Session: Bootstrapping Formula – Gamelight's Path To Success - Günay Azer, Gamelight

[Music] good Asa from um game light who's going to do what the screen says um and talk about boots drapping formula so good I please take the stage thank you thank you everyone for joining uh yeah I will be talking about bootstrapping and how we bootstrapped multiple companies including gameel light um let's go with this short introduction so I'm gai I have more than 10 years experience in Mobile gaming and attic Industries and I launched three companies all headquartered and based in Hamburg Germany and I'm also founder of gam light which is the largest rewarded mobile marketing platform in the

market um so when we were coming up with an idea we wanted something that will solve the problem for UA because before Gamel light we already had mobile app companies and we did UA and we saw that it's not optimized uh things are not easy to do for example finding the right channel even getting the contact setting everything up launching and then optimizing because you need a lot of manual work and routine work to make it done and we came up with an idea of doing the rewarded marketing which would be AI driven for optimization and Rewards so we built our own AI algorithms two of them and we also do self optimization in real time so you don't need to manually check things it will optimize itself based on the data it gets um now we are the largest reward marketing platform we got a lot of awards um and primarily for best mobile marketing tool or best AI algorithm within the last two years we got like 20 plus and we are ranked everywhere like ABS index or singular index quite high now

um okay bootstrapping um before you decide doing bootstrapping you should decide if that's something for you because there are quite a few disadvantages coming first being the mental pressure and risk because if you don't have investment this basically your livelihood and the money that you spend and if you do it wrong you might go basically bankrupt go to work and just waste your money plus there's no other company behind you there's no investor behind you so someone could support you for example for finance or HR topics or someone who would share the ideas on the projects that you're working on so the whole risk and the whole uh pressure is on you personally um you also have competitive disadvantage because most of your competitors probably have investment especially in this industry I feel like 95% companies would have an investment and grow this way um at least initially two and you would if you don't do this your competitors would go faster and um they could overcome you and then you also have limited opportunities for experiment uh because with limited

budgets you can't simply go crazy with the new ideas that you got pump in money and test them out this is not possible you should take it slow step by step and sometimes this limits what you can do but it also comes with a lot of benefits which in my opinion is uh bigger than the disadvantages that's why we've been bootstrapping too so first of all you maintain the full control of your company first it's uh financially motivating because you basically own the whole company and every margin and revenue that it makes all of it plus you also have a complete control over decision making you don't have to make reports to anyone explain your decisions what you do why you do or check your ideas with them if they would be fine with this you can decide anything you want to do to grow faster uh that also means the process are easier fast decision making is fast and um you basically grow much faster in this way if you have right ideas to push um this also results in usually very optimized product in our case for example we had to come up with things that would work we couldn't have just a par product in

the market we had to come up with something that would be the best to grow otherwise we would lose to our competition um this resulted in a lot of product updates a lot of ab tests but eventually getting there uh to make it work now how can you decide if bootstrapping could be a good idea for you there are a few things that you have to kept in mind first of all you should have a very very clear monetization plan um that's very detailed so it shouldn't be something like yeah I will get users and make money with in purchases or ad monetization that's not a clear plan it should be very specific how much RP you will make how much LTV what kind of R and it should be backed by data um your performance your business should also be very performance driven so you should make sure that if you spend some money you should get this money back or more so that you can be profitable and additionally your profitability cycle should be quite short this is something that is also common in this industry because if you launch a game and you have a year of raw cycle by the time you

get your money back you will obviously lose all of your money and you will go bankrupt so you should aim to have a short profitability Cycles ideally 30 days 60 days maximum otherwise you can't make it work um one thing to mention which happens quite often in the industry which I see um a lot of companies a lot of mobile apps and games they launch they assume that virality could be their plan so they modation plan is that I will launch the game I will acquire 100 users and they will tell other 50 users because my app is amazing and they will bring more and then they will say another 50 users 100 users and I will keep on growing or I will get a partner and they will tell others and I will just go big because the app is amazing this is not going to happen before this talk I checked there are 2.1 million apps on Google Play 1.8 million on iOS store so there are 4 million apps and there are maybe 10 apps that went viral purely not based on performance stream businesses and chance are that your business will not be this so if you mon ation plan includes any

virality element you should remove all of these virality elements and look at the data again what you have now in the monation in the monation plan so don't rely on vity this not a business model now um there are easy ways to Define if you can bootstrap your company um so first of all it should be profitable on low scale because you start low you will not go with millions of budget spending and making it work it will be low uh I will come to the first question in a moment it's about finding the right co-founder and the second and third questions are more important so second one is for a b2c business if you have a b2c business and you can make it work with 300 users roughly it can be 200 300 400 but if you can make it work with low amount low number of users then your idea can be boot strappable or if you have a business that is B2B business and you can make it work with five clients or four clients or six clients then this is a bootst strappable idea it means you can make it work but if you

need million users for your whole concept to work it means you can't bootstrap you need an investment you need to hire a team you need to spend on marketing this way you can then grow but if this you can't do you probably is a need to adjust your plan your monetization plan come up with another idea or you can then look for investment and if you get answers as a yes then yes you can bootstrap now um finding co-founder I think this is the most important thing when you bootstrap I made a mistake with my first company and I was like I know everything I can just launch the company I'm self motivated I'm I'm fine I will just push it it's pretty much I I wouldn't say impossible but it's very very close to impossible to be a solo founder to have all the skills that you need mental capacity to actually pass through the pressure and actually make it work so finding the right cofounder is the most important thing and it's probably 80% of the deal done if you

have the right co-founder and what I mean by this first of all you should be able to get along you should be able to discuss things uh without uh arguing who is right who is wrong but coming to the right decision to the final decision what's the best and this is usually quite difficult to find in general I usually adse that to find your co-founder among your ex colleagues because you already worked with them you know how they work you know how they discuss are you on the same page usually the way you discuss things so you might have different ideas but you should be able to discuss the ideas and then second very important is to cover all the skill set that you need so for example if in our business if it's mobile app and gaming you need to have text skills coding skills so back end front end potentially Q QA devops uh design business marketing bi Finance product so those eight skills are the core you can't launch a business if you don't know how to do Finance because you have to report it but at the same time you should know how to code and build an app and how to design it and potentially do sales and marketing and promote it so so those eight skills should be fully

covered by you and your co-founder and if it's not covered you should try to find another person the third person I would do more because if you have four or more you usually argue quite often to so two to three I think would be ideal um and then once you start growing once you start getting things going you would need some other too for example if you have a lot of sales activity you hire salesperson you should start knowing how to do HR how to do recruiting how to use all of those platforms do the admin PR topics creative creation office events and so on so it adds more and more but if you bootstrap you need to cover this because you simply can't hire a team at least initially then um once you have your co-founder you have your IDE validated you can launch how do you launch uh this is also a very common mistake like some when founders ask me hey I'm have this idea I'm building an MVP and I have I know what I'm doing I hire the team I'm paying Outsourcing I hired a team who

will do this uh this is not going to work most probably because if you are launching an MVP it should be absolutely as as fast as possible you can't wait for weeks or you can't wait for months to make it work uh because eventually you will waste off your budget and it might be something that's not good so I will come to this in a moment um so you should do Le startup methodology and whatever updates you do to your app they always should be based on data not your opinion and with your founder you should always absolutely we should find who is uh not who is right but um who has the better solution to make it work which is quite difficult uh because um yeah like Founders usually tend to believe that they have the right idea they know what it should be because they come up with idea they want to launch it the way they want but you should be able to be open that you are wrong and uh the other person might be right now launching an MVP so absolutely first thing you should do try to launch MP as fast as possible as long as it

works as long as there's it doesn't have to have any extra features but if users can download the app or if clients can start using it you should launch it as soon as possible and then immediately start doing updates So based on the feedback first 100 users 200 users doesn't matter more update more information you get from users more data you get you start updating your app or the product um and you should do it very fast for example in the beginning we would do app update twice a day we would do ab test simultaneously at the same time on multiple user levels to make the product better and then you should rely on data not your opinion because your opinion is just one User it's not the opinion of all the users it's not the opinion of what people want to use if you do it based on your opinion you will have a app that you would love to use that is amazing for you it's a great fit but not for everyone else um how to do data driven approach first you accept that you are most probably wrong because you do a lot of updates you will have to change up quite a lot and most probably you will be wrong

eventually and it's more of it happens quite often than you would think because as a Founder you should find the direction to have a vision like okay we want to launch this kind of updates maybe this kind of product but as soon as it didn't work with a very very fast product update you have to let it go you can't just insist on doing the same thing you have to rely on data and if it doesn't work let it go you are wrong come up with something else because what users think well what your clients think eventually is more important than your own opinion now we have a hot takech here um we don't do calls um that's quite rare I would say especially in our industry because everyone want to have networking calls get to know each other share opinions or if you especially if you start growing you will have those uh for example your clients will want to have call your service providers or extra some other people that want to pitch or some other Founders who will ask you to jump on a call to exchange ideas and brainstorm about the industry we told not all of it we don't do any calls at

all the only exclusion is when we personally think it's beneficial for us there's no way to do it in writing and we have to do this then we do this but this happens very very rarely so we don't do calls because this also brings you full sense of achievement right especially if you are a fer you usually have a bit higher ego than others and you want to feel that your idea is good and you start making Revenue so you start talking to others and they your IDE is great your product your company is good so more you do those calls you keep your yourself busy during the day doing pretty much nothing just feeling good about yourself and this way obviously your company will not grow you will just keep on thinking how great you are but your competitors will overcome you because they actually work on the product um so we don't recalls and we switch to writing pretty much for everything um because why first of all if you have something urgent or even not urgent just like normal process going on it's much better to do it immediately in writing than trying to find the time that will work for both sides agree on scheduling and then jump on a call for

half an hour to discuss this this doesn't happen it happens immediately as soon as you write the email or a chat um this is more precise I absolutely hate calls because you on the call people just talk how they wish and they don't have to actually summarize their SS in a sentence which is way more precise and less point to have mistakes uh if you do it in calls people can missp speak or they might just say something not organized and then you understand it wrong um this cause a lot of mistakes plus you can also refer to it later let's say after 3 months 6 months or 12 months if you need something some information from this you can always open the email and check it you don't have to remember or check your notes anymore what happened uh that's why we switch to writing uh with the team with Partners the only excusion again our account man just say for example work with clients because they they need to have calls to discuss but we personal as Founders we told not to calls and yeah all of this in together that I mentioned result in a very high growth for us as a company uh we we were

bootstrapped a bit more than two years ago and uh right now we are number one rewarded source and absolite performance index globally across all genres we are also number two across multiple genres and GEOS for all channels together so not just rewarded but also social channels or video networks and obviously all reward channels we are above them in certain areas such as casual gaming in Western Europe or Japan and Korea and we are also on the latest singular Q3 report where we were recognized as one of the highest growing companies both by adpen and prent as and as percentage which is quite difficult if you are already large and yeah thank you very much and if you have questions or uh if you have questions or you want to work you can write Partners thank you thank you gai and I know that gai has done all of that herself for game light which is a phenomenal um a phenomenal achievement you know I'm a

big fan already so um any questions hi um you talked about working rapidly and also the sort of stress of bootstrapping um what do you do when you fail when things go like disastrously wrong and how do you bounce back we usually don't have anything that goes that wrong because I told we usually would launch product as fast as we can so we would go that deep that we invested so much money and effort to make it work so if something doesn't work we would know it quite fast so for example my what I mentioned my founder cofounder and me we have most skills all skills that we need and if we come up is an idea we we discuss basically non-stop ideas and we come up and we do them and it usually takes very short time so if we need coding we would need like overnight just go over it make it work with the basic minimum MVP and if it doesn't work it's basically maximum

couple of days of time wasted little budget wasted but it never reached the scale that it's like half Fe so much budget and didn't work it it never reached that stage do sorry quick followup um do you ever come into problems that aren't based on the product itself for example like one of the founders getting horribly sick or like something like a natural disaster or something like that we never had this I hope you also don't have this so my co-founder is the same person that I launched my previous company was to so I knew that we get along quite well we have good idea flow and we understand each other when we argu it's over the ideas not like hey no why are you doing this we never have this kind argument so I knew that we go along and I we never had any natural disasters happening usually we would cover each other because we also by now we have quite overlapping skills too U because sometimes you need to cover for each other but we never had anything as big that we lost the cander I hope I hope it also doesn't happen perfect thank you so much

uh thank you for the the presentations that was really great I I wanted to dig a little bit deeper into the no calls approach uh makes a lot of sense from operational standpoint um once you're working with a client but being a B2B business I'm curious if you've also extended that to your BD and sales and like client acquisition uh and if so like how has that translated to no calls or is that kind of an exception where you find more FaceTime is still necessary for that it's a massive exception so I was in BD myself before I did sales and I was having calls nonstop because uh often other side is not interested uh to hear what you have to say if you are just sending them whole A4 file like filled with text um what we do with our BD and am teams they they have to ask for calls they at any chance they they should have calls with ongoing Partners they have Bi weekly weekly calls and that's the only exclusion in the company because that's also depend that depends on our clients right if they want to have calls and we say no we

don't have calls then we don't have business with them so that's the only exclusion we have makes sense and for a quick followup do you find that uh for your operational approach does that no calls approach do you find it uh cuts off like the kind of upper end of the market segment like really large companies that are maybe used to more like a little white glove like nice presentations or do they adapt as long as the results are there uh sir could you repeat could you rep second sorry for I was saying for the clients that you work with do you find that there's certain maybe larger companies where they are uncomfortable with that no calls approach where they want more like white glove uh give us a nice presentation every week give us a give us a call or do you find that as long as the results are there even if it's not the norm larger companies will adapt to that yeah yeah uh because clients work with BD or am teams usually they would have calls but if those large companies want to have call with me or with my cofounder we would usually say no because it's not just that we don't want to have calls but because we're always busy with something else and having a call with one partner might mean that we will lose something on the product side

or new updates things that we are working on that will affect every single other partner and every single user we have so it's basically the priorities that we need to set I know that we are losing on some things for example we also have very few team calls too um which would be more motivating for the team obviously to have regular calls they have with each other but they don't have with us um and uh it's more of a decision to make that yes we lose here but we win somewhere else and all in all we we see that we win way more by not having calls and focusing on the product and not simply just having calls obviously you should then be able to focus on the product if you just have no calls and then do nothing else then it doesn't work but you should be able to see what you will get by not having calls and doing something else and what you will lose in this case if you have calls lovely well I just have to wrap up then thank you very much to gai um and I'm sure she's here to maybe speak to you or is it no no speaking I'm very happy to speak on conference pleas all right thank you good night thank very much sh