I built a game into our B2B product | Hacker News Reader

I built a game into our B2B product

pragli.com

I almost didn't click on this link but I'm glad I did. It was a clever and thoughtful approach to fixing an adoption problem.

agree - this is a clever approach to solving the problem facing a whole group of applications where the "field of dreams" strategy is not going to work. Thanks for sharing.

Had to Google "Field of Dreams" haha. Love the term.

Yeah classic marketing strategies of pitching value and getting an entire team to buy in is no longer going to work for communications products like these...

It's all about capturing enough single user joy to incentivize user invitation.

Glad you liked it, gumby! Stay tuned for similar experiments to promote adoption. :)

Great how it started with framing the problem (and coming up with a name for it!) then went the product decision-making and how you landed at making a game

It could easily have been “we wanted to increase engagement so we made a game here’s the link” but this is 10x better

Haha, thanks! From what people have been telling us - naming the problem definitely helped to frame the problem better.

This is awesome. Do you have a sense of how many users it takes to solve the empty room problem? Is 2 enough?

We see a drastic improvement in engagement when even 2 people are in the team. That's by far the best.

Of course, in longer tail usage patterns, the more users that we have, the higher engagement we normally see.

"Doug and I spent several hours brainstorming out-of-the-box ways to add more value to the empty office experience in Pragli."

Why not talk to your customers and ask them what they want, then spend your time building features they need? Is the empty office experience an actual problem or is it more that people are busy and don't want to use your tool. Gaming them into spending time in your product does not seem like a win.

My mistake in the past with my own startups was to spend time building features that I thought would solve problems that my customer has instead of building things they really need. This sounds exactly like one of those cases.

"Press stunt: Hire a street performer at Caltrain"

Really? You think that is how your unicorn will succeed?

Does anyone recognize the task app in https://pragli.com/blog/content/images/2019/10/image-9.png ?

It is Asana

Yep, Asana was on the right hand side and Pragli was on the left.

Made it a bit easier to screen capture!

Really fascinating and creative approach! I wonder why this kind of thing hasn't been tried as commonly before or is as widespread today.

Thanks! Not sure - but I really think more communication and collaboration products should try out more out-of-the-box engagement features like games.

Huh? A collaboration product for a job would involve working together on your job, not playing games.

Do you have plans to implement any of the other engagement features you mentioned? I’d be curious to see what worked best.

Yes! In the article, we mentioned that we were considering collectible avatars to include into the game.

Some out-of-the-box ideas include extending our Spotify integration to audio channels so people can collaboratively play music together.

This is awesome, I've always felt that more onboarding experiences should feel like games.

Yep - definitely helps to build up a feeling of attachment and delight to the product :)

That's pretty neat. Are your users engaging with the game?

Thanks for the compliment! We just pushed it out, but after a few days we'll update the blog post to reveal some interesting insights.

Stay tuned :)

Pragli.com ceases my mobile chrome, anyone else seeing that?

Eek, that's not good! Would you mind sending me a screen capture at vivek@pragli.com? Sorry about that!!

Sounds fun! Thanks for the share

Of course! Stay tuned for more updates :)

Very good idea :D

Thanks so much :) We're excited for the results.

Love it!

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