Adact: a marketing gamification MVP restructured for high load

Adact is a no-code platform where marketing agencies and brands build game campaigns that collect leads. In October 2020, its founder Kalev Kärpuk brought Brocoders a working MVP written in PHP and jQuery and asked us to restructure it for high load. We rebuilt the code on React and Node.js, moved campaign configuration and game-session analytics into separate databases, and served campaigns from AWS. The first rebuilt version took about 6 months. By August 2022, our team had added new games, payments, Zapier, and a custom API, and we worked on Adact until June 2024.

Adact at a glance

Client

Adact, Estonia. Founder and CEO: Kalev Kärpuk

Product

No-code marketing gamification platform (SaaS) with game templates, branded campaigns, lead forms, and real-time analytics

Starting point

A working MVP on PHP and jQuery, used by Adact's own team to run client campaigns

Request

Restructure the product for high load

What we did

Rebuilt the frontend on React and Next.js and the backend on Node.js and Nest. Split campaign configuration (PostgreSQL) from game-session analytics (MongoDB, AWS Lambda). Served campaign pages through CloudFront with server-side rendering

Engagement

October 2020 to June 2024, delivered

Team

A project manager, a lead software engineer, and developers. A core team of 4 from December 2021 to November 2022

Since 2025

Adact is part of Optimove. Brocoders had no role in the acquisition

Adact timeline, 2020 to 2024

March 2020

First questions. We wrote our questions on Adact's project documentation and prototypes.

October 2020

Agreement and start. We signed the agreement and started work.

About 6 months in

First rebuilt version. React and Node.js code, separate configuration and analytics databases, AWS Lambda, and CloudFront.

By August 2022

Games, payments, and integrations. About 30 games, a payment solution, Zapier, and a custom Adact API.

June 2024

Last month of the engagement.

What is gamification in marketing? The idea behind Adact

The cost of customer acquisition is core for digital business. The less expensive it is, the higher its growth potential. Companies use plenty of instruments for lead generation, but conversion remains challenging. Low user engagement makes campaigns expensive and forces marketers to look for more appropriate solutions.

An intersection of two fields, online games and lead marketing, allowed the development of an entirely new approach. Opposite to the traditional way, when digital advertisers collect new contacts over static landing pages facing high bounce rates, gamification makes conversion real.

The low bounce rate proves online users' high appreciation of game content. They stay longer on the page, and after finishing the play, they are more loyal to sharing their contact information and are into receiving future offerings.

How do customers behave when they arrive at the gaming page?

• 

  Start the game

• 

  Complete the game

• 

  Click on the next link and ready to convert

During a webinar session on creating gamified campaigns Kalev Kärpuk, CEO and Founder of Adact, demonstrated the case for Christmas Campaigns, when 98.97% of players finished the game.

In his interview with the Brandification website, he explained why gamification works better than traditional promotions offering discounts and other benefits to their users:

Kalev's statement has scientific ground. Researchers who study emotional intellect claim that people do not usually esteem what they haven't endeavored to achieve. So, games prompt Internet users to do some actions to gain rewards.

Meanwhile, the implementation of marketing gamification requires much effort and expertise. A team should take care of writing the scenarios for the games, come up with the design, develop the code and prepare the server infrastructure. Besides the mentioned, the scope should involve the analytics showing the efficacy of the active campaigns.

The described workflow shows that customer acquisition could remain an expensive tool for marketing industry professionals. As Kalev said, the cost of one campaign could reach over $15,000.

Adact makes marketing gamification feasible

Knowing the challenges of gamification in marketing, Kalev envisioned Adact to make it affordable. It spanned the feature set needed to develop bespoke gamification content. It was an out-of-the-box solution that fully automated the work for digital agencies and brands.

Kalev Kärpuk, an entrepreneur from Estonia, started the project we describe here. Kalev has been working in the area of marketing gamification since 2016. Before developing the side project, he had worked in a New York company. This is where he learned much about game design and user behavior. He is grateful for this experience as far as it helped him to find his job industry:

Kalev decided to unite marketing gamification with technology and check if it works in the mentioned field. He started up his venture and provided consultancy for his clients. While delivering the service, he had discovered a few main goals that gamification helps to reach:

• Generate new leads;
• Drive traffic;
• Increase brand awareness;
• Reduce bounce rate.

Kalev utilized a technical prototype that ensured the campaign's run at the initial stage. The MVP was accessible for internal users only and was restricted to external customers. His team set the campaigns manually for their clients and delivered their service as a contractor. This helped Adact to receive first revenue and confirm their product proposition.

While working on the MVP, Kalev applied to the Startup Wise Guys accelerator (Estonia). They were accepted there and successfully finished it by winning their pitch competition. This event made Adact attractive to other angel investors so that they have received a few significant grants.

Adact, which developed the marketing gamification platform, won one of the top prizes at sTARTUp Day. Referenced source: turundajateliit.ee

From startup to scale-up: the Adact MVP's high-load requirements

The main priority of the Adact team was to implement a user-friendly interface design. Since the platform was envisioned as a SaaS, the UI was a key for business. The specifics of their model implied the provision of their clients with automated features that must facilitate them in creating the gamification campaigns. Based on that, the front end had to work well in desktop browsers and be simple for end users. Besides the advanced UI features, Kalev's expectations were the following:

• Smooth onboarding. Adact users could create the landing pages as fast as users of Wix, Canva, and similar low-code design platforms.
• Multi-user support. The platform should consider a few types of users such as account owners and team members. Agencies could handle campaigns for the brand companies.
• Game templates. Users should be enriched with a wide range of predefined games which they could select from the beginning.
• Customization. Campaign creators should be able to customize their games by adding various assets related to their brand visibility.
• Dashboard analytics. Every manager of the campaign could track the statistics of each campaign by viewing the analytics dashboard.
• Performance. Technically, the system should process millions of requests.

The described scope demanded high expertise in the front-end and back-end, whereas performance and usability were the key points. Based on the contemporary web-development practice, the mentioned work required such team structure:

As said before, Kalev's team participated in the accelerator program of Estonian incubator Startup Wise Guys. Like Adact, Brocoders' team was a resident of that project (in the framework of the 16th batch). Our company was presented by Rodion Salnik, who was in charge of our side product Casers.

Having learned from Rodion about Brocoders' product development expertise in building high-loaded systems, Kalev trusted our team to accomplish the work. Our team was assigned and took on the project's design after signing an agreement in October 2020.

The discovery phase: reviewing the Adact MVP

Our first step was to figure out the requirements of the project. We learned them during the call interviews with Kalev and his team. Luckily, they managed to create the designs in Figma that gave us a complete vision regarding future priorities and work milestones.

User features requirements

• Users are distinguished by categories, and they could be agencies and individual creators;
• Creators could specify the type of campaign according to their marketing goals;
• Users may pick the game either from a template collection or create it by themselves with Adact;
• Creators could pick the lead form and adjust its design. It should be shown at the end of the game;
• The UI design of the landing page, as well as the game interface, should be fully customized;
• Creators could view the analytics information to monitor the efficacy of campaigns;
• The landing page should operate as a standalone website or be embedded into the corporate website of the brand site.

The revision of the existing Adact code: from PHP and jQuery to React and Node.js

Our next step was to review the existing code and decide on its quality. We wanted to figure out whether it would bother the further scale-up or not. In a short while, we found out that the project's architecture was written with PHP and jQuery. We suggested Kalev focus on best practice solutions and move forward with React.js and Node.js. We chose them as they are suitable for constructing extendable web-based products.

• What Adact brought

  A working MVP on PHP and jQuery that Adact's team used to run client campaigns manually. The product concept and game design. Designs in Figma, project documentation, and prototypes

• What we rebuilt

  The code: React and Next.js on the frontend, Node.js and Nest on the backend. Accounts for agencies and creators, with account owners and team members. Separate databases: PostgreSQL for campaign configuration and MongoDB for game-session analytics. AWS Lambda for the analytics side. CloudFront with server-side rendering for campaign pages

• What we added by August 2022

  New games, about 30 in total. A payment solution. Zapier and a custom Adact API

At the end of the discovery phase, we outlined the project features and finalized them in the specification. It included explanations of the user stories, requirements on the technical solutions, back-end integrations, and the project delivery timeline.

Building the high-load system: the Adact architecture rebuild

Handling the server-side rendering (SSR) for Adact campaigns

The primary requirement of the Adact team was to speed up the content rendering on the player's side. Once a user opens the landing page and initiates the game, the data should be refreshed in real-time. Any events should be executed smoothly, without delays. Apart from our previous approach, when we used the back-end API and talked to many endpoints, we decided to arrange the data in single cloud storage. To implement that, we used Amazon's CloudFront:

Besides the mentioned, we used the Content Delivery Network (CDN) at Amazon. Due to this technology, we adjusted the time needed to deliver the content. The network consists of the servers which store the cached information. When a user wants to open the home page, the CDN refers this query to the nearest web server, minimizing the time for delivery.

Accomplishing the real-time analytics in Adact

User analytics is one of the key features of Adact. Showing it in real-time helps customers to understand the progress of their campaigns. It includes the following information:

• How many users visited the landing page;
• How many users started the play;
• How many users finished playing;
• How long it took for them to play;
• What score did they play?
• What gifts did they deserve?

Before building the analytics, we faced a challenging task. We found out that if we record the information on the games, including the score and time of sessions, we will increase the database and slow down its work. This went far from our expectations regarding the performance. It encouraged us to split the data structure into a few databases. The features corresponding to the campaign creation and configuration were accomplished with PostgreSQL. The analytics dashboard was designed with MongoDB. In the meanwhile, both databases should communicate with a single back-end API. Hence, we prevented the slow-down on both sides of the web application.

Making the cost-efficient infrastructure for Adact

We suggested that the founder of Adact use AWS Lambda. This solution is capable of ensuring the scalability of MongoDB. The database could be extended or minimized depending on the number of active users. With that help, customers pay only for those resources they used.

AWS Lambda and MongoDB became a pain killer for the early-stage startup. At this point, they saved their spending and demonstrated the value of their product to the end customers. Due to the proposed architecture, Adact operated in conditions of massive traffic, obtaining over 3M visitors in half of a year.

We also would love to share the case study that became possible with Adact. One client agency launched a campaign on Adact. The outcomes were the following: in 10 days, 567,077 users visited the landing page, 478,846 completed the game, and 18,574 registered.

In just 10 days, the campaign gathered 18,574 leads. That is over 1,800 prospects a day.

Adact platform features in 2022

By August 2022, a marketer could publish an Adact campaign in about 15 minutes. They chose a game, made brief design and logic updates, picked the landing page flow and the data to collect, and shared the campaign.

• Campaign builder. Predefined landing page flows, an editor for visual and logic updates, and templates and predefined styles. Campaigns ran as a standalone landing page or inside the brand's website.
• Games and prizes. About 30 games, with prizes for the audience.
• Analytics. Data on every interaction as soon as a user loaded the campaign page: visits, game starts and finishes, play time, scores, and prizes.
• Integrations. Zapier and a custom Adact API, so users could work with the collected data in their own tools.

The Adact team over time

The project started with the 6 roles listed above. From December 2021 to November 2022, a core team of 4 worked on Adact every month, with a fifth person from February to June 2022. Our work on the account continued until June 2024.

Adact results, 2020 to 2024

1. 1.Over 2 million interactions in product testing without downtime or bug-related issues, as Kalev Kärpuk reported in his Clutch review.
2. 2.Over 3 million visitors in half a year on the new architecture.
3. 3.567,077 visitors, 478,846 completed games, and 18,574 registrations in 10 days on one agency campaign.

The list of technologies in the rebuilt Adact platform

Front-end

Back-end

Databases

Integration with Zapier

We are happy to have been a partner of Adact. Being a co-partner of their team, we gained experience building an infrastructure for MarTech products.