, she can share the link with friends and family, exposing more people to the SportsEngine Play viewing product
2. If a free user creates a channel for her child’s team, she has the ability to add an unlimited amount of streamers to that channel, thus getting more free users into the product
3. Friends and family can watch the livestreams on SportsEngine Play for free, but will have to upgrade to watch a game replay or access other premium game tools

Roadblocks & Questions

As my team and I were ideating on the flow for the freemium experience, we kept circling back to a few unanswered questions. I collaborated with business stakeholders, my product team, and other UXers to try to solve for some of these questions. 

• How might we encourage the creation of free, user-generated content without diminishing the quality of content on SportsEngine Play? By creating a new channel type that is “unlisted”, meaning that the channel is not searchable on SportsEngine Play, and only people with the direct link to the channel can view it.

• Should we let free customers search for and claim a team that they are already rostered to on SportsEngine HQ? What might that look like? And what if someone else has already claimed the team but abandoned streaming? Past research has shown that our users get cold feet when they sign up for one of our products and are immediately asked to “claim” a team or organization. Many users just want to test out our products, or feel that they don’t have the authority to “claim” anything. We want to take that pressure off.

• How might we solve for a scenario where multiple parents on the same team decide to create a free account and start live streaming? If that team is rostered to SportsEngine, we will be able to connect the accounts to rostered teams, and sales can directly reach out to the organization admin to upsell him on merging the disparate teams into an enterprise account.

Create Team Channel and Start Streaming

The first step in the onboarding flow is to create a new team channel.

We took some steps to try to make the user feel comfortable with creating a team channel: the app autofills the text field to “[User Name]’s First Team” which the user can keep or edit. We also created an info message saying that by default, this channel is unlisted (meaning it can only be seen by people with a direct link to the channel).

In order to get the user through the flow and streaming as fast as possible, we only require a team channel name. Other data (Gender, level, sport, team logo) can be added later.

Invite others to your channel

The next step in onboarding encourages parents to invite others to follow the team channel. But they can skip that if they want to.

Try a test stream

The last step offers parents the opportunity to try out a test stream. We want the user to get as comfortable with using the product as possible, without the pressure of anyone seeing it.

 Words of encouragement

After a parent is finished live streaming, we want him to feel confident enough to share his stream with others.

The hope is that the social reward of having people view his stream, as well as the ease of streaming, will encourage him to create more livestreams and invite more followers.


 Invite More Streamers 

After the third successful livestream, we offer Tom the opportunity to add other streamers to his channel. We think that growing the network of contributors will only help grow the network of viewers.

 Opportunity to List Channel 

With this brand new “unlisted” channel status, we wanted to be as clear as possible as to what unlisted means, and give users the opportunity to talk to sales and officially list their channel as much as possible.

Customer Feedback
& Fast Follows

With only one month to launch, we released unlisted teams, gathered customer feedback, and shipped some fast follows.

After getting some customer feedback, we realized that at the time of the release, we were only thinking about two personas:


Persona 1: The official team admin / streamer

SSO recognizes that he already has been assigned his role on a team. He bypasses the entire freemium onboarding experience and can go straight to streaming without having to create a new channel.


Persona 2: The brand new user

This person is not on any team yet, and is simply testing out the app to see if he likes it. Nothing official, no commitment. We designed unlisted teams to make this person feel as comfortable as possible trying out the streaming app.


Missing Persona: the “Middle” man

Customer feedback revealed that we forgot about a persona who falls in the middle of the first two. This person is rostered to an official team, but does not have an official role yet. Maybe he’s a parent sitting in the stands, and the team admin asks if he wants to live stream the game. This parent downloads the app while waiting for the team admin to invite him as a streamer. He doesn’t want to create a new team, and our system has not found him assigned a streamer role yet.

Fast follow: The waiting room

• Allow users to skip the entire onboarding process
• Go straight to a “waiting room” until their team admin assigns them a streamer role
• Once new role is found, user is notified and has streaming access for his team

Unlisted Teams Impact

Easing the minds of apprehensive customers

Unlisted Teams has become a really effective way for sales to encourage customers who are apprehensive about getting an org-level account to get into the product and try things out for free.


Contributing to KPIs

With our new business goal of 300 livestreams per day, the success of users bypassing sales, quickly creating unlisted team channels, filming live streams and sharing with others has become even more critical.

For that reason, we are adding more promotion of unlisted teams around SportsEngine products, and continue to iterate and improve the current experience.