Driving the Future of Customer Loyalty and Engagement

From a simple Shopify widget to powering enterprise-grade loyalty for leading brands and reaching over 400 million end consumers across MENA and beyond, Gameball has come a long way. In this edition of Founder’s Hustle, we sit down with Ahmed Khairy, the engineer-turned-founder behind one of the region’s fastest-growing customer engagement platforms. Ahmed talks candidly about scaling from SMEs to enterprises, the rising demand for personalization, the hard economics of loyalty, why brick-and-mortar still matters, and Gameball’s holy grail.

From Engineering to Startups

Ahmed trained as an electrical engineer and rose quickly at Schneider Electric. “I was getting promoted, being prepared for management, becoming too important. That scared me,” he recalls. “I didn’t want that life.” So he quit, without a plan or a safety net. “The first decision wasn’t to build a retention platform,” he says. “It was simply to build something of my own.”

Long before Gameball, Ahmed was fascinated by why people buy. He recalls a case study about Tesco discovering that new fathers bought more beer when they bought diapers because they were spending weekends at home instead of going out. “Tesco bundled the two, and it worked”. A small but powerful example of how data and empathy could drive business decisions. “That story stuck with me,” he says. “It made me wonder what if that kind of intelligence could be democratized, not just reserved for big retailers?”

That question lingered. After a year of exploring different ideas, Ahmed reconnected with his friend Ahmed ElAssy,  loyalty-industry expert (now CPO), and the vision finally took shape: a platform that helps brands understand and engage their customers intelligently. Soon after, they brought on Omar Alfar as CTO, and Gameball was born.

Launching through Shopify

The first version of Gameball was a basic gamification loyalty widget on the Shopify app store, a light product that let brands engage users with points, badges, tiers, and leaderboards. The idea wasn’t to go broad; it was to find distribution. “We always had a bigger vision for Gameball,” recalls Ahmed. “But we couldn’t figure out the distribution channel. Shopify came as a workaround; a way to reach brands directly.”

The bet paid off faster than anyone expected. Within two weeks, Gameball became the first MENA startup to list an app on Shopify — and the first to be featured on its homepage — unlocking a wave of early users. When COVID pushed more merchants online, growth surged, and the team seized the momentum.  From there, the team built APIs, SDKs, and enterprise integrations to start serving brands off Shopify — and today, Gameball stands as the largest Shopify app partner in the region.

Scaling Through Whitelabeling

From 2023 to 2025, Gameball’s customer base grew from 7,000 to over 45,000 businesses. The growth wasn’t accidental; it came from a clever strategy. Whitelabeling.

“We realized there were major e-commerce platforms that wanted to offer loyalty tools natively,” he explains. “So we built it for them, behind the scenes.”

One example is Zid, a leading e-commerce platform in Saudi Arabia. When Zid wanted to launch its own loyalty module, Gameball powered it under the hood, branded as Zid Loyalty, but running entirely on Gameball’s infrastructure.

These partnerships multiplied reach. “Each platform already serves thousands of merchants,” says Ahmed. “By powering them, we serve their entire ecosystem.” Through these white-label integrations, Gameball quietly scaled its footprint across markets.

Moving Upmarket

As Gameball matured, the team noticed a clear pattern: smaller brands focused on acquisition, not retention. That realization pushed them to shift focus toward enterprises. Moving upmarket, however, required a completely new playbook. “What worked for SMEs no longer fit,” Ahmed says. “We don’t distribute through e-commerce platforms anymore; we distribute through partners.”

Today, Gameball follows a partner-first strategy, building a global network of system integrators, marketing agencies, and tech providers across regions. These partners are trained and certified to integrate Gameball’s loyalty and engagement tools into their own client offerings. The result is scalable growth without the need for a massive in-house sales force.

“If we want to expand into Asia-Pacific,” Ahmed explains, “we don’t start cold outreach. We go to partners in Singapore or the Philippines, empower them, and grow together through a revenue-share model.”

But for Ahmed, this isn’t just a distribution strategy; it’s an ecosystem play. “The goal is to build an ecosystem where other companies actually make money because of Gameball,” Ahmed adds. “Once a partner reaches the point where a meaningful share of their income comes from Gameball, that’s when we know we’ve done our job.”

In many ways, it’s a natural evolution of the same philosophy that helped Gameball scale in its early days: distribution through partnerships. The difference is that today, it’s not about reaching small merchants. It’s about enabling enterprise ecosystems to grow around Gameball.

Pricing Experiments & the Holy Grail

Gameball’s impact is best seen through its customers.

A leading convenience store chain in the GCC attributed 20% of its 2024 revenue directly to Gameball — enough to triple its contract with Gameball the following year. Another Saudi retailer saw redemption rates jump from 4% to over 20% after adding Gameball’s gamified loyalty features.

These results are now pushing Ahmed to rethink the company’s pricing model. Today, Gameball charges enterprises a subscription fee based on active customers and modules used, but with over $10 billion in annual transaction volume flowing through its platform, Ahmed sees an opportunity to move toward a performance-based model.  One that ties revenue to the measurable value Gameball drives.

“If we can take a small cut of the revenue we help generate, it could be game-changing — but it has to make sense for our customers,” he says. Like any startup, Gameball is constantly iterating, not just on product, but on the business model itself.

The Growing Need for Personalization

For Ahmed, one of the key drivers behind Gameball’s success is the rising expectation for personalization. “Today’s consumers aren’t baby boomers or Gen X,” he says. “They’re Millennials and Gen Z — digital natives raised on social media, short-form content, and dopamine-driven experiences.”

This new generation expects more than discounts or generic promo codes. “If I’m loyal to your brand, buying from you every few days, I expect to be treated differently,” Ahmed explains. He points out that in today’s market, abundance has replaced scarcity; there’s no shortage of products or stores. What truly differentiates brands now is the quality of the experience they deliver.

That’s where Gameball comes in. The platform helps brands surface and act on customer data; identifying who their most loyal customers are, which users are showing signs of churn, and how to engage each group differently. “Maybe your loyal customers get VIP status and faster delivery or priority service, while newer customers receive promo codes that encourage them to come back,” he says.

It’s a data-driven approach to human connection. The goal is to use intelligence not just to sell more, but to make every customer feel seen and maximize the return of every dollar spent.

Yet…Personalization is still underestimated

Personalization is no longer a nice-to-have; it’s the core of modern customer engagement. “I think brands still underestimate it,” he says. “Retaining customers is hard, and personalization is hard. You need to collect data, clean it, keep it relevant, and make sure it’s updated. It takes work.”

He stresses a simple truth: the better the data, the better the outcomes. Brands that want to maximize retention spend must invest in robust data infrastructure and ensure they are capturing meaningful insights, all while respecting privacy. “Customers are very conscious about what they share. You can’t just take their data for granted. You have to make it a benefit for them to share it,” Ahmed explains.

The Economics of Loyalty 

While engaging customers individually is critical, he doesn’t romanticize loyalty programs. “Points are liabilities,” he says. It is a promise to customers and a potential drag on the balance sheet if not managed precisely. “If you overspend, you ruin your economics; if you underspend, it doesn’t work at all.”

To him, every loyalty program lives or dies by its calibration; how earn and burn rates, redemption behavior, and profitability all align with a clear business goal. “A loyalty program without an objective is meaningless,” Ahmed explains. “You need to know what you’re trying to move; basket size, purchase frequency, or referrals, and then measure how each campaign impacts that metric.”

This philosophy inspired Gameball Academy, a training and certification hub that teaches marketers how to run loyalty programs responsibly. “We see teams issuing points without tracking redemption or ROI. That’s where margins get erased,” he notes.

At its core, Gameball operates on a simple belief: retention marketing is more efficient than ad spend on new customers. Once a brand scales, loyalty isn’t just smart, it’s the only way to grow profitably.

Unifying Online and Offline Sales

Ahmed’s focus on loyalty and retention naturally extends to how brands manage the entire customer journey. While many players chase a purely digital future, he is convinced that brick-and-mortar isn’t going anywhere. “A lot of companies are building for a world where everything happens online. But that’s not reality and probably never will be.,” he says.

Gameball is built for omnichannel experiences, where offline and online data flow seamlessly together. One of the company’s largest retail clients in Saudi Arabia operates hundreds of physical stores alongside multiple e-commerce brands, each on different systems. “Customer data was fragmented across platforms, and there was no way to identify a shopper across channels.”

Gameball stepped in to unify that chaos, consolidating interactions from every store, app, and website into a single customer profile. The result: brands can finally see and reward the full journey, whether a purchase happens in a mall or on a mobile app, across any of their brands.

For Ahmed, this integration is the next frontier in loyalty: bridging the physical and digital worlds, rather than choosing one over the other.

What’s next for Gameball?

After raising a ≈$4M seed round in 2023 from the likes of 500 Global, Propeller, and Seedra Ventures, Gameball is now closing in on a new round of funding to prepare for its Series A.

As Ahmed puts it, the goal isn’t to follow every trend, but to evolve with purpose. With AI finally mature enough to deliver real impact, Gameball is entering its next phase: evolving from a retention platform into a full growth operating system that helps brands attract, engage, and retain customers intelligently.