Engagement & Referral Systems
- Role
- Frontend Developer
- Period
- 2024 - 2025
Engagement systems for acquisition and retention: loot boxes, Wheel of Fortune mechanics, and referral flows designed to scale users without obscuring outcomes.
First-week growth
from a 100K paid base to ~1M users.
Acquisition channel
the engagement loop, second only to paid spend.
Paid bought the first 100K. The loop kept them coming back.
- Paid traffic
- Activation
- Referral loop
- Retention
- Scale
What I built
The product-facing growth mechanics users actually touch: referrals, tasks and reward surfaces, built to stay cheap to run at high traffic.
Growth was stalling at activation. The product needed a layered engagement system that rewarded both first-time and repeat users without breaking unit economics.
- 01Referral attribution that survives volumeInvite credit is staged through start parameters and qualifying actions, with duplicate prevention and backend validation, so heavy invite traffic doesn't poison the numbers.
- 02Backend-authoritative rewardsLoot boxes and the Wheel of Fortune animate on the client, but the result is decided and validated server-side with controlled probability and rarity tiers.
- 03Engagement without backend overloadHot flows lean on caching, deferred updates and lazy calculation, so millions of users don't translate into millions of constant recalculations.
- Reward mechanics stayed cheap to run, even at peak traffic.
- Passive income felt continuous without constant recalculation.
The growth loop
Every reward is a reason to come back
Play, earn, open a reward, invite a friend, then return for the bonus and play again. Each step feeds the next, so engagement compounds instead of leaking after the first session.
The reward economy
Rewards that pay out while you're away
Tech stack