Rob Alvarez Bucholska
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From Viral Spike to Sticky Play: Doug Weitzbuch on Building Housle | Episode 416

 

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What happens after “going viral”? Doug Weitzbuch (Housel) breaks down the Wordle-style mechanics, player feedback he wishes he’d acted on sooner, and the roadmap to localized, high-intent engagement. Practical lessons on PR, streaks, and turning play into business outcomes.

Doug Weitzbuch is a television producer with credits on hit series including Hell’s Kitchen, World of Dance, Lip Sync Battle, and Duck Dynasty. After producing Netflix’s Buy My House, a Shark Tank–style real estate series, he created HOU$LE, the viral daily house-price guessing game often described as “Wordle for Real Estate.” He currently produces FOX’s The 1% Club, hosted by Joel McHale. Doug lives in Los Angeles with his wife (a real estate agent, naturally) and their two kids.

Rob Alvarez is Head of Engagement Strategy, Europe at The Octalysis Group (TOG), a leading gamification and behavioral design consultancy. A gamification strategist and TEDx speaker, he founded and hosts Professor Game, the #1 gamification podcast, and has interviewed hundreds of global experts. He designs evidence-based engagement systems that drive motivation, loyalty, and results, and teaches LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® and gamification at top institutions including IE Business School, EFMD, and EBS University across Europe, the Americas, and Asia.

 

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Lets’s do stuff together!

Looking forward to reading or hearing from you,

Rob

 

Full episode transcription (AI Generated)

Doug Weitzbuch (00:00)
I woke up one day about two months ago and my daily player count was like literally 10x and I was like what is going on right now something insane is happening I literally did not know

Rob (00:16)
Hey,

so yes, we will definitely be finding out why Doug

actually and what happened how he got all those members and what was going on that he had that sort of viral effect on his app Housle. And as you know this is Professor Game. We interview successful practitioners of games, gamification and game thinking to help us multiply engagement and loyalty and I’m Rob Salton. I’m the founder of Professor Game and I am a professor of game-based solutions, gamification at you know IE Business School, EBS, University and other places around the world including the EFMD and before we dive into the episode

what we discuss in this podcast seems interesting to you. You might want to look into our free gamification course, which you can find right below in the description. Engagers, welcome back to another episode of the Professor Game Podcast. We have Doug with us today. So Doug, we need to know, are you prepared to engage?

Doug Weitzbuch (01:15)
I’m ready. Ready? ⁓

Rob (01:19)
Oh yes, let’s do this. So Doug Weitzbach, Weitzbuch? Weitzbach is a television producer who credits on hit series, including Hell’s Kitchen, World of Dance, Lip Sync Battle, and Duck Dynasty. And after producing Netflix by My House, a Shark Tank style real estate series, he created what he called House-Ole, which is a viral daily house price guessing game often described as a word-ole for real estate. And he currently produces Fox’s The 1 % Club.

Doug Weitzbuch (01:23)
Yeah, whites fuck.

Rob (01:49)
hosted by Joel McHale. He lives in LA with his wife, a real estate agent naturally, and their two kids. So Doug, is there anything that we’re missing from the intro that we should know before we dive into the questions?

Doug Weitzbuch (02:00)
think you summed me up pretty well. mean, we didn’t talk about any of my hobbies, but we can do that later, Remy.

Rob (02:07)
Amazing. So Doug, if we were to sort of follow you around, be with you in that beautiful traffic in LA and all the fantastic stuff you guys have in LA, what would that look like? What are the kinds of things you’re doing? What is a normal day, so to speak, with you look like?

Doug Weitzbuch (02:22)
⁓ well, I’ve got two little kids, you know, my daughter just turned eight and I have a four year old son. They’re very active and keep me on my toes. So normal days, like getting them off to school. ⁓ and then kind of settling in, you see my home office, I get to work off remotely from home, which is nice. My kind of bread and butter day to day is producing television and, ⁓ post COVID that whole process of producing is really gone remote. It’s still stayed that way. So it worked from home.

I’m in a suburb called Calabasas, which has a lot of fame from the Kardashian family, which I don’t know is a bit of a double-edged sword. It’s on one hand, it’s kind of fun that most people know the city name and area now because them at the same time, it’s kind of brought some other interesting elements to it. But anyway, work from home and a lot of activities with the kids, they’re involved in sports and this and that. My wife also works from home. So kind of a lot of like cross traffic of.

work calls going on in the house. I love to surf, to play soccer, I love to go to concerts, things like that.

Rob (03:26)
Amazing, amazing, good stuff going on. So, you know, we, usually talk to people like oftentimes to actually talk to people who have been, you know, on gamification or creating these kinds of games for some time. also have people like yourself who did something like Housle, right? So I’m guessing that your story will have something to do with this and probably it has, you know, some elements in between where, you know, things just.

didn’t go your way. Like you were creating this, you know, this strategy with this, or maybe if you did, they’ve done other games that you can dive into that as well. And things just didn’t go your way. And you know, maybe then you pivoted or whatever, but we want to be in that sort of painful moment with you and take away some of those lessons that you might have taken.

Doug Weitzbuch (04:07)
Yeah. So, well, when I launched Housle, sort of the launch was sort of on the heels of a lot of press that I received. So pretty quickly, I had all this success, like overnight. had tens and tens of thousands of people playing my game instantly. And in my naivety, I was like, my God, this is going to keep growing and growing and word of mouth is going to spread and,

In a week, I’m going to have hundreds of thousands and in a month I’m going to have millions, right? This is my first game I’ve ever built. And again, like I, in my head was like, this is going to be as hot as world and it’s going to take over. And that’s not the case, right? What, what ended up actually happening is with all the press, a lot of people did come to check out the game, but just cause someone clicks into the game that check it out, cause they’re intrigued or interested to see what it is. That doesn’t mean they’re going to be hooked.

That doesn’t mean they’re going to tell their friend about it. That doesn’t mean they’re going to come back the next day or ever play again or ever tell anybody about it. And so the reality set in, which is my numbers were going down day over day over day. And, you know, I, I don’t know if I would say I was depressed over it, but I was definitely like, I was taken aback. I would say I was like, this, you know, this kind of potentially silly idea that I had that it was just going to take off like a rocket ship was not the case.

And reality set in that, you know, I had a lot of work on my hands to try to find my community and find the people who love household. And I’ve been on that journey for a few years now and you know, yeah, so that’s, that’s a bit of a story there in terms of like reality that I found.

Rob (05:49)
You know, again, if you were to, you know, redo Housle or tomorrow it will be Riverdoll. Like, I don’t know what it could be about if you were going to do something like this in the future. Knowing what you know today, what would you do differently? Like how would you approach it in a different way? That would be sort of the recommendation to your past self could be, or somebody else doing something along these lines.

Doug Weitzbuch (06:11)
That’s a really good question. think that I had a lot of people playing the game reaching out to me with feedback. Some people were saying, I want more games. Because right now our game is one daily game. You go to howsle.house or you go to our mobile out howsle, there’s one daily game. That’s it. And it only takes maybe two minutes to play at most. You play for two minutes, it’s over. And if you’re a non-paying customer,

You’ve got nothing else to do other than share your score or drive to the listing of the home. There’s nothing, there’s no other games to play. And people were saying, I want more. And I heard their feedback, but it took me a very, very long time to act on that feedback. I wish I would have moved quicker. It, with the feedback, the people that reached out to me, I wish I would have even dove in deeper with them and said, Hey, can I get you on the phone for five or 10 minutes?

You know, can I talk about who like get to know my customer better? Who are these people that really like the game? Can I find a pattern of, you know, demographic of my target market? Are they a certain age range? Are they have a certain financial bracket? Are they, you know, have a certain level of education, whatever it might be. That all would have been really good information really early on for a lot of reasons in terms of like.

how to do future features of the game, also for future marketing maybe would have helped me target the correct consumer or future consumer easier.

Rob (07:47)
That makes a lot of sense talking to your consumers, getting those play testers, those people who were already actively reaching out to you. Those are people who were, if they reach out to you, they were pretty excited about your game. Even with the critics that might’ve come in, if they were already writing, it means that they were excited. Or even if they were furious, let’s say somebody was furious, that means they were passionate about your game and that they were really, really excited. So yeah, I definitely would endorse, you know, sort of…

Reaching out deeper with them and really listening in many ways and don’t get me wrong. Sometimes you do get contradictory feedback. I would, you know, then you say, well, let me try with five. And people, some people will say, oh yeah, you know, five, let’s get 10. And other will say, nah, you know, five is too much. waste too much time. Like I feel this is the advice. I really need to tone it down. So should I go back to one? To three? Should I go to 10? Should I say in five? Like what do I do now? Right.

Doug Weitzbuch (08:42)
a good point. It’s like you can’t just because one person says one thing, that doesn’t mean you go act on it, right? You want to take an aggregate and a collection of feedback and see if there’s a pattern and a trend and then sort of act from that.

Rob (08:48)
Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, you can do things like A-B testing, like, I tried with a few people, a group of people, try giving them three instead of one, see what happens. Like, do they all really do the three? Do people do more? Do most of them just do two? Or do all of them do three? It’s like, oh, wow, everybody wants to do three. What does that mean? Because then there’s your objective. Are these people free customers? You want to get them to pay? Like there’s all these things that are happening there. So love your answer for sure. And sort of taking an 180 degree spin.

you know, on this question, actually to a certain degree, this or something else that you’ve done, I’m sure you’ve had plenty of success as well. So we would like to go to a story of actually where things did go well. Like what went well, whether again, with this app or with something else that you’ve worked on and you know, what do you think were some of the success factors? What are the cool things you would recommend other people to do essentially?

Doug Weitzbuch (09:50)
Well, something that happened recently, which was very fortuitous and it’s a combination of that factors. It’s worth diving into. I woke up one day about two months ago and my daily player count was like, literally 10X. And I was like, what is going on right now? Something insane is happening. And I literally did not know. And I reached out to some partners of mine to try to figure it out.

and were doing some research online and we came to find out that there’s a very famous podcast, this group of guys, there’s a community called Barstool Sports. Have you heard of that? It’s a Boston based group of guys and girls. They mostly talk about sports, but they talk about a lot of other topics. Dave Portnoy is the CEO and founder. He’s very like charismatic outgoing guy.

They have a very rabid fan base, large fan base, many millions of followers. They have a podcast called Mostly Sports, where they talk about mostly sports, but they also talk about other things. They go live every day for 90 minutes on a podcast. And during their live podcast, they were talking about real estate and they allow their community to write in ideas for them to talk about or things to do, whatever. very rabid fan of Howl’s All wrote to them.

live on their podcast and said, you guys should play Howl’s All. I think you’d like the game. think it would be fun to watch you play. And there was four people on this podcast live and it very organically and naturally sort of unfolded them reading the comment being like, what is this game? They have this big screen in their room where they record. They pull up Howl’s All, they play Howl’s All live and they’re talking about the game. And in real time, they’re enjoying playing. There’s some really

funny, funny things that happened because there’s some younger people on the podcast that had never been involved in a real estate transaction. So their guesses were way off and it was kind of funny to see how different people really may not have an idea of what something costs. And they end up taking pieces of that segment and reposting it across all their social channels, which has a major following. And that created this like,

It went viral. was a truly viral moment for my game and it brought in this massive influx of people. And that was a wild win for us. And I finally figured out what it was and you know, I kind of capitalize on the moment and I recut the content myself and sort of started to market it a bit. But yeah, so to answer your question, that was something that happened recently that was wildly successful. It was completely organic.

unplanned. So the takeaway for me was a few things. Number one, it sort of revalidated my idea. I was like, I believe this is a very good idea. It revalidated the fact that the fans that I have that are like really into the game, they’re so into the game, right? They’re still playing daily. They’re recommending it to their fans or recommending it on a podcast. so yeah, that’s, that’s one fun story that just happened recently. I wanted to share.

Rob (13:12)
And you know, you were saying that it was not planned and all that, but it also means that you were sort of prepared for it to happen in many ways. Like of course, this is a bit more of an extreme example. There’s the, the Oprah effect. I don’t know if you’ve heard of that, right? You know, people were mentioned in Oprah Winfrey’s show, right? It is viewed by so many people that just to mention.

is like, well, are you prepared for this? And even in smaller scale, Tim Ferriss actually spoke about this a while ago, that he always warns people that he’s going to sort of promote. like, I’ve found about this, but before sending it to my millions of followers, I’m going to let you know so that you’re prepared for this influx of traffic and don’t sort of break your checkout page, essentially.

Doug Weitzbuch (13:56)
Yeah, no, I was fully prepared. Luckily, this is, it was after the point where I’ve added more features to be able to monetize the game. have a premium subscription model now. So that drove hundreds and hundreds of new people signing up for premium. I’ve got ads turned on, mulettes, I’m monetizing the eyeballs, ⁓ all those types of things. So it definitely worked out and yeah.

Rob (14:21)
Amazing, amazing. know, there’s no customer fulfillment, so to speak, like you’re not selling Jews, right? You run out of Jews because it was mentioned so many, found by so many people, but yeah, like love it, love it. And Doug, you know, from, I don’t want to say like, explain all the years where you’ve been into this, or maybe it’s exactly what you want to go for, but since you created the game, you probably, like you figured out what is the dynamic you wanted to do. Maybe you looked at Wordle and created this thing. Like, I don’t know, is there…

Was there a process for you to create the game and now to sort of be adding on all these features that have made it, you know, more, even more successful and to capitalize on to opportunities like the one that knocked on your door recently.

Doug Weitzbuch (15:02)
Yeah, I mean, I definitely modeled the game after Wordle initially. The daily basic game is six pictures slash clues to guess the list price of a home, right? Very similar to Wordle where you get six chances to guess and find the word, right? So that simple mechanic is derivative and absolutely sort of based off of that. And look, when something’s not broke, it doesn’t need to be fixed, right? Like I do believe in that.

You know, I’m a TV producer. lot of content that’s out there is very similar and derivative of each other. You know, you see Survivor and you see Love Island, you see all these, they’re all playing in a similar sandbox. And I think there’s a reason for it, especially because it’s comfortable and it’s familiar to people. So in that regard, like the base game is absolutely derivative and sort of built and based off of something successful and proven. Now moving forward, I’ve added other features already.

that I thought would add a lot of value to my community. I’ve unlocked the entire archive. So now if you pay $2 a month for a premium subscription, rather than just the one free daily game, you can dive into an archive of over a thousand games and play more. So that was something that, like I said, the community very much made it clear they wanted that ability. They wanted to play more games. They wanted that access, that ability. I unlocked it. It’s there. The other feature that sort of

is in my head for the roadmap and hopefully very soon is the daily game that you like anyone and everyone in the world sees is, is exactly that our daily game, maybe in Madrid, maybe in LA, maybe New York, maybe Colorado. You don’t know where that daily game is. And that’s what I think is fun about when you log into Howsle each day, you really don’t know what you’re going to get the box of chocolates, right?

You don’t know what kind of home, what price point, what city. It’s very novel. And while that’s, while I love that, there’s a whole other part of the world or community that actually wants something more focused on their local community. my next feature, I want to build the ability for people to play house all on a very localized level, right? So that if someone is on the house hunt, let’s say.

They can use Housle to help their house hunt. They can set parameters. I’m looking for a home from 500,000 to 1 million, and it’s in these seven communities or 10 cities. And you can use the gamification of Housle to browse homes and look through listed homes. So that’s on my roadmap. Again, also based off of feedback.

Rob (17:48)
Sounds amazing. Sounds amazing. And from, from all the experience you’ve had with this, is there, I don’t know, is there something that you would call a, a, not a silver bullet for sure, but like a best practice? Like, oh, I did this and you know, it actually, and I have a few that I, that I took from, what you were saying right before, but is there anything that you would highlight? Like again, a best practice, like do this and you know, your chances are going to be a lot better than if you don’t.

Doug Weitzbuch (18:13)
Let me think about that one for a second. It’s, it’s honestly, I don’t have a lot of those to be fair. Like it’s been like a bumpy road, know, the mobile game community I found to be very competitive and challenging for me, especially because I have no background in the space. Every, every part of the journey for me has been new and been figuring it out. And, very

There’s not a lot that’s come easily. know I mentioned like I got that press and that brought a lot of players and then this Barstool sports thing happened, which was amazing. And those were, I would call more lucky. That’s not a best practice. That’s not something necessarily you can plan for. ⁓ You know, I guess the one thing I would say that was sort of based off of hard work and grind and commitment was the press that I received out of the gate.

That wasn’t accidental. I spent a lot of time targeting very specific writers and media outlets that focus on what I thought would be, that I thought they would be interested in my story. I went and spent maybe hundreds of hours doing the research on who’s writing about mobile games, who’s writing about Wordle, who’s writing about the future of

You know, real estate, all the things that I thought my story would relate to. And I put together like a sort of PR story on myself and the game. And I pounded and pounded and pounded the pavement and obviously takes a hundred nos to get one. Yes. I got very good at accepting nos, but at the same time, accepting nos doesn’t mean stopping, right? It just means keeping going, keeping going. And so that is probably the thing that I.

would recommend to somebody is, you know, your story and your, you know, your path. Press is always great. Press is always helpful to getting your story out there, to getting new customers. And I do believe if you have an interesting story to tell and a unique angle on something, that that’s a great way to get your story out there. And there will be someone potentially willing to write about your story. And I did it through LinkedIn. I did it direct through emailing from finding emails on

these media sites and any and every way you can think of going to their Twitter. You just got to keep going, keep going. Persistence and that’s my sort of advice there.

Rob (20:48)
Absolutely. And I love it because it also shows that you were committed to that preparation, which is just as important as well. Doug, now that you’ve heard of sort of part of the podcast, I don’t know if you had any inspiration from people doing this kind of work out there or something else, but is there something, somebody that you would look forward to hearing on the podcast? Somebody who would say, if I heard this person, maybe I’d get inspired.

to doing new things or to improving this work or to doing something else. I just really love to hear this person answering these questions.

Doug Weitzbuch (21:22)
There’s a guy named Andrew Chen. He runs A16Z Speedrun, is a, so A16Z is Andreessen Horowitz venture capital firm. They have a mobile game division. They run a, I think it’s a 16, I don’t know if it’s a six week program or a 16 week program of where they hand select mobile game developers and put them through a program.

where they kind of oversee and help them launch a game. They invest in the game and they support the game, you know, in every facet. And this guy, Andrew Chen seems to be incredibly, an incredible wealth of information, highly connected in the industry, a very respected guy. He would be someone that I would be fascinated to listen to on your show and talk about the future of games and you know, what’s, what he sees working currently and why.

what’s not working and why, I think he’d be a wealth of information.

Rob (22:25)
Actually, I have a past client who applied for one of their programs. The thing is they didn’t get accepted because the program was focused on sort of futuristic tech for games. So what’s some bleeding edge stuff that people could be potentially developing and had, you know, course skills in the background and so on to create. And these people were sort of working on the blockchain, but you know, not, not like they were inventing a new blockchain or a new technology out of that. So they didn’t, like I told them, they didn’t really have a chance, but I got to know a lot more about the work.

that these guys are doing just by helping them on that part of the proposal that they were trying to get funds from, from a 16 Z Andrew Horowitz essentially. yeah, absolutely. That sounds like a super interesting person to actually have on the podcast. And, and keeping up with the inspiration, is there a book that you would recommend people to read? again, to whether it’s directly for game inspired stuff or, that maybe helped you think about all these things or something deeper.

Doug Weitzbuch (23:22)
It’s not a book, it’s podcast. It’s called the All In Podcast. Do you, do know that one?

Rob (23:27)
I do not. The All In Podcast.

Doug Weitzbuch (23:29)
Happy to share it with you. The All In Podcast is a group of, it’s typically four, sometimes they scale down, highly successful Silicon Valley venture capital and entrepreneurs who’ve been involved in some of the most successful companies this planet’s ever seen. They’ve invested in, you you name it, all the biggest companies from at the infancy stage writing check ones. And they’re incredibly smart.

forward thinking and they get great guests on and I find their content to be inspiring and beyond educational and it I think helps me stay well rounded, you know, with all different types of topics.

Rob (24:10)
Sounds like a very interesting topic for a podcast for sure. And in this world of creating, you know, these mobile apps and having your own game and making all the success that you’ve come up with, what would you say is your superpower? You know, that thing that you do at least better than most other people.

Doug Weitzbuch (24:29)
I’d say it’s networking. I have a very, very large network. I’ve always prided myself on my relationships. I love to get to know new people. I like to nurture those relationships. I am always open and willing to help anybody, whether it’s a close contact or not. I like supporting people. I like lifting rising tides, you know? I like lifting people and supporting and helping and linking people. It gives me pleasure.

So vice versa, I’m also not afraid to ask for a favor or ask for an intro or ask for advice from this network. feel like that is my superpower is like this community I’ve tried to build and continue to grow around myself. ⁓ So yeah, that’s it.

Rob (25:16)
brutal

superpower and I’m sure brought you part of that, you know, that press you were talking about before. Definitely, I’m sure that is a part of you building that amazing network that you mentioned. And now Doug, we get to a very difficult question, or maybe not, you’ll tell me. We would like to know what is your favorite game?

Doug Weitzbuch (25:34)
My favorite game. mean, I’m pretty obsessed with the New York Times community of games. have a text thread called the Wordle Nurtles with like eight of my closest friends, my brother and some other friends. it’s a daily chain of us sharing our scores from all the different games. play Wordle, we do the mini crossword. There’s a new game called Pips. We play the, you know,

pretty much any and all the games within the New York Times games. that’s, those are my favorites.

Rob (26:09)
Have you tried out the LinkedIn mini games? They are sort of in the same fashion in many ways.

Doug Weitzbuch (26:15)
That’s a great question. And the answer is yes. The last I checked, there was three or four of them. Are there more now?

Rob (26:23)
I’ll reveal some more of that, last time I checked was three, as you were mentioning. Yeah. I’m guessing it’s probably four at this point.

Doug Weitzbuch (26:30)
So

what’s interesting is these daily casual games are very much in my wheelhouse, right? Like that’s sort of, this is what I’m trying to tell and explain the brands out there that I want to work with, like real estate brands, mortgage, anybody who’s in the real estate space. I am trying to get them to understand that all these major, the largest media companies out there, Amazon, LinkedIn, New York Times, YouTube, they’re all launching games.

to engage daily with their community for retention, for engagement. And it’s obviously been proven that this is such a powerful method of being in front of your consumer on a daily basis. And that’s how I believe that’s Howsles secret sauce. Like we’re presenting a home as a fun daily game to play.

But you’re now talking about real estate with somebody, right? You’re like bringing up that conversation in a fun, simple way. And now can’t you just drive them into your ecosystem to maybe, can’t they be a lead for a loan? Can’t they be a lead for a real estate transaction? And that’s, it’s the same sort of thought process, these casual daily games.

Rob (27:49)
Absolutely. In fact, I was going to say about LinkedIn. think I’ve mentioned this before and I actually put on my LinkedIn. I’ve never quite understood fully why LinkedIn in particular is doing this. Like I understand the New York Times and especially like you think about it in terms of what new newspapers used to have. They used to have crosswords and this kind of thing for people to, you know, they almost bought the newspaper just to do that. Some people, and then they got hooked and saw some other things. Well, LinkedIn, didn’t quite get it. I had fun with some of them at some point. was playing, I think it was called Queens or is called?

And I

Doug Weitzbuch (28:22)
You hit mute.

Rob (28:24)
and I, and I caught it the first day with the new one that came up. caught it the first day. Right. And I started playing, I played every day and I was, you know, it was getting pretty decent at it. don’t want to say it was good or anything. I’ve never been competitive on games in any way. And, know, for some reason, one day it didn’t like register my score or I did it and it was like 12, two minutes after 12 PM and it didn’t record it. So my streak, which was literally the absolute best possible streak just disappeared.

And I haven’t played since. You know, streak feature is great if you have a chance to sort of come back from it. If not, it can be very frustrating. And I have said this before and I know the theory behind it. And still, when this happened to me personally, I got frustrated and just didn’t do it again. Like even if I know what’s going on, even if I could play it again, it was like, ah, you know, there’s no purpose on it anymore. Like the big thing that I was getting is I played it from day one. I even think I dropped Queens for a bit.

But that one like, yeah, I’ve been here since day one, you know, I’m going to have this amazing, you know, 10,000 days streak or whatever nonsense was in my head. And, know, just one day it dropped and it’s like, haven’t played again. haven’t picked it up ever again. And to be, to be fair as well, like they were interesting, but I didn’t completely get like,

Doug Weitzbuch (29:40)
I

on that. have an opinion on that. Okay. LinkedIn, is, everyone’s using it for something different, but what’s interesting is I just read an article which is pretty, it was pointing out the fact that there’s two very unique and different sort of communities on LinkedIn. You’ve got these employed, call them successful people, sort of boasting or bragging, humble bragging maybe, about things going on in their career.

Right. Very positive uplifting. did this, I did that, check this deal I did, you know, whatever it is. On the flip side, you’ve got this unemployed talent pool, right? You’ve got people who have just gotten laid off or freelance or whatever the story is that are looking for work. Very different communities. Right. So the question is, you know, LinkedIn, right? They want you to just live on the site. They want you there every day. So it’s like, what are you going there for?

Are you going there to look for work? Are you going there to read accolades of other people? And I think their thought process is just like, it’s working for New York times and it’s working for other people. It’s is there something else that we can guarantee to drive people to our site daily? If we can hook them on a game because people love games, people like to get streaks. Can we use that as another way to get them in and they wake up, they go, want to play that game. They play that game. know, they’re scrolling, you know, and that’s.

That’s what I think.

Rob (31:07)
Could be, could be. It’s an interesting conversation for sure. But Doug, I’d like to thank you for coming here and sharing all of your, I don’t want to say any secrets. I don’t want to say you were sort of having anything behind the curtains, but I do want to thank you for sharing all your experience. You know, the stuff you’ve done, things that went well, things that didn’t. And this perspective as well that you brought here and for taking the time to being on the Professor Game podcast. I don’t know there’s anything else you’d like to quickly share and of course, where we can find out more about you, Howzell and so on and so forth.

Doug Weitzbuch (31:35)
Yeah, thanks for having me. It’s been a pleasure. I really enjoyed the conversation. Thanks for listening. I hope anyone and everyone listening checks out the game. can play on www.housle.house or on the iOS or Android app store, the Housle app. And if you want to reach out to me directly, my email address is doug at Housle.house. You can find Housle on Instagram, TikTok and give us a follow and game.

Rob (32:00)
Amazing. Thanks again, Doug, for being on the podcast. However, Doug and Engagers, as you know, at least for now, and for today, it is time to say that it’s game over. Hey, Engagers, and thank you for listening to the Professor Game Podcast. And since you’re interested in this world of creating motivation, engagement, loyalty, using game-inspired solutions, how about you join us on our free online community at Professor Game on School?

can find the link right below in the description, but the main thing is to click there and join us. It’s a platform called Old School. It’s for free and you’ll find plenty of resources there. We’ll be up to date with everything that we’re doing, any opportunities that we might have for you. And of course, before you go on to your next mission, before you click continue, please remember to subscribe using your favorite podcast app and listen to the next episode of Professor Game. See you there.

 

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