💎 Growth Gems #53 - Paid UA for games, Growth and Onboarding

Hi there,

This week I’m sharing gems on talking to users for better onboarding, growth engineering, DSPs and launching in APAC markets from Matthieu Rouif, Margarita Vasilevskaya, David Burson and more.

---

🥇 TOP GEM OF THE WEEK

💎 Launching only a monthly plan first can help you see how people churn and talk to them in order to improve the product. 

by Matthieu Rouif (Co-Founder & CEO at PhotoRoom)
at 32:56 in Photoroom - Building, Refining, and Pricing an Ambitious App Business

Paid UA: DSPs, non-US geos

💎 The most valuable thing a DSP can provide is a trained algorithm to find the right traffic for you. Whenever you’re looking at a DSP, check if they have case studies for games or products similar to yours. If they don’t, the success rates of your test will be extremely low because they don’t have the right signals.

by Margarita Vasilevskaya
at 05:56 in UA Across Gaming Genres

---

💎 One thing Warren used to do at his previous company when launching a new campaign on a new DSP for their midcore games: blacklist all Outfit7 games from showing their ads, because they knew that was not a good audience fit for them.

by Warren Woodward (Co-founder at Upptic - Automated Growth/ASO platform)
at 22:31 in UA Across Gaming Genres

---

💎 Korea is a small market. To launch a game in Korea it’s critical to build a community, which can take multiple months. You want to incorporate local celebrities, do pre-registration campaigns, have out-of-home advertising, etc.

by Margarita Vasilevskaya
at 44:53 in UA Across Gaming Genres

⛏️ Going Deeper: there are important differences in genre preferences in APAC. For example Margarita shared that Korean players are way more into strategy genres for midcore games (also casual games) while Japanese players have more affinity with RPGs.

---

💎 Russia is one of Margerita’s favorite geos for hardcore games, and everyone is tapping into Russia already. With the right product (high affinity rate), the price is very affordable so it’s worth it even though LTV might still be lower than other markets.

by Margarita Vasilevskaya
at 46:26 in UA Across Gaming Genres

---

💎 When launching in the US, you might set bids that are relatively close between iOS and Android. But if you launch in a geo like India, you probably need 10x or 20x bids for iOS.

by Warren Woodward (Co-founder at Upptic - Automated Growth/ASO platform)
at 50:20 in UA Across Gaming Genres

Growth: growth engineering, biggest wins, adjacent audience

💎 When you try to grow a subscription business, the backend (payment infrastructure) is as important as the front-end. To do high-velocity and high-impact growth work, you need to be able to experiment with free trial length, subscription mix, etc. You need to build the growth muscle.

by David Burson (Head of Product, Growth & Monetization at Canva)
at 10:52 in How Canva drives growth for their paid subscription product

---

💎 Growth engineering is different from product engineering: a lot of the things you try won’t work. You have to get comfortable with doing just enough engineering and moving fast. Once you get positive signals, you can productivize it.

by David Burson (Head of Product, Growth & Monetization at Canva)
at 12:30 in How Canva drives growth for their paid subscription product

---

💎 One of the biggest growth wins Canva had in 2019 was a simple copy update to their upgrade dialog. It came from user research, which allowed to understand how users articulate why they upgrade to Canva pro. Example: “upgrade to Canva pro for magic resize” changed to “Magically resize designs to all formats” (which is the real benefit).

by David Burson (Head of Product, Growth & Monetization at Canva)
at 55:20 in How Canva drives growth for their paid subscription product

---

💎 If you reach a local maxima for one vertical where you have product market-fit, you can still go after adjacent users. In the meantime, you have to believe this is indeed true and focus on your main use case.

by Matthieu Rouif (Co-Founder & CEO at PhotoRoom)
at 21:45 in Photoroom - Building, Refining, and Pricing an Ambitious App Business

⛏️ Going Deeper: here is a great Reforge article on The Adjacent User Theory to better approach looking beyond your initial core audience once it’s time (including how to choose which adjacent users to go after).

Onboarding: getting to the aha moment, talking to users

💎 Photoroom’s onboarding is magical because they don’t get in the way of the user having a desire to get something done. Within 3 taps of downloading the app, you can see the background magic removal happen.

by David Barnard (Developer Advocate at RevenueCat)
at 20:59 in Photoroom - Building, Refining, and Pricing an Ambitious App Business

⛏️ Going Deeper: depending on your product, getting users this fast to a very concrete aha moment is not always possible. Instead, you might have to approach onboarding differently and instead make it longer to better showcase your product value. Check out Growth Gems #50 for Darius Mora’s gem on the two main schools of thoughts for onboarding.

---

💎 Photoroom conducted user interviews at McDonald’s. They’d pay for people’s meals in exchange for: asking a few questions about their photo usage, getting them to download the app and then use it. That’s how they realized people were not getting to the step of removing a background.

by Matthieu Rouif (Co-Founder & CEO at PhotoRoom)
at 27:47 in Photoroom - Building, Refining, and Pricing an Ambitious App Business

---

💎 Launching only a monthly plan first can help you see how people churn and talk to them in order to improve the product. 

by Matthieu Rouif (Co-Founder & CEO at PhotoRoom)
at 32:56 in Photoroom - Building, Refining, and Pricing an Ambitious App Business

---

And before I leave, a quote from this Upptic podcast:

“If SKAN is going to work anywhere, it’s going to work with subscription” - Xander Agosta (Growth Lead at Upptic)

See you next time. Stay savvy!

⛏️ Sylvain