How Pixonic grew revenues for Walking War Robots from $0 to $1M a month

[Music] hello everyone thank you for coming my name is Philip blood cough and I'm CEO at big sonic company first of all I would like to make a short intro to our company exonic was based in 2009 in Moscow we have three offices headquarters based in Moscow and two smaller offices in Belgrade and Berlin currently we employ than 100 people and I like to mention our course core approach to business it's analytic approach to solving problems and [Music] attitude to games as a service it means that we make constant updates during several years to entertain our players and improve gaming experience and some

words about our product that allowed us to grow so quickly were robots we change the name from the walking war robots just to shorten it was released in April 2014 all the data you can see at the slide one thing i want to mention that we almost doubled these numbers last month I mean numbers of revenue the day I stayed the same so this is a MMO online shooter game where you play six versus six so first gloms comes with issues in my experience I came I came across the fact that when we launched war robots it had great metrics but I needed a team to develop it so the team costed money and we don't we didn't have money at the time and our office was a way too small

this is a vicious circle when you don't have money when you have great products and when you're marketing our eyes are nice but you can do nothing we suffered from slow growth for several months as well as a weak brand awareness because experts was simply afraid to join the company they knew little about so the first thing I needed to get over it's the lack of money I I looked to the market and there were three options first of all it's investments investments is fine but if you rely on the VCS you will experience it capital dilution it's an option and I worked on it but also I looked at their market for the another office second one is a credit law and loans but banks didn't actually

understand our model and yeah banks don't understand model of the games they're pretty afraid of it and the last part is factoring it helps us to reinvest in tremendous speed the problem is that when you have a product and universe 50k dollars you can get 100k back but in period of 50 or 45 days due to a lag in the parent of the app store so that's why this kind of record recycling helps us to grow fast now when you have product you have to and you have a cash flow you can think about growing your company from 0 to 1 million dollar revenue 2 million during etc I just want to give you several tips that will help you to overcome the problems

because in our experience there was a lot of problems and some of the tips are quite surprising even for me if I told myself them right now ok so the first thing you need to be to be confident in your product don't just take words of a game designer so that the product is going to be awesome it's not right you need to have a reliable system of analytics so to be confident in numbers the same comes to marketing because you need to understand the weather marketing is efficient or if or not [Music] index Wanek we tried to launch our product as early as possible to understand basic metrics we forget everything except retention of the first hour and Thursday after this we monitor

players for 7 or 14 days only then we look at MPU and then at our PPO the typical mistake of hundreds of developers that we spoke with that they try to boost their basic metrics of their game boost their revenue by agent high level content client content while their retention rate of the first day is between 10 or 15 percent this is wrong without the product you can't grow but without a team you can't build a product so the key is training your team you need to spend hours and hours explaining your team what is a business value of each feature and try to explain how your business works so and don't forget about the things that really matter matters it's the emotional connection and fun that you

and your team creates for players so if everyone in your team understands what he is doing and why there is no chance when wrong features come to the final product also encourage standing new things you can provide your team one day free just to look at the new technologies for example or new ways of creating stuff and be open for changes because specialists know how to do the product and you need to listen to them another important problem that you will experience it when you start with a small all team of specialists I hope this specialist is really not is really experts and then you start to expand your team you need to think in advance how you will get a team of managers and whether you will hire them or whether you will teach your specialist to become managers but don't forget that not all specialists are willing to become

managers because managing people it's a different work and then creating a great product this is very important to understand which species is going to be manager or not okay so mmm marketing when it comes for marketing your product and you have a great high quality product Marketing is the only way of boosting your revenue it's the only driver of your revenue so first of all you need to get the analytic system to understand whether your marketing brings your positive revenue and when so yes of course there a system like Poland this is it will help you to reinvest fast to get revenue fast but if you make mistakes in calculation how much money will get back or when you will get monitors back you can end up in the red also the typical mistake of the hundreds

to do so again that when they spend all their money on luncheon product just realize that they don't have enough income to cover basic company costs market has grown the CPI's are high there is no possibility to grow without markets and marketing cos must have so we need to think in advance how you will increase your revenue only the only exception is that you are in the developer of several people and you don't need to mention a well stuffed team this tip is quite surprising for me but I would strongly recommend to think about your brand awareness from the start of course when you are small stool you don't have enough money for public relations but there are there ways to get into the

media sphere first of all be open share openly your expertise in case of the pig sonic we share the expertise of the PvP game expa cific of creating the game of our product and the game the game in develop community was really impressed by this and we got nice feedback without a company brand it will be extremely hard to get good experts as I already told you that people are simply afraid to join company they know nothing about also when you have a nice brand you can speak directly with all the rest developers and find out how they solve problems so you can move forward much faster and to continue moving forward you need to experiment always so I think that's attitude when you create at least all the ideas you want to test and run tests

as soon as possible with the lowest resources required is key to get an understanding the way you can move when you can push your boundaries of course mistakes will happen but believe me overall profit will cover all the costs much more and start with the smallest experiments available because you teach you study faster when you make a lot of experiments for example in pig sonic 20% of revenue comes from Japan and this is the result of a spontaneous test that our marketing director made to try some traffic in Japan and this is a result and the result is that we have great presence in the Asian and Japanese markets so and again about analytics system without analytics system you can't measure anything and you cannot

make nice conclusions whether experiment was fine or not okay thank you this that's all if you have questions I would like to answer them [Applause] [Music]