PlayAbly
We build games to help brands engage, convert, and retain customers
Hey YC 👋 We’re John and Angelo — former Unity Technologies ads, analytics, and data leads — and we’re building PlayAbly: the AI-powered gamification layer that turns website traffic into high-intent, high-converting journeys. The confluence of shopping and entertainment.
🧠 At Unity, we personalized gameplay for 2B+ users across thousands of titles. Now we’re bringing that same behavioral insight to B2B brands and ecommerce — where most sites still feel too generic, not an engaging experience
🎯 We saw it firsthand: brands burning cash on top-of-funnel, only to leak it through lifeless landing pages, collection pages, and generic lead forms. So we built PlayAbly — a conversion layer that feels like fun but performs like performance marketing.
🌍 Used by both B2B and DTC:
- Classkick (B2B tool for teachers): to qualify and convert education leads via smart quiz games.
- Skout (DTC Kid’s Snacks): to increase AOV and conversion rates with fun product discovery
🧨 TL;DR: Replace "Spin to Win" with a game your online customer actually wants to play.
❌ The Problem
Brands spend on Meta, TikTok, SEO — but don’t retain attention once shoppers land. Today’s customers ignore pop-ups, abandon forms, and bounce from even the best-looking sites. Why?
Because passive web experiences can’t compete with the dopamine drip of social and mobile gaming. And standard segmentation flows — quizzes, email captures — are too slow, too boring, or too static to convert attention into action.
Retargeting is expensive, email/SMS open rates are tanking, and most stores don’t know who their customers really are.
🕳️ Most marketing funnels are:
- Bland → no interaction, no retention
- Blind → poor data on why visitors bounce
- Bloated → costly retargeting with low ROAS
✅ Our Solution
PlayAbly creates opportunities for engagement —online, in-store, and everywhere in between.
We help brands turn passive moments into active engagement—whether that’s on a website, at a retail display, with a QR code at a restaurant, or in a B2B lead funnel. From quizzes to mini-games, our interactive layers boost attention, capture data, and drive action—bridging consumption and entertainment to make every brand moment more memorable and more effective.
Playable funnels: Games that feel native to your brand and drive:
- 📈 Higher engagement
- 💬 Useable first-party data
- 💸 Measurable revenue lift - conversions up to 3x, 2x more email/SMS opt-ins than the leading popup, recover 89% of lost engagement
🎯 How it works:
- Choose from our library of high-performing game templates (e.g. match-3, swipe, scratch, stack)
- Customize it to your brand’s look, products, and tone
- Integrate via Shopify, Klaviyo, Hubspot, or embed directly
- Launch in minutes — no dev required
- OR - if you’re looking for a more custom game, let us know what you’re looking for
🧠 Behind the scenes: AI + behavioral data personalize the game, questions, and post-game flow based on real-time signals.
🚀 Why It Works
Our games don’t just entertain — they segment, educate, and convert:
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DTC: Skout Results: 7X ROI, 4X Email Opt-ins, 20% Higher AOV
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B2B: Classkick Results: 5X ROI, 3X Email Open Rates
Retention’s better too: PlayAbly games collect data that actually gets used — building better lists, sequences, and personalization downstream.
💡 Why We Built It
At Unity, we pioneered user-level personalization through gameplay — optimizing ads and UX with real-time behavioral signals. We saw firsthand how play builds trust, surfaces intent, and creates emotional stickiness.
We asked: what if B2B sales and ecommerce wasn’t just functional, but fun?
So we built PlayAbly:
- To help brands personalize authentically — not creepily
- To make every site visit feel like a VIP concierge interaction
- To let brands build relationships, not just retargeting funnels
We believe AI should act like the best in-store rep: observant, empathetic, memorable — not a template engine.
🕹️ Want to Try?
We’re working with DTC and B2B brands who want:
- Better conversion/retention without more ad spend
- Higher-quality customer data, captured playfully
- Personalization built around actual shopper behavior
🕹️ Try a PlayAbly game:
- Skout Cookie Rush
- Replacements Matching Game
- Playfield Dog Days of Winter Advent Calendar
- PlayAbly Spinner Hunt
- Harmony 783
Offer: Mention YC and get 20% off your first game
Whether you're selling skincare, classrooms, or courseware — let’s make it fun, data-rich, and wildly effective.
#ai #ecommerce #gamification #dtc #b2b #retention #personalization #zero_party_data
How did your company get started? (i.e., How did the founders meet? How did you come up with the idea? How did you decide to be a founder?)
We started PlayAbly because we saw the problem from the inside.John and Angelo met while working at Unity Technologies, where we helped scale ads and gameplay personalization to billions of users across mobile games. We saw firsthand how interactive experiences and behavioral data could drive attention, trust, and action—all in under six seconds.But outside of games? That magic was missing. We watched friends in eCommerce and B2B spend heavily on ads, only to lose users to static websites, generic forms, and boring popups. Every marketing funnel looked the same—and underperformed.We asked: _What if we brought the mechanics of play to commerce, sales, and brand storytelling?_So we built PlayAbly: a gamified engagement layer that turns any passive touchpoint—landing page, QR code, email popup—into a fun, branded, data-rich experience. We didn’t just want to optimize clickthroughs; we wanted to make customer interaction feel like something people actually wanted to do.We chose to be founders because we couldn’t unsee the gap—and we knew we had the technical and behavioral playbook to fill it.
What is the core problem you are solving? Why is this a big problem? What made you decide to work on it?
The Problem:\Brands spend billions to drive traffic—but lose most of it in the first 6 seconds. Today’s customer experience is passive, generic, and forgettable. Popups are ignored. Forms are abandoned. Retargeting is expensive. And brands don’t know why visitors bounce or who they really are.Why it matters:\Whether it’s eCommerce, B2B, or in-store, the attention funnel is broken. Customers are trained by TikTok and games to expect interactivity and dopamine—yet most brand experiences still feel like static brochures. This leads to poor conversion rates, bloated CAC, weak data, and missed revenue. In a post-cookie world, brands need ways to engage and personalize without relying on surveillance or guesswork.Why we’re working on it:\At Unity, we personalized gameplay for 2B+ users. We saw how interactivity + real-time data could drive deep engagement and monetization in milliseconds. But when we looked outside of gaming—at Shopify sites, SaaS landing pages, QR flows in restaurants—it was clear: brands had no tools to make those touchpoints dynamic, fun, or behavior-aware.We built PlayAbly to fix that. Because capturing attention shouldn’t feel like a chore—and because we believe brand experiences should be just as interactive and addictive as the games people play every day.
What is your long-term vision? If you truly succeed, what will be different about the world?
Our long-term vision is to replace passive brand touchpoints with *a new standard for interactive, personalized engagement—powered by play.If we truly succeed, every ad, popup, QR code, and landing page will become a game—one that captures attention, reveals intent, and feels native to the brand. Just like TikTok rewired content discovery, PlayAbly will rewire how people experience commerce, lead funnels, and brand storytelling.But that’s just the start. As our experiences spread across eCommerce, B2B, retail, and hospitality, we’re building the foundation for a first-party engagement network—a permission-based, gamified layer where brands can acquire, qualify, and retain customers through interactive journeys, not invasive ads.Instead of renting attention from Meta or Google, brands will use PlayAbly to own the moment of interaction, gather usable zero-party data, and re-market through personalized games and offers that people actually want to play. And instead of interruptive ads, our long-term vision is to launch a PlayAbly Ad Network, where top-performing game experiences can be distributed across partner sites, apps, and displays—with performance economics and behavioral data baked in from the start.Imagine: A DTC brand acquiring new customers not through banner ads, but through a mini-game embedded in a partner brand’s checkout page. A restaurant upselling via a playful quiz shown on smart menus or receipts. A SaaS company qualifying leads with an interactive diagnostic game built into someone else's onboarding flow.**We’re building the infrastructure for the gamified internet—where every touchpoint is playable, personal, and performant.**That’s the world we want to live in. And that’s the world PlayAbly will help create.
