What I've Learned From The Quizlet Situation

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Hey everyone!

It's been a while, but I wanted to give a little update/reflection in regards to the Quizlet situation.

The first thing I want to do is thank all of you. This was an extremely stressful moment, especially with the release of Gimkit 4.0. Your support, however, was incredible. We read every single email & tweet that came through — each and every one reminded us just how lucky we are to have a community that is so supportive.

The way the situation unfolded wasn't great, but I did learn three valuable lessons:

Lesson 1: Get everything in writing

Based on our relationship with Quizlet and what they told us, I thought our use of their name and logo was okay with them. However, we never asked for written permission from them.

Lesson learned? Get it in writing. We made the mistake of treating our business too casually and the disruption educators faced two weeks ago might've been avoided if we'd worked out a formal agreement with Quizlet.

Lesson 2: Always bet on educators

We second-guessed ourselves during this situation as we tried to communicate with educators as we always have. We were stuck between a rock and a hard place in some ways. We wanted to be open and transparent with our communication, but by doing so, we risked damaging our relationship with Quizlet.

As an example, we knew Quizlet wasn't going to be happy with the video I made the day before the 4.0 launch. There's an argument to be made that staying silent would have been better for us and for Quizlet. But would that have been what was best for educators?

Being vocal and outspoken can be scary. Making the video was scary. Heck, even writing this blog post is a bit scary. But, this experience has proven once again that betting on educators is the right thing to do, even if it's scary or seems like the wrong business decision. At the end of the day, I'm proud of how we handled everything because educators were the center of our actions and communication.

Lesson 3: Cool down and work together

All the communication you saw from us, it was a team effort. My original idea for the video or blog post was much different than the end result. Taking some time to cool down and think was extremely helpful.

Teamwork was also essential. I got a lot of feedback on the best way to communicate from all kinds of people in my life — from Jeff, Kelli, and Fadi, to my family and educators, I received a ton of great advice by opening up and asking for help. None of us individually had the right way to communicate, but our ideas together created the right way.

I'm glad I didn't go with my first instinct and instead took the time to calm down and get feedback from others. It's something good to remember for the future.

So that's where we're at! It wasn't ideal, but hey, we learned something from it. Sometimes failure or a rough time can come out to be a really great learning experience. This certainly was one.

As far as where we leave things with Quizlet for now, they've declined our request for a formal partnership for the time being. We've let them know we're ready if and when they are.

In case you missed it, we added Flashcard Creation & Import into Gimkit and it seems like many of you are loving it. Keep sending us feedback on how we can make it easier for you!

We also added an export feature so you can take what you create inside of Gimkit with you to use on other sites that allow import. When I think about the features we added to Gimkit in just the two weeks since 4.0, it's hard not to get excited. With your help, we're making something special. I love that no matter what we're faced with, we're met with positivity, creativity, and support from our incredible educator community.

Again, thank you all for your support. There's a lot of great stuff going on with Gimkit, which I love sharing — but I need to get better at sharing the struggles too. I hope this is a good first step...

- Josh from Gimkit 💜

Patch Notes: 4.0.5

New Team Balance System: Individual

  • This new team balance system is here to help situations where students are in teams, but balance sharing doesn't work well.

  • With this new system, each team member has their own balance, and the team balance is all the individual balances added together.

  • This means that each student has to earn cash in order to purchase their own upgrades, powerups, etc.

  • More details

    • Starting cash is distributed evenly between all team members

    • Link earnings are distributed evenly between all team members

    • Handicap is applied at a per member basis

    • Powerups such as the Subtractor will deduct 20% from each individual member balance

  • Boss Battle Mode has been switched to the new Individual Team Balance System. Team Mode remains on the old balance system (shared)

  • Changed the Boss's reduction in earnings to 16% instead of the previous 75%

    • We made this large change because we think the new balance system will help make Boss Battle games more fair

  • Earnings from The Link will no longer be applied to percentage based balance increases

    • This change was made to get rid of some of the double-benefit of using the Link with powerups like the Gift

Changes to Boss Battle Mode

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Hey everyone! It’s Josh here from Gimkit with an update on Boss Battle. We’ve loved seeing you all challenge your students; there have been some incredible games!

Shortly after the release of Boss Battle, we saw some issues. The Boss was winning too much. We made a change to decrease the Boss’s earnings by 20%. After pushing out this change, we monitored the results and saw that the Boss was still winning too much.

Since that first update, we’ve made two additional changes, to decrease The Boss’s earnings by 50% and then 75%. In short, The Boss was earning 1/4 the cash from when we first launched the mode. Even with all of this, The Boss was still winning most of the time. From your feedback, we learned we messed up with the design behind the mode.

We learned it was a mistake to include the same balance sharing logic with Team Mode in Boss Battle. Basically, it doesn’t make sense for all The Challengers to share a balance. In Team Mode, this works because it’s a smaller group, and teammates can communicate mid-game and figure out the strategy. With Boss Battle, there’s too many people to effectively communicate. What ends up happening is everybody shops on their own, which means a consistent low balance for The Challengers. What we need to do is make a change so that balance isn’t shared between all The Challengers. And that’s exactly what we’ve done!

Starting on October 8th, we’re introducing a new balance system for Boss Battle. With this system, each student will have their own balance. This means they won’t be able to purchase powerups & upgrades without earning the cash on their own first. The team balance (the one on the leaderboard) will be all the individual balances together. Since each student will have their own balance, we hope this will help make the game more fair.

Here’s some more information on how the balance system will work:

  • Starting Cash: The starting cash amount will be distributed evenly between all members. So, if there are 5 challengers and you set $100 for starting cash, each challenger will have $20 so start.

  • Subtractor: 20% will subtracted from each individual member

  • Gift: 25% will be increased from each individual member.

  • Link: The Link is disabled in Boss Battle, but for future modes that use this system, Link earnings will be distributed evenly between all members. Same as starting cash. With this update, we’ve also making a change so Link earnings only apply to answered questions.

We hope this new system will help make Boss Battle more fun and fair! With this update, we’ll also be changing the reduction in The Boss’s earnings to 16% from 75%.

As always, send us your feedback! We love to hear it!

Also, one last piece of good news! Since we’re making this significant change to Boss Battle, we’re extending the leave date from October 11th to October 16th! Get some extra days of Boss Battle fun! Thanks so much everyone!