Structuring for success - Part 1 of 3

The world is in a very different place to where we were a year ago. After a long period of historically low interest rates, for the first time since the mobile user acquisition space was born in the early 2010s, the rising interest rate is forcing the industry to reconsider financing decisions and growth plans.

A fairytale to illustrate why genre matters in mobile gaming. The money lies with the games that can make decent returns within reasonable timeframes.

In this article, we take a look at how the hyper casual pie is sliced between publishers and studios, and how games that end up on the scrap heap could be targets for self-publishing.

Accounts Receivable (AR) credit facilities are a popular financing tool for mobile apps and gaming companies. But when founders and CFOs are considering whether to seek a facility from a bank or a non-bank lender, the devil is in the detail of how they work. Read on for the pros and cons of each.

As trends in mobile gaming move towards extended LTV games where players stick around for longer, it’s important to understand their behaviour over time. In this post we're going to explore the issue of convexity in LTV curves, and how to correctly factor this into your wider UA and growth planning models.

This explainer video walks you through our ROAS, LTV, and Cashflow Calculator for free-to-play mobile games. The calculator is available on our website. It's totally free to use, and will help you to model your investment formula and unit economics for user acquisition.

For mobile app and game founders looking to fund user acquisition (UA) on Facebook, Google, and other ad platforms, venture debt can seem like an attractive non-dilutive alternative to equity. We have spoken to a number of companies who used venture debt as a way of funding their growth through mobile user acquisition, but where the results did not pan out as expected. This post highlights the pros and cons of using venture debt specifically to fund UA.

Not all debt solutions are created equal, and it’s important to understand the pros and cons of each in order to get the right fit for your business. So we created the definitive guide to funding mobile user acquisition to help developers make informed UA financing decisions.

In our previous two posts, we explored some of the key challenges facing gaming and app studios outside of the US/UK/EU with regard to company formation, raising capital, running day-to-day operations, and user acquisition. This is your blueprint for success.

New free-to-use online mROI calculator from Pollen VC gives app marketers a new time-based metric to measure UA performance.

Part two of our three part series about how mobile app and gaming studios can optimize operationally regardless of location. In this post, we turn to the subject of raising capital.

The Pollen VC subscription app forecaster calculates an application’s expected ROAS, LTV and cash flow to help studios make decisions about when to invest in paid user acquisition. It also forecasts cash flow scenarios helping studios plan their finances more effectively.

In this episode, Saikala Sultanova, VP of Growth Marketing at DREST, tells us about combining white-hot fashion with community, commerce and a great mobile gaming engine. Saikala has years of experience in UA and growth at mobile gaming companies such as Ubisoft Mobile, Product Madness, and Space Ape Games.

Make sure you’re prepared for the holiday season and have sufficient available capital to maximize Q5 opportunities while the user acquisition well is open for drinking. 

Analysis from Pollen VC reveals that 85% of mobile gaming studios acquired in the last 12 months self-published their games, whilst no acquisitions took place of studios who relied on a 3rd party publisher. This highlights a continuing trend in the mobile gaming industry away from the traditional studio/publisher model towards self-publishing.

Spending money on UA is just like any other capital allocation decision in their business for founders, CFOs or UA managers. Having a framework using a monthly return metric for ROI on ad spend across multiple channels/games enables decision makers to more easily compare competing opportunities side by side and make better informed choices.

There can be great advantages to a strategy of keeping things simple and standardizing on USD as a base currency. It allows a greater clarity of thinking without having to constantly think about FX risk and other operational parameters.

Not all debt products are created equal. Studios looking to scale their games should always review all available options and model the outcomes, picking the best fit product to achieve their objectives.