Rob Alvarez
, , , , , ,
0

Earned, Not Given: Rewards Beyond Points and Badges | Episode 467

  Listen on SpotifyListen on Apple PodcastsAvailable on YouTube Get the free Core Drives in the Wild guide, behavioral design applied to real products: professorgame.com/WildCD

Episode Summary

Charlie Hopkins-Brinicombe, co-founder and CEO of Trophy, a gamification layer that powers features for around two million consumer-app users, makes the case for rewards beyond points and badges: rewards people earn instead of rewards they are handed. He walks through a gym guest pass that nobody uses when it is free and that members value once they earn it with three straight months of attendance. Rob and Charlie also debate where A/B testing helps gamification and where it hides long-term motivation such as Core Drive 1 (Epic Meaning & Calling). Listeners come away with practical alternatives to points and badges and a clearer sense of which features they can test and which need judgment.

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

  • A gym guest pass earned after three consecutive months of attendance beats a free pass nobody uses: earning it triggers Core Drive 6 (Scarcity & Impatience), and an expiry date drives both retention and referrals.
  • Gamification can work without points and badges when rewards tie back to why users act; progress indicators and tangible real-world perks, such as bringing a friend, are practical alternatives.
  • Trophy ran its own podcast for seven to eight months to generate leads, then shelved it when the audience never reached critical mass; a shareable report of insights from its platform data proved easier to make and spread further.
  • The most common gamification mistake Charlie sees is “set it and forget it”: teams ship a feature and move on instead of cohort-testing it against engagement KPIs such as frequency, session length, and retention.
  • A/B testing has a floor: with 100 users split 50/50 you will not reach significance in a reasonable timeframe, while 100,000 users can give a usable answer within a couple of weeks.
  • Short test windows favor short-term motivators. Core Drive 1 (Epic Meaning & Calling) rarely shows up in a one-month A/B test, yet it keeps users for years; Charlie argues tests pay off at early drop-off, while long-term features take more intuition.

Topics Covered

  • 0:00 Meet Charlie Hopkins-Brinicombe of Trophy
  • 2:19 Why Trophy shelved its own podcast
  • 4:22 Design by subtraction and saying no
  • 6:04 Iterating features until they stick
  • 8:16 Inside Trophy’s pilot programs
  • 9:59 Why set-and-forget gamification fails
  • 11:59 Why A/B tests miss long-term motivation
  • 14:01 A book pick, a superpower, and Elden Ring
  • 16:36 Gamification without points and badges
  • 18:12 The earned gym guest pass
  • 19:38 Trophy’s Gamification Intelligence Report
Get the free Core Drives in the Wild guide, behavioral design applied to real products: professorgame.com/WildCD

About Charlie Hopkins-Brinicombe

Charlie Hopkins-Brinicombe is co-founder and CEO of Trophy, the gamification layer for consumer apps. Trophy helps consumer apps ship gamification features that lift engagement and retention, and powers those features for around two million users. With a technical background, Charlie splits his days between sales, product, and helping customers map their users’ motivations to the right mechanics.

Find the Guest Online

Mentioned in This Episode

Some links below are affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.

Free Resources and Get in Touch

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

Meet Charlie Hopkins-Brinicombe of Trophy

Rob Alvarez (00:00): So, hey Engagers, welcome back to Professor Game, the number one gamification podcast, where we explore things like games, gamification, game thinking, game strategies, and behavioral design to help boost things that go from engagement to retention, stronger products in general. And as you know, I’m Rob, I’m the founder here and I’m a coach at Professor Game. I’m the head of engagement strategy at the Octalysis Group, the leading gamification and behavioral design consultancy. And a professor of gamification 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 if you’re in any way struggling with retention, churn, engagement in your product, service, in your business, and of course you want to understand at least why. We have a free guide for you called the free guide Core Drives in the Wild, where you get an email from me every single day for a few days. Understand how the Core Drives work in real corporate settings. And get my opinion, my take on how that goes about. And today we have Charlie. Charlie, we first need to know: are you prepared to engage? Charlie Hopkins-Brinicombe (01:06): Yeah, that’s good. Let’s do this. Rob Alvarez (01:08): Let’s do this. We have Charlie Hopkins-Brinicombe. Is that a good way to say that? Charlie Hopkins-Brinicombe (01:13): Yeah, not too bad. Brinicombe, it’s a tough one, but that wasn’t bad. Rob Alvarez (01:17): Brinicombe. So he’s a co-founder and CEO of Trophy, that is a gamification layer for consumer apps. They help consumer apps deploy gamification features to increase user engagement and retention and currently is powering the features for around two million users. Charlie, is there anything that we should say in that intro that hasn’t been mentioned? Charlie Hopkins-Brinicombe (01:36): No, that’s a great description. Yeah, that’s awesome. Rob Alvarez (01:39): Let’s do this, Charlie. If we were to to sort of follow you around for a day, what would that look like? What was it what does it feel to be Charlie nowadays? Charlie Hopkins-Brinicombe (01:47): Hmm, well, pretty busy. Very spread across lots of different, it’s pretty much the plates I would say, I mean, as startup world goes, lots of sales, lots of marketing, lots of working with people on user psychology, trying to understand the motivations of their users, map that to the features that we support and then help them kind of deploy those features in their platforms, technical things as well, I have a technical background, so pretty much everything you can imagine. Rob Alvarez (02:17): Very, very spread, it seems.

Why Trophy shelved its own podcast

Rob Alvarez (02:19): So Charlie, can you tell us a story about a time where things did not go your way using Trophy or or any earlier versions of that? Where you’re trying to do something, it just didn’t go your way. As you know, we learn very very good from fail or first attempt at learning. So we wanna take a little bit of advantage of that position now and and listen to what you have to say. Charlie Hopkins-Brinicombe (02:39): Yeah, that’s a good question. We tried to podcast as well ourselves. We ran one for about, I would say, seven or eight months. But we never reached a critical mass of users like you yourself has. We were talking to consumer apps about how they got started, and then later to kind of product teams within that about how they think about growth, how they think about retention, user engagement. And it was a great, it was a great conversations, but we never really reached the critical mass of audience to make it worthwhile. So we kind of shuttered it a little bit. We’re still publishing episodes now and again, but not at the same scale as we were. So I guess that’s an example of something that didn’t entirely go to plan. We had lots of great ambitions for it, but… Rob Alvarez (03:24): And and what happened? I mean, like, what were you expecting that didn’t happen? I I mean, you you mentioned the numbers, but what does that mean? Do you didn’t have enough listeners? Those listeners didn’t turn into some, I I don’t know. Like, walk us through what did you, especially what did you learn after that? Charlie Hopkins-Brinicombe (03:38): Yeah, I think, I mean, the idea was to, it’s for our business, right? So it was to talk to interesting people, build up a listener base, and then hopefully that leads to some leads in the future. And it just never really materialized in that way. And I think we probably learned from that to say no to a few more ideas. It’s very easy to say, yeah, that’s a great idea. We should look at that. Let’s do it. Why not? We’ve got all the time in the world. But really, it’s like the classic 80-20, like 20% of the things that you do are gonna produce the outcome and the rest of it is kind of just noise. So I’ve probably learned to focus a little bit more and just pay attention to things that are really gonna move things.

Design by subtraction and saying no

Rob Alvarez (04:22): Amazing. Makes sense. Really understanding what what it is. We’ve, I’ve I’ve talked about subtraction before. In fact, it’s probably when we’re talking, it might be this week’s episode. Not sure. Where it’s easy, it’s easy to see it once it’s presented, but coming up with the idea of design by subtraction and what am I not going to do, what am I not going to add, what am I gonna take out of my product? Which sounds like sacrilege somehow. I mean it sounds horrible for for many people, how that actually can be a very, very good design decision many times. And and in your case it seems like it was sound. You were quote unquote wasting your time in a way, according to your objectives. I mean, there’s always a way in which that might have worked. Maybe, but maybe for something else, maybe for somebody else, maybe in a different format, maybe in a different level of dedication. I don’t know. Like maybe it could have worked, maybe not. But the main thing is you made that choice of saying, well, you know what, this is not gonna work. Let’s just move on and do what works and what’s most central to us. Charlie Hopkins-Brinicombe (05:25): Yeah, I mean, the idea was to share our expertise. And we’ve done some things recently that are along that line and have worked much better. It’s just a different format. So we’ve been releasing a lot of insights, for example, from our platform, what we see working, what we see don’t working, which is the same thing, right? It’s just a different format. It’s a shareable document. It’s a PDF or a collection of insights that has worked much better in terms of being adjustable, getting it out to people as well, and actually creating it is obviously much easier than it is to do 400 episodes of a podcast. So we still learn from it. It’s still, I think I would say, worth doing, but it didn’t work as we planned.

Iterating features until they stick

Rob Alvarez (06:04): What about the opposite? A situation where, whether on the first or the nth attempt, it doesn’t matter, things did work out for you and you’re very pleased with the results, something you’d like to share with the audience perhaps, and and and as usual, of course, what lessons, what do you think brought you to that success? Charlie Hopkins-Brinicombe (06:18): I think iterating our product, I think we’ve been quite good at that. Listening to what our customers are asking for and looking for. Not everything that we’ve released has been a massive hit, but we’ve kind of kept going, persevered with it. And some of the features now are some of the most popular features that we’ve released recently. So I would say what we’ve learned from that is just keep going. Don’t let your past failures kind of get in the way of that next iteration. Rob Alvarez (06:45): And how how do you think about iteration these days? Like there’s, and just to give you some context on what my question is about, of course there’s this product mentality of, you know, you try things, see what sticks, basically, almost. And there’s also this, you know, we know what’s gonna move the needle for final users. How do we get that to be in the hands of those teams so that they use it? But sometimes you know it’s gonna work and people don’t use it anyways. So how do you, ’cause in your case you’re providing a platform more than the service itself of of of engagement. But of course without success, you know, that people don’t like it. So I don’t know. I’m I’m just curious how you’re managing that. Charlie Hopkins-Brinicombe (07:24): Yeah, I mean, we started off as a platform, a way of solving a technology problem that people didn’t have capacity for themselves. And as we’ve done that, and as we’ve learned a lot more, we started to do a bit more of the service side as well. So helping people figure out how to use our technology as well, which has proven to be probably more useful in the initial kind of phases of a customer’s journey where they are maybe not sure about what might solve their particular problem. And then later the technology will come in. But as you said, like, I think from like when you’re starting at zero, you don’t really have any evidence to go on in terms of what’s going to help the customer the most because you don’t have any customers. So you kind of have to throw a few things at the wall and see what sticks. But then quite quickly, once you start to see a little bit of success, then you can actually start to change that and work from what people are actually telling you, which is what we’ve been doing more.

Inside Trophy’s pilot programs

Rob Alvarez (08:16): Sounds good. Sounds good. Is there, is there any anything you can share? Of course, I know there’s many NDAs and whatnot, a situation where using gamification, using your strategies, it it it worked. Like how how does that, what would that look like for somebody in the audience? And of course we’re not doing video this time, but what what would that feel like? What are the kinds of things that somebody would would experience when you’re when you’re working with them? They they they come in, they say, we have this problem. What do you what do you guys do? What’s your process? Charlie Hopkins-Brinicombe (08:47): Yeah, so we’ll generally run pilot programs with them. So we’ll sit down, run discovery sessions to understand their business problem. It could be that their users aren’t engaging with their new product. It could be that churn’s a bit too higher than they would like. It could be that they want to monetize their platform in a different way. Any of those things we can help with. We’ll sit down with them, run discovery sessions, try and map out exactly what user journeys are leading to those problems. And then try to layer on some features. It could be traditional gamification mechanics. It could be just changes to the way they think about those features. Just try and help them understand how to solve those. And then we’ll try and map that back to our platform and say, okay, this is now your plan to go and implement this. And we’ll help them implement that with their team and perhaps do some designs if they have design teams or technical teams that we need to work with. Rob Alvarez (09:35): So you you basically integrate with whatever they have going on. It’s not a separate platform that you that you guys use. Charlie Hopkins-Brinicombe (09:42): Yeah, so we have a pre-built platform that you can integrate with, and we’ll always kind of direct people to that, but it doesn’t mean that we can’t do custom add-ons and bits and pieces around that where platforms are hard to reach or they’re in proprietary systems that aren’t necessarily available online. We can do that as well sometimes.

Why set-and-forget gamification fails

Rob Alvarez (09:59): Okay. Get it. Get it. So when you when you think about implementing and using these strategies on a project, what would you say is a a best practice? Something that, you know, if people think about it this way, at least their project will be better off. Of course it’s not a silver bullet, but it would definitely help them to to get better at what they’re doing. Charlie Hopkins-Brinicombe (10:21): Do you mean in terms of like specific types of gamification strategies we might use, for example? Rob Alvarez (10:29): Yeah, and related definitely to to gamification, but any best practice. I mean like, I don’t know, anything that goes from user testing, what does that user testing look like? What would that user testing look like, to, I don’t know, iteration you mentioned as well. Like what does iteration mean in in in this case and so on and so forth? Charlie Hopkins-Brinicombe (10:48): Yeah, I mean, I think the default for a lot of people is to think, okay, we’ll just add this new feature, this new layer, and kind of set it and forget it and just think, okay, that project is done now, what’s next? And move on to the next thing. We’ve kind of built our platform… We always tell people to always iterate with these things, always test and measure what happens and then go from there. So that could be A/B testing, for example. It could be putting certain users into one cohort, not seeing a feature, and then other users in a cohort are seeing a feature, and measure the KPIs against that, be it engagement, could be how many times users are doing something, how often they’re doing it, how long they stay engaged for, retention, for example. So we’d always recommend doing that. There’s probably a floor to that where it doesn’t make sense to do that because you need a certain amount of data to make the tests viable. If you’ve got 100 people in a test, having 50 in each probably isn’t gonna give you enough statistically significant data in a reasonable timeframe. You’ll be there for years, but if you’ve got 100,000 people that you can clearly split out, it’s definitely worth testing that. You’ll get your plan for the next couple of weeks.

Why A/B tests miss long-term motivation

Rob Alvarez (11:59): Usually in in in my experience when when you do A/B testing, which has many, many features and many perks as well, the the only, the only big risk that I see is is catering only for short termism in a way. Because of course A/B testing tends to be in, you know, again in the product mentality, the typical product mentality, it’s let’s see performance, A/B testing. You know, we do it for, when very, very long, for a month. And of course, when you when you overreach with with that, what tends to happen is you’re only in short term, short term, short term. And long term motivation tends to be easily forgotten because it doesn’t, it doesn’t show very well in A/B testing. So when you think about, I don’t know, Core Drive 1, Epic Meaning & Calling, it’s not going to show up very well usually on on an A/B testing for, you know, a week or a month. But overall it keeps people engaged for years. You know, even Core Drive 5, Social Influence & Relatedness, when it’s used well, it can create some urgency and give you some immediate feedback. But oftentimes what makes you really feel good and stay at a platform for years and become, you know, an Endgame user is something that doesn’t show up very well on on an A/B testing for, again, for a month. It’s harder to to to get it that way. Do you do you guys think about it that way? Charlie Hopkins-Brinicombe (13:10): For sure, yeah, that’s a great point. I mean, a lot of the use cases that we help our customers with, because we are kind of identified as a consumer platform. A lot of consumer apps have very high turnover, very kind of lower retention. Often the biggest impact you can make is at the very earliest stage, because that’s where the highest drop off is. And so things like A/B testing then can help because the people might only be in the platform for a couple of days, or not in the platform for a couple of days as it may be. So A/B testing at that phase can usually give you something reasonable. If you’re talking about, have we got kind of multi-year users here, we’ve got monthly active users growing over a three month period. You could run an A/B test if you want, but you’re gonna be sitting there for a while looking at it. So yeah, it takes a bit more kind of intuition perhaps for those long term features.

A book pick, a superpower, and Elden Ring

Rob Alvarez (14:01): Makes sense. Makes sense. After hearing these questions and and being in on the podcast for a bit, is there anybody that you would like to listen to answering these questions? Somebody maybe that inspires you or you haven’t heard about, or anything that you would perhaps like to have in the podcast? Charlie Hopkins-Brinicombe (14:17): I’m not sure. That’s a really good question. I’m not sure, Rob. Rob Alvarez (14:21): It’s okay. It’s okay. How how about a book? Maybe there’s something that’s inspired you in the in the past. Is there a book you would recommend the the the listeners of the podcast? Charlie Hopkins-Brinicombe (14:31): I don’t read a lot of business books, to be totally honest. I find I get a lot more inspiration from kind of technical books, perhaps. I, okay, actually, no, that’s a lie. I did read a book… So How I Built This, if you’ve heard of that book. Rob Alvarez (14:48): How I Built This. Charlie Hopkins-Brinicombe (14:48): Yeah, what’s the author called? It’s kind of fly on the wall stories from companies that are now very large, but kind of the stories you didn’t necessarily hear. The author sat down with them and just kind of talked through what it was like building those companies, solving the problems around those companies, which is just very interesting. So I’d recommend that. And I guess the author of that book would be a cool podcast guest, for sure. Rob Alvarez (15:12): Cool. Good one. Good one for sure. What would you say is your, is your superpower? That thing that you do great in this world of gamification, maybe with Trophy, I don’t know. What, what, what’s that, not unique. Again, many superheroes fly, for example, or have very good vision, but what’s that thing that makes you stand out? Charlie Hopkins-Brinicombe (15:28): I think I’m quite good at imagining or kind of ideation. I think I’m quite good in that phase where things are quite fluid, unknown. There isn’t really necessarily a plan yet. I think I’m quite good at getting quite close to what the outcome could actually be fairly quickly and not kind of a… You you could have 10 ideas and the one is the great idea, I feel like I have quite a good sense for what can work initially. Then, so it gives us like a little bit of a start perhaps. Rob Alvarez (16:03): Nice, nice. How about your favorite game? Charlie Hopkins-Brinicombe (16:06): Favorite game? I’ve been playing a lot of Clash of Clans recently. Rob Alvarez (16:11): That’s a forever game, right? Charlie Hopkins-Brinicombe (16:13): I played it a lot when I was a kid. And now I’ve recently returned to it. It’s a much different space nowadays, as many consumer apps are. Yeah, that’s something I’ve been playing recently. But generally, also Elden Ring is probably top of the list, I would say, in all time favorite games. Definitely just the styles, the art design, the stories. Awesome.

Gamification without points and badges

Rob Alvarez (16:36): Cool. So Charlie, when we have some time like today, we usually like to to take one of the random questions asked by our listeners in the past and throw you out a question that makes sense for you, right? So I I pre-filter them before the interview to make sure it doesn’t ask something that is definitely out of your space. So just going about to see. Okay, here’s a number. Goes here. Right. So okay. Can gamification work without points or badges? What are some alternatives? Charlie Hopkins-Brinicombe (17:06): Yeah, I mean, points and badges are two mechanics you can use. There are many others. Is that more of a general question, that points, badges, leaderboards, is that thrown in there as well? Because those mechanics kind of work too, but they might not be points and badges. But I think there’s… Rob Alvarez (17:21): I, that’s what, that’s what the the the question was sent. So I can’t can’t give you more context this time. Charlie Hopkins-Brinicombe (17:27): Yeah, I mean, there’s plenty of other things you can use. There’s also things that aren’t out there in one of those boxes, right? There’s more psychological motivators you can use. There’s lots of progress indicators you can use. It really depends on why people are doing a certain thing, what their core motivation is behind that. It’s not necessarily about the UI and the things you’re giving people as a result. I mean, you just have to tie the rewards back to the motivation and not kind of get too fixated on the individual features. Rob Alvarez (17:58): And what would you say are some alternatives? Like what are other things you can give people rather than points, and just points and badges, which is the the classic, I mean points, badges, you would say also leaderboards probably, but that’s kind of the classic gamification. Everybody thinks about points and badges when when you say gamification.

The earned gym guest pass

Charlie Hopkins-Brinicombe (18:12): Yeah, yeah, if you think of like a fitness app, for example, let’s say you have a gym membership, you use the app to track, off you go. Let’s say an example could be a reward. You can bring a friend along the next time. You come three months in a row, you get a guest pass to bring a friend along. That helps the gym out because it’s a little bit of organic growth. They’re probably going to talk about the gym they’ve been to anyway, tell friends about it, and it helps the friend out as well. So that’s not a point, it’s not a leaderboard, it’s something tangible in the real world that people can actually use. So there’s lots of things in that category for lots of different types of apps that you can use. Rob Alvarez (18:49): And I like that one because what typically is the thing they say, you can always bring a friend for free. Here’s a pass, right? They give it to you for free. Nobody uses it, really, because it, it seems exactly what you’re saying. It’s more a benefit for the gym than anything else. When you say, if you do this and you earn this right to invite a friend, it feels a lot more valuable. There’s scarcity there. I mean, there’s Core Drive 6, Scarcity & Impatience. It’s like I want it because I can’t just have it. Now that I have it, I want to use it. You know, because, and you can even limit it there as well. It’s like, you can use it for this month, for example, because then if you don’t keep coming, then you’ll lose that friend pass, right? And you’re you’re getting two in a row, because people that go to the gym stay at the gym, and you’re also actually getting them to invite more people, or or you’re increasing the chances to get them to invite more people, I would say. Charlie Hopkins-Brinicombe (19:37): Yeah, that’s right.

Trophy’s Gamification Intelligence Report

Rob Alvarez (19:38): Good one. Thank you. So Charlie, is there any anything you want to say before we we take off? Any piece of advice. Of course, let us know where we can find out more about you, about Trophy, and then we’ll we’ll take off. Charlie Hopkins-Brinicombe (19:50): Yeah, Trophy is trophy.so. We’re online. We recently just released a Gamification Intelligence Report. If anybody wants to download that, it’s linked from the home page. It just breaks down the data that we’ve seen from the customers that use our platform, what mechanics are working, how they’re using them, and the ways that those are working, which is just generally useful for people that are building consumer apps. And yeah, always happy to talk and help people figure out how to solve their business challenges. Rob Alvarez (20:19): Amazing. Thank you very much, Charlie, for coming, for sharing your ideas, your experience, your knowledge. But at least for now and for today, Engagers, as you know, it is time to say that it’s game over. End of transcription

Discover more from Professor Game

Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.