Rob Alvarez
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Monobank Gave Away 5 BMWs by Accident | Episode 461

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Episode Summary

Mykhailo Rogalskyi, co-founder of Fintech IT-Group and the fintech unicorn behind monobank (11 million users), shares how a viral in-app scavenger hunt called Lemon Hunt turned into the bank’s biggest gamification win, and its costliest infrastructure failure. He walks through what happens when a 50-hidden-lemon prize draw for one BMW spirals into five cars given away and a 10,000X spike in server requests, plus the AI bot cheating problem now hitting leaderboard-based games. Listeners come away with a concrete framework for building an exit plan into any gamification mechanic before it becomes impossible to remove.

About the Host

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.

Key Takeaways

  • monobank’s Lemon Hunt event, a 50-hidden-lemon scavenger hunt tied to a BMW prize draw, drew 3.5 million users within days and forced the bank to give away five BMWs instead of one.
  • The viral spike caused a 10,000X increase in requests to some services, breaking uptime and pushing monobank to redesign how it allocates server load across the whole app instead of service by service.
  • monobank’s embedded banking-app games now face a new failure mode: AI bots that can top leaderboards undetected, which is why Mykhailo Rogalskyi says never attach a valuable prize to a leaderboard that AI can exploit.
  • When monobank retired its badge system for a cat-avatar dress-up feature, it faced months of user backlash, a reminder to plan an exit strategy for any gamification mechanic before removing it.
  • Keep any in-app game mechanic explainable in 15 to 30 seconds, Rogalskyi says, since over-complication is the most common mistake gaming-industry veterans bring into product gamification.

Topics Covered

Get the free Core Drives in the Wild guide, behavioral design applied to real products: professorgame.com/WildCD

About Mykhailo Rogalskyi

Mykhailo Rogalskyi is a Ukrainian entrepreneur and finance professional, best known as one of the co-founders of Fintech IT-Group, the company behind monobank, Ukraine’s first neobank. With his involvement, monobank grew into a major digital fintech product with 11 million users, while its developer company evolved into Fintech IT-Group, a holding that attracted investment and received a valuation of over $1 billion, becoming Ukraine’s first fintech unicorn.

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Looking forward to reading or hearing from you, Rob   Full episode transcription (AI Generated)

Opening hook

Mykhailo Rogalskyi (0:00): Some products saw like 10,000 X increase in the number of requests, and then we had another wave of customers going to social media complaining that the banking app is not working. Rob Alvarez (0:18): Hey engagers, welcome back to Professor Game Podcast, the number one gamification podcast where we explore how games, behavioral science, gamification, and game thinking help us boost engagement, multiply retention, and build stronger products overall. And I’m Rob, I’m the founder, I’m a coach at Professor Game, and I’m also the head of engagement strategy in Europe for the Octalysis Group, the leading gamification consultancy. I’m also a professor of gamification and game-based solutions at top global institutions like IE Business School. EFMD, EBS University, and others around the world. And before we dive into today’s conversation, remember that if you are struggling with retention, churn engagement in your product, this is the kind of work that I work on daily at the Octalysis Group, and I’ve been doing it for over a decade by myself as well. and I put together the Core Drives in the Wild guide. Now that I’m at the Octalysis Group, I work with the Core Drives every single day. And it’s a simple guide that you can look into and start understanding better what these Core Drives can do in your business. And this is for free. Just click on the link below. You’ll get a daily email for a few days and you’ll get your first gist of how this actually looks in corporate settings. And without any further ado, Mykhailo, Michael, however we should call you today, are you prepared to engage? Mykhailo Rogalskyi (1:32): Yes, yes, I’m a repairer. Hi Rob.

Monobank hits 11 million users

Rob Alvarez (1:35): Let’s do this because we have Mykhailo Rogalskyi, a Ukrainian entrepreneur and finance professional professional, best known for as one of the co-founders of Fintech IT-Group, the company behind monobank, Ukraine’s first neo bank. And with his involvement, monobank grew into a major digital fintech product with 10 million users, whilst developer company. evolved into Fintech IT-Group, a holding that attracted investment and received a valuation of over one billion, becoming Ukraine’s first fintech unicorn. So congratulations on all of those achievements, Mykhailo. is there anything that we’re missing that we should know for this interview? Mykhailo Rogalskyi (2:17): yeah, we just hit 11 million just two days ago. So you can add an extra million to our customer base. Rob Alvarez (2:25): Eleven million for the customer base. That is absolutely fantastic. Very, very impressive. I was talking the other day to a a a bank in a small country, has I think it’s like nine million people. And it was very impressive that they had I think it was with like one point two million customers. And it’s like wow, one point two million. This is a neobank as well. but you know, ten million, just right the eleven actually, as you were Mykhailo Rogalskyi (2:52): Yeah. Rob Alvarez (2:52): mentioning so good stuff. Good stuff, Michael Michael. So Michael, what is a regular day with you look like? What are you doing? If we were to shadow you, what would that feel like? What would that look like?

Splitting the day between banking and AI

Mykhailo Rogalskyi (3:04): So this is very hectic, especially now, like Rob Alvarez (3:08): Ha ha ha. Mykhailo Rogalskyi (3:09): I have a lot of things moving in different directions. So most of my work days, a lot of product discussions and team meetings and what’s not. But since our last… four or five months I’m also spending too much time pipe coding my side project or creating some AI experiments in the company and this just consumes every like bit of empty space in the calendar. So yeah, so either I’m doing some work on the product or I’m doing some work in the cloud code. Rob Alvarez (3:47): It’s it’s I was talking the other day to to a colleague on how AI still has its its bunch of things to to solve in terms of engagement and all that. But when a certain type of person realizes what you can do with AI, it’s it goes deep. Like it really starts Mykhailo Rogalskyi (4:06): Absolutely. Rob Alvarez (4:08): I I don’t wanna promote any any AI platforms. You mentioned Cloud. I’m using Cloud. I’m using Perplexity. Mykhailo Rogalskyi (4:08): It’s eating up sleep. It’s eating up sleep. Rob Alvarez (4:13): I just opened my open claw stuff as well. I’m Mykhailo Rogalskyi (4:15): Yeah. Rob Alvarez (4:16): I’m using a server online. I didn’t have any any spare computers at the moment. So I said let me test it out. So I opened the server online. I’m testing all sorts of crazy things. Building stuff I don’t completely understand what’s happening behind the scenes, which is when it starts to get really scary. but yeah, it’s it’s like a it’s like a real rabbit hole, once you start Mykhailo Rogalskyi (4:36): to. Rob Alvarez (4:36): realizing how much it can do. My wife, she she was like kind of using it kind of here and there. And now she is, you know, really like every day she’s having conversations constantly with AI to to refine to to her some of the ideas, some of the stuff she’s doing all the time, all the time. It’s it’s when when it gets slow or stuck, it’s like really frustrating because it’s it’s part of the daily toolbox nowadays. Mykhailo Rogalskyi (4:59): Yeah. Rob Alvarez (5:01): For sure. So, Michael, there’s always especially when you’re in a fintech unicorn and an entrepreneur, there’s always stories of success, a failure. And as you know, here we’re very focused on the behavioral aspects, behavioral design, gamification, how all these strategies fit together and make products amazing, such as the stuff that you you have created with with your your your fintech startup. well, startup is not probably a a good term for it anymore. It’s it’s a scale up at this stage. Mykhailo Rogalskyi (5:30): Yeah, I agree. Yeah, yeah, it’s a scale-up, yeah, for sure.

The Lemon Hunt event that broke the app

Rob Alvarez (5:32): so but there’s also stories with massive success and there’s also moments where things just didn’t go your way. So can you tell us one of those stories or your favorite story, your favorite fail moment and what you learned from it and and and so on. Mykhailo Rogalskyi (5:42): Absolutely. We embraced gamification from the inception. And I think that the logic behind it was mostly because we thought it would be fun. That was Rob Alvarez (5:56): Yeah. Mykhailo Rogalskyi (5:57): the main, to be honest, the main driver is we are doing the products that we would love to use ourselves and we thought that the product will benefit and be funnier, more fun to use when we have some gamification. But it grew even further the more we scaled the business. And the recent example, which is both success and failure in in the ways was Lemon Hunt. So we launched a program when we just when we hit 10 million customers to celebrate 10 million we create this mechanics where you have to find hidden lemons inside the app. So there were in total 50 lemons that were hidden in different obscure parts or some obvious some obscure parts of the app and you have to go through all the screens and to find them you have to tap on the lemon, you add it to your collection. When you collect 10 lemons you could enter a price draw and when you collect 50 lemons you can enter like a bigger price draw. We think that the price for the 50 lemons was BMW, so you price draw a bit, but because Rob Alvarez (7:10): Good stuff. Mykhailo Rogalskyi (7:11): it became so popular we end up giving up five BMWs. And Rob Alvarez (7:18): Wow. Mykhailo Rogalskyi (7:20): so… It was a tremendous success. have three and a half million users collecting lemons within a couple of days. And it became a viral phenomenon, like everyone on threads, and thread is super popular in Ukraine, but everyone on threads were discussing and exchanging hints on where to find lemons. But the thing that we… should have anticipated but didn’t is that people will go looking them in places in products that we weren’t prepared for such. let’s just say. some products saw like 10,000 X increase in number of requests and those Rob Alvarez (8:10): Mm. Mykhailo Rogalskyi (8:10): requests were not optimal so we had some issues with uptime and then we had like another wave of customers going to social media complaining about that the banking app is not working or some part of the app is not working and it led us to global rethink on how to manage load on the app. So previously we were doing service by service depending on the amount of usual usage, we will scale that service like 10 times, 20 times X. But then when you have the event where we have 10,000 X, it’s just impossible to prepare for that. So Rob Alvarez (8:52): Ha ha ha. Mykhailo Rogalskyi (8:53): you have to have an overall solution that will save you from this problem. But all in all, we saw this disengagement by itself. was a tremendous success. We’ve led customers to the places in the app they haven’t been before. They discovered new functionality that they haven’t seen before. They tried out things that they never tried. For instance, we just launched an e-commerce platform on the banking app. they were purchasing things in the e-commerce platform the first time, or they were buying insurance products for the first time. And that led to great discoverability, the discovery of lot of functions that were maybe hidden or less known. Rob Alvarez (9:39): Makes sense. I was I was so I was thinking many things there. Like one of them is I don’t know if you’ve heard of the the Oprah effect. The Oprah Winfrey effect, right? When somebody Mykhailo Rogalskyi (9:46): Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Rob Alvarez (9:48): just shows up in the Oprah Winfrey show or is mentioned by Oprah Winfrey, her her customer, Mykhailo Rogalskyi (9:52): You Rob Alvarez (9:53): her viewer base is so huge that it’s a make or break a company, right? If you’re not prepared for it, it breaks your company entirely. People disappear Mykhailo Rogalskyi (9:59): Yeah. Yeah.

A supply chain lesson in distributing risk

Rob Alvarez (10:01): after having shown up in in Oprah Winfrey because they’re not ready. there’s many levels of this Oprah is because it’s probably one of the top persons to to to to be be that. but if you’re prepared, you know, it’s very good stuff. You know, it really gets you gets you places, right? Kind of the what happened to you with that virality effect that that you got. The other one was you were you were saying that you had it sort of separate in terms of different services and you had different servers there. one of the things that I teach when I’m talking about supply chain management at at business schools is how a strategy That depending on what you’re looking for, and you know, there’s trade-offs usually. But one of the things is when you consolidate stuff in a single distribution center in this case, which is kind of similar to that, when you put it all together, the risk you de-risk part of that problem where, you know, this service grew a lot and this one didn’t grow so grow so much. There you kind of helps balance out and minimize the risk because you have it all there. Of course, if Everything goes 10,000 X. There’s absolutely no difference in putting it together. This is just more for global regular operations, like expecting that and understanding Mykhailo Rogalskyi (11:09): Yeah, yeah, yeah. Rob Alvarez (11:13): that engagement can really change and be be differentiated when you do these strategies was was probably a a bigger moment and a realization at that point. So so yeah, fantastic. Fantastic. Is the Lemon Hut still around? Is that something still something in the in the app?

Why Lemon Hunt couldn’t become permanent

Mykhailo Rogalskyi (11:28): no, no. Also the thing that we learned with the gamification, you have to make it time constrained. You have to, especially when it’s something big, like it’s concerned, like it touches the whole app and every aspect of it, you have to have a short period of time and then you have to go back to normal. We still have other like… gamification activities in the app but the one that covers like everything like you have to balance it you are not the game at the end of the day you’re like banking app so Rob Alvarez (12:07): Hmm, interesting. We could we could have a conversation just on that, but just I’ll just let Mykhailo Rogalskyi (12:10): yeah, Rob Alvarez (12:11): leave it on record that that’s not necessarily the case. It depends, of course, on what you’re doing. If you have, I mean, don’t Mykhailo Rogalskyi (12:16): Absolutely. Rob Alvarez (12:17): get me wrong, if you have a a you know, that kind of you know raffle situation, because it’s essentially a raffle. People have to do something, but then there’s a raffle of something. Unless you’re becoming some form of lottery, which I’m sure you’re not as a bank, Mykhailo Rogalskyi (12:30): No, no. Rob Alvarez (12:32): this is not something you want to do, you know, every day of the year, right? But there’s many things where you you definitely can. We’ve worked with multiple banks at the Octalysis Group where literally the gamification is so embedded in the app and everything around it is spins in there. That that’s something that can live all year round for ten years, no problem.

Embedded games and the AI cheating problem

Mykhailo Rogalskyi (12:51): no, absolutely, absolutely. And we have tons of this kind of stuff. We even have embedded games in the banking app. They’re hidden, Rob Alvarez (13:02): Hmm. Mykhailo Rogalskyi (13:03): you have to find them. But the thing that we do with hidden games, we try to release now and then like… once a year, once two years, a new game somewhere in the banking app. And when we release it, we create a small championship. You have to Rob Alvarez (13:20): Mm-hmm. Mykhailo Rogalskyi (13:22): beat the high score and then you also enter the prize pool. The problem that we’ve stumbled upon recently with our recent release is that now with AI, it’s much easier to create a bot that plays the game for you. and get the maximum score. Rob Alvarez (13:44): Ha ha ha. Mykhailo Rogalskyi (13:46): So it’s almost impossible to detect them. another learning from that, don’t Rob Alvarez (13:53): Mm-hmm. Mykhailo Rogalskyi (13:53): attach any valued price to the leaderboard and the game that can be gamed by AI. Otherwise you risk to Rob Alvarez (14:03): Mm-hmm. Mykhailo Rogalskyi (14:04): alienate everyone. have to disqualify people who… using AI and it’s obvious, but then there will be definitely, and they will hate you, there will be Rob Alvarez (14:14): Others. Hmm. Mykhailo Rogalskyi (14:15): others who use AI a bit more thorough and it mimics a real person, so it’s impossible to detect, so you have to guess because of the time, the day, because of the, I don’t consistency, Rob Alvarez (14:26): Yeah, yeah. But Mykhailo Rogalskyi (14:28): and you’ll miss a lot, and then Rob Alvarez (14:30): Mm-hmm. Mykhailo Rogalskyi (14:31): there is no way to prove, and there will be a lot of discussions, they will call you greedy, they will call that you try to play favoritism or something like that. Rob Alvarez (14:38): You you get you get in illegal territory as well. You’re disqualified Mykhailo Rogalskyi (14:41): Yeah, yeah, yeah. Rob Alvarez (14:42): from a draw pool. Mm, why? Can you justify it? Can you prove Mykhailo Rogalskyi (14:44): Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Rob Alvarez (14:47): it? And all that stuff gets complicated. Mykhailo Rogalskyi (14:49): So this is also like a tough lesson. Rob Alvarez (14:53): So, you know, th this and and this is something again, we’ve we’ve been we’ve been working on this for for a while, but I I don’t know how the games work. I haven’t of course I haven’t used the app. I’m not in Ukraine, so it probably doesn’t make sense for me for me to have that that app in particular. But when you attach a game that is not associated directly somehow to what you are what you’re doing, and you can win the game without really committing any of what we call the desired actions. It’s open a bank account, put more money in like whatever that looks like. If it’s not associated somehow to the actual desired actions, that’s where people start gaming it and and and do AI. It’s like, well, how do how do I game something where, you know, I have to, I don’t know, make the best out of my investments. Like, go ahead, use AI. It’s fine. You know, what’s the problem? Do good investments. We want you to do good investments. If Mykhailo Rogalskyi (15:40): Yeah. Yeah. Rob Alvarez (15:42): you make more money, you’re happy, we’re happy, everybody’s happy. You know, that that’s just like an example quickly of of of that. And and that’s one of the things that we that we work on, making sure Or trying to make sure that most of the time at least, these these games, if if it’s just a a thing to associate with, you know, free time or it’s like, I just spent some time have fun here in the app, great. That’s fun. That’s great. But if it’s something else like and has you know has rewards and all that stuff, Mykhailo Rogalskyi (16:06): Yeah, yeah, yeah. Rob Alvarez (16:09): physical rewards, especially when there’s money, you know, you activate corduroy for ownership and possession. That’s where you wanna make sure, you know, the gaming of of the whole site is is is is accounted for and now with AI and everything. And even without AI before people created guides. Mykhailo Rogalskyi (16:25): Yeah, but you know what we did before that? Also, we have to do everything remotely, we can’t create… Rob Alvarez (16:31): Mm-hmm.

Offline finals level the playing field

Mykhailo Rogalskyi (16:32): But one game that we created, it was 2020 or 21… 21 I guess. And the mechanics was you have to be in top 100, top score and then you were invited to the offline event where you will play this game online and then the person who wins get the prize. It also was a car, something Rob Alvarez (16:56): Hm. Mykhailo Rogalskyi (16:57): like that. And that is kind of level the playing field even if you cheated on your own, like it’s impossible to do it live. So… It was fun. Rob Alvarez (17:08): Ha ha ha Mykhailo Rogalskyi (17:09): It also gave us a chance to create this offline event for a very loyal community who wanted to engage with the app and with the team. So there are benefits all over. But also this is a way to make it fairer.

Lemon Hunt’s viral aftermath and brand offers

Rob Alvarez (17:25): Yeah. For sure, for sure. And Michael, flipping that around instead of going for a a a time when it didn’t work, and of course there’s many things that have worked, can you tell us a story of something that did work, that went really well and that you’re very, very pleased with? what can you attribute that success to, perhaps? Mykhailo Rogalskyi (17:43): I look, As I said, I would say, Lemon Hunt was the most, by far the most successful marketing event we’ve created the whole life of our Rob Alvarez (17:56): Mm-hmm. Mykhailo Rogalskyi (17:56): company and maybe in our lives is in general. So what’s happened is it became so, so popular that other companies were start reaching out to us. It was all live, like within it’s very short period of time. you have to understand we are very nimble in those type of decisions because me and MicroFounder we are both very active in social media and we respond to social media so we are very reachable and when something like this happens of course we will spend the whole day in threats or Instagram. Rob Alvarez (18:34): Mm-hmm. Mykhailo Rogalskyi (18:35): So other companies will start reaching out proposing that they will add prices like we had a left from a developer in the price pool. We had additional cars and they just wanted to be part of it. Saying like, can you just say that this is like you will have another car from this brand. We just won’t be part of it. We’ll provide a car. Or like we will. Rob Alvarez (19:05): Wow. Mykhailo Rogalskyi (19:05): give you a two-bedroom apartment, our new build. We just want to promote it. Just mention that we are also in bed with you. And this is an amount of positive feedback we got from… Look, this is a sometime very dark times. And for the brief moment of a couple days, the whole country had something fun to discuss, something that’s unrelated to everyday struggle. something that is pure joy and that was the main benefit and gratification from all that experience.

Best practices: simplicity and a sunset plan

Rob Alvarez (19:47): sense makes sense and Michael with your experience of course within you know you you’ve been focusing on this for for quite a bit would you say that there’s some sort of best practice that other people could implement saying you know think about it this way or or consider these things when you’re building your project and you’ll at least get a better better chance of success. Mykhailo Rogalskyi (20:07): Yes, yes, I think definitely. think one thing that especially people from… gaming industry or people who have a lot of experience in gaming, tend to do that. They over complicate because games Rob Alvarez (20:22): Ha ha ha. Mykhailo Rogalskyi (20:23): that are used to play or like they that’s super complicated because it’s challenging, right? And that they like challenge when you do gamification or some game mechanics in your app, try to be as simple as possible. There is no room for you to explain something more than like 15 seconds or like 30 seconds. That’s one thing that’s for sure very important. Another thing that is more from our experience, have a strategy how you will end the mechanics for different reasons. So it’s either you are not predicting how customer will behave and they either they don’t like it or they game the system or Or they just create maybe if you have some UGC there, you won’t like what they created with your tool and you have to close it down. So you have to have a plan for that because it’s hard when you have something that people spend time on. Either this, they had to, I don’t know. put their name on leaderboard or earned achievements or something like that. They have value, they attach value to it and you can’t just disappear from the app. So even if a lot of your customers say we don’t want it, we hate it, remove it from the app, there still will be a pocket of customers like 10, 15 % who engage with that and they attach to result of that engagement and you can’t just delete it. So you have to have this this strategy of how you will win down if needed or another thing that is not even if needed we had this

Badges backlash after the cat avatar swap

Mykhailo Rogalskyi (20:23): we still have this mechanics of badges for different transactions and and things that you can do in the app you can earn badges and they are with us for six seven years And about like three, four years ago, we saw that engagements on them really down and people are not engaging with them so much. So we created something different and decided to just change. the badges section to our cat avatar and ability to dress it in different clothes. So we did it and we got backlash for months. People were bombarding us saying, where are my badges? I earned them like you can’t take them from me. Even though they, for the last year, they never looked at them, but they knew that they were there. So we had to hastily come with the idea the solution how to manage how to marry both functionalities in one screen and we brought back the the badges so so plan that in advance don’t be like us Rob Alvarez (23:32): Making sure how you can both open it but also close the whole the whole thing is Mykhailo Rogalskyi (23:35): Yes. Rob Alvarez (23:37): is probably I wouldn’t say as important, but it it i it’s a different kind of importance there. It’s a different kind Mykhailo Rogalskyi (23:42): Yeah. Rob Alvarez (23:43): of mechanic and and and direction. Mykhailo, you’ve been doing gamification in your app for a while, it seems, and I’m I’m sure you’ve at some point looked into other sources. What are other people doing, maybe books, maybe I don’t know, people in general. Is there somebody that you would like to listen to in an interview like this one on Professor GameTube? you know, be curious about what they would say.

Duolingo, a book pick, and Walkable

Mykhailo Rogalskyi (24:05): I was thinking about that question and I’m not sure that I have someone good to ask for. I would say that of course the pinnacle of communication would be a… Duolingo, my god, that took just too long to Rob Alvarez (24:36): yeah, they got from Duolingo. Mykhailo Rogalskyi (24:40): produce. but someone from the Duolingo team are really interested in how they test different mechanics because I think that they had had them all and how those tests affect the original… mechanics that they plan to and what’s what’s tweaks either it’s just a change of the weights of some I know points or they completely rebuild the mechanics like this is very interesting because I think I can’t think of any other example of the product that is not game that that do so much gaming in the app Rob Alvarez (25:17): Yeah, for sure, for sure. Duolingo, the the the founder is from Central America. I can’t remember which country from I heard his TEDx recently. Mykhailo Rogalskyi (25:24): Yes. Yeah, I heard, I listened to his interview in some podcasts also. Yeah, it’s really interesting. Rob Alvarez (25:33): Yeah, for sure. For sure. And in that same sense of inspiration, maybe is is there a book that you would recommend people to read? Mykhailo Rogalskyi (25:40): Yeah, I have a recommendation, though it’s not directly gaming related. It’s a book that struck me recently called Unreasonable Hospitality by Will… This is book about the restaurant business, not the IT or gaming or anything like that, but I think you can draw a lot of inspiration from there. And I think that apart from our core business experience and adjacent topics, you can draw lot of inspiration from other sources, from other businesses. And for me, restaurant business, hospitality business in general, a big inspiration. Rob Alvarez (26:30): Amazing. Sounds like a great book for sure. And what would you say is is you know I again I’m sure you’ve drawn inspiration from different places. What would you say is your favorite game? Mykhailo Rogalskyi (26:41): Look, I’ll cheat here a little bit and I’ll promote my side project. I have a game on my own, I buy now called Walkable. Basically, this is a gamifying way for you to discover other parts of the city, not usual routes. So when the idea came to me during Covid, I was living in London and in London, the only… a way to have fun during COVID was to walk around the city and I noticed that I’m walking on the same streets every day and I thought it would be cool if we had a fog of war type of map that will show me the part of the city where I haven’t been or the streets that I haven’t been. So I created this app. Basically, the mechanics is that you walk along the street and it paints the building. You walk past by in a different color and then you have the map and you know, okay, I walk back and forth, like, to work, from work to home, and the same street, I can look at that street, I can walk, you know, a couple miles, like, direction, and that might be something interesting. So, this is now my favorite game because I have to test it every day after you create a new release. Rob Alvarez (27:57): Interesting. Interesting. Interesting game. Sounds like it for sure. Michael, we’re running out of time, but you know, before we go, of course, let us know where we can find out more about you, about walkable maybe, about, you know, any projects you’re on to social media, whatever whatever you want us to to find you and then we’ll say we’ll take off. Mykhailo Rogalskyi (28:14): Absolutely, absolutely. I post regularly on Instagram and videos, though they’re mostly in Ukrainian. So if you’re okay to listen to my Ukrainian and you want to practice, maybe you had a relative that spoke in Ukrainian in your childhood Rob Alvarez (28:29): Yeah. Mykhailo Rogalskyi (28:31): and now you want to get some Ukrainian content, this is a good place. Rob Alvarez (28:36): Makes sense. Makes sense. Mykhailo Rogalskyi (28:38): You Rob Alvarez (28:38): Michael, any any final words? Mykhailo Rogalskyi (28:41): It was a playwright. It’s really great talking about things that are not credit and debit. I would say it because Rob Alvarez (28:47): Ha ha Mykhailo Rogalskyi (28:48): in Fintech you mostly do that sort of stuff. yeah, this is much fun, much more fun than traditional Fintech podcast. Rob Alvarez (28:58): Makes sense. Love that. Love that. So engagers, remember, if if these kinds of conversations and bringing up you what is the way in which people engage, what are some of the mechanics that could be interesting, you can also check out our free Core Drives in the Wild guide. You can just click on the link below. You’ll definitely get specific cases of past interviews, past guests on the podcast. You’ll see how that’s working in real life, and of course, my own take as a consultant at the Octalysis Group. However, as you know, Michael engagers. At least for now and for today, it is time to say that it’s game over. End of transcription

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