Framework
Apply slot machines to everything
Greg's distilled insight from giveaways: people's lives are boring and they love slot-machine mechanics, where a small action triggers a chance event. The playbook is to bolt a game of chance onto ordinary purchases and products.
“Number one is that people's lives are probably pretty boring and they wanna make things interesting. Yes. Number two. Number two is that people love slot machines, essentially. Which is you do something, person does something, and something with chance might happen. So it's like, how do you— and I know this is a big gambling me, but like, how do you apply slot machines to everything?”
Steal thisBolt a small game of chance onto an ordinary purchase to boost engagement and order value.
Story
The sports-betting site that arbitraged ad-watching multipliers
Shaan recalls Penny, a sports-betting site that gave everyone 10 free cents but only let you cash out at $10. Users watched ads for variable 'multipliers' to climb, watched tons of ads chasing higher ones, then lost it all on a bad bet back to the house.
“And then when you would stop, uh, sorry, when you would place a bet, it would say, cool, do you want a 2x multiplier? So you put down 10 cents, this could be worth 30 cents if you watch this ad. And then you would watch the ad and the thing would like variably spin and tell you what your multiplier is. And like sometimes you'd get like, you know, just a 1.5x multiplier. So it's like, try again, watch another ad. And these guys were just arbitraging the shit out of this where people would just watch a bunch of ads in order to get their multiplier higher.”
Story
The candle company that hid a $20,000 diamond inside
Sam describes a struggling candle company that took off by hiding a $20,000 diamond in one candle (the rest contained a cheap stone). People bought candles just for the chance to win, turning a commodity into a gift-able game of chance.
“This one lady had this candle company and it was doing okay. And what she decided to do was put a diamond in one of the candles and every other, one candle had a $20,000 diamond. The rest had, like a cheap stone, and it's huge.”
Steal thisHide a rare high-value prize in one unit of a commodity product to turn buyers into players.