Mini games are a low-key insane growth move, and today we’re going to
a) unpack why (especially casual ones for B2B products), and
b) break down how you can remix any classic game in an afternoon

By low-key I mean nobody really thinks about how a game can help them grow despite them having some of the best engagement and retention numbers of any type of content. They are also so easy to make now and are creative growth magnets that make sure you’re not boring like everyone else.

It’s a stealable, low-risk high-reward experiment. Our cookies and cream over here.

There is a games trend, but first, this idea is not me telling you to become a games company. For example, The New York Times is a games company now. They probably would not appreciate that label, but their puzzles were played 11.2 billion times last year. People spend way more time playing them than reading the news. Wordle was a pivot.

LinkedIn launched puzzle games too with a similar story. Over 2 million plays a day with 84% of players coming back the next day and 80% are still playing a week later. YouTube tested and stuck with playable ads, and Netflix has gone into actual games.

AKA games have crazy and proven numbers. But the NYT does not make games for its core readers. Most of the people who play games there don’t read the NYT. I don’t think any of my sisters who send me their daily Worlde scores have ever read an article from The Times. Worlde and co. led them to a new market that kept them relevant. LinkedIn is giving people short mental breaks at work and are just trying to keep people on their site more—games help with that. Netflix’s games are a new entertainment SKU.

Today’s idea is not about doing any of that. It’s about building a “marketing” lead-magnet game for your very specific buyer, based one your knowledge advantage or domain expertise, rooted on one premise—you know things your audience would love to be tested on.

Tom Orbach from Marketing Ideas championed this idea of mini games first and helped co-author this post. He’s the OG marketer. If you don’t follow him, you should!

I was having so much fun working on this post this weekend that I ended up making my own mini game for this newsletter as a real working example of today’s idea, because…

The cheapest and most interesting new brand surface you can ship this week is a casual mini game built on knowledge only you have. And it works unfairly well in B2B because it’s where nobody expects to have fun.

Granola is my go-to AI notepad for every meeting—effortless notes from calls with helpful pre-meeting Briefs and even more helpful post-meeting follow ups.

But what gets said is only as useful as what it actually helps get done. No matter how good the notes are, if nobody actions it…well.

The Granola MCP takes what you talked about in meetings and informs the work you're doing in other apps. They have tons of connectors to other data, productivity, and GTM tool unlocking dream workflow combos and making it easy to query and action your notes.

🥷 Create a free EduTainment surface that makes your audience feel smarter, carries your brand, and feeds your funnel overtime by taking your knowledge advantage and packing it into a simple mini game.

A knowledge advantage is just something you know more about and have a better scoop on than somebody else. It could be data, research, patterns or something else. Zillow has a knowledge advantage on the housing market. beehiiv has one on newsletters and the creator economy. RevenueCat has one on app subscriptions.

The problem is this crunchy data is so good and useful to the people who want it, but sadly, its almost always dished up to the people who want it in a sad and soggy way. Another “State of X” white paper. Useful, absolutely, but

Boooring.

That exact same data could be made fun. But “fun” ideas often get rejected by leadership who are selling to B2B or enterprise because it feels risky or doesn’t have the word “at scale” in it. Except the data overwhelmingly shows fun works way better than boring because the people who buy this stuff are JUST PEOPLE who like having fun and playing games behind their monitors.

So, let them. Let them play a “research” game without worrying about getting caught. Let them have fun and get smarter.

Companies like

I said I made a game, so here’s how I stole this idea myself. My knowledge advantage is my archive of How They Grow deep dives, thousands of hours looking at how the best companies actually grew. Interviews with people like Figma’s CTO or Shopify’s CRO. And now getting to build on that with this newsletters format.

So I built Startup Chess on the back of that.

It’s for a hyper specific audience (you) and crucially has a basic A or B guessing-game mechanic.

The game is simple…
How strategic do you think you are?
Do you want to find out?

My game helps you get better at product strategy in 60 seconds a day

→ You get 1 real company problem.
→ With 2 decision forks they had.
→ Can you guess which move was right?

This took me and Claude about 6 hours on Sunday.

Supabase backend, Next.js/TypeScript front end, designed with Claude and edited by hand in Figma, hosted on Vercel, Google SSO to sign in, Resend for email. Twilio for text alerts when new puzzles drop.

It was easy and that’s the point. The hard part shouldn’t be making the game, the hard part is the information sauce that makes the game good.

For me Startup Chess enhances what my value proposition to you is. And hopefully its fun and shareable and brings in new people to my main content. One free artifact doing three things.

Let’s break down why this idea really works, but first a quick word from Attio

That’s why I love Attio. It’s both the orchestra and conductor of the business side of my newsletter. All my sponsor leads, automations, pipelines.

But I hardly open Attio these days. With their SDK, API, and MCP, I’ve built my own systems running through my own agents and even my own internal tool for my newsletter. Attio is what makes it all play together.

If you want a beautiful, flexible, and agent-first CRM that makes it possible for you to build your own sales machine...

No other format comes close to the numbers games can deliver—nothing will keep people on your site longer. No listicle or deep dive.

And fortunately for the person making them, the thing that makes the best games really work is the simplicity. Easy = ritual.

As a bonus, when you build a marketing game or set of games to hook people in, they all live on your domain. And the more time people spend on your domain wrapped in your brand/product ecosystem, that dwell time registers as a signal to SEO and probably AI engines that your domain is trustworthy. It reads as ““people come here and stay” which boosts your site for citations and search.

Games are a perfect opportunity to nerd out on your niche for the people in it. The whole point is to get a little weird with it. The equivalent here is being the crazy house on the corner who goes ALL IN on Halloween—everyone knows you do Halloween.

You want a themed game that is proof of expertise your audience can feel. You want to really show you get the world your users/customers are from. Lean into the inside jokes, the lingo, the visuals or concepts only they get. The whole point is you’re not for everyone, you’re just for them. You’re not trying to be a universal Worlde and appeal to everyone.

For example with Wiz (cybersecurity), look how they’ve gone in on being just for the CISO (their ICP).

Feeling seen and understood is a rare thing in B2B marketing and a game manufactures it in the first thirty seconds. It drives brand love for you.

Great games have virality built in. Only excellent blogs go viral and its very rare. But a fun game that makes someone smile—much more shareable.

Wordle’s grid of green squares was the entire growth engine, making the score the ad. Players share high scores and challenge people to beat them. I stole the same mechanic with Startup Chess—you see how you did compared to everyone else who played and can share your strategy chops.

In B2B the loop is even tighter especially when its for a hyper specific person. It becomes a screenshot in the Slack or a post on LI. Likely a warm intro to five others who match your ICP exactly.

The key question is “how do I get my ICP sharing this game with another ICP”. Again the more nerdy you are and over specific to this one person, the more weird and shareable it is.

This move is most powerful where it looks most out of place.

Consumer audiences are drowning in games. But B2B folks are beaten over the head with whitepapers, e-books and webinars.

So a game for them is a pattern interrupt. It’s different. Nobody expects the sales or cybersecurity or analytics or AI governance thing to be delightful.

Be the delightful thing. It’s why incident.io made a game and managed to sell to Anthropic when nothing else was doing the job (more below).

Make it so a new challenge drops daily or weekly, so missing one means missing out. Show streaks. Make it so missing one = missing out.

And the holy grail is your game becomes a conversation starter at work. “Did you guess today’s answer?”, “How fast did you solve the puzzle?”, “Did you figure out it was Netflix?” . It stirs competition and chat, and if you’re lucky, you’re build a standing 9am with your ICP.

Remember, 84% of LinkedIn’s players come back the next day. That retention is all from the cadence of it.

You don’t need too and shouldn’t invent a new game.

Make life easy and just steal a proven mechanic and pour your knowledge into it (there’s a stealable list below for you in Run This Play). The mechanic is a commodity and it works better when there’s very little explaining of how it works.

The thing that keeps you from going sideways and sliding into NYT, LinkedIn, and Netflix territory where you sell games as standalone product, is that you are doing the opposite. Your game is a satellite around your actual business. It’s there to teach or test something real about your domain, it funnels people toward your CRM, and it stays small and focused. If it teaches nothing and loses relevance to what your product does then it’s noise.

This honestly makes it a much easier sell to leadership. Games isn’t a strategy pillar like it is for LinkedIn, it’s just a pocket of low stakes experiment. And…

When Toggl built their Unicorn Startup Simulator (a simple web game where players build a startup while avoiding employee churn and bankruptcy) in 2016, it took their marketing team plus a full front-end team a full a company retreat to make it.

That was the price of entry for a decade. Games were a big-company flex.

But that barrier to entry is gone. When incident.io wanted Anthropic as a customer, just one of their people vibe-coded PagerTron in Claude Code on their first ever session with it.

Now it’s almost silly to not spend an afternoon toying with the idea when a permanent brand surface for all the reasons above will cost basically $0. Worst case you a fun demo.

For the last Olympics, Wiz shipped Wizlympics: you play as their little Sensor mascot collecting real cloud services like S3 and EC2 while dodging fake ones like “Amazon Prime Rib.”

Score 500+ points and a swag box shows up at your door. Silly on the surface (and a remix of the Google Dinosaur game) but a security audience is literally being drilled on cloud services inside Wiz’s brand. The game did so well they since scaled the motion into monthly CTF challenges with leaderboards.

Nobody comes close to Wiz as the funnest cybersecurity company.

Takeaway: the jargon IS the content. A game that quizzes your audience on their own world proves you’re one of them.

This is a good example to double click on because they’re the only case I’ve seen where a company built a game for a single person.

incident.io was working with most of the big AI labs, but not Anthropic. Cold outreach wasn’t working. So they built PagerTron, a retro arcade game about squashing bugs. They put it on a custom landing page addressed to Anthropic and offered swag for high scores like Wiz did. A sales proposal disguised as a toy, built in Claude Code by a first-time user only for the people who made Claude.

Takeaway: a game doesn’t need an audience or many. It can be an account-based play for exactly one dream customer.

My friend Ali is building Lazyweb. As a marketing idea, he took the thousands of hours of product-experiment research he’s done with his newsletter First1000, and packed it into a simple A-or-B game. Two real versions a company tested and you can try guess the winner.

Nearly everyone guesses wrong, which is the hook, because being wrong makes you want to know why, and knowing why is Ali’s actual expertise. The game manufactures demand for the knowledge behind it.

Seeing Ali’s game is what gave me the idea for this newsletter and also for my game, Startup Chess.

Takeaway: the best game mechanics make people feel the gap between what they assume and what you know.

Here’s a free list with 26 stealable game mechanics. One table with the game, the link, the mechanic, and a remix idea for each one so you’re never starting from a blank page.

And if you want to jump ahead for ideas matched to your business, here’s a preset prompt that interviews you about your audience and your knowledge advantage (with the context of this newsletter) and will give you three games ideas.

So, what weird game can you make this week?

p.s. Go play Startup Chess and try to beat me. Let me know what you think!

› The moat paradox : Ali’s write up on why be built a game for Lazyweb. → The moat paradox (2 min)

› More examples: A neat list of marketing game ideas. → 14 Types Of Marketing Games (with great playable examples) (7 min)

› The build story: incident.io on vibe-coding a game for one. → Why we vibe coded a marketing campaign for Anthropic (5 min)

› The macro: how games became the engine of the NYT’s business. → Games are helping the New York Times thrive (4 min)

🔨 A tool → The game gets them in the door but the newsletter is where the relationship starts to happen. This all runs on beehiiv. Free up to 2,500 subscribers and my code THEDIFF30 gets you 30% off your first 3 months.*

📺 A play → Wiz’s Unicorn Startup Simulator is still live nearly a decade later. Get valued or die trying. If you’re a founder, notice how relevant it feels while playing; that’s the exact feeling you’re building for your own audience.