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Edtech Insiders
Edtech Insiders
Charlie Hopkins-Brinicombe on Why Most Gamification Fails and How Trophy.so Does It Better
Charlie Hopkins-Brinicombe is the co-founder of Trophy.so, a gamification infrastructure platform helping EdTech and wellness companies build engaging learning experiences in weeks, not months. With a background in product development and motivation design, Charlie focuses on creating scalable systems that boost retention, habit formation, and learner satisfaction.
💡 5 Things You’ll Learn in This Episode:
- Why most gamification fails.
- Which mechanics truly motivate learners.
- How social features boost engagement.
- How Trophy.so measures retention impact.
- How AI can personalize motivation.
✨ Episode Highlights:
[00:02:07] How Trophy.so began.
[00:03:23] Why platforms reinvent gamification.
[00:05:02] The real value of streaks and badges.
[00:08:50] Trophy.so’s retention and impact tools.
[00:12:40] Gamification for both consumer and school EdTech.
[00:14:36] Key mechanics—achievements, streaks, leaderboards, leagues.
[00:17:47] The power of social and community challenges.
[00:22:20] Common gamification pitfalls.
[00:28:29] Engagement vs. actual learning outcomes.
[00:35:28] AI-driven, personalized motivation.
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[00:00:00] Charlie Hopkins-Brinicombe: So to kind of fathom how would I build a community around these kind of challenges is kind of daunting. So people just kind of don't bother the think. I'll get to that at some point, but if you had a toolkit that just let you connect people in those ways with the leaderboards or challenges. And kind of just run it with a very simple integration, then I'd hope that we'd see a lot more platforms doing those kind of things.
And the outcome would be that everybody enjoys these, using these platforms a lot more and gets a lot more from them. So that's kind of what we wanna see.
[00:00:33] Alex Sarlin: Welcome to EdTech Insiders, the top podcast covering the education technology industry from funding rounds to impact to AI developments across early childhood K 12 higher ed, and work the. Find it
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We have a really exciting episode of Ed Tech Insiders today with a. Guest doing something really innovative in the ed tech and health tech space. Charlie Hopkins-Brinicombe is co-founder of Trophy.so it's a gamification infrastructure platform that helps product teams build gamified learning experiences in weeks, not months.
Trophy's. Battle tested tools are designed to help EdTech platforms avoid common gamification, pitfalls, and deliver engaging learning experiences at scale. Charlie Hopkins-Brinicombe, welcome to EdTech Insiders. Thanks, Alex. Thanks for having me. We chatted a few months ago and I learned a little bit about what Trophy does, and I just thought it was such an innovative approach to gamification and to engagement.
Before we get into anything else, tell us a little bit about what Trophy is and how you came up with this idea for basically gamification as a service.
[00:02:07] Charlie Hopkins-Brinicombe: It was an interesting one. Essentially I have like a long list in my phone of ideas of things that seem like good things to solve, and I've been maybe making that list for three or four years, just adding to the backlog.
I think the backlog, I'll get round to it at some point, and then I actually discovered, this is actually at the top. It was the very first one that I wrote down and I was like, maybe I should just give this a go and started to kind of find people to speak to about it. And explore a little bit more. And the more I spoke to people, the more I kind of realized that this is really a solved problem.
The idea of a leaderboard or a badge system or a streak or a push notifications engine is really kind of, everybody's doing the same thing, but it's maybe in a slightly different way. So it needs to be fairly flexible. At the end of the day, a leaderboard is ranking people according to some kind of logic that you might design.
If there was a system that would allow you to do that without doing any of the upfront work, then it would make it far more accessible for people and create less of that headache for them. So that's how it started and how it's going is we have about 30 teams that use our platform across EdTech and health and wellness, as you said.
And we just went to Web Summit last week and spoke to loads and loads of different platforms about. How to do gamification in their context. So yeah, it's been a, it's really a really cool journey for the last year and we're just trying to keep going.
[00:03:23] Alex Sarlin: It's such an innovative approach because as you say, it's something that is being reinvented in silos in many different companies across sectors.
For a decade or more, maybe even, almost two decades at this point, people have been starting to figure out, Hey, we want our users to be more engaged. We wanna retain them. We wanna be able to get them to do particular behaviors on our site or in our service and structure, sort of gamification structure is very powerful for that.
We've seen Duolingo become. One of the biggest companies in EdTech really based on exactly that. But the idea of everybody having to sort of figure this out on their own, pull the pieces together, manage it, it's wasted effort in a lot of cases when it's something solved. So you'd mentioned education, technology and health tech as two big industries that you're working in.
What do these have in common? What are the need that the gamification is solving for your customers and when they find you, what do they say about what they're looking to get out of this gamification platform?
[00:04:18] Charlie Hopkins-Brinicombe: Yeah, it's really to reinforce habits that people want to create or to reinforce intrinsic motivation that's already there in people.
I think a lot of times people try to add gameification to systems where maybe it doesn't really make much sense in the first place. So think of a workplace platform. People don't really have the intrinsic motivation to be there because they have to do, they're being paid to do that. So sometimes these things can feel kind of weird, but in consumer platforms, especially in ed tech and wellness, people are doing these things 'cause they wanna see some change in their life.
And so if you can help them to. Get there by either giving them a little bit of motivation to keep going or just giving them a nice way of seeing how they're doing. And it really helps, and a lot of companies have used this kind of insight to scale. So yeah, we're trying to just kind of be the toolkit for doing that in an elegant way, I guess.
[00:05:02] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, I think that aligning of incentives, or I don't know if you'd call it that, but the idea of like the user wants to be in. Wellness. They wanna be checking in with a therapist. They wanna be taking medication, they wanna be doing a meditation. They want to be doing the things that they're doing the wellness platform to do.
And in education, they wanna be finishing a class. They wanna be learning a language. Mm-hmm. But the issue is there's sort of the intrinsic motivation. Waxes and wanes. It comes and goes. You have other things going on in your life. So the idea of gamification just provides this incredibly clear.
Continuous structure and you say, I'm on a streak of 10 days. I talk to people who, they're like, I've been on 200 day streak at Duolingo. It just sort of, it accentuates and creates an additional incentive for them to do something that they already wanna do. And I feel like that's something that's, so, it's something that maybe underappreciated in what gamification does.
[00:05:53] Charlie Hopkins-Brinicombe: Yeah, and just to add to that, the, I think the idea of just everybody's so busy and attention is very expensive. And it might not be that, you know, so people don't want to use your products. You might look at your. 30 day or seven day retention and say like, you know, people just don't want to use my product.
But really, it might just be they do, but they just can't because you're not really telling them to come back, or you are not fighting against all the other things that's going on in their life. So if you can just nudge them in the right places, then you're kind of, they want to be nudged. And that's why people do celebrate those streaks that you're saying.
That's why people shout on LinkedIn and say, I've got a thousand days onduo because. They want that we can discuss whether Duolingo particularly has gone a bit too far or or not, but it's kind of the common thing that I hear from people. But yeah, that's what I would say anyway.
[00:06:37] Alex Sarlin: I have a personal interest in this because my master's thesis was about game mechanics in education.
It's something I've cared about for a very long time. This was actually right before the term gamification was sort of really coined and popularized, and I remember just that realization. It was one of the big realizations of my life. I read James Paul G and other people at the time and just said.
People have figured out these unbelievably powerful motivation tools. I've been playing an Apple game recently, an app store game called ero, and it is like this masterclass in gamification. Every moment they're unlocking something new, they're putting you in a new situation you're building to, you know, it's always right around the corner from some new achievement.
It's like. Unbelievable. And I'm finding myself logging in every day. It just, it works so well. And I imagine that some of your customers or potential customers, when you come and say, we do gamification infrastructure platform, they say, what am I really gonna get outta this? Does it work? Is it going to drive multi-day retention and engagement?
And I'm curious what you've seen so far in terms of what. The platform is actually delivering for these customers, because I think sometimes people are just all in on on these types of mechanisms and sometimes they're very skeptical. I'm curious what you've seen.
[00:07:49] Charlie Hopkins-Brinicombe: Yeah, I think there is a limit. You have to always keep in touch with what your platform's actually about.
If you try and design your ed tech platform like a game, you'll end up like Duolingo and then you'll get people saying that you're more a game and you don't really encourage people how to learn a language, which can be debated. But, so I think there is a limit, but as long as you keep in touch with that user and understand that they do actually want to.
Like their motivation is still there, and you're always designing for that rather than for engagement, then you'll naturally get the outcome that you want anyway, just by helping them do the thing that they want to do anyway, you'll get to the outcome. Yeah, rather than trying to like force it and shove it down their throats.
And that's how we see it anyways, we're, we are like a slightly unop, opinionated toolkit, but more and more of what we've been doing is actually guiding people on how to use what we've built in the right way. So yeah, we do actually do more of that now.
[00:08:36] Alex Sarlin: And what results are you seeing for some of your customers?
I'd love to just, yeah, you don't have to give exact numbers, but I'm so curious about the uplift. People sort of expect with gamification sometimes when they do it themselves. It doesn't work. How does it tend to work when they do it with Trophy?
[00:08:50] Charlie Hopkins-Brinicombe: Something that's interesting actually is like one of our features is, is an emails feature.
So we send weekly progress reports to people saying how they've done on various platforms because we send those out from kind of our service and we get the replies back, which is really interesting where our customer get the replies back and they tell us about them and it's like, oh, please don't stop sending these because I really love these emails.
They look so nice and they really motivate me. And they're worried that the last one is we're gonna stop sending these reminders, but it's like, oh no, please don't stop. Like I want to do it. I've just been really, really busy, so can you please keep sending them? So these are the kind of things that we see as like, oh, this stuff actually is in people's best interests and it is helping them.
So yeah, that's kind of one thing that
[00:09:29] Alex Sarlin: we've picked up on. Yeah. And do you provide some of the metrics to your customers in terms of how it's changing the product metrics to include these new mechanisms? Or is that something that tends to work on their side?
[00:09:41] Charlie Hopkins-Brinicombe: We do have those tools. We monitor retention, and one of the things we actually do, which is quite interesting, is we've developed this kind of impact score.
The features are actually performing, so we can monitor baseline retention and say, this is what your first day retention is, seven day retention is, and then overlay. Another plot of this is what it looks like when you add a streak or when you add a badges feature or a leaderboard, and to actually see how it changes the, the behavior.
And we're gonna be doing lots more around that as well. Um, experimentation is a big part of all consumer platforms, so we're gonna be adding like a full experimentation stack where you can say, this set of users is gonna get this set of features, this set of users is gonna get a different set. Maybe the street mechanic is slightly different, or the leaderboard works in a slightly different way.
And then let's just see what happens. And then. You can kind of get all that feedback and then just experiment with all the different bits of the toolkit that we've got and do it that for yourself, which is what all the big platforms are doing anyway as they figured out. Experimentation is kind of the key at scale to get the outcomes that you want, but it's difficult to do.
It's kind of its own discipline. And so if we can build a tool that can embed with the gamification system itself, 'cause what you sometimes get is you get like a homegrown gamification engine and then it's pushing stuff. Some other analytics tool and some other experimentation tool. That kind of has to work together, but there's a lot of friction and there's a lot of maintenance involved long term to do that.
So we can have everything in one platform, the gamification engine, the management system to get product managers in to actually manage the whole mechanics, and then the analytics and experimentation in one place. Then it makes everything simpler for everyone.
[00:11:12] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, that's a very powerful idea because that rapid experimentation and that ability to do AB testing or to test with sub-segments of your user base is its own value.
I mean, it's incredibly useful to be able to rapidly try different things with different types of users, and then tying that into the core gamification, mechanics is very powerful and the ability to. Try and tweak and get the exact right type of mechanisms for the right types of people. There's a huge upside there and I love that baseline measuring.
That's another very producty. You like making sure that people understand the baseline retention or the baseline engagement for various things, and then what's the delta for when you add different types? Features. It's really powerful. So let's talk about the education side of this. EdTech platforms come in many different shapes and sizes.
There's school platforms, there's consumer platforms. I imagine that with your system, you primarily would work with EdTech companies that are direct to consumer. But correct me if I'm wrong there, is that what you tend to see? Yeah,
[00:12:08] Charlie Hopkins-Brinicombe: I mean, it tends to be a little bit of both. I mean, I'd say we're probably currently skewed towards direct to consumer, but I wouldn't say that that is.
A reflection of the number of people that want to actually do these things. I think that's just where we've got to today. Yeah, I think there's a lot of cases where actually one of our biggest customers is kind of doing both. They're a direct to consumer platform, but then they also have like a school.
Almost like B two, B2C area where we're doing similar features as a direct to consumer, but slightly differently because we're tying it in with people's schools and their institutions. So both
[00:12:40] Alex Sarlin: really. I would say that's really interesting. I mean, we've been talking to a number of different ed tech companies that are increasingly trying different variations of that B two, B2C models.
We just put out an interview with the head of Prodigy learning. That's a massive EdTech success. And their model is exactly that. It's free to schools and then paid for parents and families, but then they tie in. It's basically what you're doing in school can change what's happening at home. And your account is somewhat unified and it's just a really interesting approach to sort of building a business.
And it's worked incredibly well for them. And we've seen Epic did that as well. So I love that. And I think it's really interesting, the idea of gamification and that kind of mechanism in a joint structure seems particularly powerful.
[00:13:22] Charlie Hopkins-Brinicombe: Yeah, there's lots more you can do. Direct consumers can be tricky because you, it's hard to like know how to join people up 'cause they probably don't know each other.
But in a school setting, like it's obvious you just have a, a leaderboard, but then you actually have it per year group where you have it per school or per institution. And then suddenly you've got this kind of community mechanic that you didn't really have before. That is more difficult to create on the consumer side, but we're trying to build tools for that as well.
But yeah, with the biggest customer I just mentioned, just release a leagues feature, which is breaking down by school and they wanna break it down by location. So like schools in London could compete with other schools in London, but then schools in Hong Kong can compete with other schools in Hong Kong.
So yeah, there's tons of more you can do in the school side as well.
[00:14:01] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, so mentioning the leagues I think begs a question. You know, when people think of gamification, they probably, depending on any listener's background, they may know a lot about it. They may have used it, they may have built it themselves.
They may have heard about it as a phrase, passing by over the last number of years. But when you define gamification, what would you say are some of the core mechanisms? I've heard you mentioned streaks, badges, leaderboards, and leagues. Are there others in there? Can you just break down quickly for those who may not.
Feel like they have a total grip on how the gamified mechanics work about what each of these are and how they drive user engagement.
[00:14:36] Charlie Hopkins-Brinicombe: Yeah, there's tons more that we haven't got to yet, which I'm sure we'll get to in the next 12 months as well. But yeah, so I mean, if you think of like an achievements feature, it's really recognizing personal success.
So you would award a, an achievement to somebody that completed a certain task, maybe one time or multiple times, and it should be aligned with the actions that you think will lead that person to having the best outcome. So if it's education, it might be a video platform. Getting 'em to watch a hundred videos or 10 videos, 50 videos, you can have these different milestones.
And getting people to unlock those badges as they go is naturally aligned with the outcome that they want. So that can be a nice way of using achievements. Streaks are kind of like a consistency mechanic, so it's doing the same thing multiple times. It could be on a daily cadence or a weekly cadence, sometimes a monthly cadence.
It kind of depends on the use case, but we kind of support all of the different options. Really good for retention as well, but. Sometimes they can have a negative impact as well. So you have to balance the, again, make sure it's again, aligned with what the user actually wants as the outcome and not this extra thing you're just adding because you've seen Jingo do it, if that makes sense.
Leaderboards are obviously a ranking of users, but. Again, it comes down to implementation and how you actually do that. So if you had a leaderboard of a million people, for example, it's really only gonna ever engage the top a hundred maybe. And the rest of them are really like, well, I'm never gonna really gonna make it.
So what's the point of even trying? And those people in the bottom that if imagine you log into your. Revision platform and you see that you are position 3,000,004, it can completely demotivate you from even wanting to even learn again. So we actually limit our leaderboards to a thousand people. You actually can't create one more than that.
And we encourage people to try and discover something that's common amongst users and break them down into smaller leaderboards and then have that system of running smaller, more connected leaderboards. But yeah, that's leaderboards. That's kind of where we've got to now. We wanna do way, way more. So we're thinking of challenges.
This can be personal challenges, so it could be like on a daily basis, these are things that you should come in and do today, or community challenges is quite interesting to us of actually having everybody on the platform, whether that's in a particular school or across the board for direct to consumer, working towards the same goal.
And if you all get there. You all get a prize or you all get something for free. So it could be, let's all read a million words this month and maybe you've got, you know, a hundred thousand users and everybody can take part trying to create this more social experience. 'cause if you think of a learner, often classrooms don't necessarily apply here, but if you think of that learn, self-learn journey.
It could be pretty lonely. Like there's people that actually operate the platforms. You see everybody kind of in aggregate. You think, oh, I have 300,000 method active users. That's amazing. But you forget that those are actually 300,000 houses of people sitting there and doing these things on their own.
So the more you can like. Create these social environments, community challenges or smaller connected leaders, people actually know each other. Then it can really benefit people, and I think that's been slightly missed in the past of gamification is really just, oh yeah, we'll add a leaderboard. That's fine.
That's done. Take that off the list, then you forget. What the actual user is of the experience of that. And the more you can do to actually make it more relevant, the better. So we're trying to kind of power that more.
[00:17:47] Alex Sarlin: That's powerful. And then you mentioned leagues in passing, that's another sort of social feature, right?
Where people are working together.
[00:17:53] Charlie Hopkins-Brinicombe: Yeah. Leagues can be interesting as well because they're a natural way of kind of bucketing up people by ability, not necessarily by location or peer group. Natural on ability. Don't necessarily have to know each other. You kind of know that this person next to you is at a similar stage to you.
They might have been learning for the same amount of time, or they're kind of on the same module as you. So if you can add a league, it could be based on some other concept, like an XP or some kind of points thing. But really just trying to create some element of connection and then having the ability to move up and down as you go keeps you in touch with how you're doing.
Obviously moving down isn't amazing, but you, you have to kind of balance the system in some way. So
[00:18:31] Alex Sarlin: yeah, I mean I think that point you're making about social challenges leagues the idea that a lot of consumer tech in general and ed tech is part of that can be very atomizing, right? It can be a little solid cystic, it's like a person and a system going back and forth and gamification.
Traditionally, sometimes even enhances that feeling. It's like it's you climbing that ladder inside a system alone. But these social features, I think, add a really exciting dimension to it because they showcase that you're not alone. You're not at all alone, right? Mm-hmm. You're, you're there amongst many, many other people with similar learning goals, similar abilities, similar aspirations for various things, and I think that's a powerful.
Feature. I'm curious, when you think about that future of gamification, do you feel that social learning and social proof and visibility is really gonna be core to what the next generation of gamification might look like?
[00:19:22] Charlie Hopkins-Brinicombe: I think so. I think that's probably where we're gonna be taking it anyway. It just adds a extra layer that I don't think people can easily tap into.
I think they are so focused on the learning experience as they should be, but it's difficult to step back and have the toolkit for creating that kind of experience, actually quite complex. So to kind of fathom how would I build a community around these kind of challenges is kind of daunting. So people just kind of don't bother or they think I'll get to at some point.
If you had a toolkit that just let you connect people in those ways with the leaderboards or challenges and kind of just run it with a very simple integration, then I'd hope that we'd see a lot more platforms doing those kind of things. And the outcome would be that everybody enjoys these, using these platforms a lot more and gets a lot more from them.
So that's kind of what we wanna see.
[00:20:06] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, and it also, as you mentioned, dovetails really nicely with different types of educational use cases. If you have individual consumers, they can connect with others. But if you're working within a school or within a particular city or a district or anything like that, then you have these natural, the idea of like, okay, my particular school district has a social challenge to read a million words this month.
And every time I read anything, I'm contributing to it and adding to that. And if we get a million. Great thing happens to the whole district. Like that's a really exciting and very motivating, but also very sort of pro-social goal to approach.
[00:20:38] Charlie Hopkins-Brinicombe: Yeah. And they can also be great growth engines as well. 'cause if you have this community challenge, like that is a huge marketing opportunity.
That's true. If you're a direct to consumer, like. London is running an event this month, which means we could need to read 10 million words. Suddenly you get all these influx of new people that wanna like, or they're sharing it with their friend and saying, I contribute this much. Let's share it and try and get to this goal.
Or it looks like we're gonna be a bit behind, so we need to get my friends involved so that I get this challenge, and then suddenly you are referring people. So there's so many angles to it. It's really not just an engagement thing. Once you take this kind of holistic approach, it becomes part
[00:21:11] Alex Sarlin: of everything you do really.
I totally agree. One thing that I think is really intriguing about your business model with Trophy is that it's sort of predicated on, I think, a really interesting insight, which is that many different types of platforms in education and wellness and others have been sort of approaching gamification features on their own for many years, and on and off in different ways at different features, testing them in product.
But it's really something that's happened over and over again in isolation. And I imagine that there's probably some. Relatively common pitfalls that people hit. You mentioned maybe one of them is the measurement is having to connect a gamification platform to an AB testing or a sort of optimization platform.
There can be friction there, but I'm curious if there are other pitfalls that you've seen either before starting Trophy to leading you to start it, or in your work with customers with Trophy. Like do they say, oh, we tried badges. It fell apart because of X, Y, Z. Or we tried to do a leaderboard. We tried to do some kind of social gamification, but we couldn't maintain it or we couldn't build it or, I'm just curious where the hurdles have been that have created that really interesting opportunity to come in with a fully fleshed out infrastructure platform.
[00:22:20] Charlie Hopkins-Brinicombe: Yeah, streaks is probably a good one to mention 'cause it's the one that like a lot of people are most familiar with and one that people want to implement most. Streaks can be great. They can be really motivating, but they could also be quite demotivating when you lose the streak and almost have the negative effect impact that you want.
And so a lot of people just think, oh yeah, we've, we've had a daily streak, now let's see what happens. And then suddenly, like, it's great for a month. And then people like start to get busy or they forget, or they, people just are busy generally, so they just lose their streaks and then suddenly they see this kind of cliff where it starts to not work.
And they're like, well, what do we do now? Like we just spent ages building this thing and now it's not really, it was working for some time, but not a little bit. So you have to kind of evolve this idea. And so we built in a way for people to kind of turn on this idea of like a freezes or a pauses kind of feature where give the user.
Something where you can like automatically save them once or twice on this particular cadence that you want, just to give them a little bit more back and say. I have a 30 day streak, but I've almost missed it yesterday. But the platform kind of gave me a little bit of leeway and then you've kind of flatten out that cliff a little bit.
There's all sorts of stuff like that that you can do. Again, it's, it's more dev work. It's more time going back to the product team and taking resources away from other stuff. So for us it's just to switch. You just turn it on and decide how many you want to give to people. It just kind of works out the box.
And the same is true with like a personal streak as well. It's something we're thinking about where. People implement a platform wide system of this is a daily streak. This is how everybody's gonna use this feature, but they forget. Again, it's individuals that learn in different ways or they use platforms in different ways.
Maybe some people like to study on a Friday, on a Saturday, or some people just don't. They take that time off and they study on a Sunday, but suddenly they're now drawn to. This common way of using the platform, which is quite rigid. So that's another pitfall and something that we're gonna be approaching with like a streak schedule and say that my personal streak should be through the week and not on the weekend, or I just wanna study on a Saturday.
And then you can hold people to there. Idea of works for that. So those are some of the things around, around streaks in particular.
[00:24:27] Alex Sarlin: That makes a lot of sense. You know, combining that with what you said earlier about leaderboards, how they can be demotivating when somebody shows up very low on a leaderboard.
And so you need to subsegment and have leaderboards that are relatively contained. I feel like, you know what I'm hearing in, in both that case and with this streak, you know, example you're giving is that. People will build the gamification features, but maybe not realize that there are these elements of them that can actually be double-edged swords.
That can be a little bit, you know, backsliding, they can be demotivating if, if they're used in certain ways. And then it becomes this almost like a continuous development opportunity where you have to say, you know, we created streaks, but now we have to create pauses, and now we have to create personal streaks, and now we have to create all these things.
And you know, when you come to a platform like Trophy that's doing this in a centralized way and focusing purely on that. Rather than on, oh, we have to do that, but we also have to do all the other parts of our product. You get to learn and optimize and sort of figure out all those nuances and then.
Provide them for everybody rather than, again, atomizing, you know, everybody having to learn on their own. The same lessons of, we did streaks, but we came up with a problem. Every time somebody breaks a streak, they fall apart and X, Y, Z. Mm-hmm. So I think it's a really insightful, this idea of, you know, I don't think you use these words, but I think of it as gamification as a service.
This idea of like being able to, maybe you do, but offering. A suite of engagement and retention and mechanics out of the box that can be customized in all of these ways, could be tailored in all these ways to exactly the types of behaviors and schedules and cadences that, that any platform's trying to drive is a really innovative idea.
So one thing we haven't talked about yet, and I think it's, it's a little bit of the achilles heel of gamification. I'll say this to somebody who, who loves gamification, has been in it for a long time. You know, gamification has been criticized at times for being really focused on. Engagement on getting people to show up.
Right. And you mentioned Duolingo before, it's like people can have a thousand day streak on Duolingo. Does that mean that they can actually speak Italian or speak Mandarin like that? 'cause you know, as you mentioned, that's what people are really there to do, right? They're there to learn a language, they're there to expand their knowledge.
So sometimes gamification, because if reward. You know, attendance basically, in many cases, sometimes it rewards behavior too, but it rewards, it rewards things that are sort of tangential to the actual learning in many cases. And I'm curious how you think about that, that tension between motivation and actual mastery.
[00:26:44] Charlie Hopkins-Brinicombe: I think people tend to get the idea from Duolingo and I, I do agree as a Duolingo user, like I've been learning Italian at various points and I don't think I'm any further ahead than I was when I started. You know, there's many people that kind of graduate from, from that experience with something a bit more.
I would say it's down to, in that case, the actual way that they teach you how to learn the language rather than the the game aspects. And I think it's easy to kind of paint all platforms that therefore use gamification with a broad brush and say that none of this works is maybe a little bit too far. I would say that it's more about keeping in touch with the actual user, like giving them points for doing something that's totally unrelated to why they're even on the platform is not gonna have any benefit.
For, for them. It might have a benefit for you maybe, but I mean, what's the point of of doing that? It's not, 'cause at the end of the day, retention engagement comes from when people actually enjoy using the platforms and actually get something from it. It changes their life in some way. So optimize for that outcome, not for the kind of, oh, can we get daily active users up by 2% just by sending this notification?
You know, you'll get very consistent usage if you can show people that using the platform works. And these things just kind of add to the. The experience that you have already. And that's kind of what I would say. And secondly, like you have to engage people if you want them to learn if, if they're not going to, or atten, as we said, attention is very expensive.
So you do kind of need to show people that it can be a fun experience as well. Oftentimes people know they might need to learn this thing. Maybe it's for work or something, but you have to also motivate them to do that thing, otherwise they're definitely not gonna learn. So Totally. It kind of, there's, there's two sides to it.
[00:28:29] Alex Sarlin: I mean, showing up is a foundational aspect of actually learning from any ed tech product or platform. So it predicates it, it, it's obviously part of it. And, and I agree with you. I think that Duolingo, you know, we don't wanna, I'm not trying to say terrible things about Duolingo. I don't, I think Duolingo has a lot of amazing benefits and I think I've written about how it's really.
Proven out in many ways that gamification is, is a meaningful set of mechanisms in a big way. But I do think you're right, it sort of sometimes becomes a little bit of a poster child for style over substance in some ways. And people are not always sure if, if the learning is really there and it's sort of gives gamification a bad name in some ways.
I think the, you're, you're, you're definitely right about that. What other aspect of this I'd love to ask you about, which is that, you know, one of the things that I think is very interesting about gamification, you just mentioned one aspect of this is that, you know, if you start rewarding behaviors that are not.
On the core learning path, then it can be kind of strange, right? If it's like, oh, you're coming to a, an EdTech platform and if you, you know, if you open up lots of menus and find little hidden stars somewhere, you get a five star badge and the 10 star badge and you're like, well, that's not why anybody's there.
It's not to open menus. It's not to explore the platform, it's to, it's to actually learn or just as a random example, but what's the flip side of that? I think, you know, my question is like. Is there a way to actually tie the true learning outcomes to achievements or to leagues or to streaks? Like, oh, you actually improved in a really meaningful way on this particular set of chemistry.
That's why you get the achievement. That's something we don't always see that often. I'm curious how you think about it.
[00:29:58] Charlie Hopkins-Brinicombe: Yeah, I mean, in a lot of learning there are kind of, you know, the outcomes you want might be tied to a particular grade, or it could be tied to something actually real, like language learning, for example, has.
Pretty clear requirements of you at this stage. And the next stage is, is X. Exactly. So tying it directly to these things can work pretty well. And that is applicable across a lot of different sectors as well. I mean, not just ed tech, but health as well. Often you're tracking very specific things. It could be macronutrients, micronutrients you actually want to hit or consistently.
So tying it directly to the things that people actually know about and are therefore. Makes way more sense than just tying it to, like you said, finding something in the app somewhere that you, you know, is not really related to why you're there. So yeah, that is definitely a good way of, if you have got something like that in your, in your use case that you can directly tie to.
Then I would definitely encourage people to, yeah.
[00:30:49] Alex Sarlin: So it could be something authentic in the world. Like, you know, you've kept your blood pressure down for a straight week, that's an achievement, right? That's great. Mm-hmm. Or it could be something tied to an existing structure that actually does reward learning, like language levels or, or grades or standardized test scores.
Right. I mean, you can imagine easily a test prep platform where you know it's rewarding you for getting better and better scores on your practice tests. Like that's. Directly aligned to what somebody's there for. That makes a lot of sense. And it's really interesting because I, one thing I, I admire about Trophy is that you are very, you mentioned this early on, you're very agnostic in many ways.
Or you can be agnostic about what people are actually setting up the behaviors and usage to be. It's a platform that you can do streaks or achievements or badges or leaderboards or, or leagues around any particular type of use. But I imagine, you know, you mentioned earlier on like. When people come and they have this toolkit of gamification, they may or may not realize which types of behaviors they're trying to reward.
And you're centralized experiencing many different, you just mentioned 30 different platforms using Trophy. I imagine you have a lot of insights that you can provide. I'm sure that that has been really interesting, sort of going up the consult. Stack a little bit, and as you're working with a new customer, they say, okay, wait.
We can do all these things, but how should we do all these things? What should these be? The core behaviors? What should be the thresholds? How many people should be on our leaderboard? You have more and more defined opinions that you can provide to them. I'm curious what that looks like in practice. Is that like a customer onboarding?
Is that a good defaults in the platform? Like how do you help nudge people towards the best practices of gamification?
[00:32:20] Charlie Hopkins-Brinicombe: Yeah, it's a combination of those things you just mentioned. It's a decent onboarding. A lot of times platforms will kind of hide the tools away and then do the consulting part first, but we try to flip that around and say, give everybody the tools and then let 'em ask.
Kind of how to use it. And so we do guide people on how to do that. I do calls with people often they sign up, they see that, okay, this is gonna, this is gonna work. I've shown it to the Indigen engineers. They seem like it's, looks like a good platform to use. And then they'll come to say, okay, now we're ready to like integrate, but how do we actually, what would you suggest the best setup is for us?
And so we'll do those calls with people. Then kind of show them the various sensible defaults that we've added in to help them guide them and like use those in the right way. So like I said, we don't let people create lead boards longer than a thousand people because if you were to do that, it would be a bad experience.
So we try and then encourage people to create these kind of groups of people, find something that's people have in common, and then create lead boards around that. And we have customers in Slack as well that we have like Con continuous back and forth with. We have like monthly calls with some of them to.
Review the analytics and stuff, so we are quite like hands-on as well. Although the platform looks quite unop opinionated from the, from the website maybe. Maybe we need to do a bit of work to maybe try and communicate some of the other stuff that we do. But yeah, we try and do, do both and I think that that will stick around.
I'd like that to kind of scale with us as we go. I think there is a difference, like the tools need to be unop opinionated because you can do so many different, there are so many different types of mechanics you can do in different ways, but then we need to be quite opinionated on like what's gonna be best for a particular customer.
So we, we do kind of have a hybrid model, I guess, in that way.
[00:33:58] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, I think it makes a lot of sense. It's one of these interesting, it's psychology. I mean, at the end of the day, what gamification is, is tapping into user psychology in meaningful ways and giving them structures in which to work. And psychology is something that is not, you can't just always predict from the outset how things are gonna affect a user's psychology or which users I, I think your example of the personalized schedules, the idea of being like, well, a normal streak might be coming in every day, but that's actually maybe not at all how particular learners.
They might be coming in weekly because they're studying for something that's a year away and they could, they do a weekly session and that daily streak just doesn't work. So some of those realizations about how to match user psychology is, is incredibly impactful. And I imagine that consultation, that configuration that you're sort of mentioning.
For particular use cases is probably a lot of the success of the platform. One other thing it brings to mind for me is that consultation about, you know, how any particular EdTech platform might use gamification, feels like a potentially a ripe area for ai and something you could see an AI being able to go in and say, I do this kind of platform, I might, users are X, Y, Z.
B2C and a B2B two CXY, Z, and an AI tool saying, well, you know, from what we know from the Trophy corpus, here are some of the things you might wanna try. Right. A, a small leaderboard using this type of subset and this type of behavior. I'm curious if that is something we could talk about AI more generally, but I'm curious if as sort of AI wizard kind of experience might be something that would be relevant for the future in Trophy.
[00:35:28] Charlie Hopkins-Brinicombe: Yeah, this is an idea we've had was like a, a kind of wizard to help you set it up and do some of that. More configuration that we might be able to scale a bit easier than having, you know, people that want it will obviously do the the one-to-ones, but for like the long tail of people that just kind of don't wanna speak to anyone and just want to do it themselves, that would probably be quite useful.
Yeah. So that, that's actually a great idea. I'll probably take that one away. And also because we have a podcast as well where we kind of talk about these things, what we've thought about is all the content that we have from that. All the transcripts about totally all the different platforms that people have is, can we just feed that into a model and then let people have conversations with, you know, the PM at Polar Steps is what we're doing tomorrow, which is a big travel app, the CEO of lifestyle we had on last week that are doing these things at scale.
Can we just kind of let them ask these people, well, what did you do when you're in the situation? Or how did you improve your attention? And then this is how you would set that up in Trophy to try to do the same thing or
[00:36:23] Alex Sarlin: similar. Totally. I forgot to mention that, but yeah, you are a podcaster as well and you do a podcast cloud user engagement and motivation retention.
That's so interesting. And maybe people can hear it in the quality of your mic. It's very, it's, you know, very good.
[00:36:35] Charlie Hopkins-Brinicombe: Yeah. It's worth best investment. I think it was like 80 pounds or something, but it's the best investment of of made in a while.
[00:36:41] Alex Sarlin: Exactly. Yeah. But yeah, I mean, frankly, you know, I've been thinking about something similar.
We've done over 400 episodes of this podcast at this point, and it makes this incredible corpus. Each transcript is like 20 pages long. 8,000 pages of information, firsthand information about ed tech from all of these amazing people becomes a really powerful corpus of material. And as you mentioned the, you know, the case studies, the idea of being like, how does it work in the travel industry?
Let's talk to this CEO of a travel company. And they could talk about exactly how this works. It's really, I think it's a really exciting idea. Lemme ask one more question about ai. I feel like every conversation devolves into an AI company. These days, it's kind of silly, but one thing that I think is really exciting about ai, we, we did a webinar about this earlier in the year, or maybe it was even last year at this point.
But you know, I feel like gaming and gamification are such powerful techniques. They create this really amazing structure on top of any different type of behavior. And AI is very good at structuring information. It's very good at taking synthesizing data. It could be personal data from a user. It could be data from an aggregated set of users.
It could be, you know, a a hundred research papers written about this and turning it into a structure. And I've just been really intrigued at the idea of sort of AI as a gamification engine, ai, even at a personal level, right, that a person could say. What do I want? I want to do this thing. I wanna get a new job and get the skills to get this new job by the end of next year.
And an AI can say, well, I can not only tell you what the skills are, but I can create a schedule for you. I can create a learning path for you, and I can create gamification structures so that you actually stay on that path for all the reasons you've been mentioning in this podcast. You know, align. You know you want this, but how do you structure your attention to not.
You know, end up watching Netflix. How do you structure your attention to not end up getting so caught up in your current job that you forget to upskill? Like that is so powerful and it's something that I feel like AI actually could really be, you know, transformational in, because it can customize, it can do it in any individual circumstance rather than being a, you know, a Duolingo streak.
I'm curious if you see that as sort of one possible future of gamification, that idea of AI gamifying people's goals in their particular context.
[00:38:51] Charlie Hopkins-Brinicombe: I think so. Yeah. I mean if you think of the kind of personalized streak schedule example that we gave. Yeah. It could really like suggest to you. You know, you're not really active on the weekends, so why didn't we just turn this off for you?
Or, you know, you've been like really active on Monday, so we're gonna give you like a two x points boost on every Monday or, or next Monday. You're gonna get this. And it's very, it's for that one user. So there's tons of stuff we are like actively thinking about this and there's, there's tons of stuff that we really want to, to add.
And also on the side that you mentioned of like trying to guide people of what would work in their particular use case and try and open it up to be like less. Platform wide and, and way more personal also in the direct to consumer side as well because it's these, these social experiences 'cause can really like level up the whole gamification experience, but that's more difficult to do on the consumer side.
So trying to figure out like who are the best people for you to be? Put into a cohort with is more of a challenge in that side. So like, we're essentially like an event system where we're tracking what people are doing all the time and seeing the user interactions, kind of the flashcards they're flipping, the videos they're watching.
So not the actual content of those, but the, the fact that they're actually doing that thing. And so we can kind of use that data to say, well, these other set of 10 people are also kind of doing the same thing as you, so why don't you add them as a friend? Or why don't you. Compete against them for the next week and see how you do.
But at scale, that's quite a big challenge. So AI would make that much, much easier.
[00:40:18] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, that's a really insightful comment I think of, you know, some of the surface areas in which AI learning is happening at a huge scale, like Google guided learning or open AI study mode, or magic school. You know, and you're like, imagine a world in which that type of personalized gamification, that type of cohorting could happen in that.
World. Imagine if you, you know, in magic school you have a teacher go in and say, okay, by the end of this year I want, this is the goals for this set of kids. And suddenly it goes, okay, fantastic. We're gonna make that group a cohort. We're gonna make them aware of each other. They can, they can act on a leaderboard or they can be on a collective leaderboard.
They can work together to compete with the school next door. And I'll track it and I'll give progress reports and I'll do all these things. It's like, it is such a powerful set of structures that just takes any kind of experience and turns it into. A structured, meaningful, you know, progression. I think it would be so powerful in the context of major, you know, AI EdTech tools, whether they're direct to consumer or in schools.
It's so powerful. It part of what excites me so much about what you're doing at Trophy is that, again, it's something that. I think so many people, especially at the very height of gamification, there was like a moment where it was just taking over. It was very, very hype. Everybody was talking about it. I'm sure you remember, and I think at that moment, you know, bunch ball and badge.
There was just all of this excitement about it. But I think what happened is all of these people tried to do it on their own. They hit the same kind of issues that you've talked about here as pitfalls, right? Rewarding the wrong things, demotivating accidentally creating mass leaderboards. Not making it very isolating, all of these things.
And then individually people sort of failed at it and it became less of a go-to place. At the same time, some of the most successful, especially in EdTech, companies like Duolingo, companies like Kahoot have used it extensively. It's absolutely core to everything they do. And I think we, we see maybe throughout the baby with the bath water a little bit back then and now it's coming back in, in a really, I think, thoughtful way.
And I think you're really leading the charge with that. Yeah, I hope so. That's our plan anyway. Absolutely. So lemme ask you about the podcasting 'cause I think this is so interesting, right? You do this podcast about learning and and engagement and motivation in not just in ed tech, in in ed tech and wellness and in various industries.
What has been the sort of biggest learning you've gotten from your conversations? I feel like the big trick about podcasting is that you get to learn from everybody. It's so powerful. Oh yeah. What have been some of your learnings from your discussions that you'd like to share with our audience?
[00:42:43] Charlie Hopkins-Brinicombe: Yeah, I think it's this social aspect that, that has really come from a lot of the conversations we've had.
A few people have kind of brought that up and they, they're doing this in other ways. They're building communities, and so gamification is like a, is a community, but it's like an added layer to that community as well, so that, that's really come out of those conversations that we've had.
[00:43:03] Alex Sarlin: Are there any resources that you'd like to share with our audience?
This is something we used to ask in every podcast, and I don't do it, you know, religiously anymore, but I think because you are so deep in this particular area, I'm curious if there are books or you know, newsletters or if there's any resources that you feel like are your go-to. For really understanding the psychology of gamification or how EdTech and gamification go together that you think, you know, if anybody listening to this says, right, I, I just wanna learn more about this world and understand it better, where would you send people?
[00:43:34] Charlie Hopkins-Brinicombe: Hmm. There's lots of stuff on the e-learning industry. Started to write articles in there as well. I wrote one about how most people do leaderboard wrong on there and the kind of different ways of trying to do this. So I'm gonna be posting a lot more on there. The analysis framework is something to look out for, if that's something people want to look into.
Kind of provides a bit of a framework to thinking about by ation and how you can start to implement gamification in your platform and the psychology around it. So that's, that's good to look out for. And then our podcast as well. If people want to listen to how people do Course ification and, and how it impacts their platforms, then yeah, it's The Levels Podcast is what it's called.
So on all the major platforms.
[00:44:10] Alex Sarlin: The Levels podcast. What was the name of the framework you just said? I think I missed it. Lysis Framework.
[00:44:16] Charlie Hopkins-Brinicombe: Ssis.
[00:44:17] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, I'll can, I'll send you a link. Fantastic. And, and as always, we will put links to all of these resources in the show notes for this episode. I've never heard of lysis.
I'm very curious about it and yeah, good suggestions there. Thank you so much. This is Charlie Hopkins-Brinicombe. He is the co-founder of Trophy.so, which is a gamification infrastructure platform that helps. Product teams, including many in EdTech built gamified learning experiences in weeks, not months, and incredibly customizable ways that can be experimented on, and you can try all sorts of different things to make your platform more sticky, engaging, retentive.
And motivating. Thank you so much for being here with us on EdTech Insiders.
[00:44:58] Charlie Hopkins-Brinicombe: Thanks, Alex.
[00:45:00] Alex Sarlin: Thanks for listening to this episode of EdTech Insiders. If you like the podcast, remember to rate it and share it with others in the EdTech community. For those who want even more, EdTech Insider, subscribe to the Free EdTech Insiders Newsletter on substack.
