(The model referenced throughout this post can be downloaded here) Supercell’s recent $100mm secondary financing round raises some interesting questions about how mobile game developers capitalize on a hit game. A title in the Top 10 grossing chart for the US can, as evidenced by a number of recent high-profile examples, generate upwards of $500,000 [...]
I’ve stated a number of times that, within the context of the freemium model, retention is the most important metric a product manager must track; in the Minimum Viable Metrics methodology, retention is the top-most of the top-line metrics. Retention is not only a proxy measurement for customer delight, but it’s also the input for [...]
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 [...]
Last week I participated in a panel at Casual Connect called “Emerging Strategies to User Acquisition”. I was honored to share the stage with Jussi Laakkonen from Applifier, Stefan Bielau, Erlend Christoffersen from Supercell, Gilad Rotem from InGaming, and Billy Shipp from Iddiction. Below you’ll find a video of the entire panel, which clocks in at [...]
(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 [...]
That app discovery is broken isn’t in dispute within the mobile industry. The lack of adequate alternatives to native app store search has catalyzed the existence of a vast secondary market for mobile users; that market has become so competitive that studios without sizable balance sheets are precluded from participating in it. Industry giants are [...]
It should be obvious to anyone operating in the mobile space that app discovery is ripe for disruption: slide four from MoPub’s recent 4th Quarter Mobile Advertising Marketplace Report illustrates how rapidly eCPMs are rising on both iOS and Android (the entire report is worth reading).
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 [...]
2012 was an encouraging year for the mobile gaming industry: total revenues swelled to $4.5 billion, the number of iOS devices ever sold reached approximately half a billion, and two studios proved that the free-to-play business model is not only sound, but that it can generate absurd amounts of money.
It’s interesting to see the debate around mobile vs. web first erupt again for the consumer web (see here and here), as this topic was mostly put to bed in gaming about a year ago when the largest developers transitioned from Facebook to mobile. Zynga appears to be the last holdout on that front, as even Wooga is [...]
