Time to rely on self-funding? | Paolo Trezentos from Aptoide

[Music] I am now joined by Paulo dentos from Apptoy how you doing good thank you fantastic now we haven't spoken before basy we have spoken to aptoid in the past but if people haven't encountered your company just quickly explain what it is you folks do sure so aptoid is a app distribution platform we have different app stores different channels and we are developers also on the self when a developer wants to do direct to Consumer we open with the payments fraud taxes and everything related so in a net shell we are an app store but also we provide developers with direct to Consumer Alternatives right gotcha now we I've been talking to a lot of people this year and as well as the obvious AI stuff that everybody's talking about web stores have become you know quite the topic of conversation after Apple did what they did with locking down privacy and the amount of data that could be gathered everyone seemed to be shutting

down their their battening down the hatches let's say when it comes to data and I've seen people starting to do these like direct web stores and and make deals with service providers and things like that as a separate store yourself what does that feel like to you seeing this kind of competition popping up and how you reacted to it so we have been in the market for more than 13 years with with emerging app stores and we our own app store and partners app stores and we have been following these for some time and we believe that here in Europe the digital markets act in in in us the Court decisions and in Japan what the regulator is pushing Apple and Google to do are really important in terms of up store regulation to create a more balanced market so we see it very positively in the end of the day this is good for developers and for the users and for the developer because it creates a more balanced uh Market where for eess to publish in our app store they don't pay 30% they pay 25% and for us we feel the pain and we are empathic with

developers when they do user acquisition and pay for user acquisition and they on top of the user acquisition cost the C they need to pay for the up store Revenue fee we think that is unfair so what we do with developers is they do if they do their own user acquisition we lower our Revenue share fee from 25 to 10% or 15% because to be more fair this is the kind of impacts and results that this regulation is having in the market and we are very positive on the devel M interesting well we were talking a lot about AI last year and there's been a lot of negatives associated with it certainly the generative side of things um now I imagine your company uses a degree of ml machine learning as well um has it had any impact on the way you folks are going to be doing business do you feel that there are positive uses for it in your own company indeed so AI is crossing all companies all industry all markets we we are trying to see how llms can help in our business in apps this distribution in helping developers

to reach out new users and we are impacting we are testing different things not not only for instance different description for apps and games to help the developer to get a better description of the game as well to propose the users games that are more Tower their their their taste and their kind of profile so we are using that U and of course we understand there are some challenges uh but we think that over time it will all build balance and will be positive well VC spend this down a little at the moment which means fewer games likely to be made over the course of the year as someone who runs an App Store that means fewer games potentially popping up how does that affect or impact the way that you do business and is there any good advice for developers who either currently have games running or maybe aren't going to be able to get their game funded this year what should they do what's the best case of like keeping themselves afloat until the next big thing great question so we know that the the lack of VC funding is not happening only in the game industry it

is across different Industries we fill that across different Industries and we know that typically that's over some time this kind of waves of more funding less funding and so on so our advice with developers that we work on is relying more on self funding and for that we help them just be sure they get new users and they get more revenue from the current titles and to optimize their revenue so our suggestion is invest in self funding and wait until the VC finding gets back and there are more opportunities for funding do you find there's resistance in trying to convince people to get on board with with your app store as you say you've got the kind of the big ones everyone has to go through Apple at some point they have to go through Google Play and the big ones so do you have to do an amount of persuasion to be like this is why you should jump jump on board with us or are people actively looking for an alternative and they're very happy to find something like at all definitely um our business develop team does a great

job and and more and more developers developers play reads mononon uh top games are are joining us and are working with us for that it's it's getting easier and easier as developers understand that the value proposition of getting to new users in our app stores as well as doing direct distribution and not relying in Google and Apple for that user acquisition really creates value and this this time where we need to optimize developers need to optimize Revenue these extra revenues really important so yes James it's a difficult task but more and more we are getting resonated for with the developers and getting more developers on board now why would you come to a show like this you guys have got a booth on the floor what is it that you get from talking to people face to face we we love poget games connect is not our first we' been in elsi and others and we believe he's a great event for getting the our partners the developers and so on and to meet face to face and the the

beginning show us that we can do things over Zoom but it's not the same and we we love to to mix with our partners and to share and to celebrate with them the accomplishments so we love this this event and likely will be here next year and what about 2024 what does it look like for Apptoid are there any new initiatives or things that you're planning to roll out or anything on the horizon that you're excited for we are really excited with this new year 2024 last year we grew 80% and we hope keeping growing and we grow not for ourselves but for the developers that are with us as well as for the users and to have this kind of ecosystem and gaming ecosystem more healthier and with more Advantage for all is a challenge that we are working together with developers and users and we believe that 2024 will be a great year for everybody [Music]