Polka Dot CEO on betting the studio future on one influencer

[Music] my name is Alyssa Marie laksa I'm founder and CEO of poccadot studio just about about the title I've done about 20 pitches in my two years a CEO of a company I was three minute pitches but I've not really done with longer talks and this is definitely out of my comfort zone so I decided to challenge all 2019 and have some of his talks and decided to start with pocket camera London and I needed to decide on my top topic for the talk in November and let me tell me tell you something about the situation of our studio in November if all working all eight of us were working hard on doing the planning for soft

launch of our first title trendy stylist which was big influencer in Russia and we didn't have a contract with that influence and we were running out of money a studio and also we were raising funding but it didn't look very good so at first point in beginning of November I really felt like we were betting a whole studio future on one influencer but hey quickly about myself I started my gaming career at Digital Chocolate it's actually 2007 not that early but I worked in HR and first fell in love with people doing games and we are kind of my kind of crazy but it's I'd really enjoyed the people and we'll also started enjoying the whole concept of making games everything about it I just loved mobile games and everything getting titles after cleats and couple of kids I ended up working for a small the Finnish startup called up star and

the same people who started up star way actually in 90s did stardoll name thing it's um it was a teenage sub paper-doll heaven but had like 200 million players and some poets on web site we wanted to bring back to mobile we did a game with flash graphics in about half a year got million downloads with zero mean but became didn't really monetize so well so the founders just decided to drop it mobile wasn't anything for them but for me it was very eye-opening I serve at most of the game companies most of the game studios are full of guys guys are trying to figure out what type of new gaming experience we could create for guys but a half of mobile game players are women and I just believe it was not enough new experiences for women so that's why I wear my own company's poker the studio to create this new type of

experiences for women this is our team we company was as you see it's mostly female surprise we found it in March 2017 we are eight people full-time in Helsinki Finland and we have mighty eagle Pizza West Ibaka as our investor and advisors of a lucky inverted Court and let's start with our first game idea what we wanted to what time before a game we want to develop I believe that women we most of them all look like some of them don't consider them players I also believe that when you blend some real-life elements into the gameplay it becomes more meaningful and more like engaging for female players bases were some of our guesses and we wanted to build a game with woods and mobile game with real fashion real influences make

it kind of a part of your daily lifestyle and it's on prototyping we ended up with a game but looks and feels like Instagram but has a proven free-throw loop in in it let me quickly just shortly introduce the game it's a free to play core loop is but everybody has their avatar you style your avatar to enter the game challenges other players they vote on all entrants to the challenges so it's a PvP game and the next day you get the results how well you fared against other players and based on how well you prepare you get loot boxes with cash gems to get clothes and tokens to buy new hairstyles and makeups the second loop we did it was the social that comes from Instagram when you post something you get reactions from other players they like you they follow you they visit you and all this interaction it gathers also towards loss and rewards so you play together and I really

see to like exceptionally things about this game one is but every second but I play it I feel that the game is social I'm always playing with somebody I'm not playing it even anything I do I see reactions I have my notifications oh my god somebody liked me so it has the same type of engagement vast as Instagram and the second thing is because it has realistic it all the clothes are real and investing we even saw a brand say I am at least fashionable person in a world but by playing one year and a half this fashion game I started seeing trends I knew what's in fashion at the moment and one day I was walking in Moscow and I saw a dress and I thought oh my god hang up on us so I actually recognized brands and I went shopping and I happen to buy the exact same shirt at Zara what I use a lot in our game so we saw where some of cool things about the game but as you know gave me making games

it's it's pretty tough and we also making a free-to-play game it's super hard but we were making something a bit more we were making it also blends retail and real fashion into it and there's no not a lot of kind of we needed to figure out a lot of things by ourselves also using Instagram as a progression and meta game it's kind of nice to figure out a lot of things by ourselves we started testing the game in January 2018 and by summer our like our numbers were really good but they were not exceptional and not just not good enough as you never good is not enough in mobile games and I said we were kind of running out of money and we needed to do something uh-oh unscrew verse but luckily enough because of our investor Pizza vest Ibaka we got too nervous Russian influences

sasha spielberg we already Peter had worked with her during Rovia time and they had like great results so me and pizza already in February last year we flew to meet Sasha and her manager and we had a handshake deal but when the game is ready let's soft launch it together in Russia and see what type of impact we can have with it so I fit aside it but ready or not let's set it off lunch for November and let's do it wait idea of objective for let's see how adding a big influencer into this type of a game how does it affect the KPIs and how does the UI work how what are the cons and how everything goes plus we wanted to really prove what type of a big impact we can have in one huge country with just one influencer and get enough players and enough data to also test start talking with brands and prove or disprove blending mobile games with e-commerce

so our launch plan was pretty simple we created an event to the game it's it's a normal regular event that we have every month event purse was branded for Sasha so event has its own mini game with a board game type of a mechanic it has its own challenges and its own event shop and we branded but all for Sasha so the visuals where has the challenges for life where challenges had her Instagram pictures and we actually went even farther and branded the whole game for Sasha say that her likeness was our icon and the splash screen had it so it was during that two weeks of Sasha of soft lounge it was such as game we had some major concerns before the soft lunch about two weeks before soft lunch we still had no contract with Sasha we had a handshake but have a name on the paper and

that was we had already done two months of work on creating this events localizing became too Russian like doing everything but no contract he also has of a very tight development schedule we had some concerns but how our service will fare this we used to have about a couple of hundred players at most and now we were hoping for much more and became a super server heavy and we also didn't really have resources to test the game very thoroughly and the third finger or mille thing but we were running out of money so how did it go week before the soft launch and have a contract and the russians they just stopped communicating with us i just couldn't reach them anyhow so my only hope for us to get pizza on board and try to go through him and we happen to be in shanghai together and we finally got Sasha and she said

yeah yeah I will make it happen let's but let's postpone the launch by one week us ok let's postpone it but try to make the contract and then one week before the news or soft launch dates they started negotiate the price let's double it very Russian way but at that point I said let's just go let's just do it we've put so much work into it and four days before the soft lunch we finally signed the contracts I finally could soon I have to admit for a couple of weeks I didn't really sleep [Music] on technical side we launched the game of Friday and our tech team was sitting very happily drinking beer and clicking like fingers good-looking on dashboard everything is done there next morning we work we woke up to a total catastrophe our game service are we're running on firebase and firebase had this weird quota we gave us and if you be enough

but in the morning it we had 95% of that quota used and it was rate rising and we knew it's like if we hit 100 hundred percent it will just scramble all our dates and we can't fix that in days because like just all our play player data everything there will be totally screwed and so luckily we had some technical things that we could do like we tried to slow down going up it was giving weekend Saturday so nobody was really answering us from us and so we paid I think thousand euros to upgrade our support to the maximum I got a hold somebody in Australia who opened quota at the point but it was 1994 0.2 percent so it was so close but when it opened up I honestly cried it was actually very mistake the quota should have been a hundred thousand and it was only five thousand something I

not very technical but it was they almost broke our company we had a couple of bucks also but we fixed first during the weekend out sex him did overtime but already okay I skipped a couple of slides but so the test results were pretty awesome Sascha did exceptionally good work she did a super engaging a fun video and followed that with the Instagram post and so out of his 600,000 views eleven percent or ten to eleven converts it and then to download the game so if we got to top 10 game in Russia on both platforms got 100,000 downloads all together during kick that race like it's really very nicely our day one also all the rest of the numbers rose nicely and I think yeah it was a very good success and this story has a happy ending fake got

the funding so the studio is say again and silver next such situation so a bet paid off and the next step for our slaves we are getting away from firebase we don't trust those guys anymore building on our back end so that tech team learned a lot on this and we are also prototyping on a new game we decided like we've been doing a dress-up games for month and a half so if we all we have learned during a month and a half if we could now build a perfect dress-up game what type of game it would be I think it's something pretty interesting are planning to test that in March and also bring trendy stylists do a new test launch on trendy stylist together with the bigger brands but we are in negotiations that's me thank you very much

[Applause] terrifying honestly then we had like fixed it I ice in the floor and I cried I was so stressed VADs you had to call the mighty eagle in yes luckily I can always call the mighty eagle and he will fly to save us you know you were very dependent on that particular influencer you had connections with them but you know I mean is there sort of a piece of advice you'd give to people working with influences in that way are we is it just that slightly in distress analyzed to the same level yet or is it just their way of working is so celebrity style but it just means that you have to think differently yeah I don't know because I have no experience besides face but definitely they are the celebrity we couldn't even

had access to this type of celebrity without a contact they just don't listen to small studios and of course they they are bomani mating machines like that's the thing but they think they think everything how much money it will to me and our offering like we didn't offer them any money it was the rev shady on Russian revenue so it was a bit of a bet also for them but I should have just pushed for the actual act much like harder and not trusted them I think I was just too kind of trusted I should have just flown in with the freaking paper and not left from Russia before I had it signed I should have been filing it's an interesting lesson for a lot of people in general it's like you know where there are different sort of pressures of priorities and these in these individuals and you know a lot of them are necessarily trained businesspeople as well and we not talking about Sasha but I know a lot of people working with

you know influences and it's about really and helping them learn about what we need is an industry in order for them to get the best value out of that to you that's also like what we are building if they want to do a game like intersection of games to some brands we need to learn and like talk with the brands they don't like Bell warming to the games but still using a game as parts of like ok I'm launching this big thing I have my Instagram I have my and I have this game where I have an event and like engaging event with influencer that's already worse for us and our brand but this is very new thinking for them so if you really need to educate and see and it we face a bit of a hen and egg paths unless we have millions of users they don't really listen to us but at some point makes it challenging well that's what I actually love about games it's challenge after challenge but it's keeps you honest so did anyone have a last

question oh it's whatever now that you've got the sort of like one deal now sorted or Sasha where comes to get into this could you using that as sort of like a like there we can show this works from what we've already done so it's making it easier to sort of set up future deals yeah I think so because we have like that's what one of objective of doing a soft launch you wanted to see how it works with our type of game and this type of an influencer lifestyle influencer so if you have the numbers and now we just need to prove that it's also financially viable for these influences and now that we can actually calculate after we know how our game makes money so we can calculate and we can make decisions on how much we are actually willing to pay to them so this was like super important data for us and we are much wiser and can start like making deals fourth edge of our

developments definitely great well thank you very much okay thank you [Music] you