To everyone within the GawkBox community,
We set out two years ago with a mission to help content creators earn a sustainable living doing what they love ? creating content. We built a way for viewers to play games together and support their favourite creator, all for free.
Since we launched in the spring of 2017, we?ve seen close to 500,000 people play games on GawkBox and have sent more than $1M to over 17,000 content creators who have used our platform to engage their communities. We?re so proud of what we?ve accomplished.
All the while, we?ve been working to find a sustainable business model to allow us to continue to execute on our mission. We explored multiple different product iterations but unfortunately we have been unable to find a viable model. As such, it is with a heavy heart that we have to announce that we?re shutting GawkBox down. The website, app and all widgets were all taken down effective today, July 3rd, 2019.
All donations and prizes earned through July 3rd, 2019 will be paid out in accordance with our normal monthly payout procedures on or before July 15th 2019. Your payee details, including tax information, must be completed before July 9th, 2019 to receive your June earnings.
The decision to shut down has been an extremely difficult one, but we can be proud of what we achieved and how much we impacted the lives of our partners over the past 2 years. Our highlight reel below shows some of these incredible moments from our community ? and shows us that we went a long way to succeeding in our mission.
Of course, we have a lot of people to thank ? many people played a huge part in GawkBox?s life in the past 2 years:
- To every single one of the more than 17k content creators and their 500k community members who partnered with us: thank you for your continued support, your help in crafting our product, your understanding when things did not go right, and your continued belief in our mission.
- To each of our investors across two separate funding rounds: thank you for believing in our mission and having the courage to invest your money into a new idea in a crazy ecosystem, thank you for your unwavering support through the ups and the downs.
- To each of the 22 different GawkBox team members, past and present, that played a part in making GawkBox what it became: Dan, Zak, Chase, Ramyya, Carie, Chuck, Molly, Tor, Ryan, Raymond, Suresh, Ian, Erik, Nikki, Ajay, Nick, Victoria, Michael, Neal, Taylor, Tony and Andrew. Thank you for taking a chance on our mission, for helping us learn and for going above and beyond to try and make it work. Every one of you has extremely bright futures ahead.
With that, we will close this chapter ? one hell of a rollercoaster ride. It?s been a lot of fun. Thank you.
Chris Brownridge, CEO
Update ? August 12, 2019
Our CEO, Chris Brownridge, has posted his 5 biggest lessons after being a first time founder and CEO. Please read them here:
After 3 years, $4.4M raised, 500k users, over $1M in revenue, we just shut down. Lessons from a first time Founder & CEO.
To all of our community ? while this is the end of GawkBox, we are thinking about other ideas in the YouTube, Twitch and Mixer space. To stay in touch, feel free to add your email below:
