Five Startup Tips from Badgeville Co-Founder and CEO Kris Duggan

If you're ignoring the #1 critical success indicator, your startup is screwed.

When Kris Duggan co-founded

, the term “gamification” (the company's core business) wasn't very well known. “A few companies were trying to add Flash-based games to brand websites, but there were no companies focused on actually rewarding specific user behaviors across a brand's entire digital footprint,” Duggan told Benzinga. “There was a clear need for a solid enterprise SaaS play for this in the market, but no one was close to providing a solution that could measure and influence user behavior.” But what is gamification, exactly? “Gamification is a business strategy to measure and influence user behavior across customer- and employee-facing communities,” Duggan explained. “Over 100 businesses, including Samsung, Dell

, Deloitte, eBay's

X.Commerce, and more, rely on Badgeville's Behavior Platform to track user behavior and create meaningful programs to incentivize those behaviors.” Duggan said that by the time Badgeville launched at TechCrunch Disrupt, “we already had a handful of beta customers and significant revenues.” “Since then we have added over 50 employees and more than 100 customers including Dell, Samsung, NBC, Deloitte, and more, partnered with global social enterprise leaders such as Bazaarvoice, Janrain, and Livefyre, and have built connectors for the world's most-used enterprise applications including JIVE, Omniture, and Salesforce.com

.” With four previous startups on his resume, Duggan considers himself to be a serial entrepreneur. “But I've also spent significant time in leadership roles at large, global businesses and social enterprise companies,” he said. “When we first came up with the idea for Badgeville, we were focused on how to improve the current state of analytics for business,” said Duggan. “The analytics available today tell you a lot about page views, overall traffic, and your SEO, but they don't do two very important things: help you identify and understand user behavior based on user identity, and two, help you actually move the needle and influence that behavior. At the same time, I was fascinated by the success of the social gaming industry, which very clearly [has] more to do with the ability to measure and influence user behavior. I thought to myself, ‘why can't businesses use these same techniques to increase their own key business objectives?'” Duggan said that with “smart gamification techniques,” Badgeville's customers have experienced “20- to over 200-percent increases in key business objectives, such as social referrals, conversions, time-on-site, retention, and user-generated content.” “Badgeville helps customers first define and benchmark their key business objectives, and then create programs that move the needle,” said Duggan. “For some customers, this means a sophisticated, reputation-based model to highlight user-status and encourage quality contributions. For others, it means a competitive, game-like experience. Our technology and platform is built to support a wide range of experiences to increase user behavior that align with a businesses' objectives and brand.” Considering how far Badgeville has come, Benzinga was eager to know if Duggan had any bits of advice for young entrepreneurs. Here are his top five tips: