The platform
What you set up, and what your team actually sees
Doorly is a hosted advent calendar with a murder mystery behind the doors. You configure it once in November; from 1 December it runs on its own and your team opens a new door every morning until Christmas Eve. This page is the whole mechanism, end to end.
Four steps, and only the first one is yours
Pick a tier and name your calendar
Choose a size band — the starter tier covers up to 30 people — and tell us your company name. That's the setup. There is no seat list to upload and nobody to invite.
Share one link
You get a single URL. Post it wherever your team already looks: a channel, an all-hands slide, the Monday email. First time someone opens it they type their name, and they're in.
A door unlocks every morning
From 1 December, door one through door twenty-four open on schedule. You don't post anything, schedule anything, or remember anything. Each door is a piece of the mystery — a clue, a suspect interview, a twist.
Accusations, then the reveal
Near the end of the month everyone submits who they think did it. On Christmas Eve the killer is revealed and the colleague who called it correctly — first, and for the right reasons — is your winner.
What's behind the doors
Murder at Mistletoe Manor
A chocolate a day is pleasant. A story a day is a conversation. Behind the twenty-four doors is a single murder mystery, written to be solved slowly and argued about constantly: a country house, a Christmas party, a body, and a cast of suspects who all have a reason to lie.
The doors are paced deliberately. The first week introduces the house and the guests. The second week is where alibis start contradicting each other and the first real theories form. By the third week people have favourite suspects and are defending them in public. The final doors close the loop, and Christmas Eve names the killer.
It takes about five minutes a day to keep up, and there is no penalty for missing one — the story is cumulative, not sequential, so a colleague who opens three doors on Monday morning is right back in it.
Dashboard & analytics
Engagement you can put a number on
The awkward part of most culture spending is that you can't show it worked. You booked the thing, people seemed to enjoy the thing, and that's the report. Doorly gives you a dashboard instead: how many people opened each day's door, how that held up across the month, and how many made it to the accusation at the end.
It's the same view we'd want in your position — a participation curve you can put in a slide in January, and a reason to run it again next year that isn't "people said it was nice".
Branding
It can look like your company, not like ours
Every calendar carries your company name. On the larger tiers it carries your logo and colours too, so what lands in the channel each morning reads as an internal thing your team made rather than a vendor's microsite — which is, in practice, the difference between people opening it and people ignoring it.
Those tiers also include the comms kit: ready-written posts for the launch, the mid-month lull, and the finale, so whoever owns the announcement isn't writing twenty four of them from scratch.
Where it runs
One link, wherever your team already talks
Doorly isn't an app you install into your workspace, and we've resisted making it one. It's a URL. Paste it into Slack, Microsoft Teams, an email, your intranet homepage, a QR code by the coffee machine — it behaves the same everywhere, and nobody has to grant a third-party tool access to your company's messages for it to work.
Nothing to install
It's a web page. It opens on a laptop, a phone on the train, or a tablet in the kitchen. No app store, no admin approval, no IT ticket, no accounts for your team to create.
Everyone gets the same door
Doors unlock by date, not by when someone joined or which office they're in. A colleague in Sydney and a colleague in Bristol open door nine on the same day and can argue about it in the same thread.
Asynchronous by design
There is no live session to attend and no calendar invite to decline. Five minutes, whenever suits. Someone off sick on day twelve can catch up on day thirteen without having missed the plot.
One person owns it, briefly
Setup is an afternoon in November. After that the organiser's job is optional: drop the day's door in the channel if you want to stoke it, or don't, and it still runs.