Campfire

For indie authors, writing a book is a passion. And for those who succeed it can become their livelihood. However no matter the success, writer's block can be a real problem.

As one of the foremost hubs for indie authors, Campfire wanted to find a way to encourage authors to build a weekly writing habit. Inspired by the success of other gamified platforms like Duolingo and Strava, they knew they needed a gamification system that could help them achieve this now, and support their product roadmap in the future.

With only a modest development team, Campfire CEO Jason Louro knew the team was just too busy working on the core writing platform to build the gamification features they knew they needed, and it was unlikely that was going to change in the near future.

What Campfire needed was a turnkey solution that would allow them to deliver the features they wanted quickly, but still with plenty of flexiblity and customization to make the user experience as engaging as possible. For Campfire, Trophy was the perfect solution. The team was able to quickly add gamification to their platform by building on top of Trophy's existing API-first gamification infrastructure.

Streaks

Campfire added a streaks feature to their writing platform that encourages authors to write just one word a week to keep their streak alive. In practice once authors log in to extend their streak, authors usually end up writing more than this but keeping the objective simple and clear makes it easy for authors to commit to the habit over the long term.

Achievements

Campfire also added an achievements feature to their writing platform that rewards authors for writing 1,000 all the way up to 90,000 words. This helps authors feel motivated to write and keeps them engaged with the platform.

Email

Campfire also set up Trophy to automatically email authors on a weekly basis summarizing their progress and encouraging them to write more, using Trophy's no-code email template builder to design the emails.

Recap and achievement emails are sent to Campfire users automatically by Trophy.

Similarly, each time a user unlocks an achievement, they are congratulated with an email that shows them their current progress and a badge to display on their profile.

Lastly, Campfire set up reactivation emails to automatically detect inactive users and send them emails to encourage them to come back.

Trophy's dashboard made it easy for the team to set up the features they wanted and integrate them into the writing platform within a few hours saving months of development time.

Additionally, Trophy's type-safe Node SDK made it easy for the team to integrate the features into the writing platform handling authentication, idempotency and automatic retries.

Campfire has seen a significant increase in author engagement and retention since they started using Trophy. Since implementation, Campfire has seen a 22% increase in 14-day retention.

Similarly, the response from customers has been overwhelmingly positive, with open rates on emails exceeding 60% and many customers replying to automated emails asking for Campfire to keep sending them because they appreciate the encouragement.

Responses to email reminders from Campfire customers

Campfire has plans to add more features to their writing platform including a monthly author leaderboard that creates healthy competition between writers and a streak freeze feature that allows authors to pause their streak for a limited period of time without being penalized.