 Thank you all for being here. I'm very excited to share some inspiring, but also very practical, actionable ideas with you. So the world is changing. We all know it, and we're all trying to grapple with it and move along and succeed given all these changes. What I'm seeing in my area are several key changes that really impact my work. One is, Facebook use is declining. If Facebook is not the 800-pound gorilla, it used to be particularly among young people. It's really changing, and the reasons it's changing are part of what I'm going to be talking about today. We also see that overall interest in gamification, which is generally a mechanics-first approach to design, is also waning. The bloom is off the rose. The bubble has popped. People are figuring out that that's not a silver bullet. Customers, they need to trust the companies they deal with, and that's the thing that's being broken. People are figuring out that they don't want to be manipulated, they don't want to have their data sold without their knowledge. And this goes for all of us. Your customers have choices. They can decide where they want to put their energy, their attention, and their money. How are you going to engage your customers moving forward? Are you going to do it by bribing them? Are you going to do it by manipulating them through nudges and rewards? Or are you going to do it by empowering them? Today, I'm going to show you what it means to empower your customer and why that is the future of user engagement. I'm Amy Jo Kim. As Jeremy said, I'm a game designer, an entrepreneur, and a startup coach, or innovation coach. I also work with global brands as well as startups. I'm also an author. I wrote a book long ago when dinosaurs roamed the web about community building. And more recently, I've written a book called Game Thinking, which are the principles I'm going to talk to you about today. I've worked with companies you've probably heard of, and on brands you're probably familiar with. In my career, I've worked with literally hundreds of teams and thousands of entrepreneurs. But I've been lucky enough to work on a handful of breakthrough innovative hits that created new categories. eBay was one of them. I was on the original design team that brought eBay to life. Ultima Online, a massively multiplayer RPG. How many people here know Ultima Online? Anybody? Yes, the few, the proud. Rock Band, how many people here have ever played Rock Band? Again, I was on the original design team for that, working on it when we had no idea if it was going to work or not. How many people are familiar with the Sims? Same thing on the original design team, Covet Fashion, which is a hit mobile game that turned into an entire franchise. And Hapify, a digital mental health app that's a category leader and rapidly expanding. So those teams that I worked with, they crossed the chasm into mainstream success. They created those hits. But many other teams didn't manage to do that. One of those teams was my own startup. Let me tell you something about my failures. This is myself and my co-founder, right after we got funding. We were all smiles. We launched a next generation brain game. I have a PhD in behavioral neuroscience. And I'm a game designer, so I got very excited about reinventing brain games. So that was wonderful. It won design awards. We had a few thousand avid users. We felt like we were on our way. But we didn't manage to cross the chasm. We couldn't do it. We failed. And I learned a lot from that failure. Since then, I've worked on many things that haven't failed. And from that work, I created game thinking, which is a step-by-step methodology for innovating faster and smarter and dramatically increasing your odds of success. So there's a lot that goes into game thinking. But I'm going to talk to you about three key ideas. One is high-need superfans. You're going to learn in the next half hour what that means. The second is a compelling mastery path. I'm going to show you why and how creating a customer journey that helps your customers get better at something they care about is a great way to drive engagement. And the third is a pleasurable learning loop, which is a core part of that mastery path that actually lets you implement skill building into your product. What we're going to be talking about today is really embodied in this wonderful quote by Frank Lloyd Wright. You can use an eraser on the drafting table or a sledgehammer on the construction site. And that's what we all want. None of us want to ship code that people don't use. That's not right. But figuring out how to validate your ideas early is one of the trickiest parts of software development. How many of you have ever struggled with that, with validating your ideas? I definitely have. And I'm here to make it easier for you. So let's talk about high-need superfans. What is that? Paul Buckeye, he runs White Combinator. That's the most popular and well-known startup incubator in the US, likes to say, build something just a few people love, even if most people don't get it right away. That might seem counterintuitive, but that's actually the path to successful innovation. That means solving a real problem for a very narrow niche. Now, this can be very challenging, particularly when you've got stakeholders or VCs breathing down your neck, telling you, go big, reach everybody. But it turns out when you're innovating, trying to reach everybody right away is the fast road to failure. Now, it's not just Paul and me who think this. Way back in 1961, a Bellab scientist named Everett Rogers published a diffusion of innovation. And he discovered by collecting data from a diverse industries, pig farmers, construction, all kinds of non-digital industries. He discovered that successful innovations spread through their early market. They never start with the majority, not even the early majority. And he came up with these five stages, which he named. 30 years later, Jeffrey Moore wrote a book called Crossing the Chasm. How many of you have heard of this book? Awesome. Those of you who haven't, it's a great marketing week. And he introduced, he used Rogers' original data model and names, but he introduced the idea of a chasm between your early market, your very earliest adopters, and the early majority. That chasm is exactly what we fell into when my startup failed. We got that early market. We were rocking the early market, but we couldn't manage to cross. And it turns out that who you listen to when you're building your software, who you test and validate your ideas on, matters a lot. It can make or break the success of your product. Let me tell you a story about another failure. This is a gaming platform called Cypdio. Has anybody heard of Cypdio? Exactly, because the one person there, okay, the few, the proud. But most of you haven't because they don't exist anymore. My partner and I did all the launch games for Cypdio. And this is a really innovative platform out of MIT. Brilliant co-founders, they had a TED talk that went through the roof of popularity, and they raised a lot of money from top tier VC. And then it came time to really bring it to market. And we did a bunch of discovery and testing of the platform and the games with parents who had the school-eighth kids, the kind of kids that we were targeting. And we found two groups within that. One was most of the parents we talked to. They had an iPad, so we knew they wanted to buy platforms to support their kids' gaming habits. And they said things like, ooh, that's interesting. Wow, that's a really cool platform. I'd love to check that out. They said things like that. But there was a smaller group of parents who had special needs kids, kids with autism, and with sensory disorders. And what they said when we showed them this was, this is a game changer. This would really make a difference for my kid. Do you need beta testers? When can I get my hands on it? Very different kind of response. We took that to SIFTO, and they decided to go after the Main Street. They decided not to develop games and really specialize in those high-need super fans. So they went big, they got into Brookstone, which is in every mall in the U.S., and put a lot of money into a big holiday launch, and they failed. It didn't work out. Now contrast that with HAPPIFY, who I mentioned earlier. HAPPIFY is a digital mental health app. And we were working on it, and really unsure about who it was for or if it was gonna succeed. And we found several different groups that we tested it on, one of whom was rapidly interested in it. That group turned out to be stay-at-home parents who had recently left the workforce and really wanted to win at parenting. They were type A people. And they were struggling with the blues. They found that they had lost that meaning, and accolades you get from having a job. And they became our initial early adopters. We were very nervous about that. We were nervous that we wouldn't be able to grow beyond them. We would end up being a tiny, niche product. That's a common fear people have that keeps them from doing this very smart step. And it turned out that our nervousness was unfounded. When we finally found those early customers and were able to iterate our design to please them and to meet their needs, that's when things started to take off. HAPPIFY has grown far beyond that slice of their market. But it turns out that to get started, you really need to get that very small niche. So your super fans are specific to your product. I want you to think about your product. And by the way, the supplies, even if you're relaunching something or trying to drive deeper engagement in existing product, it's still helpful to find your super fans. So these are not generic gadget geeks that you could get from some research agency. They're specific, and they're defined by need. When I worked with Harmonix, who made rock band, our super fans were rhythm game nerds who had already played guitar hero and were comfortable without the software. They were quite different than our target market, which was more, much more mainstream. But those were our partners that helped us bring rock band's life. They were critical. When I worked with the brilliant Royal Wright on Sims, our target market was casual gamers, both men and women. And yet, our earliest testers, the people that we iterated and brought the ideas to life with were about 100 simulation enthusiasts that well had met at various conferences that were super geeky and nerdy and really loved to make things. Not our target market, but they helped us bring the whole thing to life and reach that mainstream. This is Mary Lou Song, the very first product manager at eBay. Similarly, when I was working with eBay, eBay was trying to catch up to the big grill on the block who now you've never heard of. But we were really struggling to figure out the market. Mary Lou collected a group of enthusiastic early sellers who were really the cutting edge of everybody on eBay and who had managed to start making a living off the site. And as we were building the core systems, the reputation system, the power sellers tiered system, the core profiles that you're now used to on the site, none of those existed then. But we built those in a tight feedback loop with this slice of our market. Overleading or unhappify, similar thing. We found that we originally thought our market was gonna be hard driving entrepreneurs like the founders, because many people built for themselves, right? Turned out the right market for us was the stay at home parents again, but a certain leading edge of them. And they were instrumental in helping us get to that first stage, that beachhead that gives you the opportunity to grow into the bigger market. The opportunity that SIFTO missed. So don't fall for the TAM myth. TAM stands for Total Addressable Market. A lot, everybody needs to understand that. If you've got stakeholders, if you're pitching to a VC, you always have to have a slide about your total addressable market. But the mistake a lot of people make is they think then, okay, that I'm gonna find people in that market representatives, I'm gonna test my ideas on that. Your cutting edge early market is the canary in a coal mine for your TAM. And if you're able to differentiate between sizing your market and then bringing your idea to life, you will be on the fast track to success. So I want you to think about capturing a beachhead market. And again, even if you're testing something and developing something that exists, think about that leaning edge slice when you're gonna be validating your ideas. And if you capture that beachhead, you will have one of the pillars that at least has the opportunity to lead you to success. So start here. So that's a little bit about what a high-need superfan is. Now let's talk about a compelling mastery path. You've probably heard about customer journeys, right? How many people have ever mapped out a customer journey? Good, those are usually a journey toward sales. So if you know about customer journeys, you're ahead of the game, that's great. This is a learning journey that's moving toward mastery. That's a concept that comes out of gaming, but it applies to every product designer. Has anyone here ever heard of Kathy Sierra? Oh, awesome. She's a wonderful, really influential designer and engineer. She likes to say, upgrade your user, not your product. And that's a core idea in game thinking. So there's four stages in this mastery path model. Some of these stages are gonna be familiar to you, some will be new. The first is discovery. That's for visitors, someone who doesn't use your product yet. And discovery is really about crafting the right marketing message. The next stage is onboarding. You know about onboarding. That's where your customers learn the ropes. Stage after that is habit building. A lot of people confuse habit building and onboarding. Habit building you can think of as your day 21 experience. What does that look like? How is it different than your day one, your day seven experience? How is it better? What do you have for people that keep going in your product, use it, and go deeper? Do you have something that makes the product get better as your customers become more skilled? That's where habit building can help you. And then there's mastery. Two to 5% of your customers might reach mastery where they've mastered the systems and they wanna go deeper. They're ready for something else. In gaming, we call this the elder game. The game that's sort of beyond the grind or the basics. But in software development, it's appropriate as well to think about what can I do to leverage the people that are my absolutely best customers. Not just reward them with points or whatever, but how can I leverage their energy to keep them engaged and let them essentially play a different kind of game than they were playing up to that point? So this is really about creating an experience that gets better as your customers grow more skilled and more used to your product. I'm gonna talk more about that in a moment. Third core idea here is a pleasurable learning loop. Let me take this apart. Dan Cook, who is a wonderful game designer and one of my mentors and dearest friends, likes to say, in a loop, you're learning a skill and updating your mental model. That's what leads the player to life. Now, this relates to what MVP you should build and how you bring a new idea or a new product or even a new feature to life. How an MVP stands for minimum viable product. How many of you build MVPs when you're developing software? Okay, a lot of you, that's awesome. So here's a question. What is the right MVP? There's no one right answer, but if you look on the internet, you'll see a lot of people saying, oh, a fake landing page and there's consulting companies that'll build you a fake landing page. But I just told you about that four-stage journey. What stage of the journey does a fake landing page test? Discovery, ding, ding, ding, that's right. A fake landing page test your marketing message, that's it, that's great, but it has nothing to do with testing your product experience or your ability to drive retention. Zero to do with that. And sometimes people fool themselves in the thinking they're done when in fact they're just beginning. So that's not gonna really get you where you need to go if you wanna drive deep engagement in your product. Now what about an operating conditioning loop, otherwise known as the Skinner Box? This chart is from a wonderful book called The Power of Habit by Charles Duregg. And a lot of people think, ooh, that's the solution. People that discover gamification or read a book like Hooked by Mary Yall, which really uses this loop. They go, ooh, I can just manipulate, I can just reward the behaviors I want and I'm done. And it turns out that's not gonna get you there. That will drive short-term engagement. It will make your metrics go up in the short term, but for long-term engagement, it will backfire, just like all operating conditioning backfires for driving motivated, internally motivated long-term engagement. What's missing? Skill building. Skill building is the art of making your customers more awesome, upgrading your user rather than your product. And that is the secret of long-term engagement. Every hit I've ever worked on had this at its core, and we really thought about how we could create an experience that gets better over time. You ask yourself questions like, what can I hold back? So rather than just giving the customer everything up front, you develop it over time, you take your customer on a learning journey. So this chart, which is in my book Game Thinking described in great detail, captures, it's over there, this chart captures what I learned on the string of hits that I just told you about that was different than all the other products I worked on. And what you see here in the nutshell is, you see the journey to mastery along the x-axis, and you see our journey as developers on the y-axis. What do you see? The best way to create long-term engagement and to build that from the ground up is to start by focusing on habit building, not on onboarding, not on discovery, and not even on mastery, but really get that day 21 experience going early on. This can be very counterintuitive, but again, every breakthrough hit I ever worked on and every great game that was successful I ever worked on followed this principle of where you start with your MVP. So I wanna give you some examples of companies that use this approach, whether they were aware it was game thinking or not to create success, how many people here use Slack? All right, so a lot. So you may not know that Slack had three years of internal development before it ever launched. It started as an internal tool for people that were building a multiplayer cooperative game called Glitch, and they were located in different cities. So they hacked together this tool on top of IRC, and that is what turned into Slack. Let's look at Slack's mastery path. There's some really interesting clues there that I think can inspire you in your own work. Discovery and Slack is largely social. Now sometimes your IT department assigns it to you, especially these days, but most people discover it through their friends, through their colleagues, oh, you gotta check this out, and that's very similar to how people discover games. Onboarding and Slack is really interesting. You've all experienced it. Onboarding is when you interact with a friendly, helpful bot one-to-one, and then once you've learned a few of the ropes, Slack puts you into the multiplayer environment where you're with your colleagues. Now that's right out of the gaming playbook. How many of you have ever played a game where in the tutorial level, you are interacting with a bot or a set of bots who taught you a few things and you practice shooting and running around, and then you went into the multiplayer part of the game? Does that ring any bells? Like every console game or most of them. That's right out of the gamer's playbook. The thing about Slack is there is no gamification of bullshit and gigas cluttering it up. It's just got the underlying structure of a great game to help you with learning. Habit building in Slack has really built around making Slack your own, customizing it. You learn how to set the colors. You learn a few commands, then you learn a few more. You learn how to use emojis. Maybe you even launch your own channel after a while. And then Mastery continues that through line. You can launch a channel. You can keep going deeper. You can program up your own bot. You can even integrate your app into Slack's ecosystem or apply for funding from Slack's Slush Fund. What I want you to notice here is that Slack isn't just a jumble of features. It's got a coherent through line. And there's a lot of things that Slack didn't do. There's no competition. There's no leaderboards. There's none of that. By the way, there were intense internal arguments within Slack about whether they should add that stuff. But they decided not to because they wanted the tool to be collaborative at every single level. I want you to think about what the through line might be in your product. The thing that really organizes everything else. The thing that helps you prioritize your features. When you're staring at 50 features you want to build on a whiteboard, but you can only build three. Let's take a look at Slack's pleasurable learning. So the first thing is the trigger. A learning loop has some sort of trigger. It could be external and internal or both. That pulls you into the experience. Slack has notifications. That's the external trigger. But the thing that really drives you is FOMO. If you're missing out. If you use Slack and you haven't logged in for 24 hours and your team uses it, you're gonna wanna be in there and know what's going on. The core activity, the pleasurable, repeatable activity that every good learning loop has is similar to all social media which is reading and responding to updates. That's what you do when you're using Slack. Now the feedback, every good learning loop has this core activity and then some sort of skill building feedback that lets you know if you're on the right track. We as humans cannot learn without feedback. Slack's really interesting because the feedback is super simple. My updates have been read. That's it, I've read all my updates. It seems so simple you can almost overlook it but it's the most important thing you need to know if you're using Slack, whether you've read all your updates. Now, check it out. Slack in the last, not they didn't have it at launch in the last few years, Slack added a lot of variety and humor to the simple message that says you've read all your updates. Here's three among the many messages. You've probably seen these and they made you smile, right? Slack, some project manager and designer decided to put resources into this, right? Why do you think that could be? It's because it's such an important moment in your journey, your emotional journey of using Slack that they decided to reinforce it and keep it interesting for people rather than just give you this boring, yeah, you're all done. So I want you to think about what's the feedback in your app? What's the day 21 experience or your SaaS or your marketplace or whatever you're working on? And how can you really deliver the feedback that helps your customer get better at the thing they're there to do? Now, to close that loop, Slack has progress. So you, in a really strong learning loop, you also have some sort of progress and investment, deepening investment. For Slack, again, it's customization. Your sense of progress, there's nothing in the interface that looks like a game. And yet, as you go deeper and deeper, layers of Slack unfold. Slack bottle pop up and say, hey, now that you've learned this, why don't you try this? So you can see, again, some of the rhythms and the structures that many games have have been translated into this pretty straightforward work group tool. And then it also suggests things like, hey, why don't you customize your notifications now that you're better? Did you know you can do that? And what that does is it helps you close the loop because customizing your notifications helps you keep them turned on. And those notifications are what brings you back into the program and back into the loop. So the deepening investment and sense of progress you have feeds into the trigger that brings you back. Now, let's look at something really different. Let's get Kickstarter. How many of you have ever used Kickstarter? Okay, quite a few. Has anyone here ever run a campaign? Okay, so you've funded campaigns, mostly. So Kickstarter, again, like these other massive hits, started focusing narrowly on high-need super fans. Kickstarter was focused on artists originally and they spent several years being focused on artists before they grew into the massive platform that they are today, which is way more than artists. But that's what they narrowed down in order to get their core loops, their core systems, going and to really validate the idea. Once they had captured that beachhead market, that early market, they were in a position to expand further. Kickstarter's math-free path is very different than Slack, but interesting. It's social discovery, but it's pretty much through updates versus word of mouth. The way most people find out about Kickstarter is through a particular campaign and they get an email or a WhatsApp message or they see a Twitter update, like what you see here, Facebook update, and they say, oh, look at that. That's interesting. I'll check that out. Onboarding in Kickstarter is very different than Slack and the other one I'm gonna tell you about. It's lightweight exploration. Kickstarter has evolved their interface over the years more and more to be easy to explore. They use some back-end smarts with a recommendation engine, but a lot of it is just really elegant design that gets you in there and then makes it very easy for you to explore other things there and gradually start to learn on your own. Habit building in Kickstarter is for someone who's funding, it's really based around running for your project. Once you decide that you're gonna donate and put some skin in the game, you want that project to succeed because it might not, there's a win-lose state. It might not reach its goal. So you're motivated to check, see how it's doing. You can sign up for updates or not. You might want, if it's not doing so well and the clock's ticking down, you might share it because you really want that to succeed. I'm sure you've all seen that kind of behavior. Maybe you've even experienced it yourself. And then mastery is really about transitioning from being a funder, someone who donates, to someone who runs their own project. And if you decide, okay, I'm gonna go there. I'm gonna launch my own project. Kickstarter has all kinds of great tools that they've provided for you to help you track your project. They suggest, ooh, you got five days, you might wanna send some extra updates. It's very, very supportive of the people that run projects. Again, this is a platform that gets better as you become more skilled at using it. The pleasurable learning that the Kickstarter has, the trigger is responding to an update that you see. That's pretty much what pulls people in. The core activity is exploring campaigns. You start by looking at one campaign, but it recommends other ones. You can check out their videos. You can look and see how many people have donated. Again, there's this lightweight exploration. And that's the activity that really keeps people coming back. And Kickstarter's worked hard to make sure it's pleasurable. The feedback is really based around donating, particularly for the person running a campaign. If nobody's donating, that's feedback that your campaign's not working or your video isn't compelling. So if you, that feedback is both for the person running a campaign, it's also feedback to you that, hey, this is meaningful to you. And once you donate, then the magic actually starts. And what Kickstarter does, which is very elegant, is they use the moment right after you've donated to suggest that you share. It says, hey, congratulations, you're part of the team now. Why don't you share an update to let other people know? And this one deepens your investment, right? Because you're gonna go public that you've donated. So that makes you more invested in the project. And those shares then become the trigger that closes the loop that other people will use to pull back in. So Kickstarter, like Slack, creates a platform that gets better, that you perceive gets better. You can keep going deeper. And as you get more and more into it, new elements of it unfold before you. And that's the secret to long-term engagement. Now let's look at something really different, but it's got some great ideas in it. How many of you have used Duolingo? Awesome. This is a language learning app. It's created by Louis Van Aan, who's a Guatemalan computer scientist. And again, Louis didn't just create this for everybody. He was motivated because he knew a lot of people in his village in Guatemala who were poor and wanted to learn English, but couldn't afford it. And at the time, Rosetta Stone was what was available. So they had hundreds and hundreds of dollars. And he really wanted to create a free app that would allow these people that he cared a lot about to raise himself up and learn English. That's where it got started. And that was what the first, at least year and probably more of Duolingo was all about was just getting the app working for that particular use case. Of course, Duolingo has grown far beyond that, but really the punchline there for you is if you wanna grow big, start by niching down, niche way down. The mastery path of Duolingo is really great because it's so easy to see, it's so visible. Discovery, he's got this super simple marketing message which is learn a language for free. They haven't strayed from that. It's been the same for years. And that's very effective because you know what you're getting into. Onboarding in Duolingo is very interesting. It's really about level setting, okay? Meaning that people that come into Duolingo might have different skill levels with languages. How do you deal with that? Well, you ask them questions. Duolingo asks you to tell it how intense you wanna be about your work. Do you have a trip coming up in two weeks you need to learn fast? Or is this more of a casual thing? And it also asks you if you're a beginner and if you say you're not, it lets you take a placement test. Now a lot of people think, oh, that's too many clicks for onboarding. I need to like get them right into it. But in fact, what this let's Duolingo do is deliver a great first time experience by meeting you right where you're at. This isn't the right approach to onboarding for every app or product, but it's absolutely something to consider if you've got a product where people will be coming in in different ways. How many of you have used Headspace, the meditation app? Great. Those of you who haven't downloaded and check it out, Headspace has a very similar onboarding that's all about level setting. They ask you a bunch of questions and it's kind of counterintuitive to a lot of recommended wisdom you might hear, but it's just right for that app and Headspace has had massive success. So that's working out pretty well for them. Now let's look at Habit Building in Duolingo. It's really based around these short game-like activities which Luis Vanon wanted to feel very much like a casual game while really being effective language learning. So you can see them and you get this great feedback to those activities that tell you if you're on track or not. Duolingo always gives you positive feedback even if you fail, even if you try something and you don't do it, it encourages you to keep going. Duolingo has a lot of gamification in it meaning a lot of game mechanics like what you see here to support it, but the difference between Duolingo's gamification and a lot of the ineffective gamification you see is that this is not mechanics first design. It's journey first design with the mechanics supporting the journey. If you want to get long-term engagement, sprinkling mechanics on top of it will never get you there. But it's not that the mechanics are bad. It's that they work most effectively in games but also in this language learning app and also in your product. Those mechanics work most effectively when you really thought through the core journey, the core experience and then you use the mechanics to support that. For mastery, Duolingo is really all about unlocking content and it creates this map so you can see, ooh, this is what I've unlocked so far and look, there's more there. If I keep working, I'll unlock more content. Again, this is a very familiar structure from gaming but it's presented in this educational setting. And so if you are working with a content heavy app, thinking about what that looks like and how you might be able to keep people engaged can be very powerful. Again, a lot of people think, oh, I have, especially if your customer's paying you, I have to give them everything up front. But that's not a good user experience. If you do what Duolingo does, which is decide, what am I gonna hold back and then make sure you present it in a compelling way that makes people feel interested and excited because there's more, they keep going, there's more they can unlock. That can be one of the most effective ways to keep people engaged. Let's look at the learning. So for Duolingo, it's actually an external trigger that most people turn on, which is to get daily updates. But there's also the internal desire to learn a language that can drive you. And the core activity is completing the mini games. Even as you go up, up, up, up, up, you still have this comfortable sense that yeah, there'll be more mini games and I'll do more of them. They'll get harder, but it keeps it really short. It means that if you've got five minutes while you're waiting for the bus, you can pull out Duolingo and do a little bit, just like you might do with a casual game. The feedback in Duolingo is very gamified and yet it's effective. It's basically earning rewards. Badges and unlocking content is another form of feedback that lets you know you're getting better at the thing you're there to get better at. And the sense of progression and investment is really embodied in unlocking content and earning your rewards. And this also creates a loss aversion. It creates barriers to exit. If you've made your way through a bunch of content you see there's more to go, but your friend tells you, oh, there's this cool other language learning app. Yeah, you might check it out, but you've invested quite a bit and you see that there's even more you can get from that investment. You've earned the right to unlock this more advanced content. And so it helps keep you there. So to recap, skill building is the art of making your customers more awesome. The learning loop I just took apart is the mechanics of how you actually do that, how you can make your customers more skillful. And the mastery path is the way that you can think about and structure your experience so that it gets better as your customers become more skilled. So this approach works all over the world. I've worked with literally thousands of entrepreneurs now on every continent. And I found that if they apply game thinking properly they can 10x their product market fit. They can get done in eight weeks what might otherwise take six months. One of them is right here in India, Vinayak Joglakar, who's in Pune. He's the founder of SinnerZip which is an IT outsourcing company. Very successful, 500 employees across three cities. And he used game thinking to take his side project which was an AI based tool for HR managers and turn it into a new revenue stream for his company. Robin Allentson in Amsterdam. Is anyone here from the Netherlands? Yay, Netherlands represent. Robin Allentson is a brilliant serial entrepreneur who runs an AI company. He's applying deep learning techniques to fashion merchandising, retail merchandising. He used game thinking to figure out as did the Hapify team that I talked to you who that slice of his market was that he could get into an iterative loop and then bring his ideas to life. And he was amazed at how quickly he was able to do that and it really set him up for success. And most importantly saved him a lot of time. And if you've got a team and a burn rate and you're paying them, shaving several weeks or months off your production schedule is a huge deal. Oh, for Leadner I mentioned earlier, he's from Tel Aviv and he used game thinking to find the right audience and then to change the product in order to meet that audience's need. It turned out that when we first created Hapify, the team really wanted it to look like a game, sort of a two and a half the isometric game. When we tested that interface with our high need early adopters, the people, the stay at home parents who'd recently left the work force, they hated it. They said, oh, that looks like too much work. I just want something that doesn't challenge me. I want something that just like really helps me feel happier. Can't you make it look like Pinterest? And that was really hard for the team because they didn't want it to look like Pinterest. But we realized that that would help us reach that early market. So we bit the bullet and completely re-architected our UX, which was scary and challenging. That's really when things started to take off. And it turned out that that structure really let us create much more of the experience we wanted faster and cheaper than having a fully integrated game-like interface. So that was a huge learning for all of us. Miriam, who is from France, she runs a genealogy service. And she, like Vinayak, had a side project. She'd been working on the side project for two years. She wanted to create a genealogy crowdsourced website where it wasn't just the gatekeepers who could say, yes, this is the genealogy behind your family. People could actually crowdsource it. And in, I think it was 12 weeks, she was able to accomplish what she hadn't been able to do in the previous two years and figure out how to find the audience and structure her MVP so that her project would move forward. And then right at home for me in Silicon Valley, which is where I live, Karen Mevreden runs Subcast. They've actually rebranded the Scout FM. Kara used game thinking to raise money. So she was working on an idea and she'd been struggling with her co-founders to figure out what to build for beta. It was a smart podcast companion. So they used this to find that early market and then iterate their beta to the point where they could have enough data that they could get their seed funding and that worked out. They raised from precursor ventures and they're now pulled more into building out their companion and growing that market beyond that early slice. So as I said at the beginning, the world is changing and we need to change along with it. The smartest product leaders, the people that are succeeding and that are going to succeed in driving long-term engagement are figuring out how to empower their customers rather than manipulate them. That pops the bubble of gamification. There is no silver bullet that lets you sprinkle something on and just get engagement. But if you really take the time to focus and think about how can I upgrade my users? How can I understand their goals and really turn them into who they want to be by engaging with my product, you'll be on your road to success. Game thinking is a methodology to help you do this. Because let's be honest, it's really hard to do. I've been a game designer for 20 years. It's still hard for me to figure out how to empower customers which is why I put this together and make it easier initially for myself and now also for all of you. So the three pillars that you learned about today are focusing early on your high-need super fans to test and validate your ideas and get that beach head that lets you expand from there. Creating a compelling mastery path even if it's extremely simple that lets your product get better over time that gives people something on day 21, day 30, day 60 that they didn't necessarily have access to on day one and day seven. And then the pleasurable learning move that lets you create that feedback loop so that you can make your customers better at something by giving them feedback whether they're on the right track or not and help them be motivated to keep going. So as you're thinking about these ideas and adjusting them, here's how you can apply it to your own project. Ask yourself, who are gonna be my first 50 or even 25 customers? Not the everybody's, not the total addressable market, just the first 50, the people that need it yesterday. Who are those gonna be? If you don't know, you can figure it out using the techniques and game thinking. What do they wanna get better at? Such a simple question, but such an empowering question. What is it specifically your customers wanna get better at? Sometimes it's obvious, sometimes not so much. In Duolingo, what do you wanna get better at? Use a new language. In Kickstarter, what do you wanna get better at? Using the platform, if you run your own campaigns, you're gonna wanna get better at running a successful campaign. Turns out most of the people that run their first campaign on Kickstarter don't make it, but campaign doesn't get funded. But Kickstarter wants you to keep going and it's really invested in helping you get better at running campaigns. So a lot of the product is designed around that. Similarly with Slack. You get better at using Slack, right? You guys know if you use it. That's not the real thing you're there to do. You're using Slack if you wanna get better at working with your team, at communicating with your team. And if Slack didn't deliver on that, it would be a flop. And then as you ask yourself what do they wanna get better at? They say, how can my product, how can the design that I put into place, the features and systems that I implement, how can that empower my users? How can I stay away from the tempting but ultimately backfiring bribes and manipulation that have been so popular but are now waning because of trust issues? And how can I actually help my customers turn into who they wanna be? That will get you on the right road. So I want you to take away these ideas and know that if you apply these, you will increase your chances of success. And that's why I'm here. That's why I flew to India to share this with you. It's because I want you to have a better chance of success. And by using these techniques, you will definitely do that and you will innovate faster and smarter. So who likes free stuff? Hopefully lots of people. So of course I would love for you all to buy my book. If you're interested in this, it's very helpful. But regardless, I've put together a cheat sheet that has specific actionable tips to help you, but it's tuned to your role. If you're an engineer working on a project, if you're a startup CEO, if you're working in a larger company and you've got stakeholders to deal with, you're gonna need different kinds of tips. One size doesn't fit all. So we made a quiz and then a whole bunch of different cheat sheets to help you apply these ideas right away to what you're doing. So if you go to gamethinking.io slash quiz and you take the quiz, it's very short, two minutes long, you will then get a downloadable cheat sheet with tips and also with one of our core templates we use in our coaching business, the MVP Canvas that will help you plan a fast and effective product experiment that gets you the data you need to make product decisions that lead you towards success. So I encourage you all to take advantage of that. I really appreciate your time and I'm very excited to take some Q and A as well. If you wanna know more, follow me on Twitter, if you happen to use Twitter. I share a lot about our programs and just free stuff that we do. And feel free to get in touch with me directly. If you're excited about this, if you have some follow-up questions, you wanna find out more about what we do, send me an email, just copy that down. I'd love to hear from you. So thank you so much for your time. I hope this has inspired some new ideas for you and let's take some questions. Yeah, it was a brilliant presentation. Really liked it. I had one, my question is that in all the, the entire presentation you mentioned about, you know, creating a habit. But there are many products in which a customer would just use that as one time and he wouldn't want to come in a very long time, back again. What is that tweak that we can think about over here? So yeah, so if you have a situation where it just, you only wanna use something like set it and forget it, right? Then this isn't as relevant. And those kind of products usually aren't things where people are deeply engaged over the long term, right? This is really specific for products where your business model depends on long-term engagement, a SaaS product, a game, a language learning app. So you can still use some of the ideas you learn, like the idea of super fans to help you test and validate new feature ideas, et cetera. You can take that and use it. And you can still think about, well, what might mastery look like? But if it's not relevant to your product, just pick the parts that are, is what I would recommend. There is one back there. Hi, Mimi, also really enjoyed your presentation. So I have a few questions. I'm guessing, listening to the story for how the Happify experience went for the founder. I'm just trying to figure out, number one, if you are either you're an entrepreneur in a large company or you are a starter corner, how do you take people on a journey along where you let them get over that fear of, not going after the tab, but after going after some of these, you know, without getting them to fail and through this whole process, that's one. And the sort of second question that I have is, how do you identify, if you have sort of two potential, earlier or after, how do you choose between the two? Because what's the silver bullet that makes me realize that this is the second that I should go after? That's a great, let me start with the second question. I couldn't quite understand your first one. So let me start with the second. That's a great question, this comes up all the time. And it doesn't just come up once. After you've launched, it comes up again because you may have clusters and you really can't please them both. So the way that you can figure it out is, there's a couple of ways. Sometimes it's the process, a lot of times, honestly, it's the process of elimination. On HAPPify, we had three hypotheses. Hard driving entrepreneurs like the founders, that was our first hypothesis. We tested them and we found, for a lot of them, they felt like they didn't have time. Like they were too busy for it, we heard that a lot. It wasn't a must-have, it was a nice to have. So we got rid of them. We also got really excited about people that had recently been diagnosed with depression and had been prescribed drugs that didn't want to take the drugs. And we decided not to pursue those people, honestly, because our funder was scared of the liability issues and said, I'm not gonna fund you if you focus on them. So boom, they went out. And so we were left with this other one. But Kara had the same, that's one example. So sometimes it's a process of elimination. You do the research, you figure it out, et cetera. Kara Meverden, she had, who did subcasts, she had several ideas for her early adopters. She first thought it was gonna be actually stay-at-home moms and she tested them and it wasn't. And then she used the techniques that are laid out in detail in the game thinking book and she found that there was a group of people that had long commutes that really had, didn't wanna, and liked podcasts, they didn't like music, they liked listening to spoken word. And they had issues with changing podcasts in the car. And so those people had an urgent need that she and her team could fill. So she went for that for beta and we focused on them and that was great. But then once it launched, what happened was Kara had these two clusters of customers and she couldn't decide which to focus on that were both avidly using her product. One was older people, a lot of them were recent retirees and they weren't that familiar with podcasts but they wanted to get into it. And subcast had made finding and listening to podcasts dramatically easier. The other group that was really interesting was people that work for delivery apps like DoorDash. And there's, I don't know about India but this is a huge thing in the US, all these delivery apps. And there were all these people who were in their car but not for long commutes. They were going from place to place with their delivery apps. And they were really into it too. So we sat down and we're like, which should we focus on? We ended up focusing on the people with the delivery apps for three reasons. One, we felt like it was a growing market that we could really address that were very familiar and tech savvy and that they could kind of grow with us. The retirees, a lot of them really struggled with tech and although our app was very easy to use, the team felt like that would be a harder market to reach. We also had ways of reaching the people with the delivery apps through ads, through direct outreach and through partnerships. So sometimes the process of elimination comes to distribution. And we had real distribution questions about the older retirees. We weren't sure how to reach them. We actually did a little bit of research and found that it was actually gonna be even harder than we thought. The third reason was just the team's empathy. This is a team of young engineers and product managers and they just weren't that interested in the retirees. They didn't have a feeling for the market. And one of the things you probably know already but it's really true is usually what makes you wanna stick around as an entrepreneur and go through all the pain and blood, sweat, and tears of actually building something because it takes a while. You really have to have a feel for the market and care about the market and care about your customers. And the more you have that, the better your odds of success tend to be. So when we realized that the team, they just didn't care about the retirees so much along with the distribution and other challenges, we ended up focusing on this younger audience which was hard. But so usually just doing that analysis and really thinking about it from multiple angles, business angles, distribution, as well as design and then also just where your passion is can help you make those decisions. Oh. My first question, so I guess my first question is how do you stop people from just thinking about the time and the size of the market as opposed to going after what you think can be influencers or the people who are super fans? Because a lot of, whether you're going after VCs or you're looking at your leaders based in Silicon Valley or some other place, they all want to see an ROI number. Right, so part of my effort to convince people is writing this book. And what I'm seeing is more and more VCs are kind of getting it. Many VCs send me clients now and they say, help, they've raised money, we gave them some money, we understand their total address market but we also understand diffusion of innovation theory. We also understand that you have to get that early slice so please help this team do that. So the way that I convince the people I work with is partly by showing them some of the background like what I showed you with that innovation diffusion curve and explain it and telling the kind of stories. But here's the reality, even so, many people are just gonna ignore it. And so at that point there's really nothing I can do. But so I really tried to do education and communicate not just with my opinion but with hard data. Because a lot of times data will speak much louder than opinion. And so I've seen a lot of people be doubtful and then when they see a presentation like this and they see quotes from Paul Buckeye from Y Combinator and there's a great quote that's very, very similar from Aaron Chesky who runs Airbnb. So at that combination of success markers, people that have managed to cross the chasm and starting to see how many of them started with this very narrow market, I found that that can start to open up those closed minds. But it's still an uphill battle. All right, thanks a lot Amy, that was awesome. Thank you very much. Thank you.