With this announcement, we have some good news and bad news. Let's start with the good news.

New Perks Feature!

On October 15, 2022, we’ll be releasing a brand new feature called "Perks", where you can create custom Perks that fans can buy on your PodInbox Fan Page. We’ll release a dedicated announcement with more detail when this becomes available!

Deprecating Our Rewards Feature

And for the bad news, we’re deprecating our “Rewards” feature. When we released Rewards several months ago, we thought it solved a very unique need. Our goal was to create a way to gamify fan donations, letting fans “unlock” the podcaster’s Rewards, based on a fan’s total tips and donations.

We shared this idea with a bunch of podcasters, and people really liked the concept. Unfortunately, it did not work as well as we hoped.

Here’s why this Rewards feature did not work.

Not Great For Fans

The main problem is it’s not intuitive for fans. This is actually one of our CORE principles here at PodInbox: to create fan pages that are both fun AND simple. We can admit, we failed this principle with our Rewards feature.

Fans want the Rewards podcasters are offering, but it’s not straightforward how to earn those rewards. Turns out, fans just want to buy specific rewards in a straightforward way…with a buy button. Our mistake…we tried to get too clever.

So, with our new Perks feature, we’re changing it so each Perk has a price and a buy button. It’s just the simple pattern everyone knows and loves.

With the new Perks feature, fans don’t need to unlock your Perks in sequence. They just simply buy whichever one they want.

Not Easy for Podcasters

We also realized that creating Rewards is too confusing. Podcasters often got stuck on designing their Reward Levels and knowing what dollar amount to set for each level.

Creating Rewards took too much mental gymnastics, and podcasters had to think like game designers. This was also neither simple nor fun.

With the new Perks feature, creating rewards is a lot easier. You basically just decide what you want to sell, set a price for it, and publish it. No game mechanics are involved. We’re even providing a collection of Perk Templates to give you a ton of starter ideas on things to sell on your fan page.

Building on Perks

We’re VERY excited about the new Perks feature and excited to see the creative ways podcasters and fans will engage with it. This Perks feature will replace our Rewards feature, and we’ll post another update dedicated to Perks in several days, once it’s released.