Trophy Updates - August 2025

Welcome to the biggest update to Trophy this year!

Changelog

• 🏷️ Custom attributes
• ❇️❇️ Multiple points systems
• 📧 New email variables experience
• ➡️ Achievement statuses
• 📅 Achievement backdating
• 💎 Achievement 'rarity'

We're fully locked-in on building Trophy into the single best way for product teams to build and operate gamification experiences at scale.

But before we get into the details of all the updates, a quick announcement...

ANNOUNCEMENT

Trophy is selected to take part in the Web Summit ALPHA Startup Program, exhibiting in Lisbon in November 2025.

We'll be exhibiting and pitching alongside other exciting startups at the end of the year.

This will be the culmination of all the hard work the team has put in this year and we're super excited to share more details with you soon.

Now for the updates...

🏷️ Custom Attributes

This is a highly requested feature and we think it makes Trophy at least 10x more powerful.

Custom attributes let you enrich Trophy with custom metadata relevant for your use case. You can then use this metadata to personalize achievements and points systems, to enrich email copy and charts, and to segment and compare users in analytics.

There are two types of custom attributes: user and event attributes.

Custom User Attributes

Custom user attributes allow you to assign custom metadata to each user.

Here's a few use cases that demonstrate the power of these attributes:

• You're a language learning platform and you want to segment users by language.
• You're a fitness app and you want to group users by gym.
• You're a study platform and you want to group users by exam board.
• You're a B2B platform and you want to segment users by organization.
• You have subscription tiers and want to curate different gamification features for users based on their tier.

Once assigned to each user, you can use custom user attributes to configure achievements that can only be unlocked by specific user groups, create points triggers that only award points to certain users, and filter data returned by APIs to specific user groups.

Custom Event Attributes

Custom event attributes are properties of metric events that help you build deeper personalization across features you build with Trophy.

Here's a few examples of how different platforms might use custom event attributes:

• A language learning platform tracks questions each user answers. They use a custom event attribute to store if a user answers a question correctly.
• A fitness app tracks exercises users complete. They use a custom event attribute to track whether the exercise was using the bike, treadmill, or free weights.
• A study platform tracks flashcards users view. They use a custom event attribute to track what subject each flashcard was related to.
• A property auction platform tracks properties sold by agents. They use a custom event attribute to track the value of the property sold, and another one to track where it was located.

Once set up, you can use custom event attributes to create richer achievements like "Complete 100 workouts on the treadmill" and configure points logic tied to specific attributes like "Award 500 points for each property sold above £5M in Central London".

You can also use custom event attributes to further customize the content of emails through attribute-specific variables and progress charts.

Cohort Analytics

Finally, use custom user attributes to segment analytics dashboards and compare retention and engagement between cohorts.

❇️❇️ Multiple Points Systems

You can now create multiple points systems for different use cases within the same application.

Each points system you create in Trophy can have entirely different branding and unique logic for how it awards points to users.

📧 New Email Variables Experience

We've been getting feedback that the user experience for managing dynamic content in emails is a little too technical for some users.

So we decided to redesign the UI to make it simpler for non-technical users to enrich email copy with variables just by pointing and clicking.

Plus, we've taken this opportunity to add support for brand new Dynamic Metric Variables. This lets you tell Trophy to choose the metric to reference when adding a metric-based variable to an email.

Here's a few examples of data you can now add through dynamic variables that you couldn't do before:

• "The name of the metric with the highest current total for this user".
• "The current total of the metric that the user has increased the least this month".

When sending emails to users, Trophy will automatically populate dynamic variables with data from the metric that best matches the specific recipient's activity.

➡️ Achievement statuses

We've added statuses to achievements to help you test changes to achievements' logic without affecting your production environment.

Overview of statuses

The new statuses are: Inactive, Active, Locked and Archived. Here's a bit of background on what each of these are for:

Inactive
All new achievements start out inactive. Users can't complete them until you make them active and they aren't returned from any APIs and can't be displayed in emails.

Active
Active achievements can be completed by users, are returned from APIs and can be shown in emails. Active achievements are considered 'live'.

Locked
Locked achievements can't be completed, can't be returned from APIs or displayed in emails to users who haven't already completed them.

However locked achievements are still returned in APIs and displayed in emails for users who have already completed them.

Locking an achievement prevents new users from unlocking it and is useful for deactivating an achievement while leaving existing completions intact.

Archived
Archived achievements can't be completed, aren't returned in APIs and can't be displayed in emails.

Archiving an achievement means it won't be available to any users, no matter if they've already completed it - so use this carefully.

Once archived, achievements won't show up in the Trophy dashboard, but can be restored by contacting support.

Achievement Workflow

Achievements can be moved through different statuses as you test and explore different use cases before pushing to production.

📅 Achievement Backdating

When creating new or editing existing achievements, Trophy will now check if any existing users meet the new conditions and auto-complete the achievement for those users.

Importantly, Trophy will backdate the completion of this achievement to the point in time when the user first surpassed the conditions of the achievement to maintain data integrity.

As a result, when creating or editing achievements you might see the Users count update - this is backdating in practice.

💎 Achievement 'rarity'

To help build even more engaging user interfaces, we've added two new properties to the user achievements API.

{
  ...
  "completions": 10,
  "rarity": 90.13,
  ...
},

The completions property references the number of users that have completed the achievement to date, and the rarity property refers to the same statistic as a fraction of your total user base.

You can display these new properties in your application to show users how they stack up compared to others and motivate them to keep active.

Coming Soon

Here's a few other things we have cooking...

• 🔔 Push Notifications (In Beta)
  Tools to deliver personalized, retention-boosting push notifications driven by real user interactions with no code.
• 📈 Leaderboards
  Tools to run one-off, recurring, time-limited and perpetual competitions to boost user engagement and activity.
• 🧘 Streak Enhancements
  Support for streak 'vacation mode', streak freezes and user-defined streak schedules.

If you have anything you would love to see us build, or have any feedback for us just reply to this email and let us know!

Until next month...