In early 2020, as a hack week project, we launched Mixcloud Live to aid DJs throughout lockdown.

With the success of this, we looked into various other ways to aid creators financially as they could no longer perform.

Naturally, after many customer requests; We started investigated tipping.

As the live product was thriving during this period, our creators were so eager to hop on calls with us that it meant qualitative interviews were rapid and impactful.

We opted to do a fake door experiment to validate interest in rapid time.

With the use of existing components we had on hand. We mocked up a dollar sign icon to act as a tip option. This linked out to our google form.

I was lucky enough to be on a live user interview whilst they noticed the tip button appear on their channel, it led to a brilliant discussion.

We were on a time constraint. The brief was very much to take an mvp approach. Whilst early designs I had validated to work well.

We worked with the constraint that we would only use pre-existing components.

Since launch, we've paid out 6 figures to creators whilst also unlocking a new potential growth channel.

Initial release was really promising & rewarding. I’ve highlighted both an emotional & business result. We not only helped creators earn additional revenue, but increased our Pro Sub (OKR) numbers.

Bonus win

We discovered that creators who were tipped were 80% more likely to retain as a pro subscriber.

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Unlocking a new growth channel

In hindsight this seems like an obvious learning but it was new information. This opened up some really interesting discussions around how we could encourage more fans to tip.