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Tag: Streaks

Streaks In An Offline Business

I ended up damaging my finger today so typing is bit of a struggle.

I came across this tweet by Moiz Ali, founder of Native. Moiz is known for building a $100M D2C brand that he sold to P&G under 3 years. His company only employed 7 people at the time of acquisition. On his twitter, he likes to give away ideas that he thinks can grow into multi million dollar businesses. Here’s one of his ideas using one of my favorite game-mechanics.

I don’t know much about gym economics, so I don’t know how well this could work. But I do know that gym memberships are sold way beyond the capacity because most members have a poor record of showing up.

If these economics don’t work, I’m sure that a different variant of this same model will definitely work e.g $45/month fee and $1/day waiver so the gym makes $15 even if a member shows up daily. The idea is in the offering and not the pricing.

You’re rewarding your members for showing up daily which encourages them to show up. The statement that you’re making is that your gym really cares about their health as you’re willing to charge less as long the customers are healthier. The attendance rate would still only slightly improve as most members will continue to have attendance rates as before.

In addition, you’re taking 1 year commitment so you’re still likely to make money of your most regular customers.

I think it’s a great idea. What do you guys think?

180 Days Streak – And An Update On My Life

I have been writing now for over 180 days. There are many things that aren’t great about life right now. But in comparison, there will always be more things that are right and less that aren’t and that means we need to always be grateful and keep moving forward.

Mental Health

The COVID-19 situation has surrounded us for too long and this will probably stay around for much longer. I have not been able to see the few friends I have in a really long time which was the best part of my day everyday and one of the biggest advantages of the freedom given by online businesses. I miss that and it’s affecting my already feeble emotional health.

There are other things affecting me too. I had an insanely good business a few years ago, which over the years isn’t as good as before. There are many friends and colleagues who weren’t there for me during this time. For this, I’ve learnt to realize that everything is my own problem and no one owes me anything. If anyone offers support, I need to be grateful. If someone doesn’t, that’s okay.

During this time I have also had colleagues whom I offered a lot of support to, but they have deprived me of both business and happiness. I’m trying to learn to deal with this too and hopefully I will.

Blogging

Some of the days I didn’t want to write at all. Somedays I’ve done it just because I had to do it to keep the challenge going on and somedays I’ve put my heart and mind into writing this blog.

There are many reasons that I continue to keep this challenge alive. Some of them concern me, and some of them concern you.

For the reason that concerns you, I have continued writing despite being down many days, on a holiday somewhere in between, and not having enough time many days, is because I want to showcase the # 1 most important thing about life and businesses to stay afloat: consistency.

Whether you’re building a business or just trying to stay alive, you gotta try every single day. You can’t take a single day off. I hope my year long effort can showcase that to the readers with my own example.

Appreciation

I can not appreciate my wife enough during this time of COVID-19, emotional crisis, professional crisis & more. She has stood by me, which she has always done. But not just that, she’s working many extra hours because our daughter is home-schooled by her now as schools are closed. Our domestic help is on leave because of COVID-19, and she has taken care of most of the household responsibilities in addition to many that she already had.

Like me, she also works online and is a freelance graphic designer. She has also given up on her work which not only affects her income, but also her future prospects of work, as well as her rankings on many freelance platforms. She has been the mother and the wife I hoped for. Thank you.

Two Months Streak – Gamification of Your Business & Life

Today, I’ve completed 2 months of writing this blog at least once everyday. A few days ago, I spoke to my friend in a vlog about game mechanics. We spoke of one of the game mechanics that I introduced in my life called streaks. Today, I wanted to talk a lot more about game mechanics.

Games Are Awesome

Games are very very interesting in psychological terms. They are interesting because they don’t (directly) solve any problems like email or Uber does. Despite not solving any problems, game developers retain the users. And they can only do that because they hack human psychology. Because games work in this particular manner, it means game developers must have learnt a great deal from psychology and sociology research.

I Never Played Games

I haven’t really played a lot of games. Then how did I end up studying games? I did that because I read on “gamification” which is the science of taking game mechanics from the games and implementing them in your websites, apps, businesses and even your life. And so instead of reading psychology, I simply studied games as I found it to be an easier hands-on case-study of implementing human psychology for user retention and other reasons.

Why Game Mechanics

As already spoken in a post I made earlier, user retention is often much cheaper than user acquisition. So the startups are always trying to learn new ways to retain existing customers. And there’s no better way to do it than gamification of your startup.

What Can You Do With Game Mechanics

There are many many types of game mechanics. We’ve already spoken of streaks and I’ve first hand seen benefit of implementing it in my life, time and again.

Other types of game mechanics could be points, achievements/badges, leaderboard, etc. Have you noticed Careem gives you both points and a gold status badge, if you use it repeatedly. It’s done to retain you as a user.

Another type of game mechanics is to make user feel like he’s the chosen one. The chosen one feels he was born to carry out the task given to him by the business or the app. When you receive marketing material stating that you’re chosen for something, they are basically just trying to hack your brain.

Users are also driven by sense of accomplishment and progress. A lot of apps try to integrate progress into the app usage to make users feel like they are in process of solving great challenges. This makes users feel accomplished.

Another kind of gamification is creating impatience. It sounds insane when I think about it, but revoking access to a certain feature for certain amount of time and only enabling it after a certain time has passed has a positive affect on user retention. The user craves the feature despite not even wanting it otherwise. This is creating unessential impatience.

And my favorite, scarcity. Almost everyone in e-commerce uses this. Because the stock is obviously always running out and there are only 4 pieces left that would probably go away in 8 minutes and 7 seconds. The fear of missing out is triggered and you make an impulse buy.

There are many many more types of game mechanics and I’d actually like to learn some more from you in the comments below.