How Journable Plans to Add Gamification Without Sacrificing Simplicity

After spending months optimizing acquisition and conversion, Journable co-founder Steve Hoyek is shifting his focus to retention. The goal? Keep users engaged in their weight loss journey for months, not weeks. The solution? Gamification features like streaks, badges, and social accountability.

But there's a catch. Weight loss carries unique emotional baggage that makes traditional gamification mechanics riskier than in other app categories. On the latest episode of the Levels Podcast, Steve shared how his team is approaching gamification thoughtfully, starting small with streaks while exploring other features that drive consistency without adding complexity.

The Retention Imperative

For Journable, retention isn't just about business metrics—it's about helping users actually achieve their weight loss goals.

"We have recently shifted a lot of our focus from acquisition and conversion to retention. Previously, the name of the game was acquiring users. It was the funnel, right? Top of funnel, mid funnel, lower funnel, conversion, optimization."

The shift makes sense. Journable can acquire users profitably with their Google Ads strategy, but if those users aren't sticking around and actually losing weight, the product isn't delivering real value. And users who successfully hit their goals become the best marketing channel of all—word of mouth.

"Users who use the app successfully and hit their goals, they become walking billboards for our product. How did someone lose weight? They tracked. How did they track? They used this app, which they fucking love."

Why Consistency Matters More Than Perfection

At the heart of Journable's retention strategy is a fundamental truth about weight loss: consistency beats perfection.

"Weight loss is an interesting journey. It's an interesting problem whereby the biggest factor and the biggest determinant of success is consistency."

This insight shapes their entire approach to gamification. The technical term might be "retention," but for users, it's about building sustainable habits. Coming back to the app daily. Logging meals even when it's inconvenient. Tracking weight regularly.

"What we are trying to do with our app is to help users be consistent with their journey, with their habits, whether it be eating, whether it be tracking, their exercise. And gamification is a way of bringing users into the app. It's bringing, it's keeping them coming back. It's giving them a bit of dopamine to help them with consistency."

Starting with Streaks (But Doing It Carefully)

Streaks are the obvious first gamification feature, popularized by apps like Duolingo and Snapchat. But Steve is approaching them with caution, particularly given the emotional context of weight loss.

During the podcast conversation, Jason and Charlie from Trophy raised an important concern: streaks can backfire when users lose them. The moment someone sees that streak reset to zero, they can feel like failures—a particularly dangerous emotion in the weight loss space where self-criticism already runs high.

"Interesting. We thought about it briefly and discussed it briefly and then assumed that if the conventional wisdom is that streaks in apps are good, then we should likely launch it and see how it goes, right? We can learn the lessons along the way."

Steve acknowledged they haven't fully explored the psychological nuances yet, but they do have a built-in safety valve: users can log entries for previous days, allowing them to recover a streak if needed. This mirrors strategies used by apps like Duolingo with "streak freezes."

The Trophy team shared data showing that streak reminder notifications—sent a few hours before the day ends—are actually the most impactful part of the feature. In their experience, 20% of users who received these reminders extended their streak that day.

"That that was the biggest lever actually is making sure that your notification system is like really hooked into the streak feature or else people will just forget and if they forget no matter how good your streaks like look in the app if they forgot and they've forgotten right and it's too late."

Beyond Streaks: Badges and Milestones

Journable isn't stopping at streaks. They're planning a broader system of achievements tied to meaningful progress milestones.

"We have the concept of achievements, badges, different milestones. So let's say your weight loss goal is 10 kilos in total, right? You're at 95 kilos. You want to go down to 85. Then breaking that up into four different milestones and getting a badge 10% of the way, 25% of the way, so on and so forth."

Logging streaks will also translate into badges, creating collectible representations of progress that users can share. The psychology here is powerful—these badges serve as both personal motivation and social proof of commitment.

The shareability aspect matters. Weight loss often feels private, but celebrating milestones publicly can reinforce commitment and inspire others. Plus, for Journable, shared badges become a form of organic marketing.

The Social Dimension: Accountability with Friends

The most intriguing part of Journable's gamification roadmap involves social features. Steve sees huge potential in accountability partnerships and small group tracking.

"I think a huge aspect here is accountability, right? Being showing other people or giving other people access to your consistency stats, letting other people see what you're doing, being able to keep you and, you know, a friend or family member accountable to each other by logging."

They've already seen demand for this. Couples frequently purchase subscriptions together and track side-by-side. Users regularly request the ability to share their weekly reports with dietitians, nutritionists, or personal trainers.

"There are many instances where sharing your progress, your data and finding accountability with other people is done through our app, generally in the form of sharing their weekly reports, their monthly reports."

The challenge is implementing social features without adding complexity. Steve mentioned potentially exploring leaderboards among friends, though he's cautious about the competitive element given that not everyone in a friend group is necessarily on a weight loss journey.

During the conversation, Jason shared his fiancé's experience with the Garmin running app, which features a simple leaderboard showing kilometers run among a small group of friends, plus visible badges for achievements. It's straightforward but motivating—she loves seeing her friends' progress.

"She loves it. Like she loves the fact that she can see, like it's motivating to see her friends and how they're doing. And it makes her feel like motivated to run."

The key insight? Social features work best in small, self-selected groups rather than massive global leaderboards where most users languish at the bottom.

The Non-Negotiable: Simplicity First

Despite the excitement around gamification, Steve has one absolute constraint: these features cannot compromise Journable's core value proposition of simplicity and speed.

"Our North Star is simplicity at all costs. If it means spending three weeks building a feature and then not shipping it, we will do that 10 times out of 10 if it's going to impact simplicity."

This means starting small. A basic streak counter and a notification system. Then carefully, methodically adding badges. Testing social features with a small group. Each addition will be evaluated not just on engagement metrics, but on whether it maintains the frictionless experience that users love.

"We'll start very small with a streak and then very carefully start to trickle in new features one step at a time, new gamification aspects."

The next few weeks will be critical. Steve mentioned they work quickly and expect to ship initial gamification features within three weeks, just in time for the New Year's resolution wave—historically their biggest growth period.

Learning from Other Categories (Carefully)

One fascinating thread in the conversation was how gamification principles need to adapt across different app categories. What works for language learning doesn't necessarily translate to weight loss. The emotional stakes are different. The daily commitment looks different. The potential for negative self-talk is higher.

Charlie from Trophy emphasized that leaderboards, for instance, need careful implementation. Massive global leaderboards where users rank in the hundreds of thousands can be deeply demotivating.

"If you think from the user's point of view, if you're in a million and one, one place, that's actually really demotivating to see. Like, you don't want to come in and see that you've barely moved this month."

Trophy actually limits their leaderboard feature to a maximum of 1,000 participants for this reason. Better to bucket users by location, language, or personal connections than to throw everyone into one demoralizing ranking.

For Journable, this might mean leaderboards focused on consistency (days logged) rather than weight lost, segmented among friend groups rather than all users. The competitive element becomes supportive rather than discouraging.

The Real Goal: Making Users Successful

Underneath all the talk of streaks, badges, and social features is a more fundamental mission. Journable isn't trying to maximize engagement for its own sake. They're trying to help people lose weight.

"It's fine and dandy if someone downloads the app, sees the value and purchases a subscription. But in practice, if they're not getting the value out of the subscription, if they're not coming back to the app, logging their weight, logging their food, losing weight, meeting their goals, then we wouldn't have provided them much value. We would have been a gimmick and we don't want to be a gimmick."

This philosophy shapes every product decision. Gamification isn't about tricking users into opening the app more often. It's about building the daily habits that actually lead to weight loss results.

The business case and the user benefit perfectly align: users who lose weight successfully become passionate advocates. They tell friends. They leave glowing reviews. They renew their subscriptions. Retention driven by genuine value is the most sustainable kind.

Lessons for Consumer App Founders

Journable's approach to gamification offers several insights for other founders considering similar features:

Start with the core behavior you want to reinforce. For Journable, it's daily logging. Streaks make sense because consistency is the actual driver of results, not just a vanity metric.

Consider the emotional context of your category. Weight loss, mental health, and productivity apps all carry different psychological baggage than social networks or games. Your gamification strategy should reflect that.

Build in safety valves for streak losses. Whether it's streak freezes, the ability to backfill entries, or grace periods, give users ways to recover from missed days without feeling like failures.

Prioritize notifications over UI polish. The reminder to extend a streak matters more than how fancy the streak counter looks. Focus on the communication layer first.

Keep social features small and opt-in. Friend-based accountability works better than global leaderboards for most categories. Let users choose their accountability partners.

Never compromise your core value proposition. If your app's main benefit is simplicity, every gamification feature needs to enhance rather than complicate that experience.

As Steve prepares to launch Journable's first gamification features, he's walking a careful line between proven mechanics and thoughtful adaptation. The next few months will reveal whether streaks and badges can drive the consistency that leads to real weight loss results—without sacrificing the simplicity that users love.

Key Points

• Journable is shifting from acquisition focus to retention by implementing gamification features like streaks, badges, and social accountability
• Weight loss apps face unique challenges with gamification due to emotional factors—losing a streak can feel like failure in a high-stakes context
• Streak reminder notifications are the most impactful element, with 20% of reminded users extending their streak
• The app is planning milestone-based badges tied to weight loss progress (10%, 25%, 50% of goal achieved)
• Social features will focus on small-group accountability with friends rather than massive global leaderboards
• Users can already share progress with dietitians and personal trainers, with couples frequently tracking together
• Simplicity remains the non-negotiable North Star—no feature ships if it compromises the core frictionless experience
• The real goal isn't engagement for its own sake but helping users build consistent habits that lead to actual weight loss success

Want to learn more about how Journable approaches user retention and their 30-day profitability model? Listen to the full conversation with Steve Hoyek on the Levels Podcast.