How UserCheck reduced TriviaNerd’s fake signups from 19% to 0.2%

TriviaNerd was looking for a tool that would stop the abuse of their free plan from temporary & disposable email addresses. UserCheck provided exactly what they needed, and much more. The TriviaNerd developers came to UserCheck with an extraordinary amount of abuse, up to 19% of their signups were fake. By implementing the UserCheck API, TriviaNerd reduced this down to 0.2%. Today, TriviaNerd has a higher email deliverability rate, higher conversion rate from free to paid and far cleaner internal metrics.

About TriviaNerd

TriviaNerd is a leader in the online multiplayer trivia software category. Each year millions of people use their platform to play & host fun trivia games. With an AI trivia topic builder & thousands of existing curated games, they are extremely popular with HR teams looking to run fun office or virtual team building activities.

We talked to Mike Oberman, a Director at TriviaNerd, who told us about their email validation challenges and the results they achieved with UserCheck.

Challenge: Dealing with Free Tier abuse

As a B2B/C SaaS platform with a free tier, they faced some common issues:

• Lots of spam accounts
• Users trying to create multiple accounts
• People signing up with disposable and temporary email addresses

These problems caused some headaches for them:

1. Costs were going up
2. An inflated user base unlikely to convert to paid plans
3. Degraded experience for genuine customers
4. Distorted metrics affecting business decisions
5. Busier customer support team

“Even though we had email confirmation, we still had too many users with fake emails. This was causing a significant overspend on our AWS bill as well as our email sending tool. We could see that our emails to legitimate customers were starting to bounce more often. At a strategic level, we struggled to run proper A/B tests knowing that so many of our free users weren’t legitimate prospective leads”.

We’ll let Mike take it from here and talk about their implementation and results:

The Solution: Using UserCheck's API

We were recommended by a mentor to check out UserCheck’s API. Here’s what it does:

1. Checks that emails are valid
   • We stopped sending confirmation emails to addresses that don't exist, this saves us from sending unnecessary emails and saves some customers from making typos.
2. Blocks temporary email addresses
   • This is a big one. Most of our spam accounts were using temporary email addresses. Blocking disposable emails reduced our fake users by well over 90%.
3. Not allowing personal email addresses
   • This made sense for us as a B2B platform. We found that 95% of our paying customers use their company email anyway. Blocking personal email addresses got us focused on serving our real customers.

The Results: Real Improvements We Could Measure

After we started using UserCheck, we saw some big changes:

Fewer Fake Accounts

We saw over 90% fewer fraudulent accounts being created. This meant our platform was cleaner and easier to manage.

Less Work for Our Support Team

The number of support tickets about fraud went down by 29%. Our team could focus more on helping real customers.

More Users Becoming Paying Customers

Our conversion rate went up by 35%. This meant we could now clearly see the results of A/B tests amongst real prospects.

Lower Costs

Our database & server operational costs went down by 15%. We were spending less time and money dealing with fake accounts.

Setting Up UserCheck: Quick and Easy

Getting UserCheck to work with our system was pretty straightforward:

1. We got an API key
2. We added UserCheck to our sign-up process
3. We tested it to make sure everything worked right
4. We had it up and running in about a week

Our developers said the instructions were clear and it was easy to set up.

Long-Term Benefits: It Keeps Getting Better

We're still seeing advantages from using UserCheck:

• They keep updating their list of fake email providers
• It works well even as we get more users
• We can change how strict the filtering is if we need to

Wrapping Up: A Smart Choice for Better Users

UserCheck has really helped us improve our user base and make our operations smoother. We're getting better users, spending less on managing fake accounts, and more people are becoming paying customers.