 It's so great to be here. This is my first time in India, and I'm really thrilled to share what I've learned in my 20-odd years of doing software and game development with all of you. So today, I'm going to tell you about how to build your product better and faster with game thinking. I'm really glad that you're here today. It means a lot to me. And in the next 45 minutes or so, you're going to learn some things that you can take and apply to your product immediately that will dramatically increase your ability to find product market fit. So I'd like to know if you can relate to any of this. Do you ever feel like you'd like to accelerate your early design process on what you're working on? Do you ever find that you get a lot of feedback from different people, from your stakeholders, from potential users, from your team, perhaps from funders? And you're not really sure how to filter and apply it. You've got it, but it's a struggle to know, well, what do I do with that feedback? Have you ever set out to make an MVP or minimum viable product and then struggle to turn your big, compelling, engaging idea into something simple and stripped down and really low fidelity? If you've ever struggled with any of these issues, this talk is for you. Raise your hands. Have any of you struggled with these issues? I have big time. I've messed up a lot. One of the great things about Silicon Valley, where I'm from, is that we're really encouraged to make mistakes and then reflect on them and learn from them. And that's what I'm going to do here today. So I think I know why we're all here, which is we want to build products that people love and need and use that are successful. We don't want to spin our wheels like these rats and build something that doesn't make any sense. So you're going to learn actionable techniques to build a better product in less time with game thinking. I'm Amy Jo Kamp. I am a social game designer, an entrepreneur, and a startup coach. I have worked on some of the most popular games and products of all time. I was on the early design team that created the Sims, Rock Band, Covet Fashion, eBay, Netflix. I've also worked with multinational creative companies like Disney, Electronic Arts, and the New York Times to build key internal products. So I've had quite a bit of experience with big hits. I've also had a lot of experience with products I'm not telling you about today because they went sideways or they didn't work out so well, or they turned into something nobody intended. I'd like to tell you a little bit about my journey getting here, and hopefully you can relate it to your own journey toward creating great software. When I was a little kid, the thing I liked most of all was music. I used to listen to Beatles songs on the car radio when I was a little kid, and come back and pick out the tunes on the piano. My parents said, wow, you're telling them, we should get you some lessons. So they did. And I loved music so much. I played for years and got very good. So then they started sending me to competitions, regional competitions. And I did well, but I absolutely hated it. It destroyed my love of music. I didn't want the people that were my friends in piano lessons suddenly become my enemies. So for 10 years, I stopped playing music entirely. Perhaps you've had that experience where there was something you really loved and you just took it out of your life. And then years later, after college, I was backpacking through Europe and I was on a beach in Greece. And there were some people around a campfire and they couldn't speak my language. I couldn't speak theirs. But one of them had a guitar and I knew how to play some Beatles songs. So we sat around a campfire all night long and we sang Beatles songs together, even though we couldn't speak the same language. And that for me was a revelation, a pivotal experience. I found my creativity was ignited and I could find another way to play music that wasn't competitive. I started playing in bands and I've been playing in bands ever since. I also developed my cooperative design skills, working on products like The Sims, Ultima Online, one of the very early MMOs and eBay. I even wrote a book about it called Community Building on the Web that's still popular even 16 years after it was published. But I also found that it was a struggle because the lessons I was learning, which I had really developed working with these great people on these products, many of my clients were struggling to apply and I was seeking better ways to teach them how to build better, faster, more successful innovative products. And then one day I got the call. This gentleman here is Alex Rogopoulos and he's the CEO of Harmonix. Have any of you ever heard of a little game called Rock Band? Rock Band is one of the most popular music action games ever and Harmonix makes these awesome music games. Alex Rogopoulos came out to my house in Half Moon Bay, California, right in your Silicon Valley and he told me, we'd like you to come, be the lead designer on a music game and we're gonna take people with no musical talent at all and they're gonna play plastic instruments and feel like they're in a band. I said, really, that's what you're gonna do? He goes, yep, that's what we're gonna do. And it turned out that's exactly what we did do. We created a breakthrough hit. Rock Band, for a while, was one of the most popular games. It made millions and millions of dollars for Harmonix and for MTV, its parent company. And that game taught me what it's like to work with a team of crack, excellent, and experienced game designers and developers when they're very unsure of what they're doing. How they approach that game informed how I approach working with all my clients to help them build breakthrough hits just like we did on Rock Band. Since then, I've had some more great success. I worked on Lulosity, a brain games title. I worked on Happa File, I'll tell you more about that later, that's taking the science of happiness and turning it into a digital and mobile product. I worked on Covet Fashion, a breakthrough hit for CrowdStar on mobile that three years after shipping still has three million monthly active players and a healthy revenue stream. And I started to really dig into what is it that makes a breakthrough hit that lasts a long time, that drives long-term engagement. I came to understand that there were certain key elements particularly around skill building that went into what I call game thinking. Game thinking is a technique or a set of techniques for building faster, smarter products using the knowledge and approach that the greatest game designers use, but it applies to any product or app that you're building. And I'm gonna show you some of the secrets of how you do that today. We're gonna talk about four strategies for building better, faster products. There's a lot more to game thinking than this, but this is your starting point, this is your entry into the techniques and tools of game thinking. First, is to design your experience over time. Steve Jobs famously said design is not just what it looks and feels like, design is how it works. And that's probably the most important insight about really good design, the visual design, the prettiness of it is completely irrelevant. You don't have something that works well. And one of the big secrets of how game designers drive long-term engagement that all of you can use is to really think about your customer's experience over time, don't design pages, design an experience that evolves over time. So if you're asking yourself, what does my customer's end-to-end experience look like and how does it evolve? It's very useful to model that with four key stages. Let me break this down for you. The first one is discovery. That's for visitors, somebody who hasn't yet purchased or made any kind of commitment to your product. They're in the discovery phase. The key question on that person's mind is, is this right for me? Is this product for me? What you wanna do is let them know whether it is or not through your communications. The next phase is onboarding. Many of you are probably familiar with onboarding. That's where you're learning the ropes. Your customer who's using your product, your app, your service, even a device is learning how to use it. And their question that's on their mind at that point is, how do I start getting value out of this? How long is it gonna take? What do I need to do to ramp up and get going with this? That's what onboarding is all about. Habit building is the next phase. Think of habit building as the day 21ing. When that happens really depends on the complexity of your product. But habit building is fundamentally different than onboarding. Habit building is all about the customer's mind thinking, what is it that's pulling me back? Why should I wanna bother using this on day 21, on day 60, on day 90? What is the thing I'm getting better at? That's a key idea. We'll come back to that in a moment. And mastery, this is the last phase. Most people that don't design games never consider mastery in skill building. But it turns out that whether or not you fully implement a mastery level or a mastery experience, heading toward mastery with your game will help you drive long-term engagement. This is mastery is achieved by maybe two to 5% of your customers who go deep. They master your system, they love what you're doing. They want more. The key question in their mind is, how can I leverage the skills, the knowledge, the relationships I've built up by using this software? How can I leverage that to do something unique, something more satisfying, something a little bit of different? Four stages to think about that will help you create a product people love and then come back to again and again. How many of you have heard of Slack? Okay, how many of you use Slack? Okay, so those of you who are familiar, Slack is an enterprise communication and team collaboration tool that's just swept the world. It's incredibly popular. And I'm gonna break down what the end-to-end experience looks like in Slack to help you imagine how you can look in your product. Discovery, that's where you're just finding out if it's for you. In Slack, discovery in general comes from France. It's social discovery. Your friends say, oh, there's this cool tool. Your teammates say, you gotta come in and use that. Before Slack, most enterprise collaboration tools came in through the IT department. You were assigned it and they set you up. Slack is fundamentally different. And one of the things that makes Slack game-like, not gamified, but game-like is that discovery is very social and comes through friends pulling you in. That, by the way, is similar to how most games work. The onboarding in Slack, for those of you who use consoles, start by giving you a learning level or a training level where you're interacting with bots, even if they're multiplayer. It's a key thing to understand. If you're building a multiplayer environment, any kind of social environment or social app, your onboarding doesn't have to be multiplayer. Game designers have to create a single-player experience through the learning part of onboarding where you're interacting with a bot. It's much more forgiving and much less embarrassing than making your first mistakes in front of all your teammates. It's part of why Slack created a bot-like onboarding and you can use this idea too. Now, habit building, that day 21 experience for Slack, that's when you know the ropes and you're using it. Habit building for people that want to get better at Slack is all about customization. You can learn how to use emojis. You can learn how to program your bot or tweak your onboarding bot. And you can even do integrations with all kinds of different products. So the core of what makes Slack interesting over time is actually that you can customize it over time to be just how you like it. And mastery continues this theme of customization. Once you've mastered the basics of Slack, you might want to launch your own channel. You might want to program a bot or even integrate your app and put it into the Slack universe so other people can use. Slack evolves in this way to match skill level, not through any kind of fancy AI, but through having a structured experience that evolves over time to get more interesting and give you more functionality when you're ready for it. Not all at once. Second principle is to find the fun in your core loop. I'm going to break all that down, but I want to start you off with a quote from Raph Koster, who's a well-known game designer. I've worked with him for years. And he wrote a book called The Theory of Fun, which is really good reading for basic game design ideas. And Raph likes to say that fun is just another word for learning, which is deeply true. Us humans, we love to learn. There's something called self-determination theory that says that the three principles that drive humans are autonomy, mastery, and purpose. So what you need to understand is that fun means really different things to different people. For example, you remember my story about hating competition and loving the team collaboration of playing in a band. That's very much how I am. I love collaboration. The games I love to play are collaborative or team games, but many people love competition. And some people, like other forms of exploration or self-expression, fun means different things to different people. And your job as a product designer, product developer, is to figure out what it means for your customers and deliver that. So let's talk a little bit about what is a game. This is Game Theory 101, and I'm gonna make this really simple. When I started in game design, this was the definition that was in a book that I was using, because I was new to game design. And this definition talks about artificial conflicts and a quantifiable outcome. Seems like a good definition. Turns out this definition is describing zero-sum games. There are two kinds of games in game theory, zero-sum and non-zero-sum. Zero-sum games are games where there is a limited resource that's gonna be divided up among the winners. If I win, you lose. We are framed as opponents. The more people that play a zero-sum game, the less chance everybody has of winning. Pretty straightforward. So for instance, any head-to-head battle, any rank-ordered competition from the Olympics to a leaderboard on your website, all war simulations, chess, polo, go, all of those games, and most gambling games are all zero-sum games. Very popular the world was. However, I found that when I was working in game design, the biggest hits that I worked on, the breakthrough hits, were not zero-sum games. They were something else, some other animal. And I tried to figure it out. And I came up with this definition, a structured experience with rules and goals that's fun to play together. There's that word fun. Turns out this is a pretty good definition of a non-zero-sum game. The key difference is that in a non-zero-sum game, we are not framed as opponents. We are partners, and we win together or lose together. So girls playing double dutch, which is a schoolyard game, unless they decide to make a competition or playing a non-zero-sum game, a structured experience with rules and goals that's fun to play together. In Pictionary or any team-based game, the teams are playing non-zero-sum. They're playing together. They win together and lose together. But the overall structure is zero-sum because teams are playing against each other. It's part of why team competitions are so darn compelling. They have both elements. Martial arts, as it's practiced in the US, very much non-zero-sum, we all win together. And probably the best example for you to remember what this is, is a charity walk or a Kickstarter campaign. How many of you have ever been on Kickstarter? Maybe contributed to a campaign. Kickstarter is a crowd-funding site. So a charity walk is a great example because the more people contribute and the more people play, the better everybody does together because the goal is to raise money collectively. So that's fundamentally different than a zero-sum game. So ask yourself, what kind of fun are my customers looking for? Do my customers, when they engage with each other, do they want to be partners together? Do they want to win together? Or do they want the friendly competition of zero-sum? Do they want to be opponents? So that's all about finding the fun. Now let's talk about a core loop. Dan Cook is a very well-known game designer who specializes in co-op. He likes to say, in a loop, you're learning a scale and updating your mental model. That's what leads the player to life. This is a fundamental idea for you. So if you have, yes, perhaps if you have heard of a habit loop, there's a New York Times bestseller book called Building Habits. There's also a book called Hook by Muriel. These both express the same core loop, which is here, which is an operant conditioning loop. Now my undergraduate degree was in behavioral psych, so I know this stuff inside and out. An operant conditioning is part of psychology that says you can shape behavior if you take what are meaningless actions that people take and reward them in a way that makes them unconsciously want to do those actions more. That's the idea behind operant conditioning, and many, many apps and app developers embrace this, because it seems like magic. People that learn about operant conditioning, it's also called a Skinner Box, because BF Skinner is the father of operant conditioning. How many of you ever played Zynga games, like Farmville or any of that? So those were games that were popular in 2009, 2010. They swept the internet, they made 80 million people were playing, Zynga was the hottest company ever. But all those games stopped being interesting after about a month, maybe six weeks. They had a dramatic drop-off of people playing. This is exactly what happens when you embrace Skinner Box mechanics of operant conditioning can shape behavior in the short term, absolutely. But you never can drive long-term engagement. Skinner Boxes are manipulative and they backfire consistently again and again and again. So if you're trying to create a SaaS product or any kind of app or product where you want people to stick around for longer than a few weeks, this is not gonna get you. To get long-term engagement, secret sauce is skill-building. What you need to do is think about how you can make your customers more awesome, better than they were before, more who they want to be through using your product. That is what drives long-term engagement. Also what leads to player delight going back to Dan Cook's company. So I've got a model called the Core Loop. Those of you who will be coming to my workshop tomorrow, we're gonna go deep into this and create Core Loops for all your products. The Core Loop is fundamentally a skill-building habit loop. It takes some of what makes a habit loop compelling but infuses it with skill-building. You can think of it as modeling your day 21 experience. Once someone's learned the row, what's gonna pull them back? And what's the feedback system that helps them get better at something as you all know? You can't get better at something without feedback to let you know if you're on the right track. So let me talk about Rock Band. Earlier I told you that was a breakthrough experience for me in my career. So I was very frustrated with Rock Band because for the first six months, all we did on that game was work on the Core Loop. We were in a room in the middle of harmonics with paper on the windows because it was a secret project. And we were just working on playing a song, making it better and getting the feedback systems right. I was a much less experienced game designer and I wanted to build the progression systems and the levels and talk about where the mastery would go because I was excited about that. My much more experienced colleague said, no, unless we get this Core Loop right, unless this really works well and people love it, none of the rest of that stuff matters because without a strong Core Loop, all the beautiful game mechanics in the world won't drive any kind of long-term engagement. They are the icing on the cake. The cake is the fundamental core product experience. And so that really shook my world and watching Rock Band turn into a worldwide hit and go from people ridiculing us saying, you guys are crazy. Nobody's gonna buy that. You think you're gonna get people without musical talent to feel like they're in a band with plastic instruments? You guys are crazy. But it turned out we weren't crazy and it turned out my colleagues taught me something fundamental that I'm now teaching you. This is a picture of the Core Loop in Rock Band. So there's four key elements. There's a trigger and there's many kinds of triggers. We'll go into that in a moment. The trigger for Rock Band is party time. Hey, people are coming over. We wanna have a multiplayer experience. What can we do that's fun? We can play Rock Band. The key engaging activity is playing a song together. The feedback is getting your score, any kind of accolades and finding out how you did in that song. Whether you sang on key, whether you played on the right beat and you've investment path. The key part of the Core Loop is to be able to get better, play harder songs and then play bigger venues. It's very simple. You'll also see here something called the engage trigger. That's a special kind of trigger. Remember I showed you that design over time there's onboarding habit building masters. There's certain triggers that even newbies, like playing party time, let's play a song, that might be the trigger for a newbie. But for somebody who's invested, the engage trigger is the thing that brings someone who's on day 21 or day 30 or day 60 back. For many people playing Rock Band, they'd wanna beat the song, beat it on, beginner level, intermediate and advanced. And that became the phone kind of challenger loop. So now let's talk about Slack. Finding the funding to team collaboration tool. A lot of people don't understand why Slack is so popular. Slack actually was an in-house tool that was built together very simply for a group of people who are making a collaborative multiplayer game. So they had three years to refine that Core Loop before they turned Slack into a problem. Here's Slack's Core Loop. It's very simple. It's somewhat similar to say Twitter or Facebook. The internal trigger is you wanna know what's going on with your team so you check updates. The core activity is reading and responding to updates, engaging with your team. And then the feedback is very, very simple. No more updates. I've gotten caught up. The investment path, as I mentioned earlier, is continuing to customize Slack and learn how to customize it, learn how to use it in a more sophisticated way. There's the engaging activity. Here's the feedback and progress. Let's show you going around the loop. And there's the investment in triggers. Now, with Slack, that I mentioned the Engaged Trigger with Ron Payette. For a newbie with Slack, they're just getting started. They're getting into there. They're learning how the channel works. But someone who's used to it, the notifications is their Engaged Trigger. Looking at how many things do I need to check up on? Or maybe you just customize your triggers and you say, I just wanna know when my boss messages me, nobody else. Or when, in my case, when my podcast editor messages me that he's finished one of my podcasts and I can now check it. That would be something that I've configured in Slack. So again, that comes back to that theme of customization. It's the backbone that makes Slack hang together as a coherent experience. So remember, skill building is the thing that makes customers more awesome, better than they were before. And a core loop is a technique for making your customers more skillful. So if you want to drive long-term engagement, start with a skill building core loop. In a moment, I'll show you how to do that with your road. Third, this is somewhat surprising to some people. You wanna connect early with your super fans. That's shorthand for passionate, high-value, early customers. Paul Buckeye is now running Y Combinator. He was an early employee at Google. He invented Gmail, perhaps a few of you have used Gmail. And he's a very, very experienced guy. He likes to say, create something just a few people love even if most people don't get it right away. If you are innovating, if you are creating something that you think is innovative, this is exactly what you should do. Problem is, often there's a lot of people around saying, what's your addressable market? Who do you wanna reach eventually? You should target those people. Nothing could be further from the truth. And the people that really know startups know this. How many of you have ever heard of Crossing the Chasm? Great. This was a book written in 1991 by Jeffrey Morris, and this book is about his journey working with Apple, taking Apple from a hobbyist machine that just hobbyists were using and putting together themselves into a mass market success. He called that journey Crossing the Chasm. You're going from the early adopters to the early majority and then onward. It turns out that this book was based on a theory that was done 30 years earlier in AT&T Bell Labs by a guy named Everett Rogers. In 1961, he published Innovation Diffusion Theory. This was completely data-driven. This guy had no agenda. He didn't even have knowledge of how innovation worked, but he gathered data on successful innovations. Remember earlier I told you I've worked on some tremendously successful innovation and also on a lot of death? That's not true. Turns out successful innovations all follow the same pattern. They start by capturing innovators who are usually collaborators or colleagues, people that are just really into it because it's innovated. Then you capture early adopters. The key thing about early adopters is they're not generic early adopters for every product. They're early adopters for your specific product. And the way you can find them is they need what you're doing more than the average day. They will say things like, wow, I've been looking for something like that. Wow, something like that could really solve X problem like that. And if you don't capture your early adopters and delight your early adopters first before you move on to the majority, you will fail. It's common, it's based on data, and I've seen it personally with my own clients. So if you want to cross that cat's up and you want to succeed with your innovative product, make sure you start by finding and delighting just a few passionate early customers. This is Will Wright. He created The Sims, SimCity, this whole line of great games. I've worked with him on a number of games. And he was a master at doing this. When I first started working with Will, he had a mailing list that was his super fans, people from earlier games like SimEarth that just loved what he was doing. And he would call on them and bring them in and test out early ideas. When he started on The Sims, there were probably 20 different little prototypes, what it could be. And he would test these prototypes along with us on these super fans, these early passionate customers. And again, I was much younger than and less experienced. And I said, why are you doing that? Those aren't our eventual customers. Why are you doing this? And he said, because these are the people that are gonna help me bring these ideas to life. Yes, they're not mass market fans we're going after, but these are my collaborators. You have to understand, Amy Jo, these are the people you need these people to help bring your game, your idea, your app to life. And he was absolutely right. So, you want to do this and you're struggling. Think about, how can I solve a real problem for a very small group that needs it? Don't think so much about the mass market that you're innovating. Really think about that. I mentioned Slack earlier. It came to life as a collaboration tool for a distributed team. Some of them were in Vancouver, some were in San Francisco, and some were elsewhere. And they didn't do fancy onboarding. They didn't do anything fancy. They just threw together Slack so they could get their work done. A real problem for a small group of people doing something innovative. So, if you want to accelerate innovation, find and leverage your super fans first or you go after the mass market. Now, the next one is to build your roadmap with game thinking. I love this quote from Frank Lloyd Wright. You can use an eraser on the drafting table or a sledgehammer on the construction site. All of us want to do work on the drafting table. We don't want to build something, put it out there and then go, oops, we want to figure it out earlier. That's what this is all about. So here's the game thinking roadmap. This is the result of 20 years of trial and error and experimenting it. All of you, by the way, you're gonna get these slides. So let me break this down for you a little bit. Across the top you see those four stages that I let you know about. Discovery, onboarding, habit building, and mastery. And then down side you see your MVP, your beta, your launch, and your expansion. So a big mistake a lot of people make, I've made this mistake a ton of times, is early on for their MVP they work on the onboarding or they work on something else rather than their core loop. Thing you need to start with is your core loop. You can be the onboarding, you can have super simple onboarding. But you gotta start with that core loop because nothing else matters if that doesn't work. That's your core value that you hear it in your product. Now as you move toward data, through alpha and data, you're gonna wanna develop your onboarding more while continuing to expand and develop your core loop. And when you get toward launch, you're gonna need to really work on discovery, on bringing people in at that top of the funnel. And through expansion, you're gonna continue to develop all the stages, particularly mastery. You don't need to work on your mastery right at the beginning because your best customers, those super fans, they're gonna actually give you a lot of clues that are gonna help you know what your mastery should be. But the biggest mistake that I've seen people make that causes them to fail, to go sideways, to go out of business is not following this. What you see here on this chart, every single hit, big hit, great through hit I've ever worked on, followed this. At first I didn't realize what they were doing and I fought it. Now I teach it because it's so reliably powerful. So what you're wanting to do here, the punchline is you wanna test your highest risk assumptions early. And if your highest risk assumption is will people like this product? Will they get the core value out of it? You need to figure out a way to test that. And then you're gonna want to co-create your mastery systems with your super fans and enthusiasts. I'm gonna give you an example of how that works in just a moment. Let me tell you about Happify. Happify is a mobile and web app that has become the absolute leader in its area, which is the science of happiness. Turns out now there's 10 or 15 apps, all of which have funding that are trying to make people happier, trying to take the last 30 years of research science and turn it into a digital product. Happify is far and away the market leader. So I worked with them bringing their product to life from when it was two ideas with a paragraph on a piece of paper, two guys with ideas and a piece of paper into a shipped product. Let me take you through it. The challenge that the team had was to build a prototype, find their early customers because they didn't know who they were and actually prove out their business model. For the Happify team, whether people would pay for this turned out to be one of the key high-risk assumptions we needed to test. So that was the challenge that they came to me with. We set out to find some shortcuts to help them build this quickly. We started by really clarifying the product strategy. And I'll show you, those of you who are coming to my workshop, I'll show you all about how to do that. And then we worked on finding the passionate early customers and prototyping out our core loop, all of which was challenging to the team because they hadn't done it that way before. We tried out several different hypotheses for who the early customers were. Let me give you an example. We thought, well, maybe the early customers would be people with mild clinical depression. Or maybe they'll be stay-at-home moms who used to work and are kind of bummed out because they don't have their identity anymore. Or maybe it'll be really hard-driving professional men like the people on the team who are really struggling with work-life balance. And we tested our ideas very quickly before we built the thing on all of those groups. And we found out that, one, there were liability issues with the people with clinical depression that made us stay away from that. We learned that quickly. And we also found out that the moms, the stay-at-home moms, were the people that most wanted it and most needed it when we did that early testing. They all wanted it on mobile. So we switched. And we changed Happify to work primarily on mobile. The team came from gaming and they had wanted it to kind of look like a tower defense game. They had this idea that it would be game-like and look like a game. We found out that the moms that we were targeting were much more interested in something that looked like Pinterest than a game. So we switched the UI, we switched the focus, we switched the metaphor, and we found ourselves a hit. The results was that we rapidly iterated the product using these customer insights once we found the super things. And within a year, Happify had launched, gotten their mobile out there, app out there, and turned into the market leader, which they still are today. So can you imagine getting those kind of results on your product? Just take a moment and think, what if you could design your product to evolve over time? And then you could quickly find the fun in your core loop and find a way to connect with your super fans, the right ones, the ones who are gonna help you bring your product alive. And then create a roadmap that would guide you and your team so you would waste less time and stay laser focused on what you should be doing at each stage. That's what game thinking can do. It can accelerate your early product development dramatically. I've seen this again and again. It can help you find exactly the right customers to talk to. Turns out, if you have the right customers, you only need about five, test your game. And one of the biggest time wasters is getting input from all the wrong people. Game thinking shows you how to avoid this. You could turn your insights into a simple yet compelling MVP built around your core loop that tests exactly the right features, even in very rough form. How much time would that save? What if you could do all of that in just a few weeks? Imagine how much time and money you would save and how much closer you would get knowing if your product had product market good. That's what we do. If you are interested in this and you'd like to know more about how to do it specifically, one, please come to the workshop tomorrow. It's gonna be amazing. And two, go to gettingtoalpha.com slash masterclass. We offer an online masterclass that takes you step by step with powerful templates and time-saving shortcuts through this process. So thank you so much for listening. In a moment, I'd like to take any of your questions, but I'd really like you to stay in touch with me. Let me know what you think about this. Let me know if you have questions. Let me know if you disagree with anything or wonder where it came from. Can you send me email? Follow me on Twitter here or go to AmyJokeHim.com to read my blog and sign up to get regular posts. Thank you so much for your time listening and I hope these ideas have showed you how to supercharge product market fit with game thinking. Thanks. Questions, these are ideas. Can you share your experience with limosity? Can you share about your experience with limosity? Sure, let me ask you what, are you familiar with limosity? Yes. Limosity, for those of you who don't know, is a suite of brain training tools. And limosity actually bought a startup that I was working on, a seed-funded early-stage startup. And what I did with limosity was I redesigned their onboarding. So limosity was run by, actually it's run by the CEO is an Indian gentleman, Kunal Sakhurd, really a guy. And when I started working with them, their onboarding was, they had a successful product, they were actually the market readers. But their onboarding, a lot of people were dropping off during onboarding. So although I emphasized how important the core loop is to all of you, and it is important, limosity already had their core loop. It was in place and it was working. But what they had was a very, very weakly funnel at the front end. So what we did was redesign their onboarding to be several phases. One phase was a phase where we were giving you a lot of tips and ideas about brain health that would make you feel, even if you never use the lock to begin, that make you feel like you would learn something. Remember I said, skill building is the key to engagement? So the first thing we did was put some skill building into the onboarding. The second thing we did was created a quiz at the front end of onboarding. And I believe that a version of that quiz is still with Velocity today. So you guys could go and check this out on your own. Just go to Velocity.com and sign up as a newbie. And the quiz is really interesting because it asks you all these questions about your life and your brain health. It's in the language that sounds medical. It's as if you're talking to a friendly doctor. So you know how I talked about the slack bot being the onboarding for slack? The slack bot has a casual, somewhat irreverent tone, which is very intentional. And the tone of your copy editing is key to how people experience your app. In Lumosity, the tone that the team wanted was medical. They wanted the whole thing to feel very medical. So we designed that onboarding around, okay, what if you were in your doctor's office with a super friendly, like best doctor in the world and he was just talking to you. That was the feeling we wanted the onboarding to have. So we created that. I have to also admit that I was frustrated with Lumosity because after we had, they were very happy with the onboarding design. They were happy. But Lumosity does not have a lot of the elements that I would add for long-term engagement. And in fact, they do have some drop-off. But at that time, they weren't really interested in adding those longer-term elements. So I was unable to get that done. Was there something else you wanted to know or did that answer your question? Pardon? So for me, Lumosity was a really interesting experience because it made me realize that you can focus on one stage of this whole experience, what I call the player journey or the customer journey. But if you really want to create a great product, you want to have a coherent through line in all those stages. And I really encourage each of you, no matter if you ever interact with me again, just sketch out at each stage, just sketch out from the customer's point of view your product experience at those stages and see if it's coherent. The reason I mentioned this with Lumosity is that the onboarding was a great experience, but then the habit building was a somewhat different experience. So I really wanted to weave those together and make them more coherent. And I think over time they did more of that. But it's something that if you start doing that early, it can save you tons of time. Any more questions? Oh, sure. So remember when I talked about Slack and how customization is present throughout Slack? You can do little bits of customization as a customer. You can customize your experience. You can start using emojis. You can customize your user profile. And then you can also go deeper in customization and you can integrate your app. Create a new channel and you can write a box. That's all deeper customization. But the customization is a through line in the same sense that in a narrative, in a great movie, in a great script, there's a through line. And you see foreshadowing of things during onboarding that then you experience during your core loop. That's what I mean by coherent. Coherent in the sense of the narrative. And Slack is a very coherent experience. Another great example of a really, really coherent experience is a language learning app. I'm blocking on the name of it. Duolingo, thank you, thank you. Oh, thank you, brilliant people. Duolingo is an awesome language learning app created by Louis von Arn, who's just an absolutely brilliant game designer out of Carnegie Mellon. And if you look at just the onboarding of Duolingo, you'll see that it tells you what the Duolingo is all about. Just a few screens. And then if you start with using Duolingo, everything you heard about non-boarding you start to experience. That's what I mean by coherent. It hangs together. I bet all of you have experienced some app that you get started with it with the onboarding. And then when you get to day 21, it's kind of a different experience. It's something different. That's not coherent. So you want to, that's why I emphasize start with the core loop. Because if you start with the core loop and then design your product from the inside out, you're much more likely to have a coherent experience. So think about how you can foreshadow, hint at what's coming during your onboarding and set people up so that what they expect is exactly what you deliver. Other questions? So you talked about designing the core loop. And in your experience, does most apps, most applications out there have one single core loop or they have multiple core loops, one for each type of user? That's a great question. Well, first of all, be careful about user types. I think a lot of apps and a lot of people like to talk about different types of users. I've actually found it much more useful to talk about different play styles or different, I use job stories, which is part of the jobs to be done framework. I didn't talk about that today. We're gonna go deep into that in our workshop. So it's, if you think about psychographics versus demographics, meaning what is someone trying to accomplish? Tend to be able to get closer to what you're trying to do. But given that, let's say that there's several different ones. Yes, you can model in practice. Let me talk about in practice. In practice, there's usually more than one core loop and there might be different ones for different people in an ecosystem. Let's say you're building some sort of marketplace where there's producers and consumers or say mentors and mentees. I have a client right now building a mentoring system. So the mentors have one core loop, is what you're asking. And the mentees have another. And it turns out there's also stakeholders who are administrators. This is a college app, higher education. And they have a different core loop. The other thing is in most games for more sophisticated apps, the core loop is much more sophisticated than what I showed you, the model I showed you. The model I showed you is a stripped down, simple system. These simple as possible system you can build and engaging activity and some feedback. That's the really heart of it. And one of the things that's important to understand is that we are moving for a world of systems, not static web pages, not just apps, but systems. And anything that we're doing that's really interesting is fundamentally a system. Being able to think about and model and understand and most importantly, we can iterate. The core systems in your app is completely fundamental. So in reality, you start with a super simple core loop because every complex system starts as a simple system that works and then develops, right? You know that. So you start by modeling the simplest system there is and then developing from there. Most games don't just have one activity and the engaging activity. They have what's called an activity chain or maybe a mini loop within it. That's fine as long as you start with a simple loop, always expand it further. And if you're struggling, if you're taking these ideas which I really hope you do and trying them and you've got multiple players or multiple types of people in your app, go ahead and do it nourishes suggesting. That say, okay, well what's the core experience, the core loop for this person, that person and the other. Just doing that exercise will really help you identify the key underlying systems you need to build to create an app that drives long-term engagement. Thank you. I think the thing that makes it challenging is when you start, you think this is your core players and you design a core loop for them. But as the system evolves, you have new players, new kinds of players and they might have different core loops that might conflict with the existing core loops. Like just to give an example, in Confengine, when we started, the focus was primarily conference organizers and speakers. And as we evolved, we added attendees, sponsors, and so each one has certain core loop that might conflict with each other. That's right, well that's a great point. So the really simple answer is the game thinking word now. So a lot of people get confused about who to target and they say, well, but if I target my early adopters early on like you're suggesting, then aren't I just gonna have a product that only works for them that doesn't work for the majority? How do you get to the majority? How do you cross the chasm? Well, it's actually really simple. People that create breakthrough hits. It's actually not people, it's teams. That create breakthrough hits. Know how to start by designing for the early adopters, the early passionate customers, the super thinkers. And then as they continue, they move on and embrace the layers of people that are further toward the mainstream. So in your example, yeah, you have to start with someone. And you started with conference organizers and speakers who are a different audience. Once you've designed for that, if you then want to embrace others, that becomes your new design challenge. Now, how do you do that? That's part of product development. So some people create an interface where they hide some of the complexity for those people and then unlock it over time. Remember at the very beginning, I said design an experience that evolves over time. What that means is you do not have to show all your customers, all your features right at the beginning. In fact, you probably shouldn't unlock them over time. Let people just have enough to get going and then do something more. You can do this in a lot of different ways. You can have two totally separate interfaces. You can just have people that have used it for a while, have all the complexity and other people have a smaller amount. But just because you're starting with your super fans doesn't mean that you're not also going to embrace those others. It just means that you're going to do it at a later stage of development. Did that answer your question? Yeah, thank you. Okay. Any other questions? Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure. Thank you.