How Kahoot! grew to 7 billion players by designing for behaviour — a product-market fit case study

This month’s Product Market Fit Academy Open Seminar welcomed Jamie Brooker, cofounder of perhaps the most successful edtech product of all time, Kahoot!.

Jamie designed the initial product and then led Kahoot!’s product teams — growing its community to 50m monthly active users — before leaving his day-to-day role in 2017 to focus on new ventures through We Are Human. He shared his five lessons on how to design virality into your product.

You can sign up to the next seminar with Kirsten Campbell-Howes, Chief Learning Officer at Busuu, here.

By the end of this article you’ll have insights into how Kahoot!:

• Created a framework to design for organic growth
• Made people care by focusing on building a brand, not a tool
• Instilled growth as a company mindset and made it everyone’s responsibility
• Grew their initial community by launching their product in ‘stealth mode’
• Purposely remained open to and embraced new use cases in other verticals that led to future business models
• Grew through investing in community rather sales

“Design for new behaviours and emotional engagement. Make their experiences so transformative they feel compelled to tell others,” says Jamie. “That’s the secret to viral growth.” He is quick to point out that building your product and then marketing it isn’t the best approach. “Nobody cares. You have to make them care by providing intrinsic rewards.”

Jamie says that this is about thinking about the behaviour that you’re designing for that will drive organic growth. “What is it that you want them to do? What did it look like previously, and what will it look like when they use your product? And how will this lead to organic growth?”

To do this, Kahoot!’s team used a framework developed by We Are Human. You need to think about designing for the heart, hand and mind. Think about what makes your behaviour:

• Logical and sensible (the mind)?
• Tangible and practical (the hand)?
• Emotionally engaging (the heart)?

“You normally find that you’re missing one of these dimensions,” suggests Jamie, “And in edtech it’s normally emotion. Everything is clinical and forgets that learning is an inherently emotional experience. That’s the problem we were trying to solve with Kahoot!. How can we make learning something everyone wants to connect with?”

Things to apply:

• Think about what behaviour you are designing for
• Use the mind, hand and heart framework to describe the behaviour
• Think about what aspects your product is missing

Make people care

So how do you make people care?

“Think about building a brand, not a tool,” says Jamie. “We didn’t think about features. Instead, we designed for impact.”

He says building a brand means your design process needs to be values based. “Inclusive design was our growth strategy from the start. It’s not just about diversity in demographics or abilities, but desires and motivations too. We didn’t design for a specific set of circumstances or users but a universal drive in all of us. That meant it quickly became applicable to a wide range of contexts and use cases.”

It was all about designing for the instant feeling of success, something Jamie describes with a grin as “an EPIC WIN. It’s about creating a really memorable moment.”

This enabled Kahoot! not only to reach every student with a huge variety of abilities and accessibility needs — he shared a Tweet showing a pupil using an Adaptive Switch — but ultimately break out of the classroom and be used by a huge range of organisations. Kahoot! has now passed 7 billion non-unique players and is used by 87% of the world’s top universities and 97% of Fortune 500 companies.

“We asked ourselves, how do we bring the student from the back of the classroom to the front… for all the right reasons.” says Jamie. “We knew we were on the right track when the memes created by learners started to appear.” He recalls the huge range of mashups and the remixes that appeared featuring Kahoot!’s distinctive logo and catchy theme music. “This was because we were designing for emotion and something connected between them and the brand.”

“We also started to see the same from teachers,” says Jamie sharing some of the outpouring of love that appeared on the web from educators. “This kind of evangelism and sharing by teachers really drove our growth. The behaviour they saw in their classroom was so transformative that they showed great trust in us.”

Things to apply:

• Focus on building a brand, rather than features
• Use your values to create design principles
• Embrace inclusive design principles and design for universal behaviours

Don’t treat growth as a separate strategy

The key to achieving virality is to make growth a mindset that informs all decisions. Everything is about reinforcing the product’s core purpose to increase the impact.

“You need to make growth everyone’s responsibility,” says Jamie. “We made sure that everyone took a turn doing customer support. Engineers, finance people, everyone. This helped everyone think in a user-centric way, understand the problems our users were facing, empathising and spending their time improving the experience.”

He’s also quick to add the diversity of Kahoot!’s team super-charged this: “If you have people from a huge range of backgrounds in touch with users and understanding what they need from your product, you come up with ways to make the product better from different perspectives.”

Things to apply:

• Reinforce the product’s core purpose at every opportunity
• Get the whole team to interact with your users
• Build diverse teams and encourage everyone to contribute solutions

Grow your community through your product

He says the initial adoption of your product should come directly from your product design process. Kahoot! grew in ‘stealth mode’ before launch to create buzz, with the product team visiting early users of the product in the classroom to get feedback on the product.

“I remember going into schools to test our initial product,” says Jamie. “In one of the first sessions there was a kid at the back, loving the game so much he was standing on his desk. I asked his teacher ‘Is that OK?!’ And she said ‘Yes! He’s the most disruptive kid in his year, I’ve never seen him this engaged in his learning!’ This was the type of behaviour we wanted to see and was a sign of product market fit. We asked ourselves, how can we scale this…?”

This early process enabled them to work with select users around the world, who provided valuable design insights and felt special to be co-designing the product. The consequence was that colleagues of their earliest users wanted access and they started building organic growth from there.

Once they’d “proven” the product with these earlier users, they started designing network effects into their product to help supercharge the viral effect. One example of this is directly through the Kahoot! Pedagogy, where students go on a journey ‘from learners to leaders’ by creating their own quizzes that they play back with their classmates.

“Enabling players to become creators and to challenge others to play it created an exponential growth effect directly through the pedagogy of the product.”

Things to apply:

• Get your product in front of users early to understand adoption
• Involve them in the design process to help create buzz
• Use this understanding to design network effects into your product

Don’t box yourself in

If you think about the core behaviour being very human and communicating that impact over specific features or situations, then others can imagine how they’d use your product for their own needs, beyond your core audience.

“We purposely stayed ‘open’,” says Jamie. Kahoot! launched to a specific audience where they saw a clear opportunity: K12. But they were careful not to limit their growth opportunities with other audiences. “We didn’t want to stop universities, businesses or social users from using it,” he says.

“We made it all about social learning, being part of a bigger experience. This meant that people started to find their own use cases where people come together,” he remembers. He believes you need to embrace these new use cases. “I think it’s the most fun thing seeing people doing things you never imagined with your product.”

The key insight was that Kahoot! was creating what Jamie calls a ‘campfire moment’. It’s not what you learn, it’s how you learn. This ‘open’ approach meant that both kids in Kindergarten and Ikea staff on training courses could use the same product and find the same sense of instant success.

“I knew that this was true when we had 3,000 seniors all learning about the internet in the biggest ever Kahoot! (at the time),” smiles Jamie. “It’s about designing for the learner in all of us. They were using the same product that’s used in schools.”

Things to apply:

• Focus on a specific audience but remain ‘open’ to others
• Spot new use cases and embrace them
• Focus on the ‘how’ not the ‘what’ to create universality

Don’t sell, celebrate existing users

Core to Kahoot!’s growth strategy was community. “For me, it’s about making your users the hero. It’s much better to have them bragging about you on your behalf than doing it yourself,” explains Jamie.

The team would spot the themes and patterns and share and amplify what people were doing with the product to inspire others. They’d send out swag, celebrate them on social media and connect the whole office over video with classrooms around the world to play Kahoot! together.

“At trade shows, it wasn’t about selling, it was a place to meet the people using our product. We made sure that we would use this as a way to capture insights,” says Jamie. “It was about listening, asking questions and solving problems rather than pushing our product. If you empower the community, they will share. Particularly teachers who regularly attend events or do professional development.”

Jamie reckons that this approach to cultivating the community in a way that compelled teachers using Kahoot! to share and collaborate on platforms like Twitter, YouTube and Twitch, translated into each educator bringing in four more. “Focus on your existing users. Empower them to amplify your message.”

Things to apply:

• Focus on your existing users, make them the hero
• Don’t be pushy. Listen and solve problems instead
• Spot themes and patterns and then amplify them

Change behaviour

“Don’t confuse desire for love,” says Jamie, “you need to create desire, but ensure they stay for love. Otherwise you’ll have a high churn.” He mentions BJ Fogg’s behaviour and Nir Eyal’s Hooked models as big influences on the Kahoot! team.

“If you are in the business of behaviour change you need to think about intrinsic motivations and how you reward them. When you can satisfy them, you can create positive new behaviours.”

He sums up Kahoot!’s approach to viral product growth in five lessons:

1. Make people care: Design for impact and be inclusive.
2. Don’t treat growth as a separate strategy: Instil it as a company mindset and make it everyone’s responsibility.
3. Grow your community through your product: Gain adoption while in stealth mode by co-designing your product with your users and look for network effects.
4. Don’t box yourself in: Focus on a specific audience but be open to and embrace new use cases.
5. Don’t sell, celebrate existing users: focus on your existing users and make them the hero. Listen to them, solve their problems and spot patterns.

“It’s all about behaviour,” concludes Jamie. “Design for the mind, hand and the heart. Create genuinely transformative experiences. That’s the secret of viral growth.”

You can sign up to the next seminar with Kirsten Campbell-Howes, Chief Learning Officer at Busuu, here.

Jamie’s recommended further reading

• Hooked Model: How to manufacture desire — Nir Eyal
• Behaviour model — BJ Fogg
• Gamestoring co creation tools
• DOGA — Inclusive Design

More about the Emerge Product-Market Fit Academy

The Emerge Product-Market Fit Academy supports early-stage edtech and future of work founders with the question they are all wrestling with: how to get to product-market fit in their first crucial 18-months. Our Academy Lead, Matt Walton, will facilitate a seminar on one of the six important topics you need to reach product-market fit each month.

The academy is run by Emerge Education, a European seed fund investing in founders solving the $8.5tn skills gap. Backed by world-class education entrepreneurs and leaders, we provide the best environment in which to start global education companies.