Of all of our products, Bitstars.ph is the one I’ve stressed about the most. It’s the black sheep of the SCI family: all our other brands are commercially viable services aimed squarely at consumer needs, and derive revenue from fulfilling those needs. But Bitstars? It gives people cash money in exchange for their selfies, for god’s sake.

And not just any cash money, either. It’s Bitcoin cash money.

When I was explaining this concept to our two models, hired specifically for the purpose of promoting Bitstars for the evening, there was a brief flash of disbelief on their faces. I interpreted it as “are you guys seriously paying people for their selfies,” and by extension, “are you guys seriously paying us to promote this so more people can get paid for their selfies?” But I’ve seen versions of that reaction ever since we launched in June, and the bottom-line answer is a simple, unequivocal “Yes.”

Getting the Numbers Right

Having read in some-book-somewhere that it’s a good idea to set goals — both for promotional activities and for life in general, I suppose — the goal we set for the evening was to register a specific number of new users. The number itself is unimportant now. What is important is that we didn’t calibrate our expectations against how many customers our two venues actually had.

Granted, they were both completely packed; it was payday Friday after all. But even with a full house, neither place looked like they had more than 150 people. And given that our models started after 9pm, we only had a few hours before the crowd devolved into an impenetrable end-of-week delirium.

Elevator Pitching All Night Long

“Hey guys, we’re from Bitstars.ph, and we have a daily selfie contest that anyone can join. You can win prizes if you have the most votes at the end of the day. Would you like to take a selfie with us?”

Based on our small sample, it looked like our success rate for approaching customers and not being turned away right from the start was about 30%. But the initial pitch was only good enough to get the promoter’s foot in the door. They then needed to walk the customer through the somewhat involved process of taking a selfie, signing up on our website with their Instagram account, then adding that selfie to the gallery.

Although taking the selfie was usually straightforward, spotty 3G slowed the process down considerably. (We had prepared for this and were carrying around a mobile hotspot, but due to additional technical problems we were only able to use it half of the time.) All told, the entire process on average took 10–12 minutes per table.

So given that we only had a 4-hour window, it should have been easy to evaluate how many users we could realistically have registered. (Easy on hindsight, anyway.)

The Drunken User Test

There’s this old saying amongst UI designers: You know you’ve done your job well if your users can work your app drunk at 2am in the middle of a crowded bar.

I’m just kidding, I made that one up. But it was that one-liner that was going through my mind as I watched our first-timers misclick their way through our site on their phones. Although Tipsy Alice or Inebriated Bob are not the most common user archetypes to be designing a web GUI for, I’m sure it’s something folks like the Tinder designers considered. And that at least partially explains why Tinder is commonly used in an alcohol-infused setting.

In Recovery

By the end of the tour, we had missed our initial registration targets by a signifcant margin, and had consumed more alcohol than was really necessary to “keep the energy levels up.” I got home at 4am, and curled up into an armadillo ball for the next 6 hours.

Our subsequent bar tours will fix most of the issues above and probably uncover new ones, but I think that’s just the weirdness of porting online ideas into offline environments. This saying I didn’t make up: “Failure is compost.” It fertilizes your next efforts when you’re ready to try again; you just need to acknowledge it first.