

Season 5, Episode 19: The power of cohort compounding (with Nilay Patel)
11 snips May 6, 2025
Nilay Patel, head of product at Kohort and an expert in mobile gaming and user acquisition optimization, dives deep into the transformative power of cohort analysis. He addresses common pitfalls in lifetime value estimation and discusses why cohorts are crucial for evaluating product economics. Nilay also explores how companies can effectively incorporate cohort monetization into user acquisition models and the importance of handling outliers in data. His insights reveal how adapting to cohort performance can drive improved monetization and user retention strategies.
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Nilay Patel's Gaming Journey
- Nilay Patel shares his experience scaling mobile games across studios like Triple Dot and Quali.
- His transition to ad tech aims to solve $6 billion annual UA inefficiencies in gaming.
Collaboration is Key in Gaming
- Gaming demands tight collaboration among product, UA, and finance teams for success.
- Isolating these disciplines is a recipe for failure in mobile gaming studios.
Fragile LTV Models Limit Growth
- A fragile LTV model overfits to early campaign data and fails when scaling or diversifying.
- Studios often discard valuable high-CPI users due to inaccurate early LTV estimations.