Growth Designs

At Stadium Live I ran growth design sprints alongside a Growth PM. They were fast, focused experiments across activation, retention, and monetization. The model was simple: ship the thinnest slice that could teach us something, read the data, and double down on what won. Two wins stood out, and a handful of principles carried across all of them.

Free-trial cancellations were high, but not because users didn’t want Elite. In our surveys the number-one reason to subscribe was simply “more coins,” the currency of the entire core loop. The real gap was awareness: a prior test that quietly increased trial users’ bonus coins moved nothing, because the coins were credited silently, with no interface and no moment. The value everyone wanted was sitting right there, completely invisible.

So instead of giving more, I made it impossible to miss. I turned the silent coin drop into a daily rewards calendar that popped up on app open, a small, satisfying moment each day, with rewards ascending toward a 25,000-coin “big bonus.” We A/B tested it against handing the full reward over at once; every calendar beat that control.

Getting there wasn’t clean. My first iterations over-engineered the calendar: multiple progress tracks, layered mechanics, coin counts so busy you couldn’t read them at a glance. I was trying to cover every base at once. The fix was subtraction. I pulled the team together to prioritize and cut, hard, until the reward read in a single glance, and that editing is what made the final design land.

The winning variant was variant #3, which featured a 10-day calendar with ascending rewards. We believe it’s because of two things working together. First, the calendar runs three days past the 7-day trial, so the big bonus lands after the conversion point, and by day seven users are already hooked on the daily coin hit and don’t want to give it up. Second, the ascending rewards reframe staying Elite as upside rather than cost, where the pull of ‘I can get more if I just stay’ nudges people toward converting.

Staking is Stadium Live’s core loop, and most of our retention and monetization hangs off it, yet only a fraction of daily active users were actually placing stakes. The home screen had too many things competing for a tap, and new users needed more hand-holding to reach their first one.

This wasn’t our first run at the problem. An earlier guided flow had fallen flat, for two reasons. It was too restrictive, railroading users down a single path instead of balancing guidance with autonomy, so the app stopped feeling like theirs. And the visuals weren’t compelling, so reaching that first stake never felt like a payoff worth chasing.

So this time I designed for balance: enough guidance to walk a new user to their first stake, enough freedom that it still felt like the real app, built on realistic play patterns with each action celebrated visually so the moment felt earned rather than gated.

The balanced flow drove +12% stake activation with no hit to retention. It also opened a natural monetization hook: once users were staking, “want to stake bigger? go Elite” became an obvious next step.

A few principles carried across every sprint:

• Data is king. Both wins grew out of a failure that showed us the real lever: silent coins that moved nothing, a guided flow that over-restricted and dropped retention. The losses pointed straight at the wins.
• Less is more. It’s easy to add and brutally hard to remove. My early calendar iterations over-engineered it, with extra progress tracks and coin counts too busy to read, and the breakthrough came from pulling the team together to cut until it read in a glance.
• Visibility beats volume. Users didn’t need more coins; they needed to feel the ones they had. Making value legible and celebrated beat simply giving more.