Introduction

We’re coming up on 3 years post-ATT - and it’s clear that while the storms of uncertainty have abated, the
disruption is here all around us.

Measurement and optimization continue to be a HUGE mess.

But that’s why we have amazing guests on the Mobile User Acquisition Show. Over the last couple of years,
we’ve had the smartest practitioners in the world on creatives, gaming and non-gaming apps, subscription
apps, ad tech platforms and measurement platforms that have shared their insights with us on every aspect
of mobile growth.

This fountain of inspiration is what keeps us going at the Mobile UA show.

And this is why we’re excited to bring you the Mobile Growth Handbook 2023 featuring the choicest
highlights from the episodes of the Mobile UA show in 2022.

These insights will give you actionable steps to understand and thrive in all aspects of mobile growth. If
you’re facing a question or challenge, chances are that some of our guests have too - and have spoken
about how they’ve solved for it.

We hope this handbook will help you with your growth plans for this year and equip you with all that you
need to scale your product in a post identifier world.

We’ve organized this book into sections pertaining to the different areas of mobile growth, so you can dip in
and out of it. Treat this like a buffet in which you can choose what to read depending on what you’re
working on and what’s pressing for you right now.

Bon Appetit!

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3
Table of Contents
01 Creative 6
How to build a creative strategy based on vulnerability and authenticity, with Grace Ouma-Cabezas 7
(Former Head of Growth, Poppy Seed Health)

How to talk to your customers in order to make winning ads with Hannah Parvaz, Co-Founder at Aperture 9

How to execute a misleading & meta-misleading creative strategy for games with Liliya Gafitulina UA 1
Manager and Bogdan Khashiev UA Manager at AdQuantum 1

02 Hiring, Leadership, Growth Teams 13

How to build a mobile marketing function from scratch, with Simon Vishnevskiy (Head of Paid Acquisition, Dave) 14

Shattering ceilings: the many paths to leadership taken by women leaders in mobile marketing with Allison 16
Schiff (AdExchanger), Aurora Klaeboe Berg (Medal TV), Collete Nataf (Mile IQ, Lightning AI), Faith Price
(DoubleDown Interactive), Mireia Rivero (Social Point), Paula Neves (Square Enix) and Peggy Anne Salz
(Mobile Groove, Forbes)

03 Post Identifier Strategy 18

The Future of UA: SKAN, Sandbox, Data Clean Rooms & more with Sherry Lin(Lyft), Nick 19
Blake(LiftOff), Shamanth Rao(Rocketship HQ), Gadi Eliashiv (Singular) & John Koetsier (Forbes)

A walkthrough of Google’s LightweightMMM, with Michael Taylor (Co-Founder, Vexpower) 22

SKAdNetwork 4.0: when is it going to drop? with Roman Garbar, Marketing Director at Tenjin 23

Media Mix Modeling: Completing the UA Performance Picture with John Koetsier (Forbes), Igor 24
Skokan (Meta), Liz Emery (Tinuiti), Eran Friedman (Singular) & Shamanth Rao (Rocketship HQ)

SKAN: a playbook for today and the future, with Piyush Mishra Head, Growth Marketing 26
(Product Madness)

How to run a soft launch in a post-ATT world, with Faith Price, Director of Growth Marketing 28
(DoubleDown Interactive)

04 Strategy 30
From B2C to zero to B2B (including a Real Housewives detour), with Matt Bailey (Founder & CEO, GameOn 31

Growth strategies for Web3 games: Community is only one piece of the puzzle – with Atif Khan 32
(COO, Stardust)

The rise, decline and settling-down of daily deals – with Adam Lovallo (Founder, Thesis; Co-founder, Grow.co) 34

Ascent of a language learning phenomenon, with Gina Gotthilf (Co-Founder at Latitud, ex-Duolingo, ex-Tumblr) 37

4
A brief history of mobile user acquisition with Eric Seufert (Founder, Heracles Media and Mobile Dev Memo) 40

Web 3 ads on Brave: an early behind-the-scenes look with Annica Lin, VP Growth at Sable 42

The early days of ride-sharing apps, with Daniel Riaz (Founder, Trend Up Digital. Ex-Lyft, ex-Zynga) 43

How to use blockchain data to run targeted ads for web 3 with Tobias Boerner, Co-Founder at Wallet Ads, 45
Appic and Admiral Studio.

How hypercasual games took over the app stores: with Jon Hook, CMO at PlayEmber. 47

How to grow a growth education business with Brian Balfour, CEO at Reforge 49

05 Subscriptions 52
How to use monetization experiments to drive dramatic LTV improvements for subscription apps 53
with Ekaterina Gamsriegler, Head-Growth & Marketing at Mimo

How to optimize products for forever: growth strategies to win with subscription apps, with Robbie Kellman 55
Baxter (Founder, Peninsula Strategies)

Winning strategies for subscription apps in 2022, our webinar with Liftoff + Vungle(feat. Carolin Rohte 57
(Yazio), Hichem Belouizdad (Liftoff+Vungle), Lisa Kennelly (Fishbrain), Thomas Petit (Consultant) &
Shamanth Rao (Rocketship HQ))

06 UA Channels 60
How to unlock web-based flows for massive scale with Todd Kane, VP of Growth at Homer Learning 61

The ascendance of cross-promos in a post-ATT world, with David Philippson (CEO & Co-Founder -Dataseat) 63

Diversifying your UA mix in a post-ATT world: Why, When and How, with Matej Lancaric (User Acquisition 65
& Marketing consultant)

Going where the fish are: making the leap to offline partnerships, with Lisa Kennelly (CMO, Fishbrain) 66

How to scale your UA with affiliate marketing, with Dora Trostanetsky (Growth Marketing Lead, Trade Republic) 68

Omnichannel strategies for a post-IDFA world: for web and app based products in 2022, our webinar with 70
Ruckus feat. Grace Ouma-Cabezas (Poppy Seed Health), Evan Woods (DT.Co), Matej Lancaric (Growth
Consultant), Shamanth Rao (Rocketship HQ) & Anish Shah (Ruckus)

07 Virality 73
How to set up a winning referral flow - with Dominic Coryell, Product Lead at Shopify. 74

Inside Draw Something’s perfect storm: from the brink to 50 million installs in 50 days: with 76
Wilson Kriegel, COO at Buildstock

From the early days of virality and freemium to habit formation on mobile with Selina Tobaccowala, 78
Founder, Evite & Gixo

How viral content can trigger habit change at scale, with Victoria Repa (Founder & CEO, BetterMe) 80

5
01 CREATIVE

6

How to build a
creative strategy
based on
vulnerability and
authenticity
Grace Ouma - Cabezas
Former Head of Growth,
Poppy Seed Health
Check out the entire episode
🧲 Keeping a creative-first approach
In order to convey who we were serving, we really
thought creative-first. The creative would help
illustrate the personas and the use cases for us, and
could do some of the work that we were losing in the
targeting. So how can we portray that nonlinear
pregnancy-postpartum journey in a way that could
be compelling and really go creative-forward,
messaging-forward and then think about how the
channel supported each of those elements. It makes
it even more imperative that we work that way. How
can we work the algorithm to our favor?
Authentic creatives that struck a chord
with the audience
Those actual questions that we were getting,
combined with leaning into the idea that this is not a
linear path but that every day actually presents
challenges that many birthing people don’t think of
as rising to the occasion, but are pretty universal.
For example, we showed a person breast pumping
for milk and then wondering, “Am I producing
enough milk?”
As they’re doing that they’re typing the question into
Poppy Seed Health.
We had a diaper blowout because we knew that that
was a very visceral real experience that people
have. How many of these are normal in a day? So
we tried to really take those moments and illustrate
them in the most compelling way possible, and then
connect them directly to how they relate back to the
product.
A tracker doesn’t talk about the
common worries during pregnancy
Knowing what things were unspoken was important.
We were a texting app and a space that was safe for
birthing people to ask questions that they may be
ashamed to ask. So we had an image of someone
combing their hair and large clumps of hair that
nobody wants to see come out of their head. We
were highlighting postpartum hair loss, which is
something that’s quite common, but isn’t often talked
about. So it was also a little bit of things that people
were asking us and that aren’t highlighted in a
tracker pregnancy app.
In a pregnancy test ad, just think of all the creatives
that speak to that life stage. What’s shown is a
happy mom with a baby bump, or a baby on their hip
or something like that.
7
 Overcoming algorithm challenges
From a tactical point in our setup, we created
distinct campaigns for new creatives to try and
overcome some of those algorithm challenges. So
they weren’t all just in one campaign or in
campaigns that were in competition with each other.
Also just making sure that they are distinct enough
so it wasn’t like, we’re having 15 sec cuts of the 30
sec video.
That’s how we did it tactically. We tried to at least
get four to six weeks of concrete learnings by
having them as their distinct campaigns, with a
distinct budget, and making sure they’re different
enough. This did help us discover some additional
winners, and actually some of the original, more
pared down content that initially was being beaten
by that 30s video.
Recruiting creators for UGCs
We try to be as open ended with a brief as possible,
because we really want to honor the style of that
creator. We have a lot of the work on the front end in
terms of vetting and looking at all the applicants. We
worked out a loose formula of number of followers
based on what we knew the going rate was, the type
of engagement on your most recent videos, your
tone, etc, how that fit through our brand filter, which
we had to find pretty early on. So we were
identifying people that we trusted enough and
thought their style was compelling enough and that
their audience engagement was compelling enough
that we can give a somewhat open ended brief in
terms of what we want, we absolutely want you to
create this in your style. We’ve chosen you because
we think that you are brand aligned, and you’re
interesting and that we liked your style.

Why some creatives may work better Tracking conversions brought in by

⛰ than we anticipate 🚀 influencers
We had a couple of different scenarios that we shot, We’re primarily tracking conversions through promo
portrayed and pulled all together. So there was the codes, that was the simplest way. We also gave
breast pump and diaper blow-out. We also tried to people a tracking link. One of the requirements is to
simulate late nights in the bathroom wondering “Am have a link in bio, going back to us for at least 48
I okay” for the pregnant person. We showed a video hours, they would often keep it up longer. Then there
of the hair loss I had mentioned. So it kind of pulled was worry about tracking direct downloads from
together all of those stories with some thematic there. What we saw most commonly was code
music and then an overlay at the end basically, like usage. Also just overall incremental installs around
we’re here for you through it all, pregnancy, that 24 hour period of video is usually what we
postpartum and all the messy in-betweens. noticed the most, because Tiktok is not necessarily
a platform that people want to leave and then go
So because it kind of went through all the stories,
take an action, but they will absolutely use that code
my initial thinking was, I think the micro stories are
and then go to the app store later. So that’s what we
going to do better. Because someone’s going see
saw the most.
themselves in one of these scenarios, not all of
these scenarios, because they can’t happen all at
once. Some were clearly for pregnancy, some were
very clearly for postpartum, some were a little bit
ambiguous. But I think what was the takeaway for us
- just taking folks through that journey. It was
different people being depicted. It was different
stages. It wasn’t one person going through it in the
right order. But I think there’s something about
foreshadowing that in this life stage is really
powerful, because if it’s your first pregnancy, and
you just don’t know what you don’t know and you
imagine, I may need help with that or like that.
And even if one of those scenarios resonates with
you, I think it just built trust that we understand what
the journey looks like.

8
 🎩 Become the most interesting
person in the room
How to talk to It wasn’t about being more interesting or becoming
more educated, it was they really wanted to tie this
your customers to their ego and they wanted to seem more
interesting to these people around them so that they

in order to make could kind of get more social kudos, and so on.
After this, we started playing with messaging around
that. Ultimately, we ended up with this line of copy
winning ads that said, “Become the most interesting person in
the room.” We started running this line of copy on
lots of different ads. We wrote that line of copy in
2017 – 2018 and it still hasn’t saturated yet. It’s
scaled worldwide.

Looking for the why beneath the why

I like to call that looking for the why beneath the
why. I’m sure everyone’s heard of the five why’s.
When we’re looking for the why beneath the why, at
some point, it stops. Why is that? And it’s important
to just keep on asking how things came to be.

Having conversations as opposed

to interviews
Whenever you have lots of people together in a
group, what happens is people don’t really feel like
they can be as honest as they want to be sometimes
or as honest as possible. So what happens is
someone will follow someone else. What I do now is
have one-on-one conversations, or along with
another member of the team. What we do is we just
go in there, reframe these conversations away from
being interviews to being conversations, because it
puts you in a different mindset going into the
conversation.

Take quotes, not notes

Hannah Parvaz
Co-Founder at Aperture
Check out the entire episode
I always say, “Take quotes, not notes.” The reason I
say that is because it’s really important for us to
write down exactly what the customer says, rather
than just taking notes of what we think they mean.
Sometimes we put our own spin on things, and it’s
really important for us to be able to look back at
them, but look back at these conversations
objectively and say, “okay, now I can look at what
they’re saying in a different way.”

9
 Importance of using the right language
Something really important for me, when we’re
going through these conversations is understanding
the language that customers use. So you’re going
to start seeing patterns throughout. While people
who are brand new to the product are going to use
specific words and phrases, we want to build out
word banks of words they use and phrases they
use right at the beginning and words and phrases
they use when they’ve just been using it for a
couple of weeks, and then a couple of years and
how they communicate with us and how they
describe the brand and the product and so on and
the exact words they’re using.
Because then we can basically mirror that back to
them through the app, or through the product, or
through the copy that we’re using, or through even
the marketing campaigns.

Insights are always available if we’re

looking for it
We’re looking for words and phrases that people
really use that we might not have otherwise thought
of ourselves. Another thing that I look for when I’m
looking at testimonials or reviews or any piece of
written content is an opportunity to talk to that
person.
One review came through for Uptime, from someone
saying that they had a chronic illness and they’re
using the app because they can only concentrate for
short periods of time and they physically aren’t able
to hold up books. We just replied on the App Store
saying, “Are you available for a quick call? We’d love
to chat with you a bit more”. We managed to have a
call with them and got so many interesting stories
from them, and understood a whole new use case
and a whole new piece of positioning, which we
were then able to share with the world, which was
really amazing.

10
 How to determine what the core
game creatives need to be
How to execute a We’ll first look at what our game can offer as a game
mechanic itself, and then how we can implement
misleading & this mechanic into the creative, make it a creative
mechanic. If it works, we start to analyze what type

meta-misleading of users it probably attracts.

creative strategy The building blocks of a successful

📈 creative model
for games These are communication, mastery, management,
self-expression, research, and escapism.

Liliya Gafitulina
The transition from core ads into
UA Manager misleading creatives
We start to create misleading creatives after we see
that all the core creatives are burned out. Then we’ll
start with meta-misleading ones by adding some
misleading elements to the core gameplay. We see
that meta misleading and misleading mechanics
may work well with the audience that prefers to
watch ads, instead of being in the game.

A different strategy for mid-core and

hardcore games
For mid-core and hardcore games, we tend not to
use misleading at all, because here it is important to
show the end product to the user. But we also may
add some meta-misleading mechanics like
storytelling, for example, before showing the core
gameplay.

How misleading ads work with

Bogdan Khashiev
UA Manager at AdQuantum
📈 casual games
In casual games, we have many ad watchers who
prefer to watch ads, and they may be triggered by
those meta-misleading or misleading ads and pay
off quicker. When we use them mainly with the
games with really long-term retention rates, the LTV
is not that important but it is more important to pay
off rather quickly.

Check out the entire episode

11
 How the appearance on the App
Store changes
What we don’t do is actually not use misleading
videos in the store because when the end user
sees this page in the store, they should see the end
product itself.

The testing process

There are two main considerations that you should

keep in mind. The first one is the relevance of the
test. You obviously need to get enough data, enough
impressions, and respectively enough clicks to
measure your CPI so that the results that you
acquire are trustworthy. The second one is the
cheapness of your test.
For example, in AdQuantum we ran up to 30
creatives within the same test sometimes for some
projects. So you need to be wise about how you
spend your cost because otherwise, the test can be
way too expensive.

📈 The day-one player cost model

We also use the so-called day-one player cost
where we divide the CPI by retention rate. So then
we get the cost of the player who sticks to the game
on day one. That’s how we combine the retention
rate and CPI together with one metric.

12
02 HIRING,
LEADERSHIP,
GROWTH TEAMS

13
 What you may face when moving
from a big corporate to a start-up
How to build a You might have worked in a big corporate firm,
where the marketing team was north of 40 people,
mobile marketing and you had a person for every single use case.
You had MarTech people, data analysts,

function from experienced media buyers. Then, you go to a

start-up and all of a sudden, you see that reports are
being run on Tableau and they’re a bit obsolete and
scratch they’re not really useful for your use case. They’re
not really getting things to the place they need to be,
and it’s really problematic.

How did you get your UA buyers to

🎩 develop expertise?
I brought in some outside help and set up a
mentorship program for my UA buyers. I brought
someone in for one hour a week for our key
channel, the one where we spent the most of our
money, just like everyone else, which is probably
channels like Facebook, Google and Apple Search.
The outside help mentored and tutored my people
for a certain number of hours a week, and that
actually helped us make a lot of progress.

A reason why experienced leaders

Simon Vishnevskiy
Head of Paid Acquisition, Dave
may be wary of joining start-ups
I’ve consulted with companies that are at a pretty
critical stage in their growth, and they secured
Round B or C financing, and they’re big companies
with substantial market valuation. But they’re still
running, if not legacy, then Tier 2 MMPs and Tier 2
reporting. Their reason was that they never really
had the resources, they grew too fast and now
they’re facing the problem of not being able to grow
their business, especially on the marketing side,
because they’ve had second tier tools and second
tier partnerships. .
This happens to the extent that someone of my
caliber or even higher caliber than me, like the VP of
Growth or a CMO, who’s being interviewed for a role
in such a company, might not even agree to join
because they’re using obsolete tools.

Check out the entire episode

14
 Why you need a top tier MMP even
Why work with contractors?
in the early stages
I understand that if you’re looking at your
You don’t really need to have the approval of the
revenue-to-cost equation on those tools, having 5%
entire team, for example. As opposed to hiring a
of your costs go towards your MMP is a lot of your
full-time person, contractors are really like a nice
overall costs in the early stages. But if you scale
band-aid. But even with contractors, I think
your marketing spend by 5X, all of a sudden that
long-term. If I’m hiring a contractor, can I potentially
becomes only 1% of your costs, right? Without that
convert them into full-time? If I do convert them, will
MMP, you cannot get to that scale where a lot of it
they stay with me for half a year? I don’t want to hire
becomes efficient. So in a way, this efficiency buys
a person for a month – it’s just really not the best
you more efficiency.
investment.

Why acquiring to your future LTV An advantage of working with agencies

makes sense
Let’s say you’re looking at the LTV curves of
companies like Lyft and Uber and you see that one
year revenue per user early in the life cycle of the
company is actually very little. But then the markets
mature, and the service matures. Look at Uber, they
added Uber Eats and other additional services. Now
their LTV is 3X or 4X of what it was four years ago.
But if they were acquiring to this LTV four years ago,
they would have left a huge market share on the
table today.
How your pre-ATT baseline can help
you today
If you have a product with stable conversion rates
that track over time, you always need to have a
baseline to refer to. Let’s assume our baseline
happened before ATT and we had steady
conversion rates, and now our conversion rates
have declined because we’re just not able to
attribute users to certain channels such as
Facebook, Google, Apple Search – basically, paid
channels. So if you’re running paid attribution, you
need to look at your baseline before all the changes
and apply similar conversion rates to the post ATT
environment. It’s a fairly simple concept, but it does
work.
The reason is that agencies, especially the good ones,
employ highly experienced media buyers. It’s really
difficult, especially in this environment, to secure that
number of experienced media buyers. Hiring 5 people
with 8 years of experience will take you forever in this
market. Those people are in demand!
When it comes to incrementality,
start-ups have an edge over
publicly traded companies
If you’re a publicly traded company and you want to
measure incrementality by turning off all your paid
acquisition, then there is a cost to be paid there, in
cost and efficiency. When you turn things back on,
your campaigns lose all their history. So they have to
reoptimize again, and you can lose some money
there. You’ll need to ramp up because you don’t
know how platforms will behave. But if you’re in the
early stages and you can afford that strategy, add a
new channel, turn it on, turn it off. See what happens
with your overall mix.

What to look for in your UA media

buyers
Is this person good enough for my current level of
spend on a particular channel, or can they take us to
a different level if they come in with strategic
experience?

15
Shattering ceilings:
Collete Nataf
the many paths to Mile IQ, Lightning
AI
leadership taken by
women leaders in
mobile marketing

Aurora Klaeboe Berg

Medal TV

Allison Schiff
AdExchanger Faith Price
DoubleDown Interactive

Mireia Rivero
Social Point

Peggy Anne Salz

Mobile Groove, Forbes

Paula Neves
Check out the entire episode
Square Enix

16
 Not all meetings for women are actually
designed to empower women
Colette: I was a financial analyst at the Treasury
Department for the United States government, we
had a meeting at the Treasury for women leaders,
and I said, “that sounds interesting, are you going?”
She was like, “Why would I go to that? None of the
men are going. All the people who I look up to, and
want to have their jobs, are men.”
Managers don’t have to know it all
Faith: One was that when you’re a manager, it’s not
all about knowing and having all the answers, or
even understanding, specifically at a very deep
level, what each of your direct reports does and
what their business model is. Suzy was not familiar
with affiliate marketing, which happened to be what I
was working in at the time. But instead, it was about
understanding what the employee needs to be
successful.
Shattering ceilings in the 80s
Allison: I know this might sound cliche, but my mom.
She’s retired now but she was an executive for
around 30 years at a design and wallcovering
company that was involved in some of the biggest
corporate office decorating projects in New York City
during the late 80s and into the early 2000s. She
wore suits with shoulder pads and she rose to the
top, broke through the glass ceiling, VP level, in a
very male dominated industry. She went to building
sites and talked to the construction workers. She
worked with the unions. She worked with truckers
bringing in the materials and she found that she had
a very business focused mind, but she studied art in
college. She’s a very talented artist.
So it came as a surprise to her that she had such a
good head for business. She followed where her
interests led her and really rose to the top of her
chosen field.
The importance of explaining
processes
Peggy: So the idea was they didn’t fail the UX/UI.
We failed in explaining it properly, and that has
stayed with me ever since. I always think about that
when some of my colleagues in the industry get full
of themselves and the jargon, and they forget that
we are human and our mission is to empower,
enable, and listen.
The impact of support during the
formative years
Faith: I remember my parents were the ones that
would show up at every sports event we were at, it
didn’t matter if they had to drive for hours to get
there. I was really big into art when I was in high
school. So they would show up for every reception,
for every juried show that my art would get into. It
was just making it this commonplace notion that
you’re going to grow up to achieve something and
we’re going to support you in that achievement. I
want to say, that was so important in my life that it
really influenced me, because I never had a thought
that I wouldn’t go to college and that I wouldn’t try to
achieve whatever it was my dreams were.
Make sure to course correct as soon as
you find something wrong
Colette: I’m a year and a half in and I think I'm really
good at school, why do I hate this? And it turned out that
what I wanted to be doing was the thing I was doing part
time, which was building my own company. I had a
tutoring business, I had seven tutors working for me.
And that was what I was doing with my free time while I
was in grad school. Sometimes the thing that you do
part time is the thing that you should be doing full time.
So with that in mind, shut down, my tutoring business
moved across the country and came to San Francisco,
and the rest is history.
How negative circumstances can
bring positive changes
Mireia: Then the sudden loss of my mom in a tragic
accident, connected me profoundly to my life into a
journey of self discovery, to understand myself
better, what makes me happy, what troubles me, my
fears, what blocks me, since then, I think that I
became a very resilient person.
Make use of resources available to
improve your skills
Faith: How do you stay on top of your game? I was
expecting some super complicated answer and that
wasn’t what she told me. It’s all out there. You just
need to see it and use it. That sounds really simple,
but it is a moment of clarity where you say yes
again, I am in charge of my own destiny.
17
03 POST IDENTIFIER
STRATEGY

18
The Future of UA:
SKAN, Sandbox,
Data Clean Rooms Sherry Lin
& more Lyft

Nick Blake
LiftOff

Gadi Eliashiv John Koetsier

Singular Forbes

What does Google’s Privacy

Sandbox look like?
Nick: We are going to get privacy, which the industry
as a whole agrees is the right direction, but
advertisers are not going to have to blow everything
up and start again. They are getting ways that they
can measure and we’ll get deeper insights than we
currently have with SKAN.

How Privacy Sandbox differs

from SKAN
Shamanth Rao Gadi: What is the resolution that you can break
down your data in SKAN? You’re limited to 100
Rocketship HQ values on your campaign ID, that’s roughly seven
bits of information. Google is enabling you to use up
Check out the entire episode to 64 bits, which is insane. It’s like 18 quintillion
options, if you think about it now.

19
 Marketers can get more data with the
Privacy Sandbox
Gadi: Obviously doesn’t really mean you’ll get all of
it because they want to use differential privacy. But
you’re definitely not going to get 100, it’s going to be
a lot more than 100. What it really means is that
marketers want to usually have metrics or
dimensions, like campaign and creative and
keyword and have this information available, so
they can slice and dice the data. I’m pretty confident
you will be able to do that with the Google solution.
Whereas with SKAN, it’s very difficult today with
100 values, it’s hard to put that in.
The challenge in preparing and
adapting for Privacy Sandbox
Shamanth: I am fairly certain that Google is going to
privilege its own inventory, its own network. And they
are already doing that. Even though Google doesn’t
own SKAN, they don’t care about SKAN, if you want
to attribute on iOS, you’re going to have to use
Firebase and they will give extra credit to their own
conversions. With a Google owned platform like
Android, that’s going to be way more magnified.
That’s the one thing I’m very concerned about.
Why conversion model management
has been difficult
Nick: One of the limiters of that is the 24 hour timer.
Now, if you want to start optimizing towards
something that’s a bit further down the funnel, you
have to use one or more of those to keep that timer
ticking over. So you need some upper funnel events
to come through to make sure that you can get the
owner to give you something to optimize the further
down the funnel. So on the whole, we’re seeing a
blend across both of those, we’re seeing a mix of
people using those 6 bits, some for the upper funnel
events and some for those down funnel events.
What is a data clean room?
Nick: they’re safe places as they like to be called,
where a lot of the bigger walled gardens are the
sounds like Google and Facebook, they will be able
to share with an advertiser that they both share
customer level data, they bring them together, whilst
they are still able to exert some control over that
data as well. And the advertisers will be able to
match the data that they have with the data from the
platform. And they can see whether the datasets
match up if there are any inconsistencies. Are you
over serving one audience, under serving another.
So as a brand, you would get much needed access
to the data bit in a compliant space, because they
do have features that make sure that the data that
leaves can’t be tied back to individuals, so none of
the data leaves that clean room, or the only data
that leaves the clean room is aggregated, there’s no
PII infringement or anything like that.
How incrementality has worked for
marketers
Sherry: Incrementality is super useful and important
especially for advertisers, again, that have high
mindshare. So if you’re already getting a lot of
organic demand, it’s especially important for you to
separate the results of your ad spend, versus the
people who would have come anyway. Did I order
Starbucks because I saw an ad yesterday, or would I
have ordered it today anyway, without seeing the ad?
So incrementality has always been super, super
important for us.

Have targeting or creative strategies

changed post ATT?
Sherry: On the retargeting side, it’s been really
rough. Half of our audience can’t be retargeted
because per ATT, we can’t be sharing any of these
identifiers, not even server side ones like email
addresses and phone numbers unless we get user
consent. So our retargeting program has taken a
really big hit.

20
 It’s important to prioritize with
incrementality
Nick: It goes like this, in product management
you’ve got good, cheap and quick, you can have two
of those, but you can’t have all three. So you have to
decide which two you want. And that is the thing with
incrementality.

Media mix modeling using a basic

spreadsheet
Shamanth: We’ve certainly done different types of
media mix modeling, including a basic spreadsheet
based model. It’s not going to be as sophisticated
as what Coke or Nike would do. But we get an R
squared which I think is great for two hours of work
on a spreadsheet. In fact, we actually put a
YouTube video about exactly how we did it.
We also used Facebook’s Robyn, which is
considerably more accurate. It was, again,
surprisingly easy for us, compared to what we
expected at least. Again, this was not perfect, it
certainly requires a critical mass of data to be
effective. I think it’s just a huge improvement over
just using SKAN. So I would just encourage people
to try both. Robyn is easier than you think and for
the spreadsheet, you don’t need anything
specialized.

A hybrid version of media mix

modeling could work better
Gadi: Some companies are claiming they could do
real time results to an extremely granular level. And
it just doesn’t fit with how media mix modeling
works. Somebody mentioned Nike as an example
that uses very advanced, complicated media mix
modeling. It’s also very service heavy, right? So I
think there needs to be a hybrid, somewhat SAAS or
Excel or something that is easy to do. I don’t know if
you can expect it to give you real time data and
maybe other folks have cracked it.

21
 How Facebook got into the MMM
business
A walkthrough of There’s a lot of room for interpretation with MMM.
You can basically hack your way to whatever result
that you want and they’re all hired by traditional
Google’s brand marketers who are very keen on hearing the
message that TV ads are working. They don’t really
LightweightMMM care that much about digital. So I think that
Facebook saw and asked them this specifically.
From my take on the market, Facebook saw this and
said, “Hey, if we know that Facebook Ads work, and
even post iOS 14, we know that they’ll continue to
work, how do we get people to understand that?
And how do we make sure that we take the bias out
of doing the MMM process?”

The difference between an Excel

model & Robyn
So if you put a variable into an Excel model, or into
a normal MMM model, and that model isn’t
statistically significant, normally, the analyst would
then choose whether to leave it in or remove it or
change it in some way. With Robyn, it just
automatically shrinks to zero in terms of effect. So if
you have a channel that’s not statistically significant,
at least if everything’s kind of working, okay, then it
will remove it from the model automatically for you.

The difference between a Bayesian

model and Robyn
The reason why Facebook with Robyn is building
10,000 models, it’s because it’s trying to find the
right models out of the 1000s and 1000s of models
that are wrong. A Bayesian does that in a different
way. It simulates the physics of a ball rolling down a
hill. So imagine you have a chart and you have a
correlation then you have a line chart and two
variables are correlated. That’d be like the simplest
model, when it finds the edge of the line, it will roll
balls down the hill, to find where the line is drawn.

There’s more information available

Michael Taylor
Co-Founder, Vexpower
Check out the entire episode
with Bayesian models
If you’ve heard Bayesian, you’ve heard someone talk
about priors. A really simple example is whenever I
run a marketing mix model in Excel, quite often it will
say, Facebook ads drove negative revenue and the
coefficient will be negative. Then you think, that’s not
possible, my campaign wasn’t that bad that it
decreased sales. With Bayesian, you can say, I know
that this campaign didn’t decrease sales, but I also
know that it probably didn’t drive 100% of my sales.
So I know that it’s somewhere in between.

22

SKAdNetwork 4.0:
when is it gonna
drop?
Roman Garbar
Marketing Director at Tenjin
Check out the entire episode
The future of fingerprinting
You can also make a broader assumption from this
that fingerprinting is not going to be clamped down
on this year. My reason for this is that web-to-app is
the most important missing piece of the
SKAdNetwork puzzle. Until it is rolled out, Apple can
definitely claim to have created a comprehensive
toolkit for advertisers.
SKAdNetwork 4.0 may not be
connected to iOS 16
Many people associate the SKAdNetwork 4.0
release with iOS 16. However, Apple has never
specified the two are connected, only that
SKAdNetwork 4 would be released this year. It could
coincide with iOS 16.1 or 16.3, just like the ATT was
rolled out on iOS 14.5. Once it is released, it won’t
cover all the iOS base. Just like how SKAdNetwork
3.0 was only available for iOS 14.6 users or Apple
prospects for developers available only for iOS 15
users.
23
Media Mix
Modeling:
Completing the Igor Skokan
UA Performance Meta

Picture
John Koetsier
Forbes

Liz Emery Eran Friedman

Tinuiti Singular

A classic way to do incrementality

testing
Eran: A classic way to do incrementality testing is
you run an A/B test against an audience when one
group sees an ad and another one doesn’t see an
ad and basically tries to wrestle through whether the
user should sign that we actually increment that to
get better results.

The mess post ATT

Shamanth: We really were prompted to move to

Shamanth Rao MMM just because post-ATT, everything’s such a
Rocketship HQ huge mess. We talked in one of the earlier
conversations about how we were seeing CPAs, like
Check out the entire episode 1000+, 500+, and it’s just not meaningful. That’s
what prompted us.

24
 Who is MMM really for?
Liz: If you’re a large company, you can invest in this
in different ways, you can customize it in very
detailed ways when you’re putting together MMMs
but when you’re a smaller company, you can start
small and still grow it.

The challenge of MMM and

Incrementality for smaller teams
Liz: I think the hardest thing for smaller teams is the
data requirements. It’s not having the data, but is
that data available? Is that data clean in a way that
you can use it? Because MMM is not what we like to
call a push-button solution. As much as we would
love it to be a push-button solution. There’s a lot of
manual work that goes into it.

Increasing interest in adoption of MMM

Shamanth: Most of us mobile marketers grew up

with the D7 ROAS and act based on deterministic
attribution. That’s been around for a decade. That’s
what the reporting has always featured. Now if
you’re like, we’re going to look at the share of
budgets, or we’re going to run five different models,
it’s not even like speaking that same language. Also,
it just requires a different skill set.

Real world examples of MMM

Shamanth: For something like Google, where you’re

just basically trusting Google-reported numbers on
iOS, numbers look wildly optimistic and numbers
look crazy because of Firebase, they’re the referee
and the player. Obviously, numbers look very, very
good.
It turned out, we were spending way more than we
should have been. When we did cut the budget, we
just saw no change in the overall trials baseline. We
just cut the budget by 66% because the analysis
said Google wasn’t driving anything incremental.
Nothing moved and that was just a huge win.

25

SKAN: a playbook
for today and the
future
Piyush Mishra
Head, Growth Marketing
Product Madness
Check out the entire episode
The humble beginnings of SKAN
If I remember correctly, SKAN 1.0 started with iOS
13 back in 2018 or 2019. It’s true that when it came
out nobody actually paid attention. For most of the
marketers it was just there, they knew they were
getting an install postback. There were no
post-install attributes to it at that point in time.
Delving into predictions
One way is where you maximize enough information
from the conversion value schema and run a
prediction on the basis of conversion values. The
other way is doing predictions in the conversion
value schema itself.
How to overcome non-revenue events
Non-revenue events are not great predictors, but
that’s where we have to be smart. Maybe we can
have a mix of events – for example, somebody
reaching the lobby, viewing an ad, and doing a
hundred spins, all three combinations together. Then
you set that as a conversion value schema and see
if it can become a better predictor of the likelihood of
a purchase.
Comparing performance between
channels
You’re trying to compare two different attribution
solutions in a certain sense. One is the MMPs’
solution and the other is Apple’s solution. From the
data that we’re receiving, like re-download and other
stuff, Apple’s solution is technically based on Apple ID.
And probabilistic is based on, as you said, the signals
that you receive and it’s by nature probabilistic, as the
word goes. It wouldn’t be fair to compare the two,
because both have their own pros and cons. For
instance, the kind of post-install data that the MMP
solution or the probabilistic solution gives you is much
higher than what Apple gives.
Making use of SKAN to benefit from it
Some of the advertisers in my own network have
figured it out. For example, one of them is using
conversion value schema purely to extract install
date. Some others are using it to do prediction within
the first 24 hours. A few of them actually extended
the conversion window to 48 and 72 hours
26

Working from what we don’t want
We’ll have to take a call on what kind of users we
don’t want any information on. For example, if I
want to extend my conversion window to 48 hours,
am I happy with just having information about you
opening the app on day two or day three?
Data reaches us from two sources
You have to keep in mind that you have two different
sources providing the same data. One is for users
on iOS 15 and above coming directly to advertisers
or to MMPs, and the other is going to the ad
network, then coming to the MMPs and then to us.
So it’s similar data, but it’s a little hidden and
somewhat controlled by the individual networks.

The disadvantage of direct postbacks Data that’s available through the

The second problem with receiving the direct
postback is that we don’t have the matching key. We
do receive the raw report campaign ID and ad
network ID, but we don’t have the key to match it to
an ad network name or an ad campaign name,
because that exists only with the networks.
What’s included in the postback?
different versions of SKAN
You have users who are converting through 2.0
where you’re getting only click-through conversion.
Then there’s inventory on 2.2, where you’re getting
view-through and click-through conversion and then
SKAN 3.0, where you’re getting multiple data points
on the last bid and who won and who didn’t and who
was the assistant installer and so on. On top of that,
you’re getting direct postback for iOS 15.

Facebook and Google are not sending re-download What SANS maybe doing under
percentage in the postback we receive directly. But the hood
since we are getting it directly, we can still have a
directional metric stating that re-download Let’s say they’re creating multiple campaign IDs on
percentage on Google is around 20% or something Facebook, which is true we know. But how would you
like that. associate it back? I don’t know which campaign ID
stands for which campaign, even within their own
Google was also converting all blank conversion
words. So you can’t extract unless you have the key
values due to privacy threshold to zero, because
and that’s the limitation.
these were at least installs. But now we will know
the ROAS percentage in Google, where we know
what percent of the ROAS have null conversion
value because of the privacy threshold. So it has a
lot more information especially on SRNs, and that’s
a welcome change.

Postbacks are better off with

advertisers than ad networks
If the postbacks were going to ad networks, they’ll
definitely know that the last updated conversion
value can be fudged and changed to something that
they need to optimize towards and they can play
with it. But with iOS 15, we have the control as
advertisers and that’s a very good change.

27
 The stark differences between
estimated and actual CPIs
How to run a soft I would say the estimated CPIs we had were maybe
25% of what the actual CPI was. Even when you’re
looking at getting those initial installs just to look at
launch in a retention, not necessarily specifically getting into
high value revenue sources.
post-ATT world
What led to the discovery that Android
was becoming more expensive to test in?
So there was a spike in Android spending. The other
thing we discovered was Android was becoming
more expensive than iOS. We had an RPG game
and we thought that we would do really well in the
Android market versus iOS, because that’s the
rational thought process around RPG, given their
demographic.

What product teams had to re-assess

post initial results.
How are we going to view the game and the target
audience considering that the value of the player
doesn’t necessarily go up?Just because CPIs
increase doesn’t mean that the player value
increases.
So I think they had to go back then and look at their
game and look at what sort of core loops did they
have in their game, how are they monetizing and
taking into account their LTV curves and say was
their initial planning for LTV curves and
demographics going to work in this new
marketplace?

Approaching measurement with all the

realities of ATT
One was for iOS to limit the partners, maybe more
than we would have in the past. Measurements
have been a bit disrupted and so the fewer partners
that you have, the more confidence you’re going to
have in that information. We had conversations with
a lot of partners who were very interested in working
Faith Price with us to soft launch the game. We had to let them
Head of Paid UA know that we really were being very, very
conservative about how we choose which limited
DoubleDown Interactive partners we wanted to deal with in order to make
sure we can get the leading indicators on the game.

Check out the entire episode

28
 How are custom conversion values What did the conversations look like
important with the soft launch results post ATT
The reason we go with custom conversion values is
I think the biggest impact out of that was really
we need to look at more than one indicator in a
talking about what does your LTV curve look like?
game. In part because IAPs are a lot less frequent
Our conversation with them too was, what does that
than almost anything else in a game. So you can’t
do? These CPIs, what does that do to our Dx ROAS
just go with a revenue event. Obviously, the best
goals? What we’ve seen, unfortunately, is there’s
indicator of whether somebody’s going to purchase
more pressure on the front end to get higher D7
is if they purchase, but those purchases are a very
ROAS than there might have been a year or two
small percentage. And when you’re looking at
ago. So we’ve had to say “Okay, well, if this is the
SKAN, where you’re already getting that
marketing cost, here’s what we really need to fit this
percentage of actual data and not the full actual
LTV model,” and trying to temper it and say, “Okay,
data, it sort of compounds.
well, realistically, this is the type of traffic and this is
Let’s say we have the lowest level of conversion the type of performance we can drive.”
value, it might be somebody who comes in on day
one, and completes a level. Then the next one
might be they come back on day two and complete Preparing for a better soft launch
a level or maybe they complete five levels. So that’s with existing data
going to be a higher conversion value than
somebody who only completes one level. We’ve also talked about things like shorten testing
cycles, instead of doing a fully developed game, is
Then you start layering the things – maybe they do
there a new style we can bring out where we can do
tutorials or unlock mini games and then eventually
a smaller version of the game and make sure that
you see that they’ve done these things. So that can
there’s interest around it so that we can cut down
really tell our partners around the conversions that
the marketing costs of soft launch by not doing full
you’re looking for anything higher than x.
blown launches?
With games, we have no data in terms of whether or
not the user likes the theme and the mechanic and
Tracking conversion values for social the core loops. Looking forward, now that we have
channels all this information, how do we do better for the next
We have to look at what we started doing by making soft launch? How does the development side and
sure we have a weekly look back, maybe for the last the design studio make a better testing process for
four weeks and letting that data mature instead of the games?
saying “we’ll really focus on what’s going on this
week.” How did it get better, two weeks ago and
three weeks ago?
We also look at blended ROAS now. How is the
product as a whole doing and if as a whole it’s doing
okay, and I think this is easier because we have a
product that’s 10 years old as well as one that’s
three months old, to try to balance those out.

Measurement techniques that were

tested and approved
We have evaluated that with some of our partners
and said to them, we’re willing to try probabilistic or
deterministic with you, but you have to have a
backup plan for SKAN. You have to be using this
data, we don’t want to have essentially all of our
eggs in one type of attribution basket. And if
something shakes up the industry again, you have
to have a plan B that you’ve been working on that
you’re ready to roll out.

29
04 STRATEGY

30

From B2C to zero
to B2B (including
a Real Housewives
detour)
Matt Bailey
Founder & CEO, GameOn
Check out the entire episode
The fallout of COVID on a game
tech startup
COVID hit and there were no sports! We kind of fell
off the edge of the universe there. Our monthly
active users went down to almost zero, and the little
revenue we were generating also went to zero. We
didn’t have much money in the bank. I hadn’t paid
myself personally for a year, and was living off credit
cards at that time. We needed to generate revenue
quickly, both for the company and for the wellbeing
of myself running a company with little money in the
bank.
Prediction games – bringing out the
superfan in people
Before the sport, the episode or the event, fans
make predictions on what they think will happen.
Then during the event, they go up and down the
leaderboard, making certain achievements. If they
make it to the top of the leaderboard, they’re
winning not only rewards, but recognition and
status.
The Real Housewives fans want to be the most
knowledgeable Real Housewives fan. Or think
about The Bachelor. Bachelor Nation is just as
crazy as NFL fans, and every fan wants to be the
best. So it’s not just about winning monetary
awards. It’s about the status and recognition that
you get in front of a community that you care about.
How a founder’s role changes when
the company goes public
The public nature of the business and the financial
reporting and auditing also take up a lot of my time.
I’m not in the wheels of the business anymore. I’m
spending most of my time on the corporate side of it.
And although that’s hard to do sometimes as a
founder, at the same time, I’m learning so much that
I wasn’t before.
31
 Using community to build your brand

Growth strategies What’s unique about blockchain gaming, especially

with community taking the lead, is that you can
really take the last two revolutions in gaming and
for Web3 games: combine them to create an actual three-pronged
marketing approach. Of course, the steps are a little
different, but at the end of the day, it comes down to
Community is building a community and allowing that community
to define the brand you’re trying to build along with
only one piece of you, versus you defining it for them and then them
being your brand’s ambassadors.

the puzzle In blockchain gaming, they really are pieces of the

creation of that brand, and so they’re true
ambassadors. They help you acquire more users
into that community at a cheaper cost.

How blockchain gaming helps the

gamer earn by playing the game
With blockchain gaming, specifically with play and
earn mechanics, the value I get now as a gamer is
that the more time I spend in the game, I receive
some sort of financial incentive to stay in the game.
And in this medium, it’s NFTs or non-fungible tokens.
So the more time you spend, the more valuable you
are to that game, and the more value you accrue as
a member of that community. Whereas in F2P
gaming, if you were a valuable user to the game, all
of the value that was being accrued was for the
game developer.
With this paradigm shift, you as a user have the
ability to gain financially from your time being spent
in the game. That’s what we mean when we talk
about open economies and blockchain gaming.

What blockchain gaming can learn

from free-to-play games
I think you’ll definitely have to take a lot of what was
learned in F2P and move it over here. Look at the way
that analysis is done. You know this well – you’ve run
really large mobile UA teams, built a successful
agency on the UA side. So you know that the
Atif Khan modeling and the analytics side is so important to
success in gaming, where you understand the
COO, Stardust
audiences at a demographic level, geographic level,
and even from a user behavior level.
Check out the entire episode A lot of those analytics need to come to blockchain
gaming. When we talk to developers, they either don’t
have the DNA or haven’t thought of this. But it will be
extremely important to make that shift.

32
 Using NFTs to drive pre-registrations
for a still-to-be-released game
Most of these NFT drops are only like 10,000
people. But they were able to drive hundreds of
thousands of pre-registrations, because even if
people didn’t get that NFT — which the community
had been building up and they soared in value —
they still thought, “Hey, this game is amazing. Even
if I didn’t get that NFT, I still want to be a part of this
when it comes out. I want to register.”

Blockchain gaming encourages game

dev companies to work together
Take that sword example, and think of what that
sword is worth in Game A, and how that translates
to Game B. Do you trade that sword for an item in
the other game right away and make it valuable in
terms of intrinsic value? How do you do that? And
because these values are not static like they were in
F2P mobile, what would happen if I took Sword A in
Game A to, say, GoldenEye? Does the sword have
value? Does it have functionality?
I think as you see more games come out and be
successful, game developers will be forced to start
working together to figure some of these things out
and this is actually super exciting.
One of the things that I’ve noticed going from web
2.0 to Web3 or a F2P to blockchain gaming, is that
the F2P model was very adversarial. Gaming
companies were not playing nice. They were not
sharing things. They didn’t want people to know
each other. To a certain extent, if you look at F2P
mobile – innovation is stunted because there
probably wasn’t enough knowledge sharing or
openness about what needs to get done.

How LTV will work for Web3 games

I think from an LTV perspective, the shift will be

towards retention. At the end of the day, this is a
community-based open economy, and you want to
drive the most engaged users to stay in the game
longer, because that’s what will make them stronger
parts of the community. That, in turn, increases the
value of those NFTs and tokens. So retention is
going to be the most important factor. And the way
to retain people in this new paradigm will be around
providing them value from a community perspective.
Which means – how do you make sure that you are
innovating to keep them in the games?

33
 Exploiting opportunities provided by
Facebook
The rise, decline But at the end of the day, a lot of what we were
doing was exploiting opportunities that Facebook
presented to us. I don’t think anyone involved with
and settling-down the company would be ashamed of that or think it
was the greatest achievement of their career. For
of daily deals instance, Facebook lets you send push notifications
under these circumstances to your friends. How can
we get the average user to send more push
notifications? Facebook lets you send invites to your
friends to apps, how can we get more invites?
Facebook lets you do a contact import of emails and
then send out emails everybody, how do we do that?
It was constantly cat and mouse.
That’s why depending on Facebook for growth was
so unsustainable.
But we were always trying to take advantage of
these opportunities and always seeing them choked
off by Facebook because they were always getting
abused by somebody. It was honestly, somewhat
gimmicky at times, and really speaks to the longevity
being unclear. You’re predicating a lot or basing a lot
of your growth on these tricks essentially. So you’re
always at risk. A lot of companies that were in that
space are either dead today, or they pivoted out into
something that they thought was more sustainable.

How LivingSocial was different from

Adam Lovallo
Founder, Thesis; Co-founder, Grow.co
an online business
It was bizarre. The business was very human. You
have a sales part, you have customer service. It’s
not like you’re an e-commerce business where you
make a product and you sell it, you’re selling all of
these small businesses. So if any of the small
businesses have problems, those problems come
back to you, because you’re the merchant.
The focus on human capital versus a product like
tumblr with 10 employees and worth a billion dollars
and have a zillion users, to build a business like
Groupon or LivingSocial, you needed a ton of
people, not just in sales, but in account
management and operations, and even on the back
end, like developers and stuff.

Check out the entire episode

34
 The many roles that Adam covered at
LivingSocial
So we wanted to drive email capture. It’s a daily
email model. What’s the best way to do that?
Facebook ads. It’s still probably the case today. I
started running them. We started spending 50 to
100k a day plus, uploading ads during class.
Not that many people were even at that scale at
that time. Zynga is another company that was there
at scale, but there weren’t that many large scale
advertisers really. My big focus was primarily on
Facebook and some search and I worked on that
for some time. We hired a great guy to lead that
team. At some point along the way, I got pulled into
other areas of the business just to help out. I helped
scale our sales recruiting effort for 6 to 12 months,
hiring recruiters, instituting a process through which
we would screen applicants. Eventually, I came
back to growth.
Why they wanted to scale quickly
You’re going after obvious markets and our strategy
was pretty uniform. We would buy traffic in that
locality, we’d have customized landing pages,
nothing fancy just, “hey, sign up for daily deals in
Raleigh”, we’d get 10,000 20,000 people on a
waitlist. And then we’d start the sales process going
in parallel, and we would just start emailing them.
So we tried to scale very, very quickly, because we
were trying to catch up to Groupon.
How was the market for companies
doing daily deals?
it was evident that this model could not support 10
competitors doing daily deals in Pittsburgh, that was
never going to be viable.
You had traditional players, newspapers,
magazines, etc. who were trying to get in the game
too. At the time, we thought maybe they’ve got
leverage. Ultimately, none of those worked. But, we
were trying to outlive a zillion other guys that were
in the space.
We did, but to do so we got really aggressive in
terms of growth and investment. Obviously, there
were a lot of inefficiencies that came with that. But
even though the ultimate outcome for the business
wasn’t what I think everybody had hoped for, you
still point to it and say, Well, but how many of those
other companies even exist other than Groupon
and LivingSocial - none. So that’s telling that at
least part of the strategy wasn’t wrong.
Why too many competitors won’t work
for this model
Well, fundamentally, it’s a group buying model. So
you’ve got a sales team, you’re calling merchants,
and at the end of the day, the point is that you’re
driving customers to the merchants. So if Groupon
drives 100 people and LivingSocial drives 50 people
and then everybody else drives a few people, it’s not
going to work.
Perception matters in a local business
A lot of our ability to monetize this user base came
down to the ability of the sales team to basically sell
the user base to merchants. So that variability was a
big challenge. In some of our more successful
markets, we had really great sales teams, and in
some of our less successful markets, maybe less
competitive sales teams, less quality deals, and it
cycles and you get a reputation within the market that
LivingSocial is not that good in Calgary but it’s
actually really great in Dallas. If you’ve already
created that perception in Calgary, nobody cares
about anything else. That’s all that matters. It’s a local
business.
Managing different metrics across
different towns
Facebook users have a predicted one year value of X
and we’re acquiring for Y that is within or outside of
our payback period targets. I don’t think we could
afford to, or at least weren’t smart enough to think like,
actually, it’s Facebook users in Buffalo versus
Facebook users in Albany, or Facebook users in
Buffalo, who are men, or the ones of a certain age, the
number of permutations would it be manageable? It
was a relatively straightforward approach once the
business got to that scale. Obviously, when we weren’t
at that scale, we were running things more locally. But
you know, at our peak, we did stuff which probably in
hindsight, didn’t really make a ton of sense but we did
anyway: like, we ran a Superbowl ad.
Expanding into different markets
We took an approach where in most markets, we
acquired an existing company. They had a built-in
team in a couple markets, and we launched
organically. The goal was to create a separate team
in the market. But a lot of the services were shared,
the core technology, the tools, budgets were also
shared. I worked closely with my colleague in the UK
and guys in Southeast Asia, to try to share best
practices and try to support them, to the extent they
were reliant on what we were creating in the US, like
from a technology standpoint. That’s how it worked.
35
 Using predictive modeling to calculate
the payback period
We used predictive models. Say we acquired
100,000 emails yesterday, as a practical example,
we’re going to observe their behavior for seven
days, see how many of those people are
purchasing, then based on our historical data, we’re
going to extrapolate out for that cohort of people.
How many of them are going to be purchasing
within a year’s time - that gives us a one year value,
maybe even a two year value, or even a lifetime
value. We’re going to do a payback period
calculation off of that. We’re always doing these
predictive analytics that allow us to make decisions
more quickly than having to wait a year to see how
something went. But periodically, usually on a
quarterly basis, or maybe bi annually, we would
back test our predictive models. So our predictive
model a year ago said, this cohort of people should
be worth $10, on average, today, let’s see what
they’re actually worth. So we’re back testing the
model. And every time we back tested the model,
our predictions were high.
So that basically means that we were using
historical data, always overstating how people were
purchasing, obviously, we would keep adjusting the
models down. But that was pretty telling to me in
the user acquisition role.
I was like, this is a problem. The whole point of the
payback period is the part where it pays back. If you
take this to the logical extreme, these payback
periods are infinite, we’re never going to have
payback. So that was a warning sign to me for sure
at a personal level. As I think back, that should have
been a bigger red flag to me. I wish I had made
every executive get in a room and be like, let me
show you these graphs. We’ve got to do something.
Anecdotally, this is the second thing that I started to
notice, I felt like the quality of the deals was going
down. That I think speaks to some of the challenges
in the model, like merchant retention.
When things started slowing down
You’ve got a different product, you’re playing into
this nationwide trend. So if you think about things in
a blended basis, we spent a million dollars in
advertising, but we signed up 5 million users. That’s
amazing. And if you say, well, the million dollars of
advertising must be directly related to the 5 million
users, but then a year or two later, you’re like, “Oh,
we spent a million dollars on advertising, we got a
million users.”
Because we’re not on Good Morning America every
day, or because everybody’s heard of LivingSocial
that’s a very different dynamic. And your ability, the
whole payback period, math looks very different.
That was a less fun time, I can assure you.
Problem solving becomes challenging
when the company grows fast
The company went from four founders to 5000
employees in the span of three or four years. It’s
difficult, even in a perfect scenario, in an amazing
business model to get that perfectly right, you know,
see Uber. But why, especially when you have a
really fundamental challenge, like it was very difficult
to solve. And I think in hindsight you could have
gone about it in a different way. Maybe a better
business would have been just focusing on the
verticals where the economics were the most
favorable for the merchants. And I remember, we
had these conversations, hey, spa and beauty
accounts for 40% of our revenue. And the spa and
beauty merchants retain a lot better. They have high
fixed costs, low variable costs, and they have more
built-in retention.
We had conversations like, Oh, hey, maybe this
should be a spa and beauty deals, business and
spa.” And beauty is a huge category. In hindsight,
that might have been the right call, but, we’re trying
to be huge. And so you got to go for it if you’re trying
to be huge. That was the thesis.
The idea behind Grow.co
My main thesis around the conference business was,
I felt like there was a new part of the marketing
industry that was self identifying as growth, like this
podcast. You didn’t see people with growth titles five
years ago, then you started to see it, and what does
that mean? I think it means just a more cross
functional marketer, more understanding of the
technologies, more understanding of design, more
understanding of product in particular, in addition to
marketing and branding. So I thought, there’s people
who are self-selecting into this new job title. There
probably should be an in person community around
these types of people. And that was our motivator,
we’ve ultimately ended up focusing primarily on two
spaces, mobile app space, and just e-commerce.
36
 On having been picked to present to
Barack Obama
Ascent of a I honestly didn’t think that President Obama was
going to be there. I thought that we were just going
to be presenting to people from the White House. I
language learning thought it was a cool thing anyway, because I hadn’t
really been to the White House outside of the little
phenomenon tour that you do when you’re a kid. So it was a big
surprise for me.
The other funny thing is that they put us in the little
room all the way in the back. I remember I turned to
our CEO and co-founder Luis and I said, “Oh, we’re
in the losers room”.
But actually there were about five startups that they
had selected, to present to the President in person.
We were one of them and it was a huge surprise to
learn that because they didn’t actually tell us about
what was happening until about 10 minutes before
he entered.
They were being really finicky about the angle of our
poster and if our pitch was good enough, I just
thought they were being super annoying but then I
later understood why they were being so meticulous
and I’m glad that they were.

The beginning of Gina’s career

I went to my career counselor and I remember that
she looked at my resume and said, “What have you
done with your whole life?”
It was so sad because I was a super nerd and
overachiever. I cried.
I just couldn’t believe that nothing that I had done
seemed to be worth anything to her.
So I went, and I decided to work at a neuroscience lab
for a year because I was interested in neuroscience. I
thought that maybe that would give me a more
serious angle to things and it would sound really
impressive. I co-authored a study, but I didn’t want to
work underground for the rest of my life. So I knew
that that wasn’t for me.
At that point, I applied to 100 different jobs when I
Gina Gotthilf graduated. I didn’t hear back from almost any of them.
Co-Founder at Latitud, ex-Duolingo,
ex-Tumblr

Check out the entire episode

37
 Moving to Duolingo fulltime
They asked me to take over growth. This was not an
official thing to Duolingo yet. They had a product
team that was doing AB testing. That’s when my
team came in. We looked at all of the sub metrics
that were never really paid all that much attention to.
We wanted to try and optimize, not just grow the day
1 metrics but also the day 14 and day 30.
The plan was to look at referral, our activation, take
a closer look at emails and notifications and take the
company to the next level.
The inspiration behind joining Duolingo
I’m not American and I would never have gotten all
the opportunities that I had, had I not learned English
at a very young age. Learning a second language
like English in developing countries can double or
triple your income potential.
I felt like I was in the top tiny percentage of people in
Brazil, who would ever get the chance to do that, just
because I came from a good family. I believe that by
investing in that I could help change millions of lives
Using the right hooks to get journalists
interested
I thought to email them and tell them that I’m in touch
with this amazing guy who created the captcha and
did all this stuff. I felt like Luis at the time was kind of
trying to hide it because he didn’t want to talk about
the captcha anymore. He was so over it. It had been
like 10 years already.
I knew that the nerds and tech would totally geek out
on the fact that they could meet the guy who had
invented that. I worked with them with a team to
figure out how to position the mission, how to
position what he was doing and it wasn’t too hard
because I was sold on it. I really believed it. I
reached out to all these different journalists and I
helped Luis. I set up a lot of speaking opportunities
for Luis in Brazil.
The decision to stay away from paid
marketing initially
We had agreed not to do paid marketing from the very
beginning, because we were not profitable. We didn’t
have revenue and venture backing. We didn’t want to
start paying for users until we knew that our retention
was where we wanted it to be. We knew that we had
an LTV for our users, which is finally the case now. So
we started doing paid acquisition quite recently, but
we were doing other things other than PR.
Why too many competitors won’t
work for this model
Well, fundamentally, it’s a group buying model. So
you’ve got a sales team, you’re calling merchants
and at the end of the day, the point is that you’re
driving customers to the merchants. So if Groupon
drives 100 people and LivingSocial drives 50 people
and then everybody else drives a few people, it’s not
going to work.
Getting blocked by the government
in China
When we launched, we got a million downloads on
the first day, which was huge. Then our app got
blocked by the government. There was nothing I
could do about it.
I had been in touch with Apple, and they asked -
What is wrong with your app? I assured them it was
not on our end, but they wouldn’t really believe us.
Then all the people who had downloaded the app
started rating it one star because the app didn’t work.
So it was frustrating, after all that work to see that
happen and not be able to do anything about it.
An experiment that worked out well
I remember the day our engineer decided to add a
badge to our Android app, a little badge that says that
there is something new on the app, and you have to
click little red dots to find out what it is. He wanted to
do that.
I thought it seemed kind of spammy but I told him to
try it. He just went back to his desk and did it anyway.
It was 10 minutes of running seven lines of code, and
that was one of our most impactful experiments ever.
It was really a lot of experimentation and reading and
trying things out and thinking about, what are the
most impactful places that we can touch? What are
the highest ROI things that we can work on?
Recognizing experiments that failed
I remember when we decided to redesign the
newsletter. Anything that involves design was so
much work. I think on one hand, it’s because I
couldn’t do it myself. I can write copy, but I can’t
design. I need to rely on other people. The design
standards are extremely high. In order to get
something approved, it takes a very long time. We did
all this work, and then it had zero impact on anything.
38
 An experiment that may have impacted
many other experiments
Our biggest failures were when we ran
experiments, and they either worked or didn’t work.
Then later we realized that we weren’t tracking
metrics properly. That to me, is the most frustrating
thing for the whole team.
For example, for six months we were working on
sign-up/ sign-in things in terms of optimizations and
then we realized that when someone who already
had an account but forgot that they had an account
created a new account, the system wasn’t linking
accounts. So they were creating new accounts that
weren’t really new accounts, and this was inflating
our number of new users and potential. We realized
that we didn’t know how to fix this. We also did not
know how many experiments this affected.
The intention behind gamifying
Duolingo
Duolingo was originally launched with the intent of
being a game. It was baked into the product from
the very start before I was at Duolingo. The idea
behind that is that learning a language is very hard,
because it takes a very long time. It’s not the kind of
skill that you can dedicate a weekend to and then be
done. I studied Chinese for three years, and I still
barely get by. So you really need to dedicate years
of your life to this.
Also binge studying one day a week doesn’t work,
you need to do it very regularly. Add that with the
fact that now we’re telling people, “Hey, you can do
this by yourself. No teachers are gonna be making
you do it. Your parents are not gonna be angry. If
you don’t do it. You’re not paying money, so you’re
not gonna feel guilty.”
It also competes with your Facebook time
How gamification helped Duolingo get
to where it is today
People say, “yes, I want to take Harvard classes.”
Then the retention is really low because it’s so hard
to convince yourself to keep coming back. To
complete a course that you don’t lose anything if you
don’t complete.
The thought process was well, but people do spend
all their extra time playing games like Candy Crush,
Clash Royale when they’re in line or when they’re
waiting for a meeting with their lunch. That’s what
they’re doing with their time.
What can we do to make that be Duolingo? From
the very beginning, it was designed to be like a
game, but it really took all these years and I think it’s
still a process to improve, because gamification isn’t
just something that you throw onto a product. It’s
adding layers and layers of things that make it more
fun, like the points system and how you can pass
your friends, and you can unlock things.
Now there’s a mascot and you can earn points and
you can earn digital currency. Now you can buy
things with digital currency, and you can get badges.
Going international with localized
features
Our answer, I think, is very controversial here. Yes, I
agree that people have very different expectations of
what an app should look like & feel like. We chose to
ignore almost all of that. And so what we did is we
localized, obviously.
So when we launched the app in a new country, we
would basically just make it available in the
language of that country. Then we would launch an
English course, for example, for speakers of that
language.
Challenges faced in international
markets like India
So when you buy your phone, it’s in English. It's just
how it is. Typing in Hindi is supposedly very difficult.
So a lot of people get these phones, and they’re in
English, they don’t actually speak English. They just
kind of learn how to use a phone.
What happens is Duolingo notices what your UI
language is and it adapts to that. So people were now
seeing Duolingo in English and they didn’t see the
option to learn English, because from English, we
don’t teach English, we would teach French or
German. Our English from Hindi was never seen by
anyone in India, we had to change the flow there
specifically to match that.
39
 The early days of using analytics in
advertising
A brief history of The company I was working at, Digital Chocolate,
actually had a really robust analytics system and it
also had a pretty sophisticated approach towards
mobile user live ops and running analytics for these free to play
games that were new in Western markets. But the
acquisition marketing team had basically no insight into how to
spend money. So they would launch games and
then just buy Facebook ads against them without
knowing whether those cohorts of users would be
profitable or not.

The birth of Mobile Dev Memo

I left a pretty big company to a moderately sized
company to a very, very small company. I could wither
and die. I’m in Helsinki, Finland, no one knows who I
am. I’m two years out of grad school. If this startup
doesn’t work, my career could be terminated. I didn’t
have any money. I was a $1,500 flight away from any
family and support network. So in my mind, there was
a possibility that if things go wrong here, I could be
trapped. So I said, I’m going to start writing a blog as
a plan B, or like a parachute.

The difference between SEO & ASO

There’s no real SEO on mobile because there’s no
real PageRank. So there’s nobody that’s crawling all
of mobile content and allowing for some kind of intent
to be accommodated for in search. There’s search in
the App Stores and on Google Play. But that doesn’t
link into content that’s been evaluated for relevancy
for those keywords.

ASO is not just keyword stuffing

That’s not true search capability that doesn’t
necessarily capture intent, unless the intent is very
easily interpreted through just like a superficial search
term. All that does is match specific keywords in a
limited keyword space to a search term. So without
that ability, discoverability is basically 100% reliant on
ads. And that’s not true on the desktop.

Eric Seufert
Founder, Heracles Media and Mobile
Dev Memo
Check out the entire episode
How a policy change killed an app
The CEO was on a long flight to the US. And so
everything was fine. He gets on a plane, and he
lands. He’s getting a million text messages, annoying
emails – AppGratis shut down because Apple had
killed the app. And so his company was just done at
that point.

40
 How bot installs worked in the past
You’d buy all these bot installs, and it would drive
you to number one top download, and then you get
a bunch of free installs. And that doesn’t work at all
anymore. You can still buy installs, but the benefit is
pretty muted now of getting to top position. You
could do that as a one off, but how do you
productize that and make it systematic? How do you
build it? How do you build a business around that?
Why solo developers find it difficult to
survive in the market
It’s that things in Silicon Valley are so expensive, that
the only way to hire people and build teams and build
products is to be one of these big established
companies with a ton of money in the bank, or equity
that’s actually worth something. Otherwise, you just
have to be so charismatic that you’re able to build a
cult of personality and you can hire people on the
basis of your interpersonal communication skills and
your ability to sell them on a vision.
The experience on Angry Birds at Rovio
I heard from one network that they actually thought
there was a bug in their dashboard software because
there were insanely high click through rates for our
game, which then resulted in really low CPI. That
was a fun experience, the brand recognition and
brand equity drove a lot of installs. But then we also
capitalized on that to the greatest possible extent by
spending a ton of money against that and just driving
a huge number of installs.
The best way to learn and develop UA
skills
If your first job is doing UA for Uber or one of these
apps that just is part of the zeitgeist and everybody
downloads that as soon as they see the app, they
don’t have enough salt. But I think if you want to learn
truly systematic UA, you’ve got to work on something
that has zero brand equity, because that’s how you
really learn about optimizing campaigns and
incrementally improving click through rates and
incrementally increasing the user base and focusing
deeply on early stage retention, and then the final
conversion and all that kind of stuff.
Exploring CPG is lucrative when
the brand is doing well
That whole CPG business unit was extremely
lucrative, while the brand was at that peak reach.
Then it became a liability after that, and we lost a lot
of money. So I think you can connect the
commercial properties of something like that to the
brand temperature. But if something’s extremely,
extremely hot, then yeah, you could probably sell
toys. If something’s kind of waning or cooling then
you probably can’t.
The best approach to build a
lucrative game
The ideal approach is to have the product teams
working really closely with the marketing teams and
establish a feedback loop between them and making
sure that we understand what type of users we can
reach easily with this type of game. If those aren’t the
right users, then we need to adjust the game to make
sure that it appeals to the right users.
How programmatic works
With programmatic it’s that you think about the kind
of canonical programmatic use cases of retargeting,
and so what are you doing, you don’t care about
some group that a user belongs to because you
know everything about that user, why are we
targeting a user, the group behavior is totally
irrelevant. I’m just looking at the behavior of that
user. If they were really valuable users, I want to get
them back in the product.
The efficiency of programmatic
The way that programmatic is really, really efficient, is
you say, “look, all these bozos are bidding at some
low level for this video game,” because on average,
those users that come out of that video game don’t
monetize well, but I know this specific user x, I’ve
seen him in my apps, and I know that he spends a lot
of money. Now when I see him in this app, I’m going
to outbid all those guys, because in aggregate, the
users of that app are not worth very much. But I know
that that one specific user is part of our tail of that
distribution. And he’s worth a lot.
There’s always free content to learn from
The great part about being alive right now is this
infinite pool of content available for free from experts.
Probably my first stop would have been fun to learn
something new like YouTube just because people put
out the highest quality content you can imagine. And
it’s free.
41
 Defining Basic Attention Token
What the Brave browser does is they think users
Web 3 ads on deserve to get paid for their attention. So if you
spend a certain amount of time on an ad, they feel
Brave: an early like your attention is worth something. So you will
get paid and they call this token the Basic Attention
Token.
behind-the-scene
s look The possibility of fraud on the Brave
network
A lot of Brave browser users are not actually in the
United States. They actually found loopholes, they
use the VPN to pretend they are in the United States.
So I know there is some targeting fraud. It’s just not
being targeted to the right people. So I see that and I
believe, perhaps Brave knows about the problems. So
this is something I think they need to figure out how to
resolve.

The first mover advantage

I will say that’s the advantage of advertising with some
newer platforms because they offer much cheaper
CPMs, or CPCs to advertisers. So for that reason, I
say, “Okay, if it doesn’t work at least we tried and it
wasn’t so expensive.” I’m just trying to have that first
mover advantage. And second is to learn this in a
Web 3 technology and then start thinking about how
we can adapt this for the future.

Annica Lin
VP Growth at Sable

Check out the entire episode

42
 Navigating the uncertainty that came
with regulating ride-sharing apps
The early days of We knew we could all lose our jobs. There were a
couple of things that helped me make that jump in

ride-sharing apps and be okay with that. One was the fact that I
recently saw something in the market and so came
off as more intelligent and then two, the team.
Everyone I got to meet when I joined and was
interviewing. John and Logan seemed like really
good guys. Their former CTO, still with the company,
Chris Lambert, really great guy, Director of Growth,
great guy. The Data Scientist at the time, really good
dude. Everyone in the interview process, pretty
dope. And I was like, this is a cool team. They’re
trying to do something that’s positive. It feels really
great. We operated under the assumption that we
could lose our jobs.

Build the company that you want

to build
We were going to compete, not just on service and
product but also on values and the company that we
want to build. One of my mentors there told me, “Let’s
build the company that you want to build. And so you
should strive to make Lyft the company that you want
it to be.”

Early priorities at Lyft

Early priorities were trying to figure out how we
balance the marketplace. And how do we go about
acquiring both drivers and passengers in a way that’s
efficient as well as something that we can claim is ROI
positive.

Survival guide for ride-sharing apps

Daniel Riaz
Founder, Trend Up Digital. Ex-Lyft,
ex-Zynga
Check out the entire episode
If your game goes over six months, and you have
users that stick around past six months, you’re happy.
But it’s a freemium model. And so most of your
premium users are going to decay out. If you look at
your user base, across everyone, you see a rapid
decay across that user base. And so we have
retention drop really quickly. With Lyft, what was
amazing to see was that people just kept coming
back. They just kept using the service. It was just
really sticky. I never saw anything like that in terms of
the curves. The curves were amazing. It was basically
a flat line of coming back week over week over week.
And it was pretty incredible to look at that data and
see that.

43
 Initial strategy to retain drivers
At one point, we had a guaranteed payout, where, if
you’re active and you drive, even if there’s not
enough demand, we’ll guarantee that you get a
certain rate. That guaranteed that as long as they
drove, they were going to make a certain rate, even
if there wasn’t enough demand at the time. So just
drive, we’re working on the demand.
Testing retention between 2 cohorts
What was amazing is we did tests where we made it
free for a certain cohort of users versus not for the
other. Then we looked at the retention. Once we
ended the free period, they were pretty much
comparable. So we concluded that they just need to
try it a few times, and then they'll stick.

Making demand frictionless The downside of capitalism

We understood that once they tried it a few times, it
was sticky and that they were going to stick. To make
the demand more frictionless, we worked on it,
essentially making it free for a little bit as a
promotion. That really increased demand as well.
Expanding to other markets
There was a lot of prep work in terms of making sure
that we had drivers to go on every single market.
That the experience was still going to be good for all
the passengers in these markets, and that we
weren’t gonna get shut down in any of these
markets. That they were all regulatory friendly. It was
a lot of coordination across the ops team, the growth
team, as well as the government relations team to
ensure that we could launch in these markets with a
consistent user experience that our consumers got in
LA or San Francisco
Launching in 24 cities in one day
The assessment was like any other individual market
that we launched. Are we seeing passengers actually
take rides? Are we seeing repeat engagement
amongst them? Is our driver base active? Are they
continuing to drive? And are we seeing natural supply
growth? Are we seeing organic pickup on both sides,
essentially? And if we did, we were happy with it. The
overall outcome was pretty much successful.
Capitalism has losers. I don’t think the tech crowd
focused enough on the consequences of their
disruptive tech.
The high cost of a sustainable
bike-sharing app
A lot of those companies have gone belly up
because basically, the business model is not
profitable. These are hardware companies where
you basically build and ship these bikes, and then
you’ve got to maintain them. You have to re-allocate
them because this is dockless, they’re going to be
spread all over the city. Then you have to re-allocate
them, like a team that’s on the ground with overhead
on the ground and move them from A to B on a daily
basis. That’s really expensive.
Limebike's biggest challenge
The biggest challenge right now is actually
topography. That should not be a surprise, but it
would be in terms of having people take a ride uphill
is not going to have that effect. The biggest challenge
is dealing with the topography side effects,
deployment effect, that affects a whole standpoint,
deployments basically at the top of the funnel for this.

Factors that led to the demise of

other ride-sharing apps
In the US, the primary competitor, outside of Uber for
us, was Sidecar. In terms of the mistakes they made, I
would say probably one, they were slow to scale. Two,
they didn’t pull in enough resources fast enough. This
would be something that I think about. If you’re trying
to build a massive network, that’s going to need a
huge amount of volume, to hit profitability and hit
liquidity. Like any marketplace, you need to move
really fast, you need to bring in resources quickly. And
you need to be able to kind of attract those resources
outside of financial capital, human capital. I’m not sure
if Sidecar was able to do that.
44
How to use Blockchain data privacy complexity

blockchain data The good thing about blockchain data is, it’s public.
It’s public data, but at the same time, it’s private
somehow, because of who’s behind a wallet ID, and
to run targeted everything a wallet owner does is publicly stored in
the blockchain.
ads for web 3
What blockchain looks like in
performance marketing
You can basically upload the image, like a mini clip,
you can define your marketing message, and then
you can drop this message directly into the wallet of
your future customers.

How an ad would appear in a

user’s profile
To give an example, it would be a coupon or benefit
directly in your shopping basket. This is a good
comparison to understand what this will look like in
the Web 2 world. The trick here is targeting and in the
best case, also any kind of utility, any added value of
the development.

How apps are incentivizing users to

invest in web 3
Another example, where I think the utility is nice is the
running app Stepn. It’s an environment from the app
business. That means if you walk or run outside, you
get coins for your run. But you need to be eligible for
earning coins, you need an NFT sneaker. You need to
buy them and once you have a few, then you are
eligible to start earning the coins. And I think this
direction, it’s a nice way to incentivize people to get rid
of their laziness.

Tobias Boerner
Co-Founder at Wallet Ads, Appic and
Admiral Studio

Check out the entire episode

45
 Dealing with the spam problem
From my past experience spam becomes a
problem on almost every digital channel. So that’s
for sure. I think spam is already a huge topic in the
NFT and crypto cases. However, we think the fees
will prevent at least a little bit of the massive spam
waves from that because you have to pay for
sending this. If you have to pay for something, there
are some obstacles there by nature.

You can’t always be discreet with

blockchain
Blockchain isn’t so easy to control. But it is public. If
you have something to hide, maybe you stay away
from that, or you stay in the offline world.

46
 What is the hypercasual genre
The reference point I always give is Netflix. For me
How hypercasual hypercasual is like Netflix, you log in and watch
whatever you want to watch.
games took over
How hypercasual games are designed
the app stores I call it the nan-test. So if my nan can play one of our
games and understand it within two seconds, it’s
non-punitive, in no way do you feel like you’re being
punished for not succeeding and you’ll see the
hypercasual games. It’s so adaptive. Now, if you don’t
pass the level and you play it again, the level won’t be
the same, it’ll be even easier because it wants you to
succeed. It’s a game that everyone can play.

The genre that turned mobile

phone owners into gamers
With your smartphone, you remove that barrier of, “I
am a gamer, I’ve got my console, I’ve got my PC,
have all my equipment around it.” and go directly to
“I’m just a mobile phone owner.”

How big is the hypercasual industry

The hypercasual industry is estimated to have a value
of around 2.5 billion dollars in 2019. In terms of users,
stats from Tenjin said that in 2019, it will hit 160 million
monthly active users. So that’s up 68% from 2018,
where it was 500 million. But if you look at the speed
of growth in 3 years, if we go back to 2016, the
number of MAU that Tenjin recorded was 65 million.
So in three years to get from 65 million to 860 million,
1,000% growth in three years, it’s incredible.

The early days of hypercasual

At AdColony when you start seeing new names, new
developers, new publisher names driving crazy
volumes, in terms of impressions, that’s when you
start paying attention and doing your homework.
That’s when you start to realize that there’s something
Jon Hook very exciting happening here under the surface.

CMO at PlayEmber
Check out the entire episode
A different strategy for user acquisition
Facebook, and Google, are very dominant in other
areas of gaming, but surprisingly, in hypercasual there
are other UA channels that perform more effectively
than Facebook and Google.

47
 The monetization model used in
hypercasual
In hypercasual, for UA and monetization we don’t
have separate teams. It’s the same person because
we need to have that granular view tying user
installs, and user activity with revenue. You need to
be wise about how you spend your cost because
otherwise, the test can be way too expensive.
A changed concept of game design
For me, a good core loop is basically putting you in
this state of flow. It’s a bit like how Netflix draws you
in. But this good core loop isn’t born from an idea
that you just implement and that you build on. It’s
through constant testing. So you pick an idea that’s
got potential, and you’ll build a video ad to test it out
on real players, you evaluate the depth.
The strategy for creatives in
hypercasual
In terms of creative, for hypercasual generally, it’s
video playable ads specifically that are driving most
of the revenue. You’ll see how drastically different
they are when creatively compared to other genres.
Because you are effectively playing the game, you
would see no difference between a playable ad
versus the game. Versus if you look at a lot of ads
for let’s say triple-A games, the ad you’re watching
almost looks like a movie, then you go play the
game. That wouldn’t look anything like what was
advertised.
So I think that the closeness between the ad
creative and the game itself also results in a much
higher install rate.

What is a game mechanic?

A game mechanic is just the action of playing. What
are you getting the user to do over and over again
within the context of the game? Are you asking them
to jump, swerve or fly? So the mechanics in a game
are often set up by the rules of the game. So the
challenge in a game would generally come from
applying your game mechanics to certain situations.

What are the game mechanics in

hypercasual?
In casual games, you might see an IPM of around
four, so four installs for every 1000 impressions versus
a top hypercasual game, you might see an IPM of 40.
So that’s 10X.
That’s why hypercasual can buy users with a lower
CPI versus a casual game and still get the same CPM
in the waterfall that we’re bidding on. That’s why
you’ve seen this explosion of hypercasual in the
charts because we can compete with any other big
game launches.

48
 Growth challenges at Blue Bottle Coffee
The model of growth itself, for the digital side of that
How to grow a company, was very different in terms of the levers
that we pulled and the interesting problem or
growth education integration about how to leverage this amazing
physical in-store experience to also drive the digital
side of the business and vice versa. That was also a
business very specific challenge, not just from a growth
perspective, but from a technology perspective, as
well as how you integrate those two worlds.

Who is an unbiased coach?

The reason why I use the words external unbiased
coach is that I think we just have a tendency to tell
ourselves stories in our heads, either negative or
positive, stories that aren’t necessarily true, based on
the way that we’re interpreting the world. Those
stories don’t necessarily serve us. They stray from the
actual truth. I think that’s actually the most important
part of getting to the truth.
So one of the most valuable things that this person
has provided me is bringing me back down to earth,
bringing me back to the truth. When you’re telling
yourself a really negative story about something, as a
founder, you’ll go through so many times where you
think the company’s just gonna fall through the earth
and it’s all doom and gloom and stuff. He’ll put me
back to, “hey, well, there are all of these other positive
things going on. This problem, we need to tackle
head-on”.

Lessons from founding a social

network company
I think the big lesson was, it was just a lot around
execution. We did not execute well. We didn’t have
the right co-founder mix that was representative of all
of the essential skills that we needed to make that
successful. We didn’t necessarily have a technical
co-founder, I became that person, over time, by just
teaching myself how to code. We didn’t necessarily
bring on the right mentors either at the time, who
really understood the tech in the software space, we
didn’t move into the right environments, to surround
ourselves with supporting resources.
Brian Balfour
The importance of building and
CEO at Reforge maintaining momentum for startups
One of the things that I tell my team at Reforge all the
Check out the entire episode time, and I tell other entrepreneurs in my portfolio is
that in startups the most important thing to think
about is how do you build and maintain momentum
because once you lose momentum, it’s 10x harder to
regain it back.

49
 What sets Reforge apart?
Reforge is very much in the professional education
space now, and it’s a different approach, but has
some similarities in the sense that a lot of the
budgets and a lot of the decision-making historically
have been locked up in the hands of like HR execs
and people at the management level. As a result,
professional education companies end up building
educational products that are very much about
checking the boxes for the end consumer.
Why I started writing
Over time for me, writing is thinking in the sense
that it is how I work through meaningful problems
and then find a way to communicate those
problems in a well-structured way and so I think one
of the things that is sorely lacking in a lot of
professionals today is just this ability to trust in your
own problem-solving skills and work through
meaningful problems on your own.
Problem solving through writing
We’re just running from meeting to meeting, just
constantly reacting. So then when we have three to
four-hour chunks of time, people come with the
feeling of a loss like, I don’t even know what to do
with this time, what things I should be working on,
etc. And so I think for me, it’s just like writing is one of
those things where I work through meaningful
problems.
Writing as a means of showcasing
what you can do
This is becoming incredibly important for all roles in
all products – to find ways to show off a meaningful
body of work that you have produced in your prior
roles, and that’s what writing has done for me.
Content as a driver for company growth
There’s what content does for your company from a
softer side of things, like things you can’t measure.
Then there’s just more of the underlying mechanics of
it.
I think the first is kind of what most people are used to
in the sense that what great content does as you
educate your audience and your user base is that it
helps you build this brand and this reputation that is
much larger than you actually are, like yourself as a
product and a company. What that’s doing is, it’s
providing the space for your product and your
software to grow into so there are many, many people
that would read HubSpot content. They had no idea
HubSpot sold software, but when they were in the
buying cycle for buying marketing automation
software, one of the first places that they would go is
Hubspot content. Then they would find out that
HubSpot also provided the software.
Hubspot’s growth through content
marketing
Its audience would then write additional content
linked back to HubSpot, which would improve SEO.
The next cycle of this loop that I’m describing, got
better and better with every single cycle. HubSpot
has the domain authority of like 98 – 99% and they
can publish any piece of content, it’ll immediately
rank in the first couple of spots.
It just builds this massive compounding, like a
machine over time that generated upwards of
100,000 leads per month. It provided this distribution
machine which is just crazy. As a result over time,
that’s what got to the IPO.
50
 The inspiration behind Reforge Importance of best fit for Reforge
The team would ask me about professional I think what people are used to is the old world where
development like what they could be doing and then you’re accepted into these things based on some level
I would spend hours researching what to of prestige or something like that. That is not what we
recommend to them and I just kept coming up do at all. What we really think about it, is what we call
empty-handed. Everything was intro and entry-level, fit, meaning is this person applying, going to be able to
designed to help people get jobs, which is great, but get an immense amount of value out of this program
just wasn’t what my team was looking for. for them based on their role, their stage in their career,
There are certain things out there, from traditional the type of company and product that they’re working
MBA schools, but they tend to be so high-level and on, problems that they’re facing, and some other
so disconnected, that it’s really hard for somebody factors.
to apply. That’s because their customers could come
from finance to tech to management consulting. So The target audience for Reforge
like they’re trying to serve all of those audiences. As
a result, it wasn’t very credible. So I decided I was We have to constrain it to really think about how we
going to create this course on the side and write built this product specifically for a certain type of
down everything that I felt like I had learned over the person. What we’re doing is we’re trying to match
past 10 years. that with the people applying. I think a lot of products
actually don’t do this well enough like they build a
product specifically for a certain target audience.
The most underutilized tool for growth Then they launch it to the masses. That really
I think the most underutilized tool in the world right creates a lot of issues in the sense that it’s really
now is the scientific method. There’s a reason that it hard to understand what’s working and what’s not
was defined and has been used for so long. That’s working, and it creates this really bad negative
because it’s an incredibly valuable tool when you’re word-of-mouth cycle because all of a sudden, you
going into the unknown and trying to improve have all these people coming into the product that
different problems you didn’t build it for, who see this product and
they’re like, “What the hell is this thing? This thing
sucks.” They don’t really understand that, they might
Playing the long game in professional have been the exact target audience.
education
We are very much playing the long game in the
sense that I think there are professional education
companies out there that went for scale incredibly
quickly. As a result, it’s coming to bite them back in
the ass in the sense that they created this
“credential” and then just tried to sell as many of
those credentials as possible to as many people as
possible.
The problem and the challenge with that are that if
the thing that you are selling is a credential, then
that credential’s inherent value is based overtime on
the quality of people that have that credential, more
like HBS, which is you just do all the filtering at the
top of the funnel and to build that value in.
As a result, those credentials start to hurt the
business.

51
05 SUBSCRIPTIONS

52

How to use
monetization
experiments to
drive dramatic LTV
improvements for
subscription apps
Ekaterina Gamsriegler
Head-Growth & Marketing at Mimo
Check out the entire episode
Scenario planning with spreadsheets
What I mean by scenario planning is that I would
have a sheet with a lot of different revenue-related
metrics covering pretty much everything from the top
of the funnel, like trial opt-in rates, average revenue
per subscription to the very bottom of it, ending up
with LTV, payback periods of a different subscription
durations.
Mine is quite complex, the one I’m using at work.
They can also be fairly basic. As the spreadsheet is
automated, you have multiple inputs, and multiple
variables which impact each other naturally. Once
you change into just one of these, you can pretty
much see in the end, what kind of a shift in revenue
or left-hand values or any other metric you can
expect.
How increasing the trial opt-in
rate impacted LTVs
We fall into the category of personal development
apps, these are the ones where the users’ motivation
is the highest at the very beginning. Then gradually, it
might be going down because learning to code
requires a lot of energy and effort. So for us, in order
to lock the user in, it was critical to helping the user
commit. That’s why we were offering discounted
subscriptions at the beginning of the journey, which
was also having a negative impact on the lifetime
values overall.
So of course, if we would increase the trial opt-in
rates, then the distribution of the purchases
happening at full price, versus the discounted price
would get more healthy. This would have a high
impact on our LTVs. This is exactly what happened
and what helped us a lot.
The reminder to cancel trials went a
long way
We were receiving a lot of user feedback and reviews
where users were not very happy with the trial opt-in
overall, they have very little trust in it. So a lot of
reviews were talking about developers capitalizing on
users who forget to cancel. So it’s quite a barrier for a
lot of users to even start the trial. The way it would
work is that it would describe how exactly the trial
period is working, and how long it is and mention that
the user will get a notification or an email before the
trial expires so that they can cancel it if they don’t find
the pro features valuable. We did exactly that. This
resulted in around a 100% increase in the trial opt-in
rates and also decreased our cancellations within the
first 24 hours by 25% which was huge for us.
53
 Tracking trial churn and subscriber
churn
There were different experiments that we did for
tackling trial churn and also subscriber churn. For
the trials, the first thing we noticed is that when the
users opt in for the trial, let’s say the trial of 10
screens was working great, and users were clearly
understanding how the trial is working. But it was not
clear to them why they would upgrade and what
would be the benefits of having a pro subscription.
This was because the big part of the benefits for the
user was missing.
After that we started experimenting with benefits, in
a personalized way based on the user’s answers
during on-boarding. This helped us decrease trial
cancellations by around 10%. On top of explaining
how the trial works, we also started to add different
parts to the layout, which would be saying, why
would you need to upgrade and what would be the
main benefit for the user.

Experimenting with screens

The big question is how exactly to figure out what is
worse, including the screens into the flow, and
whether it should be one long scrollable screen or
whether it should be all broken down into separate
screens. So we experimented quite a bit with that.
Currently, the multi-screen version works very well. It
also led to around 60% improvement in the trial
opt-in rates and also decreased our cancellation
rates by a lot because even at the obtain stage users
would already clearly understand the benefits of
opting in for a trial for a pro subscription and also,
how is it different from the basic version.

Notifying users of updates & changes

It was clear that a lot of users were under the
impression that the content might not be deep
enough, or there might not be enough of it for the
whole year. That’s why they would cancel the
subscription pretty fast at the beginning of the
journey. The only way to tackle this, as I saw it, was
value nurturing, which means constant reminders of
the new content. We just were not communicating it
properly. Showing the in-app messages, sending
push notifications, and even setting up in-app events
came in quite handy with promoting the big updates
because otherwise, the users were under the
impression that literally nothing is changing or
happening or improving.

54

How to optimize
products for
forever: growth
strategies to win
with subscription
apps
Robbie Kellman Baxter
Founder, Peninsula Strategies
Check out the entire episode
Optimizing your product for forever
Somebody in senior management shows up one
day and says – “We need subscription revenue, so
make our product a subscription.” And subscription
is a pricing tactic. But you need the mindset that
goes with it, the focus on treating your customer like
a member and focusing on the long term. I use
forever as a standard for focusing on the long term,
it may not mean forever. If you have an app for
parents of young children, forever might be three
years. If it’s an app for college students, it might be
four years. But it’s about optimizing for that longer
term.
The importance of finding the
right metric early on
People are smart, whatever metric you give them,
they are going to figure out how to move that metric. If
the metric is retention, they’re gonna hide the cancel
button. If the metric is sign ups they’re going to focus
on signups. If it’s cost per acquisition, they’re going to
focus on acquiring the cheapest customers. So it’s
really important to do the heavy lifting of figuring out
lifetime customer value against cost of acquisition as
a metric to use as one of the several metrics on your
dashboard. Because I can get a very cheap customer
that’s not valuable and it’s a waste of my time. I can
spend a fortune on a customer that pays me a fortune
and it’s incredibly valuable.
How Netflix was different from other
companies looking at subscriptions
What I noticed during my time there was, how data
driven they were, which pieces of data they were
looking at: they were looking at not just cost per
acquisition, but also at lifetime customer value. So not
just how much does it cost to get someone to sign up
for the two week free trial, but how long do they stay?
And then they were looking at patterns once
somebody stayed – what did they do? How much did
it cost to serve them? How did that change over time?
As you can imagine, when they’re sending DVDs out,
during your two week free trial, they’re getting no
money in, but they’re physically shipping something,
paying shipping costs, cost for the distribution center,
all those variable costs they were incurring. So they
really had to understand what the payoff was going to
be, because that was not a cheap acquisition.
55
 How different teams can come together
to support retention
I worked with this one company. They had me come
in, they said, our retention team is terrible, we’re
thinking of firing them. We’d like you to come in and
help us fix it. And this was a streaming company, not
Netflix. Their acquisition numbers were very good.
The acquisition campaigns were working great. But
people were canceling either after the show trial or
after the first period. So that was retention’s fault. But
when we looked at what the acquisition campaign
was, which was a marketing decision, the campaign
was – we have this one movie that everybody wants.
So everybody signs up for the movie, you have a
free trial, you watch a movie during your free trial,
maybe you forget to cancel after the first period and
then you cancel. Now, the retention team, the
engagement team, they can do a lot of things to
expose the customer to all the other benefits. Like
Disney Plus – you came for Hamilton, but stay for the
princesses, stay for National Geographic, they can
surface other benefits to you. And that is a great
technique. But if they’re attracting people who have
no intention of staying, that is a very uphill climb.
Getting the right people to sign up is
more valuable than getting more people
to sign up.
Another example is – join a bank and get a free
toaster. If you open an account, you get a free
toaster. So you think, I need a toaster so I’ll come in,
I’ll open an account, I’ll get my free toaster, I’ll put no
money into my account and eventually close it. If they
said instead join our bank and build your credit, join
our bank and save money and accrue interest, fewer
people will sign up. But the people that sign up are
coming for the right reasons. And that is especially
important if you’re counting on future revenue, not
just first day revenue.
Testing out your new subscription
plans
The first thing we look at and say, where can we test
this so that we can see what actually happens in
terms of who converts: new to us, light users, heavy
users. So you do that in a very small market and you
would be really clear about what is the worst case
scenario of every single person in this market that is a
valuable customer to us, which is what is the cost of
this big mistake. So that’s the first thing that you want
to do is understand those dynamics in a small way.
And then once you learn from that you can adjust the
offering, so you can raise the price. You can remove
benefits and say these benefits or add ons later. You
can do a lot of things with the offering and then you
can test it again.
Finding your why behind subscription
models
I think a lot of times when I ask a company, why are
you doing this subscription? Is it for the acquisition of
new people? Is it for deepening relationships with light
users? Is it for rewarding and deepening the
relationship with your best customers? They always
say all of those. Those are three different use cases,
three different products, three different scenarios. So
you’ve got to pick one.
When is a freemium model preferred?
Freemium, on the other hand, is about building
habits. The reasons that you use freemium are
either you’re trying to change your behavior on an
ongoing basis, you want to prove to somebody that
they would have this habit. They don’t think they’ll
use it very much and you want to show them that it
will be a habit. Second thing is, there’s some kind of
network effect, meaning that each new person that
uses your product for free creates more value for the
people who are paying for it, for the premium users.
And so they’re part of the product.
How Adobe educated all stakeholders
to make their model a successful one
They communicated it really clearly all the way
along, they educated the public markets on what to
expect and what metrics to look at. Don’t just look at
the cost in the first month. But notice the recurring
revenue, you have to understand it’s all about
recurring revenue. It’s all about retention.
A big part of this, too, was educating their investors.
Today, I personally think investors still need some
education on subscription, at least some investors
do. But most of them actually, almost blindly prefer
subscription models to transactional models. But I
think back in the time that Adobe was making this
switch, subscription models weren’t the darlings they
are today. I think the CFO and the finance team
really did a great job at communicating why was
Adobe doing this and what the long term value
would be to the shareholders.
56
Winning strategies
for subscription
apps in 2022, our Hichem
webinar Belouizdad
Liftoff+Vungle

Liftoff + Vungle

Carolin Roht
Yazio

Thomas Petit Shamanth Rao

Consultant Rocketship HQ

Challenging the pre-ATT playbook

Thomas: Until ATT showed up there was a playbook

that I would say 80 or 90% were following, which is
acquisition mainly driven by paid ad monetization –
very aggressive, onboarding paywalls. You use the
app, there’s a paywall jumping at you every three
seconds, which is basically you pay or you stop
using.
I think now with this remix in marketing, there are a
lot of people who are starting to question if this is
actually the only way. There were a bunch of apps
Lisa Kennelly who weren’t doing that, but I think they were the
Fishbrain minority. And now they’re looking like people we
should be inspired from and should be thinking
about.
Check out the entire episode

57
 How a marketing mix model can
Channel diversity to get users
help with measurement disruption
Lisa: We still spend a lot on paid, we’re still looking
Carolin: We are currently working on a marketing
at the channels that have always worked. But we’re
mix modeling approach, to estimate the true value,
also looking at, who’s upstream from us in the
for example, of Facebook, on our business metrics.
customer journey for our specific customer? And
So the end or the result of this will be aggregated
how can we get into that conversation? So that’s
data on an ad level. The outcome will have an
definitely something we’ve been doing more of.
impact on channel investment, on overall results.
And this will provide us with a macro overview. So
Alternate measurement models that no campaign or ad level, that’s not where this is
are being evaluated going. But this modeling will hopefully help us to at
Hichem: I can see that marketers are also exploring least solve the measurement issue of the post ATT
the top down approach to measurement or world.
evaluating the media mix. And they’re using
modelling and incrementality as an alternative to
decide how to choose the right budget with the What media mix modeling can’t be
channels. used for
Thomas: Eventually it did bring a really interesting
Schemas that have been effective insight about how those channels have a much
bigger impact than we believe. And that was typically
Carolin: We have no trials yet, we are currently
the case for higher funnel channels, including
using only the revenue schema so no conversion
YouTube, Tiktok, Pinterest, where impressions do not
value or engagement. We’re not measuring
necessarily convert into install immediately, but they
occurrence, meaning we use the six bits solely for
participate to eventually downstream impact. And we
revenue. Reasons for that are the 64 values we
did shift a bit more budget on these channels,
have are enough for us to map our revenue range
because it was more than what the last click was
plus we don’t have too many events in the app we
saying. So typically, you would assign less to search.
are measuring yet. So the revenue schema for us
But it’s tricky. And it really works at channel level, you
works perfectly because we measure the exact
can’t make conclusions with that like, I’ve decreased
value of the user and give a signal to the platform,
that campaign by 20%, was it incremental or not?
like how valuable the acquired user is for us.
Like the media mix model is not gonna answer this,
it’s a very strategic high level budget assignment
How probabilistic matching compares between channels. It’s not tactical execution.
with SKAN attribution
Hichem: Probabilistic matching avoids most of the
drawbacks that come with SKAN attribution. That’s
why a lot of advertisers like this way of working
because you get the postbacks in real time. There is
no privacy censorship threshold, you can get
multiple post backs per user, and each postback has
a rich data set. So it is just like the days of IDFA
attribution. I believe it allows for more refined
optimization. So in theory it should be driving better
performance.

58
 A model to match between SKAN and
make an analysis towards revenue
Thomas: We’re trying to build a similar matching
between the SKAN number we receive and make a
regression analysis towards revenue. Like when
Facebook is telling me I’m paying $30 for a SKAN
trial, can I make the equivalent, that means $60 in
revenue, or whatever it is. And there are a number
of challenges doing that, it’s really hard to build one
because the SKAN value coming from one network
and another network, they’re not the same. Like I
cannot say okay, a SKAN trial is worth $30.
Because then a SKAN trial on this network was 20.
On that network it was 45. And two weeks later, the
value has changed. So I’m in the middle of building
this.
Lisa and her team’s experiments with
web-based flows
Lisa: I would say the biggest mistake we made was
spending a lot of time building out a web version of
the product, which I don’t really think the rest of our
marketing organization was set up to support or had
the resources to support. So, we see this
opportunity for a lot of SEO and a lot of organic
growth. And obviously, it’s cheaper on the web, we
see this great opportunity, like how do we actually do
that, as a company that’s been historically an app
company and doesn’t have a lot of web experience?
And then also, even if we get all that traffic, how do
we convert it? And what do we convert it to?
Because for a long time, it was like, oh, let’s convert
them to just web. It’s cheaper. We’ll save money
from the app on Google tax. And now we’re like, let’s
get them all to the app. We don’t care. Forget
everything on the web. So it’s been quite a journey.
Two popular web-based journeys
Thomas: I see apps both succeeding and failing with
two completely different approaches, one being a
very direct journey where people would be
redirected to a very simple landing page, where the
objective is to go to the App Store as soon as
possible. And the other takes a much longer route
where maybe you don’t have the full product on the
web. But you do start onboarding users on the web.
What Yazio learnt about web-based
flows through rigorous testing
Carolin: We tested everything, different landing
pages, different funnels, funnel length, user flow
from creative to the funnel. And our core learnings
are that long funnels work better than short ones.
Direct funnels work better than going through a
landing page, even for those channels that you
might think demand more context like Outbrain,
native advertising. Our major challenge is obviously
that we asked people to purchase a product that
they haven’t even downloaded yet. So right now, we
are adding a free trial to the web, which we haven’t
done until now.
How first party data usage is gaining
importance now
Hichem: It said that 85% of US marketers and 75% of
Western Europe marketers are saying that increasing
their use of first party data is a high priority, but I think
it becomes a big priority for everyone. First, because
it helps you to comply with global data protection
laws. I think it’s a major thing now. It stays in the end
of those two connected and gives more control and
transparency over what happens with that data. It’s
easier to obtain consent for first party data because
customers know what you will do with this data.
What we lose out on when trying to
maximize first day trial
Thomas: You do see that there’s not a unique
correlation of how many people subscribe on day one
and how many subs I have at the end of the day.
There were channels that were bringing us a lot of
what I call the late converters, which very often are
people who retain more, invite more their friends,
have access to higher value and have higher
payment retention and users retention. And today,
we’re completely blind to that. So I’m just assuming
that those networks are bringing the same after the
first day. And I know for sure it’s not right, which is a
little bit of an issue. But we have to live with that.
59
06 UA CHANNELS

60
 Threefold approach to web-based
marketing
How to unlock The web-based marketing efforts were threefold.
One was the ability to improve our margins or net
web-based flows CLTV, since we’re no longer paying that 30% Apple
tax while acquisition happens on the web.

for massive scale
Two, from the data points that we had in general, the
kind of cohorts of customers on the web were at a
much healthier CLTV for us, against iOS and Android
users. So a really healthy market there.
Third was our ability to move past just selling an
individual, singular, monthly, six-month, or 12-month
subscription, but the opportunity to really drive more
ARPU or revenue per user at the time of purchase,
through cross-selling and bundling was good.

How the user journey involves

parents and kids
We really have two users that are equally important
from a user journey perspective. Advertising to the
parent who was going through the onboarding, funnel,
and quiz either in-app or on the web, and signing up
for a trial, but then leads to a subscription 30 days
later. After that experience, the customer downloads
the app and signs in or continues their journey on the
app to start their free trial experience.
That is really where the customer becomes dual,
where it’s the child who is the end user for this product
and uses the product every single day, but the parents
are the one whose credit card is being charged.

Components of a web-based flow

Todd Kane
VP of Growth at Homer Learning
Check out the entire episode
for users
Our architecture and strategy in terms of our
web-based flow is a true end-to-end onboarding
experience and purchase cycle that happens within
our web ecosystem.
So a customer comes to our landing page because
we’re in the kids’ education space and the ability to
really provide that insight and details to the parent, in
a more long-form way allows better education to the
parent of what the problem is that we’re trying to
solve.
The parent goes into an onboarding funnel, which is a
combination of some first-party data that we collect,
such as email and SMS, and then goes through a
quiz, which creates personalization for the child, what
they’re going to be experiencing and using inside the
app through a series of questions that connects back
to that kind of onboarding experience of the child, the
parent then submits their credit card.

61
 Surprising wins and failures
The more zero-party data, or first-party data as they
call it these days, we can kind of gather the better.
Intuitively collecting email and SMS we felt would
probably be important but we certainly believed that
collecting in the first step would really hurt the
attrition of consumers going through the funnel.
We found out very surprisingly that that actually was
helpful, not hurtful in terms of collecting that data.
That was a big unlock for us that there’s a level of
trust within our consumers who are really willing to
give up their email and SMS and not for any real
incentive, besides just wanting to learn more about
our business and dig into a little bit more.

Other channels on mobile that

work well
The number one concern that was company-wide
about focusing on the web was that all these
customers will come across our website, go through
the funnel and decide not to purchase but just go
directly to the app and purchase from there. I think
that was really dissolved on day one, as we found
that there is a whole different customer subset that
lives out there outside of the mobile app world, at
least for our product and category that’s super excited
about what we have to offer, super willing to not only
go through a web-based funnel and download an app
but with us really create some better opportunities
and how we can serve them in a larger way.

62

The ascendance of
cross-promos in a
post-ATT world
David Philippson
(CEO & Co-Founder -Dataseat)
Check out the entire episode
How do you spot an opportunity for
cross-promo?
They are a highly valuable user, but perhaps they’re
on level 40 or 50. Or perhaps they’ve been playing
the game for 28 days, and the average lifetime is 35
days. So when you start looking at high likelihood to
churn, or you start looking at churn bell curves,
there is an obvious opportunity to actually start
doing cross-promos to even your own high-value
users.
Understanding why a cross-promo
didn’t work
The next question I’d be asking is whether you
included any first party data in that cross-promotion.
After all, the gaming company doing the
cross-promo can start including their own data in
the bidding logic to decide who to serve adverts to.
For example, how long have certain users been
playing the game? Are they an ad whale? Are they
a depositor? Did they come through a paid or
organic channel? Just knowing whether a user
typically has clicked and downloaded other games
in the past is a very strong signal as to whether it’d
be worth serving them an advert.
The infrastructure required to drive
cross-promotion
Let’s assume you have SDKs, and there’s
ironSource, MAX, Fyber, Admob. You then need a
bidder that you actually control that can then
respond to those impressions coming from the
SDK. And when I say respond, I mean deciding how
much to bid – is it worth $15 or $8? So you need a
bit of control over that.
How do you define mediation
So the developer or the publisher needs to be able to
operate with multiple ad-serving SDKs. You know,
they need to work with ironSource, AppLovin,
Facebook DataSeat, Vungle. Mediation is a software
layer that manages that process, basically which of
the ad network SDKs is called.
63
 The key function of adapters
Any SDK or ad network you’re working with needs to
have support from the mediation company. And that
actual software support is called an ‘adapter’. It’s a
piece of software that goes around the data SDK and
allows it to operate in a MoPub environment or
allows it to operate in an AdMob mediated
environment and so on.

What’s opportunity cost

So every bid we make on cross-promo comes with a

price. We still bid $10, for example. We still recognize
that we spent, say, $12,000 this month on
cross-promo, because by doing so, you can then
calculate return. Now it’s not return on ad spend as
such. It’s not ROAS. It’s more return on opportunity
cost

The importance of calculating

return on opportunity cost
One of the challenges of the old way of doing it,
which is when we didn’t really record the cost, was
that the monetization manager had an issue! He
could have got $10,000 from an ad network, and
instead they’ve just served a load of house ads and
he’s missed his target! So internal financial
recognition is important, and the monetization
manager knows that it actually wasn’t $10,000 taken
off his table. It was just replaced by internal money,
which is still calculated ROAS behind it.

64
 One UA channel is not the safest bet
There were times when Facebook was doing well,
Diversifying your and then the quality decreased—everything was
changing. So if you put all your eggs in one UA
UA mix in a basket, you are playing a very dangerous game, I
would say. If you’re running your UA on one channel
and that’s the only channel, what if that stops
post-ATT world: working?

Why, When and When to diversify your UA portfolio

If we were having this discussion three years ago, I

How would say Facebook only, up until you hit around $1

million a month in spend. But things have changed
quite rapidly. I start thinking about diversifying the
UA portfolio after hitting $20,000 a month.

How to go about the diversification

process
I always tried to maximize the spend in one
channel. So, doing the diversification of the
optimization strategy first and then moving slowly to
other channels, step-by-step.

Trials and error post IDFA

I tried basically everything when these IDFA
shenanigans happened, from funnel, engagement
schema to revenue schema. I’m now working
mostly with custom schema, where I use four to five
engagement events, depending again on the game.
Then I add the revenue brackets on top of it.

How to set up revenue brackets

If there is a possibility for players to buy something
within 1,000 euros or dollars on the first day, then it
won’t make sense if I set up brackets by $1, because
it’s a huge gap. That’s something that I keep in mind –
based on the maximum amount of money that can be
purchased or can be spent on the first day, I set up
the revenue brackets.

Incrementality is nice to have

Matej Lancaric
User Acquisition & Marketing
consultant
Check out the entire episode
I opened up a Google campaign, and suddenly I was
able to see a huge install and revenue increase in
organics. And there was nothing else that changed.
Obviously, I could see this even without running an
incrementality test. But the incrementality test just
said, “Okay, so you’ve arrived, but the question is, do
you want to run this campaign or not?” Of course you
want to run it, because this is definitely having a
positive effect on both installs and revenues!

65
 Look at where you can interact with
your customers even if it’s B2B
Going where the They have to buy a fishing license in most of the
United States. You have to buy a fishing license if
fish are: making you want to go fishing legally. So who controls that
customer touch point? Can we be on that customer
journey? So that, for example, is one partnership
the leap to offline that we have, which is with Aspira, a company that
provides the software that certain states and
partnerships provinces use to sell fishing licenses. So we’re even
several steps up in the customer journey the
customer is not even aware of. This is purely on the
B2B side.

Product customizations to support

seamless partnerships
The product changes are to support the ease of the
customer journey. So if I get an email via a partner, I
should be able to tap on that link that will take me
right to a custom page in the App Store, and then I’ll
get a custom flow into the app. That’s kind of the
level we’ve been focusing on. If a partner sends me
this, I’ve never heard of Fishbrain before, I need to
have some sort of touch points that are
partner-specific. We’ve changed the splash screen
in the onboarding, and maybe we set up some
custom CRM. So in your first week, your
onboarding emails, maybe all the content is the
same, but the visual is branded a little different to
make it fit the partner.

Is it important to make your links

trackable?
Then just making sure those links are trackable, so
we could easily do a standard either
fishbrain.com/discount or something like that. But
then if that gets spread everywhere, it’s a really
good deal, that’s not great for us. So we think, how
can we have individualized Firebase links that are
connected to user IDs on the partner side?
Because often in some of these partnerships, if we
do have any kind of an agreement that if they send
us X users and there’s money involved, we really
Lisa Kennelly need to track how many that is.
CMO, Fishbrain

Check out the entire episode

66
 Other offline partnerships that How to tailor promotions according
were explored to seasonality
Last season was the first time we did some radio and We shift the priority depending on the season. For
billboards, which was again hard to measure the example in Q4, when it was around Black Friday,
impact of. The radio ads went on ESPN radio and Cyber Monday, then we put the shopping aspects
satellite radio. We heard from every person we talked first, because then also for most of our customers, it’s
to in our target audience, they all heard the ad many like not exactly the high season. So they’re more in
times. Again, how it translates to the bottom line is a the shopping phase than in the fishing phase. And so
little trickier. now as you go into the season, we’re still talking
about it, we’re still doing commerce sales, we still
The inspiration behind adding an highlight those benefits, but we’ve shifted a bit more
ecomm layer to the app into the utility social benefits. So it’s something we’ve
learned over time, but we’re going back to what you
We were just talking about how much money people
said about making the brand new, consistent, we
spend on fishing gear, right? So if we’re thinking
really tried to in all our messaging hit on “in the
about revenue streams, and we say, there’s this much
Fishbrain app, you can do this, this and this” and
money being spent on fishing gear, we can certainly
shopping is always part of those value propositions.
take some of that. While we love subscription
revenue businesses, they can only grow to a certain
extent, but there’s this opportunity for if you can
integrate in the fishing gear experience into the social
experience and within the app as well, it just seems
like this opportunity, and it’s very relevant like, hey, if
I’m going fishing, or if I’m looking in the app, and I see
what somebody’s caught, and I want to see what they
use to catch it, what rod, reel, bait etc. I can just buy it
like that.

Validating an add-on service with

your user base
We definitely did a lot of customer validation around
integrating your fishing gear and that experience in
the app. Another part of that is that people also want
to and continue to want to be able to just track the
gear they’ve used in the past. Like there’s that side of
it. It’s just tracking what I use and then making it
sellable for other people consuming it to see like, “oh,
cool, I saw that I can buy it.”

67

How to scale your
UA with affiliate
marketing
Dora Trostanetsky
Growth Marketing Lead, Trade
Republic
Check out the entire episode
When to start thinking of direct
partnerships
My recommendation would be, do your homework
at the beginning, identify who are the bigger players
in your vertical, who are the ones that will generate
a lot of traffic. But, be mindful of something. Some
of them are very good for brand marketing and
some of them are very performance based. So
don’t get fooled by just the size of the website and
their volumes, because sometimes they don’t
necessarily convert, they’re just there to establish
your brand.
Work with partners that allow you
some control
Work with a network where you can establish a little
bit of the groundwork saying, I want to test this
channel, these are the types of websites I want to
go after, partners I want to go after and these ones
are the ones I don’t want you to talk to yet.
Designing a typical user journey
As marketers, we’re hooked to the type of
marketing we’re doing, the numbers, the conversion
rates. But at the end of the day, the customer
doesn’t know any of it. So it’s important to put
yourself in their shoes and go and explore exactly
as they will explore. So as a user journey, just go to
Google, type some of the main keywords that relate
to your company, your vertical, and find out what
people are seeing. You’ll be surprised sometimes
what comes up next to your company name, next to
the search terms, it will help you understand what’s
going on, related to the search queries.
Why a landing page trumps the App
Store in a user journey for services
requiring information
If you send them to a landing page, there is no
commitment. The user can read further, they can
educate themselves, or they can even open it in the
browser and then do something else, think about it,
let it sink and then come back to it later or even go
to the App Store organically. In that sense, I would
say sending users to a landing page could be very
beneficial if your product requires trust.
68
 Capturing data of users likely to
switch devices or platforms
We have seen that in the past with Facebook A/B
testing, sending users to a webpage or to the App
Store. We actually noticed that quite a few people
are jumping from one platform to the other and it can
become very difficult and tedious to really track them.
So the best way is if you can capture them in some
way on web, so when they decide to switch platform,
and even organically just go to the App Store, you
have an identifier to match them with and say this is
a person that we have seen came from this source,
and then decided to continue on a different platform.
So in affiliate marketing, if you have this kind of
identifier, given of course by the user, that will be the
best way for you to understand this cross platform
situation that’s happening.
Testing out your new subscription plans
The first thing we look at and say, where can we test
this so that we can see what actually happens in
terms of who converts: new to us, light users, heavy
users. So you do that in a very small market and you
would be really clear about what is the worst case
scenario of every single person in this market that is a
valuable customer to us, which is what is the cost of
this big mistake. So that’s the first thing that you want
to do is understand those dynamics in a small way.
And then once you learn from that you can adjust the
offering, so you can raise the price. You can remove
benefits and say these benefits or add ons later. You
can do a lot of things with the offering and then you
can test it again.
Best practices to scale affiliates as
a channel
If you really want to run affiliates at scale, then a third
party network comes into play because they are
connected to the majority of publishers, not all of
them. And then you can really be able to appear on
small and medium and big websites and tap into all
kinds of audience, including niche audiences, or
some people that are a little bit harder to reach
through other channels. So I would say best practice
there would be to diversify your basket. Make sure
that you have these direct deals and you also have
some brand marketing, where it’s just that the website
talks about you without necessarily having to perform
in terms of conversions. And then you also have a
third party network, this will allow you to really
expand.
So diversify, diversify, diversify, that’s all I would say.
The potential of affiliate marketing as
a UA channel
I think affiliate marketing is not a well understood
channel. It’s a very underestimated channel. It’s not
as popular as the social media channels. So people
tend to ignore it in many verticals, but it has very big
potential, especially in the FinTech world, where
people are going proactively to look for information,
so you need to be there.
69
Omnichannel
strategies for a
post-IDFA world: for
web and app based
products in 2022, Evan Woods
our webinar DT.Co

Ruckus feat. Grace

Ouma-Cabezas
Poppy Seed Health

Matej Lancaric Shamanth Rao

Growth Consultant Rocketship HQ

How to capture data during the

first 24 hours in games
Matej: The first 24 hours in games, especially on
iOS, is really important. I had to talk to the product
and game teams about how we can grab as many
events as possible in the first 24 hours. For
example, we had to implement different special
offers in the game. Just capture as many purchases
as possible in the first 24 hours, and not screw up
the whole game economy as well, that was really
important.

Anish Shah
Ruckus

Check out the entire episode

70
 How web-based strategies can be
more productive
Grace: We just leaned in with a much more web
based strategy, which I think has been really
productive for us because there was some education
around who we were what we were and thinking
about this onboarding, lead generation, bringing
people into the funnel for our CRM and lifecycle to
nurture them into subscribers for our products. So
not so much a performance change, but it did heavily
shape where we invested.
Following Facebook recommended
strategies can be beneficial
Evan: I would say we actually grew a lot during these
changes, mainly because our strategies were
Facebook’s core five type strategies. So a lot of our
Facebook structures, for example, are highly
consolidated. We were really focused on broader
audiences. So I think a lot of what has become best
practice, we were already doing. Some were in
preparation for, but really that’s where we saw the
best performance out of Facebook.
Deciding on the volume of creatives
Evan: For one of our clients- a 7 to 8 figure a month
client, they need a lot, and things saturate quickly.
We’ve been working internally on a calculator. If
you’re spending as much a day how much creative
will you actually need? It really does vary, because
there’s another client we have, they got on to Oprah’s
favorite things. That creative they rode it for almost
five months, way after holiday. So it can vary. But I do
think that spend is a big indicator obviously of how
quickly your creative will saturate and we do try to
triangulate what is that number of video ads that we
need to constantly have in rotation in order to combat
that saturation.
Emotion and storytelling can be
more powerful than just targeting
Grace: What has been really successful for us, we
had a video asset that was really emotive and
touched on these use cases across the different life
stages that we support that perform the best. And we
also chopped it up into individual stories. So we had
one that was more postpartum one that was more
pregnancy, one that was a little bit ambiguous –
you’ve just found out, you’re pregnant and you’re not
sure if you’re happy or sad, but the sort of the
compilation video that showed just how we imagined
our user and the instances in which they’d reach for
their app and go to Poppy Seed Health, performed
the best. And then we found down the funnel that it
was actually attracting primarily people in their early
pregnancy.
So even though we were showing all these different
use cases, I think, for the user, they’re able to kind of
foreshadow how they may apply to them. So it was
broad in terms of our offering but actually performed
way better than trying to drill in individually. So I don’t
know if that’s a function of how targeting is changed
but really digging into the emotion and the storytelling
and trying to show them where you would be when
you would need us, really contextualizing ourselves in
an emotional way has been the most powerful thing.
The creative approach that Grace and
her team followed
Grace: It’s gotten us temporarily banned from a few
platforms. But we show a woman pumping, we show
someone changing a dirty diaper, we show a woman
in the mirror combing her hair and some of her hair
coming out, alluding to postpartum hair loss, we show
somebody on the toilet, somebody looking at a
pregnancy test. So we really get in there because a
part of our brand was eliminating shame and taboo in
those situations. So those were really compelling to
users. The only individual ad that performed almost
as well was where we showed a woman breast
pumping. And we always use real people that we
actually know. These are not models of professional
talent that we use and I feel that was so resonant. We
used a plus sized woman and we got so much
positive feedback like you’d never see this in
maternity advertising. So occasionally we had to
contest a few “This is adult content” to get those out.
But once they went out, they performed exceptionally
well.
71

Shifting to CRO-focus
Evan: Diverting those dollars to conversion rate
optimization I think is a big thing as well as if we can’t
target or optimize as effectively as before, therefore
leading to often lower conversion rates, can we
actually impact that off of Facebook, or invest in
better measurement, etc.
Why a landing page can have a better
conversion rate
Shamanth: We set up a landing page to describe
the product, and the landing page has a CTA button
that goes to the App Store. The advantage is that
the landing page provides a lot more context. So
longer copy, which the app store doesn’t provide.
So I think that’s one reason why that converts much
better now. But again, that’s much more effective
outside of gaming.
Making use of affiliates to bring users
to your app
Anish: If Facebook and Instagram aren’t as
knowledgeable that you’re in that life stage, you’re not
going to be seeing ads on them. If a customer is on a
baby/pregnancy oriented website, you’re getting a
better conversion rate, because they’re not being
pumped with ads from other companies who are
doing similar things. So the customer experience
might actually be pretty good there from not being too
inundated
Finding the right influencers
Grace: There are people who have relatively robust
followings and have never done partnership deals
before. They’re still approachable. We worked with
somebody who had a million followers and it was still
a very economical relationship for us. And it was their
first partnership deal and they were excited. I feel like
Tiktokers are still excited, but less jaded than the
Instagram brand.
Broken measurements are avoided
when you have good partnerships
Evan: For so many other publications, they’re
incredibly bought in audiences, there is no issue
around IDFA. And it is a flat fee. So you’re taking on
risk. But if you have the right audience, you’re able to
activate them. The ROAS I know for that particular
publisher with every one that I’ve worked with is just
extraordinarily high. So relying on other brands and
having the right placement, hopefully somebody that’s
a little bit more editorial and explains the benefits of a
product or service.
Investing on data analytics
Evan: Large brands also use really basic tactics, in
addition to GA and making sure that you’re getting
data from the ad set and the creative and the
campaign “How did you hear about us?” I’d say
having posts or just a purchase survey, on the
confirmation page or an email. Huge advertisers are
using it. It’s obviously submitted from an actual
customer and you are able to get a much better way
through upper funnel channels, have their efficacy, I
think it’s become a lot more important. And then yes, I
agree that looking at just blended aggregate numbers
and trying to isolate how much you’re spending on
one particular channel at one given time and seeing,
is there marginal efficiency overall for the business,
so we’re making these larger changes.
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07 VIRALITY

73
 The ups and downs of new
business ventures
How to set up a When you start a business, you either realize that
you’re pushing a boulder off a cliff, which is a good
winning referral thing, or you’re pushing a rock up a hill. And this
was definitely a rock-up-a-hill type of thing. The
margins were bad in the laundry business, nobody
flow wanted to fund it because there was a recent, large
company called Zooks in the area that was started
by two very senior guys, Todd Krasner, and Tom
Stemberg. They had a massive failure in the
laundry business and nobody wanted to touch it.

There is no substitute for a good

product
Referral programs work, first and foremost, if you
have a product that people love. That’s one of the
things that people forget. You can’t just tack on
virality to a crappy product, because nobody’s going
to share something that they’re not really
passionate about. First and foremost, referral
programs work when the product is good.

The importance of a contest element

We used to do programs several times a year
where it was a tiered reward program. We would
say, “Invite your friends, when they make their first
purchase, you get $25 and you’re giving them $25
to make their first purchase.” Whoever refers three
or more friends during this short period of time is
going to get an additional $50 bonus. And then
whoever refers the most friends gets something
free. It was kind of a contest tied to that. At Grabr
also there was a contest. I liked the idea of adding
in this contest element, or competition with the
referral programs. It gives people talking points
about entering for a chance to win, but it has the
referral mechanics tied in and people earn points,
dollars or rewards incentives somehow just for
participating in many different ways.

Dominic Coryell
Product Lead at Shopify

Check out the entire episode

74
 Immediate incentives gurantee a
successful referral program
I was volunteering at a dog shelter. I learned a lot
about behavior by doing that, during the time when I
was working at Talkable. You don’t train a dog to lie
down in one fell swoop. You do little motions, and
you get them to sit with little incentives. And
eventually, they learn to lie down. I think referral
marketing is actually very similar to that. Where you
have to make the user very successful early on with
little bits of feedback and rewards for just doing
positive actions, like sharing, because their first
share might not be successful. If with that first share
they’ve taken the time to share your brand and
there’s no feedback that’s positive from that, even if
it’s just showing them like their friends are clicking,
and other friends are interested, then they’re never
going to do it again. Because they’re afraid that they
have done something that might damage their
network. It’s very important if you instrument a
referral program to make sure that people who share
feel the success immediately after they share in
some capacity,

A great user experience always

converts to sales
When somebody checks out, and you show them an
overlay that covers the receipt page and asks them to
invite their friends, you have a lot of people in the UX
camp who say, “Well, that’s a terrible user
experience.” Because what happens to a new
customer that hasn’t actually tried the product yet?
We’re asking them to share, maybe they want to see
the receipt page, etc. If you look at the numbers,
though, programs that have that overlay, in my
experience, have a 5x to 10x higher referral rate than
programs where they just put it in line on the receipt
page. That makes a huge difference. So this means
you can’t really measure the damage that you’re
doing, though. It’s just annoying people. But the
numbers in sales really speak for themselves.

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 The early version of Draw Something

Inside Draw The story goes that Zuckerberg’s wife was an avid
player of Draw Something, our original browser
version of the game, which was only on the web at
Something’s that time, and a few of those games that we had on
our website. Zuckerberg in 2010 wanted to figure
perfect storm: out how to increase the network effect and increase
time spent. He thought that real-time matching
would be a real opportunity for Facebook. He gave
from the brink to us an opportunity to achieve that.

50 million installs Facebook to mobile

in 50 days Facebook to mobile happened pretty fast. Between

2010 and 2012, it went from Facebook to mobile
really quickly, we had to continuously find ways
through the game genres that we were in to create
games that people would want to play on the
platform that would be potentially viral on those
platforms.

Challenges faced in accelerating growth

Wilson Kriegel
COO at Buildstock
Check out the entire episode
I think the biggest challenge for everybody including
ourselves was re-engagement mechanics,
particularly on mobile and market penetration and
scale. Most had really sizable budgets so it was
hard to really accelerate growth, so retention was
critical. Games like ourselves where you were trying
to match people and create asynchronous
gameplay or synchronous gameplay, it was very
hard to get people to show up at the same time, or
to maintain a relationship between players.
We didn’t really crack that, until we delivered on
Draw Something itself, which was obviously just a
quarter after Puppy World. We tried to work with
carriers, the media, the press, editorial companies
and those times I would say were more static
around marketing execution around accessing
users. So you would try to go to Samsung, or if you
were trying to find a publishing platform in emerging
markets you had to go find distribution.
Draw Something’s unique gameplay
The gameplay of Draw Something was less
competitive and more asynchronous and we’d like
to say, more of an experience of tossing the ball to
each other, something that you can enjoy doing,
any family members, any friends.

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 50 million installs in 50 days
I don’t think we had defined expectations other than
the fact that we needed something to work. So it’s
different than when you’re in multiple cycles of
development and you’ve got defined KPIs and you’re
running financially viable P&L and have a lot of room
in your forecast. The game was going to go live.
We were all taken aback by the level of success.
Nobody predicted that level of success about
Fortnite, or League of Legends. When somebody
has a month to get a monster hit as a single, you
have something special, but you don’t really
understand the market conditions, or it could be a
billion dollar franchise or 100 million, or 50 million
installs in 50 days. It was obvious at the get go that
there was something special about it.
Of strong foundations in the
formidable years
I think without the foundations and all those years of
hard work and fundamentals, when the product
became a monster hit, we wouldn’t have been ready.
The product never went down. We ended up with $50
million in 50 days. We were doing billions and billions
of gameplays a month, 500 million impressions today
at our peak, over 20 million in the US, when we’re
dealing with media-rich content, we’re dealing with
visuals reviews, we’re early days in AWS. To Jason’s
credit our CTO that time and our really brilliant
engineers, we never went down once.
The extensive database the team build
which contributed to their success
The other part that was really important to how we
became successful is that we controlled the
keywords. We had built a tremendous database,
going back to our engineers, and we were able to
learn what works and what was popular and what
people were having the most fun drawing and
finishing or guessing. There was an algorithm and we
did bi-monthly iterations or bi-weekly iterations for
infrastructure purposes. There was also a very active
awareness that we have something very special, and
we pretty much dropped everything else.
A seamless gaming experience for all
That was something that was a new offering as well
as I would say in a multiplayer asynchronous
environment and nobody had done which was, you
can come back and still have your history of all the
other gamers you’re playing with.
And you can select who you want to play with again,
who you can call out to have a match with or not. And
so you can have people you knew and people you
didn’t know and establish your gaming rapport as well
as a personal rapport both of those different user flow
user spectrums if you will, versus just this is only a
network game, of my social network.
5 days at GDC
In those five days, we went from looking at $50
million rounds to being in many conversations with
Zynga, EA, and Disney. They all went into a bidding
process around acquiring a company, which started
somewhere around $120 million and ultimately ended
up at 200 million over a period of five days. So it was
a very amazing acceleration process where on one
side, we’re talking about doing a $50 million round.
On the other side, we’re talking about a company that
we thought was gonna sell for scraps for $10 – $50
million in a month or two now having conversations
about $120 million, and ultimately agreeing to a deal
with Zynga for $210 million, which is obviously public.
The push and pull that comes
with growth
The velocity drives you up, and also drives you down.
If you’re dealing with an asynchronous game, where
people’s interest is playing with other people, they
care about when people start pulling back from the
games, that means you have less game plays, and
thus, you have fewer reasons to go back to a game.
The truth about growth
I think at the end of the day, there’s no right or wrong.
But Zynga had its cycle when it went from being the
primary provider of gaming from Facebook to trying to
move into mobile and struggling to do that. You have
product cycles, you have industry cycles and platform
cycles. People just forget that that’s how a lot of
businesses function. It doesn’t make them bad
businesses or ephemeral businesses, it just means
that you’re not always going to be at the top of your
game and market conditions create cyclical cycles
and business growth and tremendous companies like
Shazam or even Machine Zone, who created a billion
dollar P&L, were never able to create Supercell- like
organizations and multiple IPs which generated
sufficient of cash flow and ongoing growth.
77
 What made Evite stand out

From the early One of the things I would say that we did really well
at Evite was really looking at the metrics and
looking at that virality, which is how many people
days of virality you invited and how many of them in turn became
creators themselves. There was tons of competition

and freemium to at the time, there was Invite Me 2, Time There, See
You There. I truly believe one of the reasons that
we went above the crowd was because we were
habit formation very focused on AB testing and constantly iterating
to improve that viral coefficient. So even though we

on mobile didn’t call it a viral coefficient, at the time, it was

always how many invitees will become creators.
That was a number we looked at. That was one of
the main reasons I think we were able to sort of, be
alive today.

Surviving the dot com bust

That wasn’t very fun. We had taken $37 million in
funding for online invitations. We were not as
focused on revenue as we should have been. We
took out billboards because that’s what people did.
We were in a position where to get the investor
value back, the best thing we could do was sell the
business. We did something very unusual – if I
remember correctly, we took an ad out on the Wall
Street Journal, saying, “Evite’s For Sale” We ended
up with two bidders.

Early beginnings at SurveyMonkey

Survey Monkey was a very amazing business.
Ryan Finley, the founder, started the company in
1999. If you ask me, I think he’s the person who
sort of invented the freemium model or one of the
earliest people to do the freemium model.

Life changing transitions

Selina Tobaccowala
Founder, Evite & Gixo
Check out the entire episode
So I sent him a note and negotiated my package. I
told him that I was an executive in Europe, so I had
to give at least three months’ notice. And I said to
number three, I’ve early signs of pregnancy. Dave
responded within minutes, and said he was
determined to build a company that could support
families, but also build a massive business, and that
building the right culture, while also being profitable
was very important to him. I got that email and I
said, this is the guy I want to work for. So I started
a new job across the continent, across a different
country, four and a half months pregnant.

78
 What defines a healthy company culture
On the culture side, specifically, the thing that I
learned and appreciated the most from Dave is that a
lot of people talk about culture, a lot of people put
their values on a wall, and then you know, write it up
and tout them, but Dave was not focused on that. He
wasn’t focused on making sure that we had them
sprinkled everywhere, he was focused on figuring out
the culture and the values that we actually wanted to
live by and how you took policies underneath that, to
make sure.

Lessons from failed tests

So every month, we would stand up there in front of
the whole company and talk about our metrics. But
we would always talk about some AB tests that didn’t
work. Dave was a guy who loved to bet and we would
always place bets in the AB tests. Sometimes he was
wrong, sometimes I was wrong, sometimes our head
of growth was wrong.

The importance of a properly

worded survey
One of the biggest things I learned about surveys
that surprised me was how you can easily bias
people with questions. I never really thought about
that. If you ask people if they agree or disagree,
most people in the US are going to agree with
something because it feels nicer to agree with
something than to disagree with something.

79

How viral content
can trigger habit
change at scale
Victoria Repa
Founder & CEO, BetterMe
Check out the entire episode
The elements for a successful business
I changed my life completely and kept persuading
people that such a dramatic career switch is not
scary. As every successful business everywhere is
built on two key elements: revenue and cost, you
focus on maximizing revenue and minimizing costs.
And lack of experience could be compensated with
ambitious productivity, and most important with the
desire to learn, grow and develop.
Content creation is not all about
creativity
I noticed that in social media, we only have
between one and three seconds to catch users’
attention as they scroll through their news feeds.
We need to pack this message but at the same
time, make it as simple as possible for the
customers’ brains to absorb it. I was surprised by
how analytical and technical content creation
might be.
People might think it’s all about creativity, and you
can literally craft everyone with your own post.
Yes, it requires a lot of analysis and data, but it’s
possible through absorbing users’ behavior and
tastes. If you want the content to become viral,
create what people want, not what you want.
Create what people find interesting and useful, not
you, not your boss or colleague. It maximizes
chances to hit your audience’s core interest.
The launch strategy of BetterMe
How did we launch it? Having a lot of experience in
content marketing, we started an intense campaign
aimed at gathering an audience interested in health
and weight loss issues on social media. We
launched a Facebook page with tons of weight loss
content to understand what people actually want
and need. After maybe 100s of posts in the
Facebook group, we gathered enough data to have
a clear picture of our core audience and what are
the most sought-after topics.
After we had enough followers, we published Better
Me’s closed app as a solution to the most urgent
problem the audience was trying to solve in this
Facebook group. That exceeded our expectations
for 10 days, we got about 100,000 installs. We
received a lot of feedback and kept improving the
testing of our solution on our audience, making it
exactly the way people wanted to see it.
80
 Connecting with the audience
What the post has to do is call for an emotional
reaction to the pains and concerns of the audience.
For example, sometimes to sell a weight loss app,
you don’t have to put a beautiful woman on it. Your
customers are dreaming to become better. You
have to put an image of a real woman with real
measurements that might not be perfect, that will
call for a reaction.

The users that successfully lose

weight
But some of those people are falling under the
pressure of social judgment and trying to lose weight
to be a better size. It’s hard to lose weight for
someone, you have to do it for yourself. People who
do it because they love themselves are more
motivated, disciplined, and persistent than people
who try to fit in with someone’s beauty standards.
And discipline is crucial in the weight loss process.
Discipline is core.

81
Conclusion
We hope the insights offered in this book have helped you take another step forward in your journey. We
also hope that you revisit this book from time to time to strengthen your strategies.

We would love to hear from you about any feedback you have for us - please
drop us a note at hi@rocketshiphq.com

And if you want to dive deeper into all of this, check out these additional resources:
➝ The Daily Ad , our weekly newsletter full of creative inspiration based on the best ads on the internet.
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and apps like BetterMe, Lingokids and FitMind(among others) to unlock ROAS and scale from creatives.
If you’re interested in engaging us to produce high-performance creative for your own games and apps,
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