Founded in 2020, Poker Power supports women at all stages of business, from entry level to C-suite, and their decision-making through learning to play poker. Their mission is to empower one million women to practice and learn skills correlated with success including strategic thinking, decision-making, negotiation and risk assessment.
POKER POWER
Launched in 2020 Industry: Education Management HQ in Chicago, IL 50+ Team Members
THE CHALLENGE
Build a first-of-its-kind app making poker social, inclusive and easy to learn with a range of features to support a growing online community.
Pineapple Helped the Team Behind Poker Power Launch an Inclusive Community-Based Poker App That Provides Critical Skills for Women in Business.
The Poker Power team, spearheaded by Erin and AJ, had a powerful motivator - to prepare women for greater success, especially around money. The success of in-person classes using poker as a teaching tool left Erin and AJ inspired to create an app that allowed women to play poker and connect online while supporting a virtual curriculum. The problem was that third-party apps placed a limit on data collection, available features and the overall experience Poker Power was looking to deliver. Through working with Pineapple, Erin and AJ were able to say goodbye to an underperforming dev team and finally focus on their mission of supporting one million women to succeed from the classroom to the boardroom without distractions, delays or budget blowouts. Together, we’ve launched an app that offers women classes, community and invaluable support by gamifying life and leadership skills. Finally, the remarkable women behind Poker Power can focus on growing their community knowing their app is built to grow with them.
Despite offering in-person classes, Poker Power’s bread and butter was the virtual world. The team wanted to connect its users and help support virtual classes by creating a central hub that included gameplay, education and community. The Poker Power app needed to be inclusive, technologically sound and ready to launch without the bugs common in complex gaming engines. Although their parent company had 25 years of experience, the entire Poker Power team was new to building apps and trusted their vision to a dev team with experience building gaming apps. Creating problem after problem, the dev team they hired habitually said “yes” to requests without backing up their big talk. This led to missed deadlines and broke
After being contacted by Erin and AJ, we stepped in to audit the back-end of their poker app… and immediately found problems. We went all-in with the Poker Power team and set out to build a new app from the ground up. Not wanting to run before we could walk, we rolled out individual features instead of a fully finished app. Each stage of the app build was rolled out to “Super Users”. We knew these ‘superusers’ would deliver honest feedback (exactly what we wanted) and help find bugs since they loved playing poker. Creating a feedback loop was critical to the project’s success as each soft launch was just the start of the product’s build, not the finish. Through each iteration, users could respond with what they liked, disliked, and bugs they found. By keeping Poker Power’s incredible community at the heart of the app launch, we were able to deliver a product that wasn’t just effective; it reflected the specific needs of Poker Power’s incredible community of users.
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Poker Power has become a true force in women’s poker; inspiring, informing, and financially backing a (growing) community of 30,000 women to achieve success. By taking the time to understand the users at the heart of the Poker Power community, we created an app that wasn’t just intuitive and accessible - it was impactful. The app we built doesn’t just allow more women to access the training and support they need to shape their own lives. It adds a critical element to Poker Power’s overall strategy with the ability to educate, inspire and sell to their users. Helping the team move from restrictive third-party apps to their own platform helped deliver complete control over their community which will become critical for future monetization strategies. Driven by their motto, “Be Fearless. Bet On Yourself”, the Poker Power app is now available in 40 countries. It is helping tens of thousands of women change their personal and professional trajectory. We’re proud to have helped play our part.
From Worry to Case Study
Bring Your Product to Life Without Unnecessary Stress, Hassle or Delays
Erin and AJ’s winning product started off the same as yours - an idea. Whether your name ends up in lights as our next case study, or you simply walk away with an answer to the questions that have been keeping you awake at night, it all starts with a strategy call.
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