The data-driven nature of the freemium model changes the way certain functional groups interact with each other during the product design and development process. Because analytics is a revenue driver and not a cost center in freemium, it isn’t implemented after a product launch as a means to reduce losses. Rather, the initialization of analytics [...]
I wrote a few weeks ago about the importance of tracking a basic portfolio of metrics that I called Minimum Viable Metrics. I argued that this is especially important on mobile, where product iterations are necessarily less frequent than on the web because of platform idiosyncrasies. My point was that any iteration containing more than one [...]
One innovation the freemium model brings to bear is analytics as a fundamental component of the product development lifecycle: since distribution (and thus customer adoption costs) are 0, behavioral customer data is available with enough volume to develop new streams of revenue from it. The freemium model accords an analytics team the opportunity to conceptualize [...]
(Dashboard template can be found here; source code on GitHub here) In freemium mobile, my experience has been that the principles of the Minimum Viable Product as a product strategy are respected but sometimes necessarily abandoned because the concept isn’t perfectly transferable to mobile platforms. The MVP approach was designed for a platform (the web) that allows [...]
Today I gave a presentation called “Big Data in Mobile Gaming: Optimizing the User Experience” at IGExpo in Tallinn, Estonia. The aim of the presentation was to provide a general overview of how an analytics system can (should?) inform the development process, with some attention paid to defining various metrics and the process of data-driven [...]
Download the model here (updated 20-03-2013) As free-to-play transitions from an emerging, vaguely defined abstraction into the dominant business model on mobile, developers will face an increasing need to understand the concept from an analytical standpoint. I spent some time this weekend thinking about how free-to-play games generate revenue: what mechanics converge to deliver positive ROI on the [...]
In a past professional life, I wrote algorithms on a commodity trading desk for an institutional investment fund. And over the past year, I’ve come to recognize the market for mobile users (which I call the secondary market for mobile users, or SMMU) as being fundamentally similar to that of other commodity spot markets, on [...]
I read an interview about VC investment in gaming companies recently in which a quote surfaced with which I very deeply disagree. The question was about what VCs look for in a gaming company; the response was this: You need to have a great game, to know how to get users and have a finely [...]
Part One As I mentioned in the first post on this topic, a marketing manager knows only a few things about a user acquired from a mobile user acquisition network; one of those things is that the user was put up for sale.
Part Two When a marketing manager buys a user from a mobile ad network, he knows exactly three things about his purchase: The purchased user has a mobile phone and has installed at least one app; The user’s mobile phone model and geographic location; The developer of the app from which that user came was willing [...]
