Rock Milk Progress Report #001 (2017 Apr-Sep)
As mentioned in other posts, we at Rock Milk believe there is a lot of value on building our business in the open. It was not once nor twice that we delved deep into another developer self recorded story just to come out with renewed motivation and new valuable knowledge.
In this interest, we plan to write up reports with key learnings and metrics from time to time (not sure about the time table). Since this is the first one, I decided to take most Rock Milk lifetime so far, from April to September.
Key Achievement and Learnings
We started walking the talk
After years of talking about starting a game dev thingy together, we finally started! Hurray!
During the first couple of weeks we decided on the set of tools we will be using frequently.
- Basic: Google Drive and Docs, gMail, Hangouts, Whatsapp
- Social: Twitter, Facebook
- Content: Medium
- Development: Godot, Trello, BitBucket
Most tools decisions were made with a “least effort” mindset. We picked whatever we felt comfortable using or in some cases what we were already using for other projects.
We also defined the company goals and overall direction. We went with:
- Launch 3 games in 2017
- Get to 10k downloads in 2017
- Create 10 pieces of auxiliary content (posts, videos, podcasts, …) in 2017
Setting those goals was very important to keep us honest during the development, specially because we have very little milking time.
We developed and launched our first game
Reakt was the first game we worked on. It was designed to be a laboratory where we could test the whole pipeline, from working together to Godot to Play Store to Adwords.
Overall it has been a great experience and we already launched 3 versions and still plan new updates. You can read all about it on the project post mortem we wrote.
Life after the first game
After Reakt, we had to decide on the next path to take. And there were a lot of options. Keep pushing Reakt updates? Work on a second game? Which game?
We ended up deciding on spliting our work load 30/70. 30% would go to Reakt updates while the other 70% would go to prototyping new game ideas. We ended up with two new game ideas we liked and ended up deciding to pursue the one Diego built. It is a bigger project though and should take months for us to complete.
We wrote a bunch (at least on our standards)
“Man, I rather write code all day!” — Rock Milker after 4 weeks on an article assignment
This sums it up well. We have been grinding our way on writing articles and posting them here. It has been challenging but we are really proud of the work we done on this front.
What about numbers?
I will split up the metrics discussion on three topics: Games, Community and Content. All are heavily interconnected, but I feel there is value on discussing them separately.
Games
We launched a total of 1 of the 3 games we plan on launching until the end of the year. This will be one of the hardest goals to reach but we still plan to try and find opportunities through jams. We are participating GDN’s Elder Berry Jam this week by the way.
We reached 616 installs, which leaves us miles away from the 10K target. That said, installs are accelerating as we build our community and we believe we still have some cards on the sleeve to reach this one.
Other interesting metrics:
- Reakt D1 retention stays above 13% on most cohorts
- Reakt Google Play Store rating is 4.92 on 45 ratings
- Reakt MAU was 342 on September
Community
Community is as important as anything in our business. Not to say it is the most important factor of all. We have been focusing our efforts on Twitter and Medium as a dev centric community and plan on making Facebook more user centric. This is all very much ideas so far as we still have a lot to improve on our social media skills
Other interesting facts:
- Most Facebook community are friends and family.
- Almost all Twitter and Medium community came from the viral post on Why we choose Godot Engine.
Content
We plan on creating 10 pieces of auxiliary content by the EOY and we are on track for that, as this is the 5th post we publish since April. The highlight here is the Why we choose Godot post that went viral, getting a lot of love from the Godot community.
We are very satisfied with this area of the business, where we summed more than 7.2K views on our articles so far. We plan on keep writing and testing different formats as we move forward.
Other interesting facts:
- After the Why we choose Godot article went viral we saw an uplift of 60% on the rest of the inventory.
- We still see views on our post due to Medium nice SEO scores.
Conclusion
It has been a fun ride so far but we are very far away from reaching our set goals.
Plenty of work ahead!
If you read so far, thanks very much! If you have questions or want to chat, please reach out on Facebook and/or Twitter.
Matheus Almeida, Best Half and Head of Sorting Algorithms @ Rock Milk
