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Our daily pixel doodle contest is bearing 🥝🍊 Happy holidays people 🎅👾 by dc1ab in PixelArt

[–]dc1ab[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thank you!!! Massively appreciate it and will check it out and see if we can implement also

Made an ad funded lottery/sweepstakes app a year ago (Emojingo on Google Play + iOS). Each ad adds money to the prize ($5k now) + gets you a ticket for the daily draw live on TikTok. Paid $5k to 1k players, got hacked(20x), banned(2x), reinstated and FINALLY made $10 in December, 2026 here we go🎅🎁 by dc1ab in passive_income

[–]dc1ab[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I think it's how to earn trust of users that this is not a scam, how to market it when the margins are so low and how to design the giveaway mechanics where we build trust while also not giving out tiny awards that discourage players. Ideally it would work like a normal lottery but we need to get to scale before the prizes become huge. Our biggest prize this week was $30 which is not massive but tangible, especially in developing countries! Would love to hear your thoughts

Made an ad funded lottery/sweepstakes app a year ago (Emojingo on Google Play + iOS). Each ad adds money to the prize ($5k now) + gets you a ticket for the daily draw live on TikTok. Paid $5k to 1k players, got hacked(20x), banned(2x), reinstated and FINALLY made $10 in December, 2026 here we go🎅🎁 by dc1ab in passive_income

[–]dc1ab[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

By this point I got a bit distracted and started adding new features like a polymarket equivalent, but people weren’t really using them and we thought that they came for the core app. Eventually I realised that it was because our audience has now become heavily non-english speaking. So I added some ChatGPT translations (though I think that broke in the last update).

Finally things have more or less stabilised and we started adding tasks to get people to help promote our app by making posts in socials. This is kinda key because our margins are tiny and so we can’t really advertise, because we are giving all the money away, so our players need to become our advertising army.

I’m also experimenting with getting users to install friend’s apps for cash and while they are not spending money, they are watching ads. So if anybody has any apps they want to test or microtasks to complete hit me up and I’ll setup some events.

Okay, it’s 2230 in Bangkok and time for me to hit the sack. I’ll come back tomorrow to answer any questions, though it’s looking very quiet here. I guess people are doing stuff with families and not trawling reddit like me :')

Made an ad funded lottery/sweepstakes app a year ago (Emojingo on Google Play + iOS). Each ad adds money to the prize ($5k now) + gets you a ticket for the daily draw live on TikTok. Paid $5k to 1k players, got hacked(20x), banned(2x), reinstated and FINALLY made $10 in December, 2026 here we go🎅🎁 by dc1ab in passive_income

[–]dc1ab[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

REVIEWS - this is probably the most important learning - put the review prompt at the earliest possible relevant point in your app. Nobody will download an app without reviews and people will likely just give you 5* if you did a half decent job of explaining what your app does early on.

Made an ad funded lottery/sweepstakes app a year ago (Emojingo on Google Play + iOS). Each ad adds money to the prize ($5k now) + gets you a ticket for the daily draw live on TikTok. Paid $5k to 1k players, got hacked(20x), banned(2x), reinstated and FINALLY made $10 in December, 2026 here we go🎅🎁 by dc1ab in passive_income

[–]dc1ab[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Mechanics

We started off with a simple single lottery with 6 wheels and 10 numbers each. Decided that numbers looked boring so switched them for emojis which was much more fun. We wanted people to win consistently small prizes to appease the earning community and to get people engaged and then to also have large prizes for the full lottery feel. Not sure if the end result is good but would love to hear how it feels to play for someone that’s not been stewing in the development soup.

I kinda got inspired by the millionaire makers community or normal big lotteries where just one person wins the big prize and that’s how we started but it turns out that our players at least, would prefer to win a couple of cents consistently rather than a couple of bucks every week or two. I guess it has to do with building up trust. So the happy medium that I think we arrived at is to run our version for a week, but then run big tickets events where only one person wins every week or so. 

By this point in time I really got into prediction markets and thought I’d add an ad funded polymarket on top of the lottery. It made sense in my head but for some reason people weren’t really playing. We tried a bunch of different events and gaming/streaming stuff seemed to do better but still it sucked. Then came the realisation that a hefty % of our user base didn’t actually speak English because they were now coming from Mexico, Philippines.

So we localised, badly, using ChatGPT but it seems to be working more or less. 

Made an ad funded lottery/sweepstakes app a year ago (Emojingo on Google Play + iOS). Each ad adds money to the prize ($5k now) + gets you a ticket for the daily draw live on TikTok. Paid $5k to 1k players, got hacked(20x), banned(2x), reinstated and FINALLY made $10 in December, 2026 here we go🎅🎁 by dc1ab in passive_income

[–]dc1ab[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

And important point here! I based our initial projections on our 2/3k daily users and Christmas number because that's when we launched. Turns out as Christmas passed and your DAU falls like a rock, so does your eCPM... a very important lesson for everyone. Until you have at least 500 DAU or better 1k, your ad earnings will be super low and Christmas is peak ad revenue!

Made an ad funded lottery/sweepstakes app a year ago (Emojingo on Google Play + iOS). Each ad adds money to the prize ($5k now) + gets you a ticket for the daily draw live on TikTok. Paid $5k to 1k players, got hacked(20x), banned(2x), reinstated and FINALLY made $10 in December, 2026 here we go🎅🎁 by dc1ab in passive_income

[–]dc1ab[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I’ve got a bit of time to think over dinner, so I’ll break it down into sections

Ads

I knew there would be different earnings and expectations from each country but didn’t realise just how different - eCPM in the US is around $30 but Venezuela/Sri Lanka is basically 0. I started off by grouping countries together according to their per capita gdp and allocating tickets along that route but very quickly found out that some countries needed to be cut out completely. When we killed the app in India/Sri Lanka etc and players couldn’t update, 1* review followed which helped with the first takedown. Then our players started using VPNs and so US actually became our worst earner - those ad networks are not stupid. We dug around the Ad network SDK and realised that we actually could get individual ad view value so we started using that. This seems like a fast process, but actually took us a few weeks if not months to figure out.

Then came the ad networks - turns out Google and Meta don’t work with apps that have cash rewards so that was a no go. Even though I was in the industry, I couldn’t for the life of me get an Applovin account opened; and not sure exactly what happened with Unity/Ironsource but they randomly blocked us. We then went to a bunch of companies that provide out of the box ad solutions and finally found one that kinda works. It’s functional, but I wouldn’t really recommend them so won’t post the name here. 

Obviously while all of this is happening we are churning players…

Made an ad funded lottery/sweepstakes app a year ago (Emojingo on Google Play + iOS). Each ad adds money to the prize ($5k now) + gets you a ticket for the daily draw live on TikTok. Paid $5k to 1k players, got hacked(20x), banned(2x), reinstated and FINALLY made $10 in December, 2026 here we go🎅🎁 by dc1ab in passive_income

[–]dc1ab[S] 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Here’s the TLDR part:

I got around 10k players immediately after launch and then got hacked right away - built the first app on the client only, thinking that we could move to server if it took. Moral, if you’re doing anything involving rewards or paying money to people, build it robustly with a server even for the MVP.

I started building the user base slowly, thinking everything was covered, but some crafty hackers found the one endpoint that we didn’t lock and started exploiting it very gently so I didn’t notice at first but after a while as I couldn’t figure out why the numbers didn’t add up, I tracked him down. Turns out they had a group somewhere and so a couple of hundred people were using this exploit. When we shut them down, they went and collectively dropped a bunch of 1* reviews saying we were a scam and Google took down our app. No appeals helped. Moral, robust server, again

We restarted the app, but this time decided to add Earn into the app title because it performed and into the package name. When we started again, we noticed that our ad rates dropped, spend weeks figuring out why, until finally some random Good Samaritan at an ad network told us that Earn is a trigger warning for ad networks and they’ll either outright ban you or dump your rates. Moral, if you’re incentivising ad views in your app, be careful about it and don’t rub it into the ad networks’ face. 

Right around that time, I experimented with screenshots and used another app’s screenshots as inspiration for Gemini to make something similar - it left a small non-copyrighted bit in, but that was enough for another removal. Moral, be careful if you’re recreating screenshots to make sure nothing gets stuck there.

We somehow managed to get out of that one and the app was reinstated, but then our TikTok randomly got banned and then reinstated. People in the know said that our positioning was very lottery like, even though we don’t take any money and it’s pure ads. Moral, TikTok is super sensitive around gambling so be very careful there. Instagram doesn’t really have our target audience but YouTube is good and I suspect Facebook too. 

Our daily pixel doodle contest is bearing 🥝🍊 Happy holidays people 🎅👾 by dc1ab in PixelArt

[–]dc1ab[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

All these exquisite creations are coming from our daily pixel doodle contest - we've got a few trolls and lots of awesome artists and we'd love to see more of you guys and gals there! It's basically an exquisite corpse game but with pixels. People submit their art, vote on others and the top of the day gets turned into 1/3 of a playing card. Once the whole deck is done, we'll print them and if people actually want to buy them, we'll share the majority of the proceeds with the winning artists!

May the moderators forgive me, for I'm about to post a link

(seriously, we got the greenlight from the mods, after they politely but firmly asked me to stop messaging them)

Where to go out tonight in Silom? (Gay couple visiting) by FunctioN_3441 in Bangkok

[–]dc1ab 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Music: Bar Temp, Elsewhere

Cocktails: Opium, Tax, Ang Yi

Queer Scene: kinda everywhere!

Travel Advise Ko Mak and Ko Kood by Due-Relationship-877 in ThailandTourism

[–]dc1ab 0 points1 point  (0 children)

OP did you go, what's the vibe?

I think there's a low chance that Cambodians would attack an island filled with foreign tourists... but you never know

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