The folks at Metafy offer coaching from professionals, content, and a community for gamers to learn and improve their skills. For most of Metafy's existence, coaching was a one-to-one experience—one coach advised one student at a time.
But in late 2023, PG Gonni, Design Engineer, and Corey Harnish, Senior Partnerships Manager, were tasked with transforming the eSports startup's coaching program to create a new revenue stream. PG, Corey, and their team needed to find a way for "partners" (what Metafy calls its coaches) to engage multiple students at once. Metafy had tried once before to develop the coaching program…unsuccessfully.
This time around, they knew they had to get creative.
Challenge: Create a maintenance-free class system without engineering support
The coaching program is one of Metafy's most popular offerings. In the original one-to-one model, partners maxed out their earnings quickly. They could only offer so many sessions per week and charge so much money per session. Soon, partners hit their earnings ceiling, which also resulted in a stagnant revenue stream for Metafy. Scaling simply wasn't feasible.
"Partners are the people who fuel Metafy," Corey said. "And it's limiting when a partner can only connect with one person at a time for $30 or $50."
Many of Metafy's partners hold other jobs—or they're students or professional gamers themselves—so they needed more incentives to do coaching work hosted by Metafy.
"We wanted to help the partners and give them a chance to earn more money for their one hour of time."
PG and Corey committed to turning individual coaching sessions into group classes. However, they needed to solve the problem without tapping the engineering team or using too many hours of their current team's bandwidth.
They'd previously used automation to streamline simple tasks, but never to develop a complex project like this.
"We needed to build technology, but we couldn't involve developers. We had to move fast and stay lean," Corey said. "What do we do? We go to a no-code tool like Zapier. Zapier was really the only reasonable solution to this problem."
Solution: Combine the power of no-code tools and automation
To create an entirely new group class system that didn't require human input, PG and Corey put together a complex flow of Zaps connecting Typeform, Airtable, Stripe, and Webflow. They began by setting up a Metafy subdomain on a separate page using Webflow, a no-code tool for website development. All the content on the page, including tags and filtering options, is also powered by Zapier.
Here’s how the Zap works:
Typeform to Airtable. A partner submits all important info about their class in Typeform, which creates a new record in Airtable with the necessary information.
Airtable to Stripe. The class info in Airtable gets sent to Stripe, which creates a product page for the class. The price gets automatically calculated and includes processing fees.
Webflow. A new item is created in Webflow, and the class is published to the site.
The Metafy team also took advantage of Zapier's Custom Actions (formerly App Extensions) to create a robust, personalized system that’s completely automated from start to finish.
For example, every time a customer purchases a seat in a class, the custom action updates the record in Airtable. And, when the class sells out, the payment link is updated and completely deactivated in Stripe.
"Zapier is the perfect tool for Metafy because non-technical folks can build a lot of functionality without writing any code. But we also can use some code if we want to. It's very flexible," said Corey.
Results: A new revenue source with no manual work
With Zapier, PG and Corey were able to take an idea to scale revenue from impossible to achievable.
When they tried to build a program like this in the past, their team spent a few hours a day maintaining the solution. As a small team, they couldn't justify that work.
In the program's first 30 days, the program brought in an additional $6,000 in revenue for Metafy's partners. Within six months, that number jumped to $75,000—all with a minimal amount of additional work for their team (beyond the initial setup).
"To date, we've had partners earn up to $10,000 off one two-hour session! Multiple partners earn in the thousands from these. It's a completely different level of earnings for these gaming creators."
Corey Harnish, Senior Partnerships Manager, Metafy
The best part? Metafy's partners and students are thrilled with the new class system and its capabilities.
"Partners love it because they're able to 10x their earnings just by lecturing a group instead of one person at a time. Students love it, too, because now the classes are more organized, there's a formal process, and they're able to hear other classmates' questions and feedback," said Corey.
"Before this project, 'classes and events' weren't words associated with Metafy. A class wasn't a capability we could offer," said Corey. "Now, we're empowering these entirely new paradigms that we didn't have before. Seeing that activity in social feeds is really invigorating for me."
