Show HN: Easy Way to Run a Contest For Your Startup

Show HN: Easy Way to Run a Contest For Your Startup(gleam.io)

24 points by uts_ 12 years ago | 12 comments

greggoodson 12 years ago |

Greg from Rafflecopter here - our name is mentioned in your terms of service for some reason http://cl.ly/image/0A2L0W0L3G2t glhf

AznHisoka 12 years ago |

This is a saturated field, as others said. But there's room for a competitor here. I would focus on the main social networks integration: Facebook, Twitter, and maybe maybe Pinterest. Everything else, including Mailchimp is overengineering.

Also I left a comment just now on your site. I wonder if it's possible to get all the Twitter oauth tokens when people enter through Twitter?

dmak 12 years ago | |

It is definitely a saturated space. However, only a few competitors are agnostic to platforms (Splurgy, RaffleCopter, gleam.io, and a few others). Other competitors such as OfferPop, Woobox, Shortstack, and etc... are all Facebook centric which means you cannot embed your contests/giveaways on your website; This means you won't be able to funnel your existing website traffic into your social properties.

Also, MailChimp is not over engineering at all. It's a very key feature. These integrations are important for marketing teams. After people socially engage into these contests/giveaways, their emails are captured and then can be ported into MailChimp where you can run e-mail campaigns.

uts_ 12 years ago | |

Co-founder here, I replied to you about oauth.

Integration with ESP's is critical to marketers, as someone mentioned below the key reason people run competitions is to drive sales/engagement with followup. Especially for Ecom.

There's a blog post going up in the next few days from Chris at Vero on this very topic :)

Sujan 12 years ago |

Nice product and website! Haven't seen Dropbox used as a CDN before ;)

Being able too look at the backend of a demo competition would be great. This makes or brakes the tool for me. Additionally, I missed more information about the social network integration. Competitions and give-aways are big on Facebookm so how does it look and work there?

uts_ 12 years ago | |

I hear you on the backend demo :) Our frontend is all AngularJS, however the backend isn't. We plan to have a visual drag/drop builder once we do that.

We have most networks integrated from an entry perspective, including Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest (No API currently), SoundCloud & YouTube. We've got Tumblr coming then adding based on demand.

Our Facebook tab solution is 90% completed, we're just testing it currently. Install to Facebook will be in the free plan, on Pro you'll be able to customise the tab/gate images :)

mindcrack 12 years ago |

Nice service, but it's already a saturated market with service providers like splurgy.com and rafflecopter.com

uts_ 12 years ago | |

Indeed, this isn't our only product :) But certainly we believe there's room in this space to do things better.

treskot 12 years ago |

How is this any different when compared to rafflecopter.com?

uts_ 12 years ago | |

Few differences (we also have a lot of respect for RF, those guys have a great product):

- Verified actions, we verify via API's that users actually complete an entry. You can just bypass this on RF (something I'm sure they're working on).

- API, you can create completely custom entry types on Gleam. Put our API code on your shopping cart, or email signup form & activate an entry. Useful for things like "Add 5 products to your wishlist for an entry, or leave a review for an entry".

- More social network coverage (Instagram, YouTube/Soundcloud)

- More ways to install than just embedding on the page

Sujan 12 years ago | |

Looking at rafflecopter, they power plain giveaways. Give me your name, you get the chance to win something. gleam.io seems to be more for competitions where users can do different stuff to get multiple entries. Quite a different product.

dmak 12 years ago | |

RaffleCopter only offers giveaways, and does not have as much features as other competitors such as Splurgy, OfferPop, etc...