🎮 Morty: IMDb for immersive experiences

The best consumer founders know the game. 20K+ of them read Consumer Startups every week.

Stay ahead. Get the playbook behind today's breakout startups.

Read time: 4 mins 47 seconds

A word from our partner

If CRMs were invented today, they’d probably look like Attio.

(No offense to the ones still stuck in 2012)

Connect your email and calendar, and Attio instantly builds a CRM that matches your business model — with all your companies, contacts, and interactions enriched with actionable insights.

It’s AI-native, not “AI duct-taped on later.” Which means you can:

Granola, Flatfile, Replicate, and other sharp operators are already using it.

🎁 Attio’s giving Consumer Startups readers two weeks free to see what an actually modern CRM feels like.

Most founders look for problems in obvious places.

Andy Bauch found his goldmine in a Google Sheet.

Hardcore escape room players, including Andy and his co-founder Karlis, were quietly logging every room they finished. That quirky completionist behavior became Morty, a marketplace for immersive experiences that is expanding globally with 100K+ active users and 4–5M monthly Google impressions, backed by General Catalyst.

💰 Funding note: Morty has a small allocation open in its current round. If you want a look at how they are becoming synonymous with a new category of entertainment send me a short blurb about you and I’ll forward it to Andy :)

Let’s dive into the story of Morty 👇.

Andy’s path from Disney streaming engineer to media tech founder gave him a front row seat to what actually holds attention. 

However, the real breakthrough came from a side project. 

For a decade he has built massive LEGO mosaics in his spare time. What started on Etsy ended up in the homes of Beyoncé and Miley Cyrus.

During an art show, hundreds of strangers showed up every weekend to co-build 8-foot mosaics with him. Watching that crowd, Andy saw that people are hungry for in-person experiences that can compete with their phones.

He realized dozens of categories of dopamine-fueled IRL entertainment were rapidly growing: immersive art installations, barcades, haunted houses, immersive gaming, cosplay, gaming cafes, murder mysteries…he saw a chance to build a home for a new wave of activities.

One of Andy’s favorite immersive experiences is escape rooms. He tracked every one in a Google Sheet. 

Out of curiosity, he called other enthusiasts and asked a simple question: “How do you keep track of the ones you’ve done?” The answer kept coming back the same way. More spreadsheets. More tabs. More manual logs.

This wasn’t organization, it was obsession. And obsession is the foundation of a sticky product.

It was 2020. No one was going out, so discovery was off the table. Andy and Karlis started where the users already were: tracking.

The first version of Morty was a simple system of record for escape rooms, built to replace the Google Sheets hardcore players were using. Users could log completions, add ratings to remember quality (think Foursquare for experiences), and, when possible, see room availability.

Early integrations were patchy, so the team doubled down on logging. If players came back to record every session, Morty would earn the right to layer on discovery, and later, commerce.

As traction grew, a bigger pattern emerged. 

Real fans travel for the best rooms. They will fly to Athens, Barcelona, Orlando, or New Orleans to chase the top lists. That meant Morty could not expand city by city. 

It needed a global database, the IMDb model for physical experiences.

The product arc followed the following sequence: 

Global tracker listing everything → Discovery and social so you could follow players and find your next challenge → A booking marketplace → Now MortyPass, a loyalty program that rewards people for booking inside the app. 

Thousands of attractions are bookable directly in-app today, and the team is expanding into other verticals. The tracker created trust and habit, which made the marketplace transition feel natural.

Andy started with friends in the scene and ran a tight 15-question interview. 

He focused on routines, logging habits, and “what would make this your home base.” He ended each chat with “who else should I talk to?” 

Escape rooms are group activities, so every interview produced two or three warm intros. No incentives needed. People shared because the product made their hobby better.

Morty’s first big experiment was an invite-only beta. 

Every user got a few codes, and new users needed one to join. It worked so well that Morty fans lit up subreddits and Facebook groups with code threads and screenshots. 

Signups jumped to ~1K fast and validated that the tracker had real pull.

‼️ However, it also nearly got them banned from the largest Facebook group in the hobby, roughly 50K members. Moderators were flooded, and the community felt spammed. It could have severely jeopardized their long term trust with those important online communities.

If your best channel is a community you don’t own, earn your way in before you scale mechanics that create moderator overhead.

Ambassador field marketing
The team launched the Morty agent program, where superfans volunteered to drop flyers at local escape rooms in exchange for recognition, an in-app badge, and some Morty swag. 

It worked! Agents started doing weekend “flyer runs,” and owners were far more receptive because the materials came from their most active players, not a cold outreach. 

Discover → play → log → share → repeat.

Turn operators into promoters (with cookies)
To warm up venues at scale, Andy and his wife mailed tiny USPS boxes with two vacuum-sealed homemade cookies and a short note with a QR code. 

No ask. Just “players love your room; here’s what Morty is.” 

Owners wrote back, asked for more materials, and began promoting Morty in-store, organically. The cookie boxes created real trust and long-term relationships.

Earned search that compounds
Once pull was obvious, Morty built the web app for SEO: server-side rendering, venue and city pages, and review surfaces that rank for “best escape room [city].” 

Readers arrive from Google, some become reviewers, more content gets created, rankings rise. In 2023, Morty launched Best of Morty. Owners added badges to websites and windows, which drove backlinks and referrals. Morty also shipped a plug-and-play asset page so venues could drop Morty into post-game emails and site footers in seconds.

Amplifying operator promotion

Morty also launched a referral program. When owners refer new players to Morty they get free Morty ad credits and waived booking commissions.

These pieces reinforce each other:

Operators tell customers about Morty; customers add missing attractions and write reviews; reviews power SEO; awards and referral bonuses motivate owners to link back and talk about Morty in-store. 

That stack now drives 4–5M Google impressions per month and 50–80K monthly anonymous web users who browse before they sign up.

Morty started monetizing last year and it does so by charging a take rate for experience booked in-app. 

Morty charges a flat $3 per ticket with an optional “I Love Morty” tip at checkout. About 30–40 percent of bookings include a tip, which pushes the blended take rate closer to ~10 percent.

One challenge lies in natural disintermediation. Some users discover experiences on Morty, then book direct. To counter this behavior, the team launched MortyPass. Users can earn points for booking in-app, which makes staying in-platform feel rewarding, not restrictive.

To unlock more revenue growth, Morty has to integrate with the booking systems of operators. Booking systems are fragmented, and many operators are small businesses. The tech and onboarding need to work for owner-operators, not just enterprise vendors. Solving this unlocks both revenue and a cleaner user experience.

1/ Hunt for spreadsheets. Manual workarounds = opportunity. Andy didn’t invent escape room tracking—he just replaced the Google Sheets hardcore players already used.

2/ Build for obsession. Casuals churn. Completionists stick, spread the word, and pay. Morty focused on the “do them all” crowd, not rainy-day dabblers.

3/ Let users distribute. Morty’s “Agents” dropped flyers at escape rooms nationwide—owners trusted them because they were regulars, not sales reps.

4/ Earn community trust first. Invite-only buzz almost got Morty banned from the biggest Facebook group. Growth hacks without trust burn bridges.

5/ Stop disintermediation with aligned incentives. MortyPass rewards kept bookings in-app. Build retention hooks before people start going direct.

—

See you next Tuesday,

Leo

btw.. give Attio a spin. AI-native CRM, 2 weeks free.

Follow me on X and LinkedIn

📥️ Want to advertise in Consumer Startups? Learn more.