What does it take for an indie studio founded by someone with no game design experience  to achieve 100 million downloads?Our guest in today’s episode is Sheetal Bairamadgi. Sheetal is the founder of Crikey, a game studio based in Sydney. Sheetal began her career as a digital marketing manager, and after working with a number of apps during her tenure as Chief Marketing Officer at Leadbolt, Sheetal decided to  start her own gaming studio, Crikey. Crikey has a number of games to its credit, and the most popular one is Phone Case DIY which got 100 million downloads within a couple months of release.In today’s episode, Sheetal takes us through the journey of how she envisioned Crikey and how she and her team refined the processes of their ideation and research from their early games that got lukewarm responses to their first big hit. This conversation again proves that it is possible to build hit games by focusing on research, processes and data, even if you don’t have much formal game design experience. Key Highlights:👾 What inspired Sheetal to transition from ad tech to game development?👩🏻‍💻 Why Sheetal picked hypercasual games to get started with🎮 The key challenges and learnings with Crikey's first game.📝 The research process used by the Crikey team for coming up with game ideas.💡Great ideas can come from anywhere - and from anyone on the team.📱Even the app icons can make a huge difference to a game's performance.💯 How the Crikey team learned to improve upon their processes and games as they built new games.🙌🏽 Who Sheetal's first hire was - and why.🥇 The roots of Crikey's first hit game - and how the idea developed into the actual game.🔙 What Sheetal would do differently if she had to start all over again.**Check out the show notes here:https://mobileuseracquisitionshow.com/episode/how-to-use-structured-tgifs-to-build-a-100-million-download-game-from-scratch-with-sheetal-bairamadgi-founder-at-crikey/**Get more mobile user acquisition goodies here:http://RocketShipHQ.comhttp://RocketShipHQ.com/blog

Is there a secret to achieving better retention?Marketers and app developers are often asked the same question - how can we improve retention?Unfortunately, while there is no magic formula for this, in today’s episode, we’re sharing one strategy that helped us improve retention rates which further rippled into better monetization. This could be something worth trying if you are working on improving your retention rates as well.**Check out the show notes here: https://mobileuseracquisitionshow.com/episode/how-to-find-the-balance-between-monetization-and-retention/**Get more mobile user acquisition goodies here:http://RocketShipHQ.comhttp://RocketShipHQ.com/blog

Danika Wilkinson is a product marketer at Social Point, where she is responsible for the overall, high level marketing strategy of one of their games. She strategises all aspects of game marketing, and guides UA specialists in performance analysis and optimisations.Today’s conversation is an update on a topic that we discussed with Danika the last time we spoke with her on the Mobile User Acquisition Show. Today we talk about how she and her team completely  revamped  their creative process – and broke out of a creative rut.We go in depth about what inspired them to hit the reset button, what the elements of the reset looked like, what some of their challenges were, and how Danika brought different teams together to work towards a single goal to revamp their creative process. There are so many insights in this conversation for those of us that are often hesitant to bring about big changes in workflow, and for those of us wanting to unlock new creative winners for their marketing – and I highly recommend this.Key Highlights💡 The inspiration behind resetting Social Point’s creative process🏆 Creative winners are usually the result of a process and not ideas 🏃🏽‍♀️ The new framework for ideating new concepts📆 The testing process had a fixed timeline that all members were aware of🎤 How Danika’s team overcame the miscommunication between the creative and UA teams through data literacy🏄‍♀️ The different challenges and biases in creative testing🚗 Moving from an IPM centric testing to a CPI centric📱 How has the testing process changed for iOS post ATT🎭 How company culture influences changes in workflow Creative diversity reduces the risk of losing profitability **Check out the show notes here: https://mobileuseracquisitionshow.com/episode/how-to-break-out-of-a-creative-rut-by-resetting-your-processes-with-danika-wilkinson-product-marketing-manager-social-point/**Get more mobile user acquisition goodies here:http://RocketShipHQ.comhttp://RocketShipHQ.com/blog

LTV: a metric that is central to marketing decisioning. While it is an important metric to decide further budget allocations, it’s important to understand that there is no one single objective way to define this. In this short episode, we outline the different ways in which LTV can be defined - there is no one single correct way, and why it’s important to be clear about exactly what definition we’re talking about. **Check out the show notes here: https://mobileuseracquisitionshow.com/episode/why-your-ltv-might-differ-from-your-analysts-ltv/ **Get more mobile user acquisition goodies here:http://RocketShipHQ.comhttp://RocketShipHQ.com/blog

In today’s episode, we’re in conversation with Jerome Turnbull. Jerome is Vice President of Growth at AppLovin where he helps fuel user acquisition and ad monetization for the games made by AppLovin's partner studios. Jerome played a key role during the launch of Project Makeover- a game that topped the charts in just 4 days of launching with over 5 million downloads. Today, we deconstruct how Jerome and his team mapped out the launch strategy for Project Makeover, especially in a time of significant inflexion with Apple’s privacy policy changes on the horizon - and during the hyper-competitive Q4.There are so many learnings and gems in here - not only about launching, but also about launching and growing an app in an uncertain, challenging time: and I’m excited to present this episode to you. KEY HIGHLIGHTS🕹 How metrics differ for hyper casual games vs. match-3 games🔧 The benefits of fine-tuning during the pre-launch phase 📆 The impact of the hyper-competitive Q4 when launching an app📣 Is cross promotion within and across other studios beneficial?🏃🏽‍♀️Player motives that were tested out before launch of Project Makeover👥 The team structure during the launch of Project Makeover**Check out the show notes here:https://mobileuseracquisitionshow.com/episode/the-anatomy-of-a-breakout-launch-learnings-from-project-makeover-with-jerome-turnbull-vp-of-growth-applovin/ **Get more mobile user acquisition goodies here:http://RocketShipHQ.comhttp://RocketShipHQ.com/blog

App Store Optimization is often discussed as a key component in app scaling strategies. In this episode, we see why this isn’t really the best way to grow an app. Shamanth also highlights that the difference in search behaviours on Google vs. an app store is what led to ASO taking a backseat in his methods.**Note: As you may have seen, the second cohort of our workshop series, Mobile Growth Lab is now open for enrolment.In our last cohort, we had 40+ growth marketers, leaders and practitioners join in our live sessions to learn how to prep for the impending IDFA changes - this edition helps you build a strategy based on the realities of ATT and a post-identifier world.The workshop also features guest sessions by our superstar guest mentors Aurora Klaeboe Berg, Thomas Petit, Matej Lancaric, Paula Neves and Maor Sadra. Go here to sign up: mobilegrowthlab.com**Check out the show notes here: https://mobileuseracquisitionshow.com/episode/app-store-optimization-is-not-a-strategy-for-scaling-growth/**Get more mobile user acquisition goodies here:http://RocketShipHQ.comhttp://RocketShipHQ.com/blog

Today’s guest Aurora Klæboe Berg is the COO of Medal.tv. Medal.tv is the largest platform for recording and sharing short gaming clips among friends. She was previously the co-founder and CEO of Megacool, which was acquired by Medal.tv in 2019. Before starting Megacool she held the position as VP of Business and Marketing at Dirtybit, the Norwegian indie game studio sensation behind the successful Fun Run game series. She holds an MSc in CommTech Engineering and Entrepreneurship from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. She is deeply passionate about helping game studios succeed and giving back to the Nordic entrepreneurial ecosystem.In today’s episode Aurora tells us about the unique challenges of starting a developer focused product - and getting adoption from scratch. She tells us about her unique and counterintuitive approach to starting her company even before she knew what the company would do - and her approach to figuring out what the company would eventually do - by actually listening to users. She also tells us about the unique challenges and opportunities with referrals and virality - and how these can unlock tremendous growth in a time of escalating acquisition costs. For a unique perspective into bootstrapping, figuring out a product, scaling, virality, referrals and much much more, we’re thrilled to have Aurora on the show.⚒ Why Aurora and her team built 1 prototype per week for 10 weeks.🩺 How Aurora and her team gathered user feedback to decide what to build.⏳ SDK fatigue and how to overcome it☔️ The common mistakes that apps make while considering viral flows.🛹KPIs that impact a referral flow.📱The power of dark social.**Note: As you may have seen, the second cohort of our workshop series, Mobile Growth Lab is now open for enrolment. In our last cohort, we had 40+ growth marketers, leaders and practitioners join in our live sessions to learn how to prep for the impending IDFA changes - this edition helps you build a strategy based on the realities of ATT and a post-identifier world. The workshop also features guest sessions by our superstar guest mentors Aurora Klaeboe Berg, Thomas Petit, Matej Lancaric, Paula Neves and Maor Sadra.Go here to sign up: mobilegrowthlab.com**Check out the show notes here:https://mobileuseracquisitionshow.com/episode/how-to-build-a-hit-developer-facing-product-with-aurora-klaeboe-berg-coo-medal-tv/**Get more mobile user acquisition goodies here:http://RocketShipHQ.comhttp://RocketShipHQ.com/blog

Today's episode is a reading of an article I wrote for our friends at Liftoff in 2019. While mobile and marketing have come a LONG way since then - with platform and algo changes, and of course Apple's privacy policy changes, this article is a useful reminder that many of the fundamentals and principles underlying scaling haven't changed all that much - and there are some principles here that I hope will be helpful for you in your own scaling efforts.Link to original article on the Liftoff blog here: https://liftoff.io/blog/scaling-user-acquisition/ Link to show notes here: https://mobileuseracquisitionshow.com/episode/how-puzzlesocial-grew-ua-spend-from-zero-to-1-5-million-per-monthand-got-acquired-by-zynga/ **Note: We’re excited to announce the second edition of our live workshop series, Mobile Growth Lab, to help marketers, leaders and execs prep for a post-IDFA world! In the first edition, we helped over 40 attendees: See the mapPrepare the groundworkMove forwardFind acceleration We’ll cover all that (updated for the reality of the post-IDFA world) and many requested topics like web-based flows, creative strategy, conversion values, prep for iOS 15, and more. Interested? Fill up this quick form to join the interest list. (It’s a 2-minute form, and there is no commitment as yet. This is to help us get an idea of the level of participant interest so we can plan sessions and logistics.)**

In one of our previous episodes, we discussed how media mix modelling might not be the best bet post-IDFA. However, some of you have reached out to say that it isnt quite as black and white - and that media mix models could be more widely applicable than what we’d outlined. To throw some more light on this, we have Brian Krebs, founder and CEO of MetricWorks, who has seen first-hand the success of media mix modelling for mobile apps, especially at levels of scale far smaller than that of most CPG brands, in which space these models have traditionally been used.  In today’s episode, Brian shares with us some of the ways in which these models are specifically applicable to mobile marketing campaigns - and argues that these measurement tools are not only useful post-IDFA, but also provide advantages over other measurement tools used by mobile marketers.Key highlights: 🐯 The importance of incrementality for advertisers💈 Is the last-touch model still relevant?✂️  How media mix modelling differ for mobile from CPG (consumer packaged goods) companies. 🎒 Why Media Mix Models are more easily applicable to mobile apps than to CPG companies.🍎  The key input factors for a Media Mix Model for mobile.👩‍🏫  How Apple’s IDFA changes accelerated the interest in MMM-based solutions.💠 How companies can start building media mix models.⚜️ In what situations and at what thresholds are Media Mix Models useful?📳  What do outcomes of Media Mix Modeling look like?Note: We’re excited to announce the second edition of our live workshop series, Mobile Growth Lab, to help marketers, leaders and execs prep for a post-IDFA world! In the first edition, we helped over 40 attendees: See the mapPrepare the groundworkMove forwardFind acceleration We’ll cover all that (updated for the reality of the post-IDFA world) and many requested topics like web-based flows, creative strategy, conversion values, prep for iOS 15, and more. Interested? Fill up this quick form to join the interest list. (It’s a 2-minute form, and there is no commitment as yet. This is to help us get an idea of the level of participant interest so we can plan sessions and logistics.)**Check out the show notes here: https://mobileuseracquisitionshow.com/episode/how-to-apply-media-mix-modelling-based-solutions-to-mobile-apps-with-brian-krebs-ceo-at-metricworks/**Get more mobile user acquisition goodies here:http://RocketShipHQ.comhttp://RocketShipHQ.com/blog

Today’s episode is a recording of a webinar hosted by Singular and moderated by John Koetsier. We were joined by Eran Friedman from Singular, Pedro Ponce de Leon from Liftoff, and Ben Holmes from Adcolony.This episode (and webinar) gives you the low down on everything that’s happening and working across the iOS ecosystem a few months after the introduction of ATT. We talk about how extended probabilistic matching (or fingerprinting) is still here - will this be sustainable? We talk about how marketers are approaching measurement today, the challenges with privacy thresholds, the emergence of web flows - and other industry-wide changes that are shaping the mobile marketing landscape today.🍎 ATT adoption trends : unmeasurable inventory, censorship metrics, extended probabilistic matching.👎 How advertisers are coping with broken measurement - and marketers’ wishlists for Apple.🧩 Probabilistic but non-tracking methodologies.🔐 Picking right conversion models.📲 The buzz around owned media channels and first party data.🌟 The ascent of web-based flows🌠 Consolidation in the ecosystem.🤖   What’s happening in Android - and what’s comingNote: We’re excited to announce the second edition of our live workshop series, Mobile Growth Lab, to help marketers, leaders and execs prep for a post-IDFA world! In the first edition, we helped over 40 attendees: See the mapPrepare the groundworkMove forwardFind acceleration We’ll cover all that (updated for the reality of the post-IDFA world) and many requested topics like web-based flows, creative strategy, conversion values, prep for iOS 15, and more. Interested? Fill up this quick form to join the interest list. (It’s a 2-minute form, and there is no commitment as yet. This is to help us get an idea of the level of participant interest so we can plan sessions and logistics.)**Check out the show notes here: https://mobileuseracquisitionshow.com/episode/state-of-ios-ua-stats-trends-and-strategies-our-webinar-with-singular-liftoff-adcolony/ **Get more mobile user acquisition goodies here:http://RocketShipHQ.comhttp://RocketShipHQ.com/blog