World of
Reallife
We grew up on games that showed us exactly where we stand. Here's how to give our companies the same board.
The Game Drew
the Board
In the last few weeks I’ve been playing the World of Warcraft Forever Beta with Christina. It took me straight back to the vanilla days, when the game came out and I was stationed near Munich at the German Air Force Officer School.
It was never about the graphics. WoW lives on the fine feeling of progression across many dimensions at once. You beat higher-level monsters, your skills grow, your equipment levels up, and all of it sits in a beautifully laid-out skill tree.
My beta recap
Progress
The game
A skill tree shows what you've earned and what comes next.
Work
Months of work, and nothing shows what you've unlocked.
Yardsticks
The game
The auction house shows exactly how much you're earning.
Work
The numbers sit scattered across Stripe, the CRM and analytics.
Peace of mind
The game
Fishing, for no discernible reason. Just satisfying.
Work
The quiet hours only come once the month is covered.
In the auction house I could watch the market, spot inefficiencies, buy low, sell high, corner a niche. Those were very clear yardsticks, and improving them became a purpose in itself. And for no discernible reason, I really loved fishing. Back then it had no real monetary value. It was part of my peace of mind process. Nothing has changed: in the beta I caught 259 fish, more than 96% of all players.
Diablo had a fantastic skill tree. Morrowind and Skyrim had them too. Age of Empires gave you a clear tech tree to pursue. I always wanted to make that an element of the business world, because the business world is fucking boring.
The Air Force had clear hierarchies to climb, but it was built to be resilient, not efficient. I missed the progress, so I left after four years to study psychology. This idea of gamifying my work never left me.
Almost all of us who build companies grew up on these games. So why do we run our businesses with no visible progress at all?
Nobody Plays
the Second-Best Move
If you look at a chessboard, you never make the move you think is second best. Except in a training game, you always play the move you deem the best.
In real life you waste your time all the time. You do things you shouldn’t do. You procrastinate. I’ve always been frustrated by that behavior, and I see it in myself.
Here’s what the difference looks like. World Championship 2013, game 10, the game that made Magnus Carlsen world champion. He has White and it’s his move. Neither option loses. Which one do you play?
?
Carlsen played e5. Attacking the queen looks stronger, and nothing goes wrong after it. It just gives the whole advantage away. The second-best move never feels like a mistake. On a chessboard an engine shows you the gap. In a business week, nobody does.
The board
- Chess
- You see all of it
- Your business
- You see a fraction
The goal
- Chess
- One, and it's clear
- Your business
- It shifts with the day
Your turn
- Chess
- You have to move
- Your business
- You can always pass
My version is painfully concrete. I keep missing out on promoting my events with ads, or on making new creatives for them, so I miss out on leads. Then I forget to follow up with the most promising leads. It all goes down between my busy workweek.
Tim Schumacher, the Cologne investor and co-founder of saas.group, recommended a book in his talk at the Future Tech Festival: Drawdown. It looks at what we could do about climate change and ranks it. Some things simply help more than others, so why put your time and energy into the seventh most helpful one?
When I looked at WoW gold guides again, two things were missing from all of them. There are tools for almost everything, like TradeSkillMaster, which is very manual to set up and then powerful. But it’s all still “if this, then that” software, with no AI in it. And nobody tells you that this is the most efficient investment of your time and gold, given your current situation right now.
It’s the same gap in business. A CRM shows me my pipeline. What I want is someone telling me which three deals matter most. That’s why we built Customer Magic.
You Live Where
You Feel Comfortable
There’s a trap here, and WoW shows it well. The world is split between players who take it slow and enjoy the journey with their friends, and min-maxers who want to level fastest, be first and get the best gear, and who enjoy optimizing all of it.
Business has the same split. Lifestyle entrepreneurs optimize for quality of life. Startup founders chase the highest path of growth and venture capital. It’s totally fine. It’s a spectrum, and you live where you feel comfortable.
Quality of life
Balanced
Maximize growth
In the game
You keep up with the pack, without planning your evenings around it.
In business
A company that grows steadily, paid for by its own customers.
What your board asks
How far above the floor are we, and is it growing?
When I had the choice between Berlin and Cologne, I chose Cologne for the nicer people and the better quality of life. So a board for a real company shouldn’t push everybody towards “more”.
We have what we call the monthly nut: the money we need each month to cover salaries, tools and taxes.
That makes the nut a floor, not a high score. And it gave me my real win condition: Stripe revenue covering the nut on its own. Consulting trades my time for money. Stripe doesn’t. When Stripe alone covers the nut, consulting becomes a choice.
What We Built
Into Our Admin
So I stopped writing about it and built it. World of Reallife is a new area in our own admin, for Christina and me. It has two boards so far, because our mantra is build, grow, repeat.
We went through five design rounds in a single day. The first looked like normal business dashboards. The second was a beautiful game with the numbers gone. The answer sat in the middle: the numbers stay in charge, and the game sits on top.
The first real pull, on 2 November, already told me things I didn’t know:
127
Leads in one week
Our best in 12 weeks, at €3.37 each, our cheapest ever.
11 and 26
Leads without ads
The two weeks before that, with no ads running.
104
Errors in four weeks
They hit 44 people. The record clean streak is five days.
9
Decisions waiting on me
The fixer's queue went from 47 items to zero. The rest needs me.
Every number sits against my own marks: 50 leads a week or more, €5 a lead or less and never over €10, and 5% of leads becoming customers, with anything under 3% a bad sign. And beside each board sits its own quest log, sorted by value. It’s the part I wanted most: not another chart, but the next best move.
Draw Your
Own Board
You don’t need our setup. Pick one workflow and give it an afternoon with your coding agent.
Copy this into your coding agent and answer its questions. You’re done when your board shows real numbers and tells you the one next move.
I want a simple board for one workflow in my business: [describe it].
First ask me what my monthly floor is, and which three numbers would tell me where I stand. Help me find where each number lives, and connect to real data only.
Build one page that shows each number against my own normal and a target I set, plus one streak or personal best.
Then add a quest log: the next steps, sorted by highest value, with one reason each.
Don't invent numbers. If something isn't connected, show that plainly.Bring what you built to the Pirate Lab on Wednesday, 11 November, and we’ll look at your board together.
Whether you’re a casual or a min-maxer, the point is the same. Know where you stand, play your best move, and when the quest log is empty, go fishing.
Cheers,
Ben
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Questions & Answers
Do I need to be a gamer for this?
What if I'm not chasing growth?
What is the monthly nut?
Why does Stripe revenue matter so much here?
Where do the numbers on the board come from?
What is the quest log?
Founder from Cologne with 15 years of startup experience across 9 ventures. After helping thousands master growth marketing, Ben learned vibe coding from scratch and launched CaptAIn within three months. He leads the Vibe Coding Cologne community, blending real founder experience with teaching clarity.