welcome to another episode of growth hacker TV I'm Bronson Taylor and today I have Gabe zickerman with us Gabe thanks so much for being on the program hi thanks for having me absolutely uh now Gabe you're the author of numerous books you're a public speaker uh they can Google you or look at you on YouTube uh you're a conference organizer and each of these roles these mini roles you have they kind of stem from what seems to be your singular passion which is gamification uh tell us what is gamification uh great question so you know gamification is the process of using uh Concepts from games from loyalty programs from behavioral economics to create engagement with users and solve problems and I think if we think of it a different way um it's about taking the best ideas that people have come up with uh and applying those to situations where we need engagement for consumers or we need engagement for employees um you know to get them to be the best version of themselves to do the things that we need and so on yeah absolutely um and I've heard you break it down before where you say it's game thinking and game Dynamics uh used to engage audiences and solve problems talk us through those just a little bit in a little bit more detail what is game thinking and what is game Dynamics we'll start with that sure um so I think taking a step back um people have been gamifying things for literally thousands of years the military is used uh you know War Games as an example of thinking and companies have been using war games and there's been all these different ideas um for how to use gamification over the years what's really happened over the last few years is it's kind of narrow it's sort of solidified around this common concept with the rise of uh video games and Casual games in particular uh social technology the incredible EDD that the whole population seems to have or no you know there's this crazy stack now I I just saw from Nielsen and we talked about it in talk about this kind of stuff a lot is um that 20 of the population checks their smartphone every 15 minutes of the day from the time they wake up to the time they go to bed which is a hundred yeah which is a hundred checks a day which is a lot of interruption you know and what's what increasingly we realize is that in that context it's hard to sustain people's attention start to get and keep their attention and if you don't get or keep their attention they're just not going to do the things that they both need to do and things that you need them to do in order to have a successful startup product business idea workflow whatever the case may be so we need to find a way to kind of cut through that noise and get their attention so in my new book The gamification Revolution we talk a lot about how businesses have employed game Thinking gain mechanics uh behavioral economics loyalty program Design Concepts to get people to be engaged yeah now the um you know because you asked about game Thinking very specifically sometimes the root of a good gamified solution comes not from the deployment of specific game mechanics as much right um you know points and leaderboards and so on as much as it comes from the notion of thinking about things the way a games person would think about them okay and one of my favorite examples of that is this thing called speed camera Lottery where basically uh you know instead of a regular speeding camera you know that takes your ticket takes your picture if you speed and send you ticket in the mail uh the Wii speed camera Lottery works is that anyone who drives by speeding camera at or below the limit gets a lottery ticket and you split the proceeds from the tickets the tickets are pooled as a prize okay um and they tested this out in Sweden and it was very successful at lowered speeding by about 20 percent which makes it the most successful speeding intervention in history but more to the point what's interesting about it it's a good it's a good example of game thinking because it's about looking at something like a speeding camera and saying hey wait a minute it doesn't really behave in the way that we know drives engagement like in a game it doesn't have positive reinforcement it doesn't tell people that they're doing well every day and help them move forward so that's that's an example of game thinking it's thinking like a games person about problems that don't necessarily lend themselves typically to games yeah it's being creative and taking it Beyond just you know a leaderboard like you mentioned um do you think there's really anything that's as effective as gamification to engage audiences and solve problems it seems almost like it's magically effective when it's done well right yeah well you said the important thing though when it's done well I you know like um you know there's a lot of enthusiasm excitement and hype about gamification because partially because people are always looking for the next thing but but also because actually it really works um you know there's this sort of average example of gamification done well raises engagement for companies by about 30 percent uh which is a stunning number already makes it you know probably the most successful uh toolkit um you know that's ever been designed for this but on top of that you know there's examples there's case studies in companies where you know they've raised engagement by 300 percent um you know or more uh by bringing gamification into the equation you know one of my um one of my favorite examples two of my favorite examples we talk about them in the gamification revolution um uh Tabasco Nation the brand Tabasco built a online gamified portal on Facebook where basically every drop of Tabasco sauce that you use is like a point and then you can do these challenges like put the basketball sauce on cake and um uh you know we're eating in a weird place with your friends and then uh you know you can redeem those points for various experiences they actually have doubled their total social media footprint across all metrics by using it doubled wow um and uh the other kind of fun example was the Israeli Defense Force the Israeli Army that uh implemented a thing called IDF ranks and using IDF ranks as people who follow the Israeli armies blog and stuff uh they've increased their uh Facebook mentions by I think 300 percent they've increased over 200 percent uh the number of um people who've tweeted about them and interacted with them online uh so so the so yeah the stats are basically insane like they're insanely good and the key is things have to be designed well in order to be able to accomplish that yeah and it seems like uh all the books we've written have been to really help people do it well um because you know it's easy to throw something together and when I was thinking about how to structure this interview I thought it'd be great to kind of look at each of the books you've written um because they're going to be so relevant to our audience our audience is startups looking to use gamification to engage Their audience solve problems all the things you talk about sure so let's start with the book that's coming out I believe next month is that right gamification Revolution it actually just came out it just came out perfect time yeah so April 2013. yeah there you go perfect um so tell us you entitled it gamification Revolution uh what does that title mean why'd you call it that well you know I I actually I talked about it a little bit today um on my blog at gamification.co um you know many years ago when when the gamification concept wasn't even out yet I was writing my first book game-based marketing the book I actually wanted to pitch the book we we were talking to the Publishers about was this kind of idea of an Omnibus strategy guide so gamification Revolution looks at um you know how companies are using engagement science uh to transform their corporate strategy transform their HR and Enterprise strategy and transform their marketing strategy and basically crush the competition with um with better engagement and and how they do those things in these three kind of categories when we first set out doing the gamification thing in in 2008 I wanted to write a book like this and my first publisher game for game-based marketing wanted a more narrowly focused book um because it was an unproven discussion and Global financial crisis and all this kind of stuff and to be fair um they were probably right about the timing of that uh you know we wouldn't have had as many examples in 2008 and 2009 as we do now um but now this book implication Revolution is full of you know case study After Case Study companies using a gamification in in many different ways and we actually gamified the book itself and have built uh the world's first uh gamified social reading application it goes along with gamification Revolution and you can uh share content with other people unlock a special bonus uh uh content and ideas and gain access to all these resources that support the book really a lot of fun really kind of interesting and a model that sort of readers of the book or viewers of your program can look at to kind of reverse engineer an approach to thinking about gamification so it's learning it supports the ideas of what we talk about yeah and if you can gamify a book I mean you can gamify anything if you can gamify speeding tickets you can gamify anything it seems like Yeah you mentioned the three kind of uh things that this book focuses on let's talk about each of them briefly in a little bit more detail you said gamification as a winning strategy um what do you mean by that well you know uh one of the main sort of things that's happening in the world we talked a little bit about this kind of attention deficit uh problem uh Focus problem with people but also there's this notion of the kind of millennial generation coming online and they need sort of different things and they have different expectations about how the world should behave how rewarding it should be uh how quick feedback should be given to them all this kind of stuff and so there's two different ways to think about gamification in that context so one of them is uh gamification is a tactical solution that we deployed when we need more engagement so we've got a product or service we've got an HR process whenever we need to make it better we can deploy gamification that way the other way to think about it is to say no engagement is actually a strategic function of the organization it is something that a company needs to be able to do at a high level and needs to do it all throughout the organization everyone needs to be thinking about engagement in order to be able to advance whatever it is that we're trying to do as a business yeah so there's a a small but growing group of companies for whom that's true gamifications being thought of as a strategy and also you can build strategies using gamification so War gaming and so on um where you use game Concepts to actually develop the strategy for your business so both sides of that act yeah uh element so at the highest level it becomes a strategy kind of deeply woven into the organization not just a singular tactic like we're going to do this today it's really a high level way of thinking well and and I will say this and we talk about this a lot you know um by 2016 um you know Gartner group says 70 of all the world's biggest companies will be gamifying M2 research says that that'll that will equate to nearly three billion dollars worth of spending in the us alone on gamification products and services not including labor and and we believe that that amounts to about 5 000 new jobs in related to gamification and the main job is every organization needs a chief engagement officer it's somebody who is the expert on how to build and develop engagement with people they are a social scientist they are a builder they are a systems thinker that's what characterizes them um so they're all about absorbing all the latest information and helping propagate that throughout a company that's really the Leading Edge idea um behind the Strategic side of the gamification Revolution yeah what you just defined is that person in the organization it sounds a lot like a growth hacker it seems like a growth hacker should have gamification in their tool set of things they can pull from to really use to build engagement so I think it's great um the second part of your new book is about engaging your team and driving results and when it comes to engaging your team I haven't really heard you talk or write a lot about engaging your team through gamification I hear about how to get users I hear about you know the the strategy but how do you actually use it within your team how does gamification work in that way well I mean it's funny that you say that because you know we spend about half of all of our energy uh in the gamification industry talking about the HR and Enterprise uses of gamification so team oriented um and I will say that at the beginning of this uh this crazy ride building this industry um I I probably wouldn't have predicted that that would be such a big deal um I you know I assumed it was going to be a marketing thing probably like you feel like it's mostly marketing maybe that's just because it's what I'm watching from you yeah yeah and I I think that that's a little bit of like kind of the bias of how you look at the problem because if you were one of the Enterprise companies who participates in our conference G Summit which is coming up in just a couple weeks in San Francisco you know fully half of that content is devoted to HR and Enterprise discussions all of these big Enterprise organizations coming talking about it all the different things that they're doing and and part of the reason for that the reason why it's so important why we cover it um to the extent that we do is that the things that make consumers hard to reach and hard to get and sustain attention from they're the same things that apply to employees it's not like people suddenly when they walk through the door magically they walk through the door of their job suddenly they're no longer like checking their smartphone and they're not like distracted by other stuff I mean you know what's happened in most people's work is you know nothing short of a catastrophe in terms of Engagement and and uh the organization and so companies you know Smart Companies are looking at this and saying wait a minute you know what instead of like hating on Millennials what is it about the millennial generation that's amazing what can we get out of them that's really meaningful yeah instead of looking at employees as being you know these um you know uh like motivated by Money Motivated by fear um you know what is it the underlying Concepts that can be used to help you know Drive their uh Drive their performance Drive their throughput help recruit train uh engage recruit other people um so smart companies that have been leveraging gamification and doing all of those things they've been um cutting the cost of and raising the quality of their employee interactions dramatically and there's some many great examples both in the book and at G Summit yeah absolutely that's one thing I love about all the stuff you've done is you really Champion the Millennials you see the positive and you you learn from them to kind of fold that back into the organization and move forward as a society and I think that's rare there's a lot of people hating on the Millennials right now you know they don't work hard enough they're too distracted whatever fill in the blank but there's something about them we need to learn from so I like that a lot um and then the last section of the book is about connecting and engaging and leveraging your customer base what do you mean by that well this is I think the gamification of the consumer elements that you probably are most focused on and your audience probably thinking about a lot um you know so here we look at a lot of the examples of how companies have used gamification successfully uh to raise their consumer engagement to raise a consumer uh behavior and you know one of the things that I think every growth hacker probably understands intuitively if not process wise but that is core to the gamification ethos is that there's a sort of funnel of behavior and you know people consumers start at a at a level of of disengagement so either zero or a very light level of Engagement and over time if the stars aligned and design the system right you raise their engagement level over time yeah the critical piece and and I I think I hope I'm not speaking out of turn I feel like a lot of um you know what makes growth hacking uh so interesting is um is embodied in the kind of social gaming approach to uh consumer acquisite customer acquisition and retention sort of the Zynga School um of customer management which of course overlaps a lot with gamification yeah so this this idea that you can um that you need to cut through the noise that you need to build a funnel that raises people's engagement gives them the right level of um uh reward incentive and reward all those things are important um but I think the critical difference between the gamified and growth hacker View and what came before it is this idea that um is the idea that people are after something more than just cash and free stuff uh and discounts and giveaways uh that the best deal isn't always the thing that actually drives good long-standing behavior that there's actually many smaller elements of behavior that are actually way more important to the consumer than getting the best deal and it's not to say that people don't care about that uh but one of the things that I've talked about a lot and we talked about in the book is the saps model of rewards stands for status access power and stuff um and it refers to the kind of reward structure of what people want and what consumers want in return for loyalty in return for engagement yeah and one of the things that you notice is it's mostly about non-cash things it's mostly about giving people something that engages them emotionally in a good way and so we talk a lot about how companies have successfully hacked that and brought to the table um you know winning strategies for for sustaining engagement yeah no that's great I mean you think about the the four things you mentioned status access power and stuff only one of them is stuff the other three are very intrinsic values but if you think about how we're all motivated it makes sense I mean we're not always motivated by the best deal if we just watch and reflect on our own behavior we're motivated by things that really fill us internally in ways that we didn't even realize we needed to be filled so I think it makes total sense um before gamification Revolution you wrote a book called gamification by Design yeah it's about really implementing game mechanics in web and mobile apps and this is going to be really targeted to our audience because they're building web and mobile apps all day every day so give us some great examples of gamification in web or mobile apps some of them are obvious maybe you know some that aren't so obvious yeah I mean I this is a lot of what we talk about um you know when we talk about in all the books but I think you know I think obviously most people think of Foursquare right away uh when they think of a mobile app with gamification um there are many more examples that are particularly interesting uh that we talk about in different elements of the different books and um you know as it continues to evolve a Nike Plus is one that we talk about a lot we've talked about more than once um leverages gamification a combination of hardware and software to create long-standing engagement but gamification by design that book that you're talking about uh was the first and still continues to be really the only sort of practical guide for implementing gamification in a product or service and it's a sort of methodology that's evolved over time uh you know the book is still uh quite current though now it's already you know two years old a little over two years old uh We've evolved we've taken some of those premises and evolved them uh also in kind of video training um and in-person training that we've done but the basic premise is that you can gamify using a methodology there's a process that you follow you produce a gamification architecture which is a kind of agile process flow document for how to gamify something and then you can kind of fall and execute on that you know iterating along the way the basic thing though that's important about it is the solution the like what you actually will do to gamify is not obvious because it's going to be different in every single situation okay but the process that you follow the methodology you use to arrive at what to do to gamified is consistent from one experience to another so that's the important thing it's how to think like a gamification designer I gotcha know what some of those tools are but not necessarily spoon feeds you like oh you know what I know what you need to do you need uh you need XP system and then you need to redeem mode points you need some Karma because it's every system is the same it's always got these things in it that's not true yeah now it makes a lot of sense you mentioned it's a methodology it's a process I know you don't have time to go through that whole process because that's what the book is for um what are some of the highlights of it though like give us some of the tidbits some of the highlights of the process kind of looks like this is it just throwing everything at the wall and seeing what works or is it more methodical than that well um it's definitely more of a thought than that but there are some there are some times when you know you definitely want to do it in fact we actually use games and gamification to design gamification um which sounds a little bit meta but we use we use some tools and techniques that are in the book and also in some of my online videos which you can find at gamification.co certification classes and and uh in-person workshops we actually use game Concepts to develop the gamification elements um things uh sometimes called game storming it's a sort of games and brainstorming put together uh where we use that to actually come iv8 and come up with new ideas we play games with groups and individuals to um id8 and swamp certain process problems but basically we moved through the different kind of um elements of gamified design Mastery uh Point systems um achievement systems and rewards uh and so on to move through these different elements and in each element you know we play a series of games we reverse engineer some stuff we make an assertion about what uh systems what gamified systems will probably work with some kind of guidelines a framework patterns that we know work and then we Implement that and test that in an agile fashion yeah no it makes a lot of sense that's more or less the process yeah and that's what I was looking for just kind of a high level like you know what is it we're you know attacking here um but I will I will tell you this a gamification architecture is a sort of standard document um and when you take a workshop with me when you take a course when you do a video even when you do the book The Net output of that is to produce this document and you can you know it's going to look really different I mean if you're doing an app for you know health and wellness you know are you doing or you're working on on a website for you know Financial Services they're going to have some similarities but they're also going to be quite different so the key is to allow the flexibility for people to come up with ideas that are original and thoughtful but in a way that's scalable yeah is that really where your genius has come from is like kind of codifying that process is that the the main thing you've done for the world do you think well thank you for that what I think yeah um no um yeah you know look in practice I think one of my main contributions to this discussion has been uh this um you know making order out of chaos um you know packaging Clarity you know and it's this is such a fast-moving discipline the science and research where we're pulling science and research in from three main disciplines game design behavioral economics loyalty program design each one of them um you know has its own set of experiences knowledge uh as I like to say to people each one of them makes fatal mistakes about understanding human behavior that are so obvious to someone sitting across the table in the other industry um that they're kind of shocking and gamification is really the first time that we put those things together yeah um one of my favorite examples is the use of points so if you ask a game designer what's the purpose of points in a system they will say well points track progress but that's all they do they're not really motivational if you ask a loyalty program person what is the value of points they'll say points are everything points Drive everything because people love to collect points and it matters a lot and if you ask a behavioral Economist about the value of points they'll say well it depends on what kind of points you're talking about and what the situation is and what they're doing with them and what they can get for them yeah and the truth is all three of them are right yeah they're all correct context however if you out if you were designing an experience for engagement or behavior change you'd only from the perspective of any one of those people you would make a fatal mistake at some point at some point you would miss something that was very obvious to the other group because they're each focused on different kinds of things so in gamification we're trying to as much as possible put our arms around an immense immense amount of data an immense amount of research a very wide set of design patterns and boil those down and make them uh processized in a way that ideally doesn't produce cookie cutter results but does produce a scalable methodology yeah so I will take credit for uh helping to create some order out of this chaos because there's a lot going on but it's really the work of thousands of people you know all across the world in such a wide range of Industries and organizations that are on the street that are doing this that are building the patterns and you know and as much as possible I try to be a voice for making those things real yeah that's great um do you think every company should use gamification is there any comment I know it seems like what we've talked about they all should be is there any company where you say you know what that vertical they get a free pass to ignore this whole conversation for some reason is anyone hit that category no I mean no people people ask me you know very answer this question all the time and I will tell you I think the most amazing thing to me is and you can just do this just do this for your own edification if you have a minute um spend an hour of your day and ideally sometime when you're out and about walking around or doing something and look at how much fun you're having okay interacting with the world around you just a realistic assessment all right um what you'll find is that the vast majority of our day is very transactional it's us doing little things in a kind of gray bubble um you know we've come to accept that those things are not fun we've come to accept that some things are utility and some things are structural and we don't need to feel engaged with them um and and we're settling though is the thing we've settled and in practice any organization when organizations grasp that idea so when they say hey wait a minute I think there's an opportunity here and they suddenly put the you know it's like when the color changed in Wizard of Oz from black and white to color and they put that color into the activity suddenly we're like wait a minute this is so much fun I'm having a really good time you know getting money out of this ATM um all of a sudden right instead of it just being a transaction and that gives that company A major advantage and that's the kind of thing we're talking about in gamification Revolution is those businesses that act on this and act well and act strategically stand to gain a tremendous amount in this upcoming um cultural and economic shift yeah yeah now a lot of the companies watching this a lot of entrepreneurs they have very small budgets they're starting out they're bootstrapping maybe they got their series a who knows um does it take a massive budget to really pull off gamification when it's done well or is it really more about creativity do you need an r d Department do you need a bunch of people you know full-time game storming or or can you do it on a budget oh I mean listen gamification is it doesn't require complicated technology it actually it can be done very cheaply and you know many people do it with pen and paper uh there's a great example um of a guy named John Guerrera it's worth checking out his story on gsummit.com I use a speaker in communication Summit he did he can find his life using pen and paper helped him write a book get his dream job lose a ton of weight he did all that with Post-it notes and pencil um and so you know especially you know one of the things for entrepreneurs we often think about entrepreneurship and and their need for gamification for their product or service but actually they can use gamification on themselves because in many businesses uh you are as an entrepreneur the most important resource in the company and you need to be efficient you need to have you need to scale you need to have energy you need to feel like you're accomplishing something in order to get through the tough times right um so one thing is to look at how gamification can be used cheaply on yourself to get you where you need to be and there's lots of cheap free apps pencil and paper all different kinds of ways that you can do that with yourself you can obviously do it with a startup yeah well exactly and I think those things when you're an entrepreneur I think those things are the same I think yeah how the entrepreneur Affairs is how the startup fares right um so so that's one thing to think about one thing to consider and I talked to a lot of the entrepreneurs that I work with uh like that the second piece of it is when you're doing it for your actual um for your actual startup whether that's a mobile or web app um I highly recommend taking a super agile approach everything that we teach in gamified design is about agility um so you want to actually do a fairly cheap first assay um and you know I've come around on basically what those elements probably should be for a startup and um you know I think you I think you definitely want to um I talk about this at length in one of my startup videos but basically you want to probably do one to three things in your first version in your MVP gamified okay and those include doing an XP point system whether or not that showed to the consumer or not doesn't matter just for your own identification you need to string one up and you need to have some kind of notification or a viral Loop social Loop built into your product uh those are probably the MVP versions of that and then you know I talk a lot more about how to get in Greater depth but it doesn't have to be particularly expensive no that's great uh now let's talk a little bit about the other book you've written the game-based marketing um just briefly what is game-based marketing I think would probably know by now but give us your quick definition of it yeah I mean this was you know this this was the first kind of gamification book in the Contemporary sense uh you know I wrote it came out in 2010 right as Zynga and Foursquare were kind of you know popping up and basically it looked at the sort of original idea at the intersection of loyalty programs and game design and a little bit of Behavioral economics what does that look like from a marketing standpoint um how companies have used that well I think one of the most telling things that's really interesting about how quickly all this moves you know same thing with startups and growth hacking is that you know I just had a conversation with loyalty programs um company a really big one and you know they said to me they were like well when this whole thing with game kitchen first started in 2010 it seemed like loyalty and gamification were very much in a line that we were talking about the same stuff we were on the same page and you guys have just gone you know through the roof with what you understand and what you know and we've just you know we've been left behind and so one of the most interesting things to me is I think truer words have never been spoken like you know like most loyalty programs even brand new contemporary loyalty programs fall into the same ridiculous trap over and over and over again they think that what people want is they want to earn some points and burn those on free stuff and people do want that let's be clear people do want that and they will do that right and if it's interesting to them they will do it for some period of time but there's a big difference between giving away free stuff to someone who would have given you money anyway and radically reshaping and changing the behavior of people to get and sustain their engagement yeah so when when you see something like Walgreens launching balance rewards in 2012 their new kind of loyalty program for the big you know Pharmacy chain I actually like cried I'm exactly but I kind of you know I kind of laugh cried a little bit because I was like this is so ridiculous oh so in 2012 your best idea is you're going to give everyone a card and they're going to swipe it when they go to Walgreens and they're going to get one point for every dollar they spend and you're gonna have some bonuses and then they're gonna redeem them for free stuff at Walgreens yeah how exciting yeah this is amazing I'm sure people are really going to Care yeah about your program so once those kind of companies once those sorts of experiences on the marketing side start waking up and realizing that they don't have the kind of Engagement they need with consumers the companies that lag the ones that are not on top of the gamification Revolution are going to suffer for that significantly the first movers at this moment have a very serious advantage in terms of consumer attention absolutely because gamification is such a big deal it's such a huge turning point and engagement's so real that whoever's doing it it's a it's a big leg up it's not just a small step in the right direction um yeah if you would rattle off some of just some examples categories of game-based marketing I mean I'm sure we all can name a couple but what are some of the the possibilities for game-based marketing well I mean you know there I I've talked about a few of the ones that um I think are um you know that I think are most significant that have been um you know most successful for organizations but there's so many really fun ones that have been really really really successful um you know another one so we talked about Tabasco right um we talked a little bit about Nike plus one point I want to make about Nike plus that's so important is that it's not just a system that's kind of cool and gets a lot of PR it's actually changed their company's business entirely absolutely you know when Nike Plus was first conceived Nike wasn't um the top shoe brand for hardcore athletes Nike was a fashion brand okay and if you were a runner you were running a new balance in Asics you didn't run in Nike in 2005 because why would you they made you know they made fashion shoes um and so Nike Plus has really had a tremendous effect today they get about five million people uh using Nike plus every single day yeah to run with and it's it's really kind of change the whole meaning of what it is to be a sportswear and apparel business and that's one of the kind of promises I think one of the big promises um another side which we haven't talked about a great deal is B2B marketing oh how does that work that is well look it would of course it would yeah um you know it it absolutely has another category with the tremendous tremendous amount of success and really great case studies so in gamification Revolution for example we talk about Siemens uh the German engineering company which has this game called plantville um that they made a gamified experience in which you play a plant a factory manager um where you're running a factory and what's really interesting is that the majority of the people who play it are people who actually run factories for a living so they do their job during the day and then they go home and play a video game in which they play their job uh like overnight um which is really interesting but it's been very successful yeah or IBM which built a business process management software toolkit called innovate and uh put that out on the web for decide to put it out on the web and see what would happen uh built a couple of games out of it called like city manager which is a Sim City but for people who actually run cities for real um and now it's the single biggest lead generator in IBM for the for the global organization so it's a revenue stream yeah uh for the company in addition to being a kind of demonstration of that so you absolutely can Market um both in B2B and b2c using gamification and be very successful with it that's great and you know the examples you gave you know without knowing it they're very personal to me I'm a Nike Plus user myself and using that app completely changes my running Behavior it changes the amount I run it changes how I think about my runs I mean I am literally going outside to play a video game when I go for a run because of the way the graphs look and the way it you know feels to me sure and then you mention uh Siemens plant managers that my father actually retired as a Siemens you know uh worker in a plant so it's a lot to ask him if he's uh ever interested in playing that game yeah you should have some good examples all right well lastly uh this has been a great interview one more question here you're the coach director of a startup accelerator the founder Institute and actually didn't know you were involved with that because I followed the founder Institute on Twitter I look at what they're doing I just didn't know your involvement there so tell us you get to work with startups in that accelerator I'm sure often and of course they're coming to you for a gamification advice I mean you are the guru for that one thing uh what's some of the gamification advice that you find yourself given to these startups just over and over what's the thing you can tell startups listening to this right now that they really need to hear from you yeah um so uh yeah I I can tell you that very very clearly I'm the co-director for founder Institute in New York City and uh have been a mentor for years and been doing that for four years I didn't get to travel all around the world and and work with startups all over because fi is uh the most Global of the accelerators kind of all over the world and one thing that's fairly consistent I tell the startups this kind of inconsistent way so first thing is you know gamification you know if you want to include that in your pitches if you want to pitch with it um as a startup which is today's very and it's really hard to actually find a startup that's not using gamification um you need to say more about it than that so if it's gonna if it's part of your vision for how you get and get Traction in the market and how you achieve that traction you need to say way more about it than just oh we're going to gamify our consumer interactions it's a little bit like saying we're going to monetize with advertising you need to be able to say a little bit more about that so people want to understand what you're tapping into and how you accomplish it the second note I talked a little bit about um which is usually my second note for startups so that's an XP point system facing inward if necessary if you don't want to do it to Consumers and um you know I am an agile approach for uh you know for how you're going to do everything and make sure that the social viral notifications are built into the app um and then the third piece of it which I think is is really super important probably the most important thing for startups you don't just get consumer traction because you've built a great thing and you don't get consumer traction just because TechCrunch writes about you this is a very common misconception because in a lot of startups that's the popular media impression of what happened right like Foursquare went to South by Southwest four years ago and all you know three years ago and all of a sudden everyone just picked up on it right that is not the case at all Dennis and Naveen even had a startup before called dodgeball yeah which was which didn't really work yeah and when they figured out that it was the judicious application of gamification to dodgeball that would create that engagement they and they got the timing right they launched a thing that changed the world yeah but it's you have to do this by Design I think that's something that growth hacking people really understand intimately you've got to design you've got to have gamification as part of your core design ethos it's got to be part of your vision for how it's done big deeply into the product it's not an adjunct it's about everything that you do yeah well this has been a great interview Gabe again thank you so much for coming on the program I can't thank you enough oh thanks so much Bronson Great to be here