The Pursuit of Scrappiness #27 - Davis Ziedins (Beetroot Lab) on partnership with Conor McGregor, operating $100 M ad budget, science of building successful apps, and recruiting global experts via Linkedin
Davis Ziedins is Co-founder and Business development lead at Beetroot Lab, a game development studio in Riga operating since 2014, whose biggest hit Dystopia is made in partnership with Conor McGregor and recently hit the 1 million downloads milestone.
In this super-high energy episode, we talk about the fundamentals of the game development business, building a very specialized skillset team in the Baltics, doing partnerships with global celebrities, keys to success in the saturated mobile gaming market, and the marketing of mobile games.
The topics covered in this episode with Timestamps
[01:45] - INTRODUCTION AND THE ORIGINS OF BEETROOT LAB
- Mobile game mass development
- Making the first million
- Working with game publishers
[10:10] - BUILDING GAME DEVELOPMENT TEAM
- How realistic it is to build games from the Baltics
- Scarcity of game development savvy talent
- The natural personal appeal of gaming for talent
- Getting top global experts to work with you
- Why Georgia is an excellent place to build an outsourced IT team
[19:20] - PARTNERING WITH A GLOBAL CELEBRITY, CONOR MCGREGOR
- Getting Connor McGregor on the project
- Structuring a deal with a celebrity
- Giving ownership as a key for engagement
- Latvian legal entity, not an obstacle
[30:50] - SUCCEEDING ON THE HYPER-COMPETITIVE GAMING MARKET
- Data-driven trial and error
- Shipping first version asap to get user feedback
- Buying users as an expensive experiment to measure fit and monetization
- The appeal of mobile gaming for users
- Monetization in gaming
- The psychological aspect of gaming and monetization
- Dealing with exploding user acquisition costs
- Building a game where the best players can make their career
[53:20] - MARKETING OF MOBILE GAMES
- Economics of game monetization
- Going back to the ice age in targeting iOS users
- Creatives is the king - producing the right ones
- The need for substantial working capital on demand
- The working capital impact of app stores
- Working with alternative app stores
[01:12:30] - OUTRO AND THE ROAD AHEAD
- Next steps for Dystopia
- New games
- New project in skill-based cash game industry
- Geographic reach and China
To reach out to Davis use:
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davisziedins/
Find out more on https://www.pursuitofscrappiness.co/
Support for this episode comes from Nexpay > https://paynexpay.com/
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Find out more on https://www.pursuitofscrappiness.co/