Rob Alvarez Bucholska
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If You are Losing Users Despite Growth, Watch This! | Episode 441

 

Don’t experiment on your own revenue with broken game mechanics. Get our guide “Core Drives in the Wild” to learn how to apply real behavioral science to your product: professorgame.com/WildCD

Most companies treat user churn as a data problem, but looking at “where” someone leaves doesn’t explain “why” they lost interest. We break down the “Engagement Leaks,” a phenomenon where record-breaking marketing spend fails to fix a product that is effectively a sieve for users. By analyzing the high-touch onboarding of Superhuman, the “novelty hangover” of Robinhood’s digital confetti, and the legendary community design of Harley-Davidson, this episode reveals how to use the Octalysis Framework to plug leaks in different stages of the user journey. A masterclass in transitioning from a product people merely start to one they actually stay with.

Rob Alvarez is Head of Engagement Strategy, Europe at The Octalysis Group (TOG), a leading gamification and behavioral design consultancy. A globally recognized 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)

Rob Alvarez (00:00)
So there’s this thing called the engagement leak. And it’s the reason you are losing users despite a record breaking marketing spend. Now, I know this sounds crazy, celebrating growth while you’re actually bleeding out. But here is how the math of behavioral science actually works. Most analytic tools will tell you where people are leaving. They show you they’re dropping out at step X, but they are silent on the why.

And today we’re looking at three world-class examples to reveal the leaks that traditional data misses and how to plug them using the Octalysis framework.

Rob Alvarez (00:36)
You are currently pouring money into a sieve.

Yeah, that is actually a real word S-I-E-V-E. Look it up.

Acquisition is getting more expensive, yet retention remains as a black box. At the Octalysis Group, These kinds of problems are what we solve on a daily basis through our consulting. We have over 170 clients, which is the biggest client base of any gamification consultancy.

And we’ve done this not only for small companies, not only for this or that, we’ve done it for Fortune 500, we’ve done it for startups, we’ve done it in the crypto sector and web three. We’ve done pretty much everything and everywhere. FCMG, education, we’ve done so many things. And in this video, I will show you how to transition from a product that people start to use to one that they stay with. We will analyze things like the onboarding leak, the novelty leak and the end game leak.

But before we dive into the first story, if you want to see what the Octalysis Core Drives look like in real businesses, go ahead and grab our free drive Core Drives in the Wild. I break down examples, real examples from past episode guests through the lens of each of these core drives and show you how these core drives translate into practical business outcomes like retention, referrals, and revenue. Find it on the link in the description, skim the first day’s example, and then come back to see

how the three engagement leaks in this episode map to the exact same framework.

Rob Alvarez (02:04)
I want to start by an example of this app that did something that most experts said it was a waste of time because there was no way that you could scale this thing. When they launched, they didn’t send you the download link. Instead, they put a massive wall. They didn’t just let you go in. They said, you need to be on a 30 minute one-on-one video call.

We’re talking about super humans on scalable onboarding. They were not teaching the features to the user. They were engineering Core Drive 2 development and accomplishment. By the end of that call, the user hit inbox zero. That’s a first major victory. If what you’re doing for an onboarding looks like either VCR manual or one of those videos that nobody wants to watch, you are most probably having a massive leak.

on your onboarding. So I just want to ask you, does your user feel like a superhuman, like the app, within the first three minutes, or just as an admin of the software you’re selling to them?

The second story is about this app, this trading app that famously used digital confetti to celebrate every single trade initially for sure. was a massive hit. You give them confetti and people trade more, right? Eventually that magic starts to completely wear off. The confetti became absolutely invisible.

You clicked on the button of the trade and you knew your brain already knew confetti was coming out. So it literally disappeared in front of your eyes. And then of course, the habit was never able to stick. Initially, that confetti was hitting core drive seven on predictability and curiosity. It’s a black hat. It’s an intrinsic motivation. It’s a core drive. It’s intrinsic motivation. creates, however, what we can call a novelty hangover.

After you do it many times, there’s no more novelty. You enter the hangover stage to bridge that gap after, you know, a month or even a few weeks or two months, you need to start introducing things like Drive 3, Empowerment of Creativity and Feedback. When this shiny concept starts wearing off, the user needs to feel they’re getting a better skill.

They’re getting better at something. They’re able to make their own decisions. You need to transition as well to more white hat motivations. They’re not just watching a light show. you’re thinking of these apps that are not just a thing that you use for a few minutes and then are done with. You’re thinking about apps that keep people coming back. Think of a trading app like Robinhood, which is the one that we’ve been discussing. So after the novelty fades from your UI, what meaningful choice.

is keeping your user in that flow state.

So let’s move on to our third example. And here I’m going to straight up front tell you the company that it’s about. It’s about Harley Davidson. These, you know, the big motorcycles, very noisy that have, you know, massive fans and people who just don’t like it because it’s too noisy or whatever. In Harley Davidson, they don’t just sell these bikes. They sell the H O G or the Harley owners group. Veterans become mentors.

When they reach a level cap, they go so far as far as they can in a normal game that hasn’t thought about this, people would just abandon, they would just leave because they get bored. In this case, you give them Core Drive 4, ownership and possession, Core Drive 5. You give them a bunch of motivations so that they stay and they go beyond that scaffolding phase and you actually design for their end game.

If your two year power user is treated the same way as your day 10 user, they actually rather find a new mountain to climb. What is the status? What is the mentorship role that is available to your most loyal and long living users?

If any of these stories feel a bit too familiar, it’s a sign that your leaks aren’t technical. They are entirely behavioral.

You can’t really patch a hole if you don’t really know if the pipes are broken or how to fix them.

That’s why I want to invite you to click on the link below and get our free guide, Core Drives in the Wild.

Once you go through it or actually while you’re going through that guide, you will find how some of these implementations are actually familiar things that you could be doing right now. And of course, if you want expert help, you will definitely find a way to get us for a strategy call or whatever it is that you were needing.

And there we’ll map your core drives. We’ll look into your specific situation and figure it out. So right now what you need to do immediately is stop guessing why your users are leaving. You want to go ahead and find that leak. And as always, as we like to say in the end of the podcast, as you know, at least for now and for today, it is time to say that it’s game over.

 

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