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Interview Joseph “Coop” Cooper, CEO & Founder of Earn Alliance, the largest web3 game aggregator and discovery platform leading the future frontier of gaming.
Coop has been coding since he was 9yrs old and this is his 5th startup, with 2 exits: one company to Jack Dorsey’s CashApp and another to PokerStars.
Earn Alliance has developed a new ecosystem of “engagement as a service” which rewards gamers for their time and input, while offering developers a platform to test new projects. The innovative company is shaping the mass adoption of web3 gaming through problem solving retention challenges and incorporating innovative reward systems.
This is our interview with Cooper.
1. You’ve been coding since you were 9 years old and have successfully exited two startups. What inspired you to start Earn Alliance, and how does your background influence your vision for the company?
I’ve been gaming for 29 years and coding for 25 years in my life so far and I cannot help to push the boundaries of helping my businesses and other entrepreneurs get their ideas from zero to one with tooling and continue to experiment with the beauty of games! After seeing blockchain games drive economic value to those who participate in the ecosystem, I see a future where gamers and communities can find their passion in life just as I had modding games as a child and hopefully spend their invaluable time doing something they love alongside people they cherish. All of this encompasses the foundation of Earn Alliance’s vision of closing the gap between gamers and their fans with game discovery and engagement.
2. Earn Alliance offers an “engagement as a service” model that rewards gamers and assists developers. Can you elaborate on how this ecosystem works and what makes it unique compared to other web3 gaming platforms?
Games usually pay to acquire users but after they show up for the party, they don’t know how to dance. We provide tooling to engage users daily with different tasks that help web3 go to market initiatives or enable games to drive gamers to taste their product and see if they stick through quests, challenges, and soon white-labeled Battle Passes. We hope to help not only drive user engagement, but drive revenue to studios, and Earn Alliance gets paid after we’ve successfully pushed a specific activity. This is unique to other platforms as we have 1B hours of gamer history data, millions of install games history, and more to match the best gamers to relevant games that they would actually enjoy!
3. Retention is a significant challenge in the gaming industry. How does Earn Alliance specifically address these challenges, and what innovative solutions have you implemented to enhance player retention?
We’ve launched daily challenges allowing gamers to try different things, daily on Earn Alliance and be rewarded for it if and only if they win. Everyone loves a challenge, and coming back daily for a new one across your favorite games is fun and enables game developers to focus on building new features, versus features that retain. We imagine expanding this to in-game quests, battle passes, and more in the future.
4. Web3 gaming is still in its early stages. How do you see Earn Alliance contributing to the mass adoption of web3 gaming, and what are the key factors that will drive this shift?
We have over 2700 web3 games on the platform and millions of impressions on our “Wall” which aggregates the entire web3 game industry in a single feed. Our users have found their next favorite web3 game community by coming back daily to our platform. This doesn’t happen ever day, as it’s not like your next favorite game is going to come often. But keeping in tune with opportunities to participate and explore new game communities is the key factor that has currently driven over 10 million engagements on our platform to date.
5. Your platform provides developers with a space to test new projects. How do you balance the needs and expectations of both gamers and developers on your platform, ensuring mutual benefit and engagement?
For developers, they pay after the engagement has been completed. Running impression ads hoping someone will click on an enticing image about your product is not only a distraction for game studios but waste of money. Gamers get enticed with different types of rewards to checkout games. We learn more about their interests and make sure we match make the best together moving forward. Farming is one of the things known in this ecosystem, and we’re likely to have the most data in the web3 game industry and strongest protection against bots and lessened rewards towards farmers who don’t plan to genuinely connect with games.
6. As someone with a track record of successful exits, what is your long-term vision for Earn Alliance? Are there any upcoming features or expansions that you’re particularly excited about, and how do you plan to stay ahead in the rapidly evolving web3 gaming space?
Earn Alliance will become the ultimate place to connect and engage with games. It’s not a social network – we want to be neutral and inclusive of all games and their stages of development and we don’t plan to distribute games. Apple, Google, Epic and Steam already do a great job at that, but the world needs a better way to find their next favorite game aside from hearing it from a friend – Earn Alliance will do just that with powerful AI recommendations, summaries and data aggregation to enable a gamer throughout the entire lifecycle of their journey with a game – engage, trade NFTs, buy digital currencies and more will all be possible on Earn Alliance in the future.
7. Can you tell us some anecdote about the exit of Cash App?
The truth is that I took a break from the game industry and fell out of love with enterprise sales and developer tool platforms in my journey with KintoHub. After developing an amazing team and beautiful product – Cash App was keen to bring our superpower into their stack while I was ready to take a pause and align my values which landed me right back to building in the game industry.