375: Gamifying Engagement & Conversions with Angelo Ferro

was booming and everyone's using chat GPT, we pivoted to AI. So we launched a company called shop landing AI, which was a AI generated landing pages with the idea that based off of the campaign and the traffic that was coming to your website, we could personalize the landing page to have it very tight and very specific to the persona that you were targeting. So we did that for about a year and then how we came to Playably was that we were at our conference, we tried conferences that we'd never done it before. So we went to a conference in New York called Commerce Next and our, we went and started a booth. Our booth was shop lining AI. And then, you know, we provide gamify, gamification. And at that time, our gamification was, we had a quiz as part of the AI landing pages, and then we had a lot of people come to our booth to see, specifically seeking us out because like, Oh, your gamification show me your games. At that time, we just had quizzes and landing pages. But if they said like, Oh, we want games. I'm like, you want games? We can give you games. We came from gaming. So it was, We didn't intentionally, we started with game developers and our background has been in gaming, but it never

occurred to us to kind of like lean into gamification for e commerce. So it wasn't until we had a customer that we wanted to work with come up to us and tell us, Hey, we want games that we decided to pivot to Playably. Collin Stewart: Interesting. And so you had give me a rough idea of the revenue where you were. Like, it doesn't have to be precise, but just like, did you have a few customers, a bunch of customers? Angelo Ferro: So when we were doing shoplining, the landing pages, we had less than 20 customers and we were under half a million AR. Okay. So we had some, the issues that we had with shop landing was that there was just when we were building out the landing pages there was a lot of back and forth between, so we mostly work with direct to consumer brands on Shopify and there was a lot of back and forth and it just took us a long time to get the pages live because there were so many edits from the client. I think part of that is that. People perceive that they can, the owners are used to, they can build the landing pages themselves. So oftentimes they would insert themselves. And even though we were the experts, they would always see a lot of pushback.

So it took a while, like the time to launch was this too long. And also when we were launching, we would AB test our pages. And so hands down, our pages always had higher engagement lower bounce rates and higher time on site. But the conversion rates we didn't get the product page and we had trouble convincing it because product page is a different stage of the customer journey, but we'd always get compared against the product page. And so there was how do I say this? Even though our pages were engaging better, the brands that we're working with, they were very, you know, focused on conversion rates. And when they compared our landing pages against conversion rate, they were looking for more of a quick win. And what we were trying to build was like, you know, if you have a sustainable landing pages that are, have higher engagement, conversions will come, but they wanted to see a quick win within a month or two. Collin Stewart: Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. And so you've got a handful of more than a handful of customers, arguably two handfuls of customers, a significant amount of revenue. You're at a conference and people come up to you and they say games and you're like, let's pivot.

How did you go from that moment at the conference to kind of validating the idea? Was that enough validation for you? Did you immediately start building it or did you do some something, anything else to Angelo Ferro: Yeah. So what we had when we were doing shop landing, we had landing pages and then we were kind of like dabbing our feet into quizzes. So quizzes we started to build more interactivity into the landing pages and we saw a lot of good results there. And so we were actually planning on kind of doubling down on quizzes. And then when the feedback came back, that, Oh, you actually want games. I think for us, it's kind of serendipitous. Cause like we happen, we happen to have a team that could build games, like my co founder and I came from Unity, the founding team is from Unity, we have experience in mobile games. We did. My co founder before he, his first startup was called Playnomics and it was all focused on behavioral analytics for mobile games. He sold that to Unity. So we had the expertise to figure out, you know, like the, how to instrument the games to collect the data that the brand wants. And we also have a game designer. So who has built games as part of her career working in

museums. And so we just had to have the team and like, it kind of feels like we were, Inadvertently assembling the Avengers. And then all of a sudden people like, we want games. Like we happen to be the team that could do it. I think there was the piece of it where like we had the team and we had the expertise that we could do this thing. And we were excited about it and we had seen some traction with the quizzes. And so I felt like we could, we could move some of these. People who had quizzes over to some of the games. And so that's what we did moving to some of the existing customers over who were building landing pages for like, Hey, we're actually, we pivoted to games. We would love to replace, you know, that crappy spinner you have with one of our games. And so that's where we started. Collin Stewart: Gotcha. Yeah. And so, so your first customers, did they come from that conference? The first customers were actually customers that we had on shop landing AI, and then we were able to migrate a couple of them over onto Playably. Angelo Ferro: And so for them, we started with the customers that we had really good engagement with on the quizzes. And so these were, the quizzes were we, when we think about,

you know, where we are at Playably and where we were at shop landing, it was just, you know, we were able to get people on the website and we were able to get them to stay longer. And now with the quizzes where we get, we're able to get them to interact. And it's so hard to get people to do anything. So like, if it, a fun quiz got people to do something, if we could take the next level, a fun game that feels branded and it's very, you know, bespoken speaks to that audience. If we get higher engagement there and we've seen it since we made the movie games, that like people are a lot more engaged. People are more likely to give you an email address. And if there's a reward or an offer tied to the game, people are more likely to redeem that just cause they feel like they've earned it. Collin Stewart: Interesting. Yeah. So. Yeah, it's that I think we talked about this in the pre interview. It's kind of that near aisles hooked principle. Angelo Ferro: Yeah, exactly. There's a lot of like behavioral economics and a lot of like, you know, behavior and games about we talk a lot with brands and the big pain point that keeps coming up is they're spending a lot on Facebook and on Google to get traffic to the website and then it's bouncing. And so what we think about is like, you know, if you only have eight seconds to get someone's attention, what's going to

get their attention? Like a welcome pop that's like, you know, the first thing they see or some fun interactive game that's. Is engaging and so we think about like, how can we get that attention and we feel like games are a great way to keep that attention because if you can get them to engage and stay longer in a site engagement and retention are always precursors to conversions. We saw it in gaming and we see it. Oh, sorry. We saw it in gaming and then we see it with the brands that we're working with on playably. Collin Stewart: Not everybody's going to have the kind of cash and bankroll to be, you know, at a conference to try and validate product market fit. Is that something that looking back, would you do that again? Angelo Ferro: Looking back, I so how we got the, when we were about to say we were a child binding the primary marketing channel that we were doing, we didn't do any paid media, but we did do cold email outreach. And so that's kind of like, it's, it's a little bit of a spray and pray. We were working with a couple different agencies and so we did get customers through that, but you're never going to get like a big enterprise company through those. Just

through cold email. And so the conference, okay. Oh, well, if you, if you could help us get it, but the way that we did it and the, the agency partners that we work with, we weren't able to get like, you know, huge deals from that. And so the conference was helpful. We signed up as a startup booth and I think what was helpful for us was that we, our value prop stood out. Since then, we've kind of really used conferences as a way to meet with our ICP. And what's been helpful for us is that we're, most of these conferences, we're the only ones building games. And so we're, it's easy for us to stand out, like our booth, we have people, you know, like, hey, do you want to play a game? And then we have them play the game. So, for that sense, conferences has been really good for us in terms of, Being able to get in front of our ICP and it was kind of nice for them to tell us like, oh, this is something that they wanted. So right after that 1st conference, we did another conference and we didn't really have any games yet. So we were still kind of like, fleshing out the idea and then most recently we were at NRF and so we had a bunch of games and kind of like looking at our evolution from when we started to where we ended

in 6 months in our, like, our conference game. Our conference game has gone up. No pun intended. I guess our conference game has gone up so much in terms of our ability to show a real product and people get it. They see the game and we know how to we have something novel and unique. And what's been nice is I think we've had about 20 follow up calls. From that conference. And so if we can close, you know, 25 percent of them that it, you know, conference space for itself. Collin Stewart: Yeah. So first customers for Playably came from a conference and I guess you had some, we had some preexisting customers. First kind of net new ones, your source was conference, not, not cold cold email, and then your next customers, those have been coming from. Conferences as well. Those have been coming from Angelo Ferro: conferences as well. I think what we've been doing is now that we, we're basically rewarming the leads that we had met and that showed interest in the conference in the first conference six months ago. What's been helpful is that people like the idea. Yeah, I kind of, people like the idea. And the hesitation has always been, we're

kind of introducing a new concept of gamification. And talk with a lot of brands and when they think of gamification for e com, they think of the, the spinner and there's a tension between, like, if we talk to the sales, the person in charge of the website loves the spinner because it gets convergence and it gets sales and then the creative director hates the spinner. Because they think it's tacky and it kind of pieces around it's a spinner. Yeah. But what we do is we kind of bridge it to like, we can build you a bespoke experience that feels very much like it's intent. It's felt, it feels like the brand put effort and thought to it. It's not like a throwaway experience. It's kind of like a surprising, like factor for the customers, but it also gets slim. To get the convergence against the increased engagement and the retention. All that to say is that now that we have more examples, we were kind of, we're selling ahead as most startups do. And now that we have a couple of solid examples and now we have more games live. I think it's one of those things that as we start to. Have more examples live and have more games out there. My hope is that we'll start to generate more inbound leads for us. Collin Stewart: Gotcha. So, yeah,

existing customer base kind of came from, did the existing customers come from conferences or was there some from cold? Angelo Ferro: The, the existing customer base was all cold and like friends of friends. So it was within our network, but mostly cold email outreach. Gotcha. And then since then we've been kind of focused on the conferences and then going to more in person events in New York. So I live in New York. There's a lot of direct to consumer meetups. I think we shied away from it before because we didn't have a product yet. Like we had the landing pages, but like kind of. It's hard to show that. And then I just got back from conference yesterday and I showed them the game and everyone's like, Oh, I get it. I said, Hey, we're, we're, it was like, what do you do? Like shoppable games? Like, what's that? Like, let me show you. And then they play the game and like, Oh, it's really cool. So we finally have that product. And so I feel like that encourages me because I would go to these meetups and I'm like, I built landing pages, but you can't really like, you know, what is that? You can't really tell here. It's like, it's here. It's like of all the things I've had a soul and like, you know, the many pivots of our company, this has been the most fun. I'm having a lot of fun. I'm selling it.

That's awesome. And it's got, it's great that you can kind of present the aha moment right there. You know, with the landing page, the aha moment comes later at higher conversion rates. So you can look at it in a chart, but it's less exciting. It's less sexy when you're, when you're showing a game, it's like, Hey, here's the fun part. Angelo Ferro: We show them the game, they engage with it. And then. They play it and I'm like, you know how hard it is to get anyone to do anything these days the fact that you play The game you had fun and then we're able to get people to do that It's like it's it's kind of you know, it's a where attention is like the scarcest thing The fact that we're we feel like we're close to unlocking something. And so that's The most excited of the whole team has ever been in the years that we've been together. So Collin Stewart: that's really exciting. Yeah. Last question for you. Describe the moment and the feeling the first time you realized you might have product market fit or something. Angelo Ferro: Yeah, I was at so Sam from Yopo every month she hosts, he's like, yeah, it's called e commerce coffee collective.

So it's a bunch of like e commerce brands and service writers. And then it's like a coffee happy hour. In New York in the whole area. And so I've been going to, I go to them once a month and it's just great. So I catch up with people. And then when I finally had a game, I showed someone like, Oh, here's the game. We had to pull it out. This was around, I think it was December. And then she was a vendor and her mouth just dropped. She said, when I showed landing pages, when I showed all the other things that we had built, no one's mouth ever dropped, but the way that her mouth dropped. And she was like, she was playing the game and she was happy. There's a, it's kind of weird. Like our product makes people happy. And I guess when I worked at unity, I mean, you can argue games didn't make people happy, but this is the first time where like, like the person using it, I mean, the end customer we know they love it because we get feedback from like the brands that like, Oh man, people reach me on Instagram and they really love this game. So I think it's super cool. But to see it in like real life, to see people like have that, like, aha moment, like, Oh, this is really cool. Has been kind of like. I guess a marker of like, maybe we are up to Collin Stewart: something.

That's really awesome. It's that, that, that feeling where there's an emotional reaction. Angelo Ferro: Yeah. There's an emotional reaction. And then I mean, I've done conferences before and I've had to like, this is, I'm like excited. I love to go, I would love to go to all these events and just be like, Oh, Angela's the games guy. Like, yeah, I just want to be the games guy. That's what I'd be really happy if like my whole rest of my career, I'm just known as like the person who made online shopping fun again, which is our slogan. Collin Stewart: You should get like a, I don't know, maybe, maybe the flexible led screens aren't quite cheap enough yet, but I'm like flexible led t shirt with your game writing would be, Angelo Ferro: yeah, we would have it. And then we could have, one of the things we thought for a conference, cause we had a lot of people play is if we had a leaderboard, so then we could have like a raffle so we could gamify the whole conference experience, right? Where it's like, Hey, play our game, get your leaderboard top 10, you know, you get an extra raffle to win a free game or something. So Collin Stewart: that's awesome. I mean, even, even as a conference. Something to, to attract people to the booth. It's like, Hey, come play a game

that there's a pretty cool get. That's pretty cool. Get everybody else's handed out swag. And you're like, Hey, this is the, not only is this a fun little game, but it's the product. Yeah. Angelo Ferro: Yes. Yeah. We always Angelo Ferro: get this is like our third conference that we exhibited at. And then it happened to be a case, like we're always in the startup area. So like sometimes we're neighbors with the same people and they're always like, you guys always have the most packed booth. It's like, cause you know, this is way more fun than the ERP system. Totally. Collin Stewart: Totally. Oh, yeah. One of our best years at a conference was because we were right next to Brex right when they were just taking off and they had this like amazing magician there and he was like the greatest. I mean, I'm using my hands, but he was doing sleight of hand tricks and all these like, like real magic tricks. And it was amazing and we just kind of like our team spent most of the time standing at their booth, but then we turned around and be like, Hey, we're over here. Do you want to have a chat? And they brought a ton of people to our booth, which was fantastic. Yeah. Nice. If people are curious, want to learn more, want to reach out, ask you a question, or find more about Playably,