How to 10x Your Revenue in a Tough Market by Paul West

subscriptions. This has become even bigger for us in 2025. I think for our new game, it's like 80% of our purchase revenue is subscriptions. It's really, really, we've really leaned into it and we try and drive a lot of conversion to it. So, yeah, that's continued to be huge for us. Um, and obviously a dollar in subscription is much more valuable than a dollar of IP because there's a repeat element to that purchase. It's 4 a.m. and we're rolling the dice but drops knowledge made of golden eyes. Felix with ads making those coins rise. Jack up designs worlds chasing the sky with the two and a half gamers the midnight crew talking UA adverts and game design too. M feeling shaku bringing the insight. We're rocking those vibes till the early day master eyes on the prize tracking data through the cyerspace skies. Felix like a wizard in disguise lift us to the high two and a half gamers talking smack. Slow hockey stick got your back. Ads are beautiful. They light the way. Click it fast. Don't delay. Uh-huh. Uh-huh.

Hey everybody, welcome to the Two and a Half Gamers podcast. No, Mate Lanceric hasn't lost all of his good looks. I am your host today. I am Paul West and I am the founder of Fun Games. And today I'm going to be taking you through a presentation that I presented a couple of months ago at a conference which went down quite well because it was about how we managed to grow 10x in a troublesome market. So I run a game studio that makes idol games. We're about 20 23 people now I think. And yeah, we managed to have a great year last year and we did specific things that helped to accelerate that growth and continues to accelerate the growth in 2025. So I thought I wanted to well I wanted to share some of this with the community and Mate gave me a great opportunity to do so. So feel free to strap in take the best leave the rest. Hopefully something's useful for you and I won't waste your time. I'll jump straight in.

Okay. So how to 10x in a down market. Aware is a very arrogant title. I didn't choose it. The conference that I spoke at chose it for me but to be fair it did draw people into the room. So maybe it is a good title. Um hi there. I'm Paul. As I said I'm the founder of fun games. The fun games consists of some incredibly talented people covering every department. We produce the games in house ourselves. We launch them, we publish them, we live ops them. And this is all possible thanks to the incredible team that we have. We are probably best known for our game called Bitcoin Miner, which we launched actually back in 2017, but really came into the focus and got a lot of attention in the last couple of years in terms of growth. And I'll show you some of those numbers in a sec. quarter million followers on socials, mostly in Discord, which is uh really helpful, but bit of a vanity metric. 15 million downloads as a studio, but here's the real number. So, we did $10 million in revenue last year in 2024 for the first time ever, and that was quite a significant growth for us as a small studio. So, as you can see, this is I actually founded the company in

2016. Um and we slowly have done things uh a little bit you know made some okay games. I think in 2019 the spike was the first merge game on the app store we which we produced. So that was quite a bit a new idea and yeah 2024 we basically did just under a million dollars in sorry 2023 we just did under a million dollars in revenue. Fast forward with 2024 included this is the gear shift change that we saw um obviously breaking the $10 million mark. But 2024 was tough, right? Why am I talking like I'm asking myself the question? Sorry, that's odd. Yes, 2024 was really tough. Um, if we ask ChatGBT, we can see the number of jobs that was lost. Always be nice to chat GBT, by the way. If they run the world one day, it's always good to have been kind in in the background. But yes, it was I'm not going to go too much into this. Everyone knows the challenges, the layoffs, and the trickiness that the whole of the gaming industry has faced. So, I will skip over this. But the real question is how do we manage to 10x when there were

these cost of living crisises and you know difficulties within the market. Well at the start of 20 20 it was a challenging time. You know we hadn't really moved the needle much in in a few years. We had a great team but we couldn't seem to execute on revenue driving products. So we did lots of work internally to see what was changing or what we needed to change to see some growth. And what we found was we were spending most of our time on things that weren't driving revenue. So, Bitcoin miner was uh over 80% of our revenue in 2023, but it was way under represented in terms of our resource and focus. In fact, we were spending the majority of our time on a new game that was completely unproven and was very risky. Everyone loved the new game, so it was kind of why we were so tied to it for so long, but it wasn't necessarily going to be driving us the results. This paired with one of my favorite quotes. Bear with me. I know I've just put a billionaire on the screen, but I really like Bezos's quotes, which is, well,

someone approached him and said, people always ask him, "What is going to change in the next 10 years?" And his feedback is, "Well, what's not going to change in the next 10 years? If we can optimize our business to things that aren't going to change, we'll have a much stronger chance of success." So, we did that. We looked internally and decided on these are the core pillars that we're going to focus on because we think they are future proofs. The first one is free cash. Everybody likes free cash. You know, especially in a challenging market, cost of living crisis, you know, those kind of things, having a little side hustle, even if it's only like $5, $10 a month, is kind of rewarding, especially if you're playing games anyway. So, we focused on that specifically. Uh, Bitcoin, sorry, Bitcoin is the next one. We choose Bitcoin because it's the only way we can do micro payments to users. So we can pay someone instantly within seconds a fraction of a cent and not have any fees for doing so. That is very innovative and an incredible use of blockchain. So yeah, that's why we use Bitcoin. Also,

Bitcoin has a magical charm to it. It can alienate people or it can really get people excited. I think some people know Bitcoin for being risky or scary or intimidating. There's a lot of people who see it as like this magic internet currency that just keeps going up in value and if I have some I'll be rich one day. Um, Bitcoin has this kind of unique pole and power that's quite useful on marketing. And mobile don't need to justify this to everyone. Uh, I think you know mobile is very well established as a huge platform. Even if it just maintains its current status, it's still going to be a huge distribution platform for us in the next decade. in H1. This is our results. So here we're seeing revenue against ARPD. So you could see month on month as we focused on these new like future proofs as we called them, we were seeing really good results. So revenue would continue to grow and this was reflected by us focusing on the product that was driving the most revenue. So ARP kept going up

as well. Hooray, we fixed it, we thought. And then we see a little bit of a dip, although it was only a little blip. And then we kept going. So overall, every month was pretty much growth, growth, growth. Um, and it was an absolutely exciting year for us to see all this expansion in the product of Bitcoin mining. So yeah, of course you're thinking, I thought you going to give us some tips. What did you actually do? Well, I split this up into a couple of sections. First, monetization. We really heavily focus on live ops. We set up every weekend and in uh we call it the midweek event live ops. So these are very very primitive setup things that actually drive quite a different experience in the game. So on the weekend you blast a rocket to the moon. You have to build it. It's just basically the same game almost reskinned and it's really really successful. It allows us to get loads of users back in on the weekends even more than typical with push notifications and the rest of it and allows us to scale significantly. So that was like a big

chunk of what helped us. Um, and we've continued to run, I think we've run over 150 events now in Bitcoin miner. So, we really believe in that and it really keeps the players engaged. So, new revenue streams is a good one. These are a couple of things to look at. Not huge, but combined can be quite meaningful. So, Playgap is a new ad network that basically monetizes your offline ad placements or so if you go to request an ad but the player's offline or the ad fails to load for whatever reason, then Playgap comes in and saves that impression being lost. It's a really cool idea. Zebedee is our partner that does the Bitcoin transactions. We have a great relationship with them. We actually almost work as an ad network for them. So, when we send them a user, it generates us income because they pay us for that user. So, that's been a great new revenue stream for us. and Wildfire, I think it's wild, getw wildfire.gg is the is the website. Little plug for them. They monetize Discord communities. So, they work with big brands, big game studios, big publishers to

pretty much put ads in your Discord, but at this point, it's not a huge revenue stream for us, but it is a great way to monetize an existing community. And actually, our players in our community love it when they get special offers or deals or new skins or whatever for engaging in the thing they love, which is gaming. Yeah, those are some new things that people might not have seen or heard about and it's probably worth checking out if you're looking to find those extra uh margin points or areas of growth. Subscriptions. This has become even bigger for us in 2025. I think for our new game, it's like 80% of our purchase revenue is subscriptions. It's really really we've really leaned into it and we try and drive a lot of conversion to it. So yeah, that's continued to be huge for us. Um, and obviously a dollar in subscription is much more valuable than a dollar of IP because there's a repeat element to that purchase. Oh, hello. Here I am. I have something very important to say. This episode is brought to you by vibe.com. Have you ever thought about TV ads and how they

are just for massive brands with multi-million budgets? Yeah, not anymore. With vibe.com, you can launch CTV ads on Hulu, Roku, Tubi, you name it, in minutes. It's that simple. Totally selfs serve. And yes, it actually drive real business results. So over 5,000 brands are already using it. So maybe it's your turn. Check out vibe.co. That's vibe.co.vibe.co. And uh enjoy. Thank you very much. Now, let's get back to the episode. So, these are the main things I'd say on the monetization side. Also, a boatload of testing. This is like I mean there's not probably any like golden nuggets here to pause the screen and read through, but we've done a lot of different testing of everything within the game. You know, running UI tests, running um new ad network comparisons. We try and only go for things that will

really shift uh the revenue. So for example, if we're going to run a economy balance test, rather than go, okay, let's drop it by 10% and increase it by 10%, we'll probably have it by 50% and double it to really find, okay, where is the margin? Let's get really extreme and then find a sweet spot and narrow down from there. But we had a very good run and into 2025 actually of successful AB tests that just kept on living lifting the the ARP out. So yeah, we just use Firebase for this pretty much with our own back end that we've had to build, but that's yeah, extremely extremely valuable and the reason why we're confident in pushing updates to the product. So uh yeah, as you can see, our ARP dial and our DAU continue to go up. I think most people who have scaled games before know that it's always quite tricky to do this in tandem to grow your user base and keep the ARP dial going up. Normally a golden cohort early on kind of just takes it and then the ARP dial shrinks. But we've actually managed to fight that growth together with ARPD

versus DAU. And actually this is even more extreme in 2025 as we've seen the APD it's actually doubled from where we are here looking at the studios DARD combined. So that's that's pretty exciting. We also leaned heavily into UA Mate will like this bit. So we took a lot of risks. Um, you know, as a pretty much like self-funded Bootstrap Studio, it's quite risky to spend a dollar and wait for it to come back. We used to pretty much want it back in 3 days. We pushed the payback windows out and just got more sophisticated with how that could work. We never went too far. I think like in the first half of the year, we never went past day 30 for us. And now we've creeped up like a bit further from there. But, um, that was something that was risky for us, especially as a studio founder uh, who pays 20 mortgages. It's like want to make sure that you can do that but there's no risk there's no reward and we would no way have scaled 10x last year without putting a lot into UA. So yeah um what mate preaches is

true. Yeah, and we focused. One of the things we did in H1 was we added so many ad networks on the user acquisition side just to see where works best for us. And by by the middle of the year, we were like, "Wow, we've got so many networks live." And we did some analysis and saw that basically 90% of our spend was on four channels. And we just said, "Okay, well, let's just shut everything else off. let's focus on these and just really, you know, try and get um as much as we can from these networks. Fortunately, they were also some of the biggest networks as well in new way. So, we knew that, you know, if we doubled one of those, it would be worth way more than, you know, doubling any of the other ones. So, that was something that we did halfway through the year, which was really valuable and it's always good. We probably should do it again now to be honest. Just reense check on have we expanded too far? Should we shrink down and just really really apply more focus to to the big networks and an investment in creatives using some creative ways to get creatives such as

hiring influencers of Fiverr or you know using AI that was something that we invested a lot more time and resource into. So this was the magic UA formula which is not sophisticated at all. Take some risks, focus on the big stuff, do a lot of creatives and subscribe to this podcast because the mate has really good insights on creatives community. Yes, this was good. We saw big growth here because of this as well. So, we do a couple of things specifically with the community that keeps them engaged, keeps them excited, you know, uh they do our QA for us. They help us localize the game in some cases. So, we do giveaways every week. We reward fan we have like fan art of the week. So if you created a really cool meme for us that we could present to you on our social channels, we we give you rewards. If you helped players in the Discord, like just players coming in going, hey, how do I do this? Or I've got a bug and you offer assistance, then we kind of give rewards there. There's kind of a few different ways we do it.

Scale, of course, that was something big that happened this this uh in 2024. One of the ways we did get upscale is by pushing to Discord from the game. So we have this mechanic in the game where if you join our Discord, we reveal a a code in the Discord every Monday. If you take that code, put it in the game, it increases your earnings by like 1% every week you do it and it stacks. So we have some players who have been playing Bitcoin miner for like two years who have like I can't do the maths on that, but a lot of multipliers on their like gold income in the game and that's a really popular feature. and if we ever forget to update it on a Monday or it's late, we are bombarded with messages like where is it? Where is it? So that's a really easy practical thing that potentially people could do. And we launched Reddit in 2024 as well in terms of just having a community on there. The organics coming in from Reddit are very good quality. So I would consider having a look at that if you uh if you're not doing that already. However, we were missing target in 2024. We

wanted to we set a 10 million target in 2024. It was a bit crazy at the start of the year as you could have already imagined to 10x but as it was going throughout the year the team and the leads were like this is this could actually happen but when we forecast what was going to happen we we were going to miss it so we needed something quite special to happen. Yeah, we were sad for a bit because we thought we were going to miss target. But then we did some really nice, this is a I guess a little plug for magic. We did a little bit of analysis on the market of like where in idol is there plans for expansion and we realized like mining and bitcoin is just too strong to ignore. So we went through that category and we saw that mining still has a very strong attraction from the marketing perspective from the art from the LTV on that theme. So, we decided to rebrand our magic mark game that I talked about earlier to be something called Idle Mine where you're actually controlling these miners in a mine mining Bitcoin. So, taking the Bitcoin mono even deeper, making it 3D, making it a much higher

fidelity game. And that launched in September, October, we started to push it. And this game went from zero to a million dollars in 60 days. And we've never had that before. And actually, now it is our biggest game. It's overtaken Bitcoin miner in 2025. and the magic team. So this was uh you know a stroke of luck but also um some great focus from the team to pull this off and you know from a honestly a weekend project of reskinning the game we suddenly found the missing revenue that we needed to hit our target which was amazing. So yeah we were back on track and on towards the target and that's actually what happened in in 2024 which was very lucky for us. So how did our 2024 actually look? Yeah, 10 million we hit the number and this is the breakdown. So of our revenue, we focused entirely pretty much on Bitcoin miner. That 15% was the prototype which is idle mine at the end of the year. So we just looked at our future proofs as I said earlier, the free cash, the Bitcoin and the mobile platform. Obviously we're not

going to start developing suddenly for PC or console as a mobile trained team, but we just really focused on those three and that helped us hit those numbers in 2024. Well, I I forecasted what would happen in 2025. Uh, but I can tell you a bit more about this as we've gone through it. We're still focusing on these three. Absolutely. We have some new games coming that lean outside of Bitcoin specifically. So, can we do this concept in a more casual market? And that's something we're working on right now, which is showing some promising results in our first stages. And that's basically it. The the kind of topline tips are like focus on what you can control. Obviously, that's a real key, but controlling your controllables is key. You can't control the market. You can't control what's going to happen with uh you know, whether VCs are suddenly going to want to be investing again. Um you can't control what game is going to do or what Fortnite does. So, just keep it within your own control. Just have a check in on what you think is your future proofs. That's uh that's something that I would really recommend

doing. That is pretty much the reason that helped turn us around as a into a growth studio. And for us it was owning a large slice of a growing niche. And that's what we continue to focus on. You know, these rewarded games, this kind of player and concept we think is just kind of continues to grow as you see from the expansion of rewarded UA platforms. These games paired with that work really well. And yeah, obviously we make games guys. If we can have fun making games, what hope other industries have. So keep it keep it fun, keep it light. And yeah, that's basically it. Thanks very much for listening. I hope it was helpful. connect with me on Twitter or LinkedIn if you have any questions. Always open to chatting with uh with with founders and game designers and builders. Yeah, hopefully that was useful. Will let me know if it is or it isn't. And uh maybe see you at a conference sometime. Thanks everyone. [Music]

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