Big data case study: Self-publishing What The Hen!

[Music] [Music] so hey hello my name is Macau as I was introduced and I came from Prague from a small startup which is here for like over two years now and I came to tell you something about how we released our first game and what were what were the ups and downs of self-publishing I changed the name of the of the slide recently because 20 minutes is not long enough to go into too many details or too much details so we just focus on how we fix our broken situation where the support of influencer marketing actually

how is this working okay so we call it allow me to make time in an indie style as I said search monkey is a small start-up was found back in 2015 we are over 15 people right now including external consultants and interns mmm I would mention something which which is on to point number four it's impressive track record and I'll talk about that a little bit later above the game like to give you a overview what server game is its line defense very collecting heroes it's based like in apps are based on gotcha and it's what we focused on is the cartoon and humorous style and it's in development for over two years and was officially released this February this is how the game look right now so it can give you

the impression sign defense you know we're like fighting against each other a little bit about the status where we are right now and where we get after the you know like after the half a year of release we are over 2 million installs and we generated over 750,000 gross revenue in dollars so far and in the half a year here you can see the the monthly revenues and increase and I'll be talking more in detail about each of the month and what we did and what leads us to where we are right now which is break-even yay a little bit of the of the KPIs and the history we can discuss I believe after the presentation if anyone is interested I can go you know like it would be better person by person because you get stuck on one spreadsheet is not as good as you'd only so are we talking about a seven-month till today and what we did to succeed

and not die because believe or not there was a time it is here when we were facing nearly bankrupt and late of this end of the studio one wise man which I met couple of months ago said the difference between startup and corporation is that in start-up you want to succeed and survive in corporation you are checking the check box so in the end of the day there is some is bad it's not your fault because you did the checkbox what we did in in a 2016 the game was in a very long soft lunch over a year we started January 2016 with iOS as you can see these are you know like those Peaks are results of user campaigns where we were testing and iterating on the product it's not looking so bad as far as you don't realize it's in hundreds of users you know only so after like a year we just were kind of how to say like stuck and

we didn't know what to do what should be the next step because I came from a corporate background and like it's awesome to work for corporation because I have an inside - you know like loads of analytics and also data and also basic instructions but the thing is that they are like a bad behavior manners which I took with me into the into the company and it like this startup is the first first for me in my entire 15 years carriers in gaming so actually it was I who said let's do iOS and let's try the featuring that was like very big mistakes thanks to the things two guys in the team we just decided like Luke after a year in soft lunch there is no way how to succeed with a strategy so let's go and try something else so we turn out and we decided let's try Android and it was one of the smartest decisions we did after like 11 months in the in the soft lunch and as you can see like those installs are in you know like thousands they are

no not any more in hundreds only end of the January look very promising for us and you know like the result of the AP tests and result of the of the changes we did for super positive for us so we were really looking forward and we said yeah right now it seems like we are able to you know like release the game world well and see what happens so yeah that's it like we built our own sink PvP splitscreen booth and we were you know like having that classical approach to the marketing like though the community you know like have the visibility you know like get two people on board see how they're you know like we'll be engaged by the game we also you know I try the classic PR campaign so like let's build something unique and share it with the people so the question is do you think that approach work no not at all actually it didn't work so back to our situation like one thing

which is a key learning and the whole process is that the data we got in AP tests and from the build in February set a super like super positive mood in a team so no one really saw a red flag which was releasing a big ball change of the game and the gameplay itself right after a release which nearly destroyed the whole studio and you know as you can see in the point number four like our original 4.6 rating on Google drop down in a couple of days to fall and that also result in to a huge loss of revenues which we are able to generate so far before and the for studio and the whole project real face I would say like volley of that so

when we were here evolved like a like the year ago and either in the second half of our soft lunch we were looking for like answers because the game was out I am in like in the soft lounge we did a couple of iterations we did like bait user campaigns each month but devils like not a big clue what to do next how to how to polish the game how to you know like break that like a kind of a low performance during the soft lounge and we came here and we just saw the most of the talks were like a really high level like you should succeed by fixing your core loop we don't like it it's not really enough for someone who came for advice so what I'm going to share with you later in the presentation is really like a detailed data what we did after the unsuccessful release in February and a really pessimistic March

we because we are a startup being with the corporation we have to survive somehow so that's what we did and with the help of with the help of our friends from the industry who you know like introduce us to a very scale free-to-play consultant we were able to change the tide and to leave the wallet of that which we faced in March so as you can see one of the thing like we actually work in like two separated lines one of one was focus on marketing and find out the way how we can effectively get new users and the second thing is what to do with the game how to fix that sorry like up which we did in in the February lease so as you can see in April we started to work with externals who finally understood a free-to-play so they helped us to interact with the economy and I can also explain later what it is in real what steps we did not like we fix it and now

right now we are okay so as you can see one of the like our marketing efforts well focused on three three directions one is closed for small studios which is getting featured it's kind of like a mantra will be featured video get a million installs and here if you have millionaire millionaires the second one was influencer marketing because we felt there is a huge opportunity and again we were introduced to very interesting people who helped us a lot in the time and the third one was a plastic paid user acquisition this is a result of like a first testing campaigns with also which also set a super positive mood in the team because would we say what we saw and also cost like five hundred per video we were a really positive couple of days which was awesome and it was hoping that we might be able to scale it up invest more and that you know right the scale will be

same so we'll get two times three times four time more money do you think it's it work like that no it's not actually so yeah after after like two months of the like desperate said moved and you know like thinking about the suicide we just found out that somehow he made it somehow means a lot of stuff a lot of focus a lot of hard work and support for the you know like the friends which I meant to mention before and we were able finally to you know I come up to some nice flow of revenue of the income so and also what happened that the guys will join us those free to play and consultants they saw an obvious issues which we had in the in the core gameplay loop and in the economy so as we call it there was a lot of flow hanging fruits which we can grab and just fix where we were

may super-positive and even if even even more than ever before as you can see this is part of the achievements I have still on my telephone because you know I got like dozens of them because each day we passed something so that was really like a super positive for us we got over a million installs and we got finally over 150 gross revenue all time so like no more months wait like 15,000 K we did we did what more in June one of the big first a/b test of the ball change in the game with those with this fixed economy we get its fruit because we just we just targeted to 80,000 per month and we did 124 with everyday 55,000 per day I of course per day and it was still you know

like beginning of the of the grow this guy over there in the middle of the picture is so far so far our most successful youtuber and it's a guy who is driven most of our revenue so far and it's also one of the things which I want to mention you know to the end of this to the end of this presentation because like we more and more folk used on the YouTube marketing and we saw that in like those like cheaper campaigns can generate like a technically lot of money in comparison to its cost and for the first time in the history we just tried something bigger and we went for even for a year which was over ten thousand dollars per the testing campaign and so far it was one of the most successful step like here you can see all together in

that time 130,000 installs including organic 45 tons from you know brought just by that player and he also helped us to increase the rating so far because the game these days the game keeps a four-point 72 star on Android and we have over 100,000 ratings so far in that half a year the result of that campaign also was that we owned Italy for a moment unfortunately the sad thing is that it's only intially so far so we're still waiting for France Germany England and us again joon-suh promising you know like we're passing another in our milestones for example 73,000 a years and finally discussing almost successful months so far which was July after like

hard work three months changing the game changing the economy you know like doing HR shift within the team you know what getting more people on board and you know focusing heavily on the influence marketing and starting with paid you a campaigns we achieve nearly 200,000 growth revenues and yeah we tested user acquisition campaigns here as you can see is the impact of the of that super engage youtuber with who's working with us till now and what we also tested was that if the following campaigns with the same youtuber can work and actually yeah they can and they are bringing a lot of new traffic each of that peak is a video from the same youtuber in Italy here's the effect on our elaborating as well couple of couple of details of our

KPIs but I believe like this one is more important but you can see built $0.99 as the older build built 1.3 is the new build including all the changes and fixes and economic we did for example I think which those external you know like designers identified was and from place data for the heroes because our game is about collecting heroes so what we did before was linear a linear line of growing know Exponential's start grow in heroes while we had a linear pay in coins which means that people don't have any reason to buy excellent level it up so this was this is one of the example which we fixed and which we identified thank to these guys and like it also it was also one of the thing why we were able to see even the server day seven retention grow as well as the Arco Grove

like nearly 100 percent we also started to do my couple of UA campaigns there for us also positive the thing is that our game so far is we are finally behind the break-even point and we are generating profit unfortunately margin is so small that we are not right now able to scale up the ua campaigns and try something really huge with a big impact it's it's too risky so caprile fails and key learnings be some more about the development the development nodes one of these is like don't try to break the standard and we did couple of decisions which were driven by for example that corporate

background which got us into like a dead ends and it was extremely painful why I would say like we paid for that by the moved in the team and we also paid by the real money of course because we need in the end of the day pay the people for their work iterate fast and frequent that's something which is mostly in the high-level pitches which I saw the true is that there is a really huge truth behind it because what we got in like stuck in and here comes the story which which I was which I was facing the prof weeks ago in other pitches we always describe ourselves as industry veterans and one of my close friends and one of our lead client engineer told me look Macau maybe it's time to just delete industry veterans from auto pitches and I said why and he told me because we are veterans but by age not by delivery and you know like that's the true like so iterate fast and frequent like it's true and it needs to be done what we did

actually we did for example I about change for three or four months to just to find out that it perform much worse than the old version some hard facts about the evaldo influencer in pains it has the highest retention so far out of all the channels which we tried organic in Taiwan user user ua campaigns influencer marketing and and like Facebook invites for example if you get a great youtuber he can help you a lot if you get a youtuber who do it really for money has happened to us like a week ago when we were you know like put placing our bed for us market it will just go through everything you build before for a couple of months and that's actually like one of the downsides which we which we just

saw it's quite hard to predict the impact of the youtubers and of the of the campaigns that they are doing like we did over 50 videos in last six months we did we worked with over 20 youtubers so far it's it's about 60% or A+ but most of the mid low margins it's 40% total loss some of them extremely painful because the profit which we which we generated in last two months we lost in three days a couple of soft facts it's extremely difficult to work with some of those guys they are nice they can bring a lot of money they can cost you a lot of money but to find and to have an agreement is sometimes extremely difficult and although most of them should be professionals sometimes to me

it's more like you know like kids with money rather than professional partner in a discussion and cooperation and building in order to knowledgeable about the annuity game and impact and for us in the end of the day the revenues what's good it this war with some of them to work long term and really use them for example like once per week for a couple of months because they're still bringing money even after four months for now some of them oh the sauce I thank you very much so just to wrap it up we were in a situation which was really not so optimistic for us by a work on a specific task which was getting someone who understand free to play a free to play design we were able to fix the divorce issues it was mostly because our game is in the end a about data and a hold and how to end the content and how a space so direct work

on these tasks helped us to fix the issues and out of all marketing tools so far influences work for us the best there is a flip side and there can be a huge price if you not fit because those guys and their audience require and expect something so that's one of the like one of the biggest you know like learning and it's that's it 19 minutes we have fun ready for questions we got any questions for Bobby Hill there we just got time for one we get bass also right there anyone would look much closer than me nope meat hello thank you nice talk just one question is if you could go back in time when you first started working with influencers is there like one or two pieces of key advice you would give to yourself I would say definitely don't

hope it's the only way how to you know like get the coverage and how you get how you get the players into the game because would we did in a desperate time people tend to just you know like mmm identify an opportunity like the only way how to save something it's like a kind of a Messiah Complex or something so always think in a critic way and you know like always count if it's even worth or not and if the if the if the decisional just doing or just making is worth in next couple of weeks sorry it's maybe a bit confusing but the

thing is that in that time for us influence and marketing look like something especially after the first testing campaigns it looks like something which is like which is it it will it will allow us to do a cheap CPI cost or even like ECPI because the engagement is really huge in from organic and it's driving a lot of organic traffic but it's always but there is always something which is like a cost so we paid five hundred and we got back fifteen hundred we told it if we pay ten thousand we'll got you know like back thirty thousand last time we pay nearly twenty and we got back three so just be be careful and don't don't you know I take it as like it's it's it it's working on low scale we just gave up pay more money and it will it will done the job it's not like that it's not so cheap [Music]

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