The booths people talk about — the ones with a queue all weekend — work differently. They run a loop: a tiny game pulls people in, a contact exchange happens during the high, and a tiered reward pushes the visitor to do the next thing.
This blueprint shows you how to build that loop yourself, in the time it takes to ship a small product feature. The game is the surface — what matters is the data layer underneath that turns a visitor into a tracked, attributed lead.
The Ideal Booth Visitor (IBV)
The IBV is not a persona at the top of your funnel. It's a behaviour pattern at the booth. An IBV does six things, in order:
If you only count step six you get a CSV. If you engineer steps one through five you get a customer.
The loop: Engage → Exchange → Reward
Three stages, no detours. Each stage is short — under two minutes. Each stage hands the visitor smoothly into the next.
Notice: there's no form. No "scan this QR to join the mailing list." The contact exchange is a bonus round of the game.
Stage 1: Engage — the game pulls people in
The game has one job: lower the cost of stopping. A passing visitor needs to feel that a 30-second commitment will be fun, not a sales trap.
What works:
- Spin the wheel. Classic. Every spin wins something — even the consolation tier is a sticker. No empty slots. The wheel is loud enough to draw the next visitor.
- 1-v-1 with a staff member. A 30-second mini-game on a tablet — trivia about the visitor's industry, a reflex challenge, a guess-the-stat about your product. The staff member loses on purpose 60% of the time. The visitor laughs.
- Daily prize draw. Every play enters a daily prize. A high-value item — an iPad, a flight upgrade, a year of your product — keeps people coming back to check the leaderboard.
What doesn't:
- Anything that takes more than 30 seconds before it's clear they've won something.
- Anything that requires reading a paragraph.
- Anything that makes the visitor stand alone — pair them with a staff member from second one.
Stage 2: Track the staff (the hidden engine)
Here's the part most booths skip. The app tags every play with the staff member who hosted it. This single piece of data changes the booth.
- When a visitor opens the app, they pick the staff member they're playing with from a list of who's on shift — photo and name. From that moment, every quest they complete is attributed to that staff member.
- Staff have their own dashboard inside the app — their rank, their plays, their attributed leads. They check it between visitors. It runs the booth on competitive instinct alone.
- A booth-wide leaderboard runs on a screen behind the booth — staff rankings, plays per hour, conversions earned. Same data, public view.
What this produces:
- Competition. Staff stop scrolling. They engage. The booth feels alive because the people running it have skin in the game.
- Coaching data. Day-two morning standup, you can see which staff member's plays converted highest into LinkedIn follows, who claimed the most tier-3 merch, who turned plays into pipeline two weeks later.
- Reward fairness. Bonuses, dinners, and bragging rights go to the staff who earned them — not to whoever happened to scan the most badges.
A booth where staff are competing is a booth visitors want to walk past again.
Stage 3: Exchange — contact as a bonus round
The transition from game to contact is the most important sentence anyone says all weekend:
That's the whole script. The visitor is in a "yes" mood from the win, and you're not asking for anything they don't already do daily.
The unlocks, in order of friction:
Each tier unlocks the merch tier above it. Staff don't have to upsell — the points and the reward shelf do the selling. Notice how front-loaded the public-posting actions are: the cheapest, highest-leverage UGC (an Instagram Story selfie) sits in the middle of the journey, not at the top.
Stage 4: Reward — make the rewards tiered and visible
Most booths give the same lanyard to everyone. The IBV loop only works if the reward shelf is visible, tiered, and cumulatively desirable. The trap: making Tier 3 a piece of consumer electronics. AirPods and mechanical keyboards are expensive, generic, and forgettable. The right Tier 3 is access — the things your company already has that nobody can buy at retail.
Why this works. A 15-minute founder Zoom costs you nothing and is more memorable than any consumer-electronic giveaway. A year of the product is high-LTV, zero marginal cost, and exactly what your real customers want. A VIP wristband is a status symbol your competitors can't replicate. The visitor walks away with a story, not a charger they'll lose.
Two design rules:
- Tier 3 must be teased clearly. A printed sign on the booth wall: "1,000 points = 15 minutes with the founder." Or a polaroid wall of past Tier-3 winners. The point isn't that the prize is on a glass shelf — it's that visitors can see exactly what they're playing for.
- Tier 3 must require a public action — a posted Instagram Story, a tagged feed post, a mascot selfie. UGC is the cost; access is the reward. Every Tier 3 claim produces a piece of branded content that other conference-goers see, attribute, and walk to the booth from.
The mascot multiplier
The mascot quest deserves its own callout. A team member in a costume — or a partner with a recognisable mascot — roams the conference floor. Visitors who find them, take a selfie, and post it with the booth tag earn the top tier.
Cost: one suit, one extra body on the team. Effect: dozens of organic posts that other attendees see, follow, and walk to the booth from. The mascot is the highest-leverage hire of the week.
What you walk away with
A booth running this loop produces, by the end of three days:
The "lead magnet" of a great booth is the booth itself.
Closing
A booth is a software product with a three-day deployment window. Run it like one. The loop is simple — Engage → Exchange → Reward — but the data layer underneath, attributing every action to a staff member and a quest, is what turns the foot traffic into a forecast.
You can ship the whole thing yourself. The Copy for agent button at the top right has the full build brief — paste it into Claude Code, Cursor, or any agent that scaffolds a project, and iterate from there. Or run it on Domino's quest engine and skip straight to the booth design. Either way, the playbook is the same: design the loop, tier the rewards, and turn your staff into a leaderboard.
Visitors won't remember your demo. They'll remember the founder Zoom they unlocked, the mascot selfie that ended up on their Instagram Story, and the staff member who beat them at the trivia game. That's the booth they'll tell their colleagues about. That's the IBV.
{/* Inline CTAs */}Run the numbers, then ship it.
Plug your booth size and conference length into the calculator to size the opportunity. Then copy the build prompt and hand it to Claude Code or Cursor — the loop is small enough to ship in a week.