Secret Ingredient: Superfans

There are a significant number of mobile tech startups doing interesting work.

In this post, I want to touch upon what’s probably the most important element of actually winning the mobile appstore battle. It has a mobile gaming flavor to it but:

Mind you, this could be applied to practically ANY product business worldwide.

I hosted a panel discussion at Game Developers’ Conference 2016 in San Francisco on this topic, and the key question was: “How can indie game developers turn their games into startups that win?”. It’s a critical question, but startups can win and often do win, against larger competitors. 
Our panel had stellar folk who have built gaming businesses from scratch: Sharon Newman of Big Duck Games, David Reichelt of Color Switch, Rohith Bhat of 99Games, and Gregory Storm of Storm Watch Games. Their backgrounds, methodology and even attitude to game development are quite dissimilar.

For context:

• Big Duck Games and 99Games are studios that are deeply technology and analytics focussed, building games with native code. (Oh, and I’m a huge fan of “Flow Free”!)
• Color Switch was built by David and Adi with no native code, as a hobby project on drag-drop platform Buildbox.
• Storm Watch Games’ method falls somewhere in between, and deeply analytics and data driven. (Check this out for some data-driven advise to game developers)

The contrast here is stark. There’s clearly no single ‘ingredient’ to success. However, there is a common theme, and we see it across startups, not just indie game developers.
(The legendary) Paul Graham alludes to this often in his notes, and pinpoints the one ingredient that can turn any startup into a winner:

Superfans

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The one thing that differentiates a winning indie gaming startup from others is superfans. It matters infinitely more to have 50 users who love your product, than 500 users who only like your product.

​The panel unanimously agreed on this point: Know who your most engaged users/fans are, and work to make your game better for them. The “how” of this is two-fold:

• Smart soft-launch User Acquisition: Spend a very small amount of soft launch budget on user acquisition, but spend it on a platform that will give you a full demographic view of your user base (Psst: Facebook)
• Deep Analytics by User Segment: The intent is to understand what granular user segment has the majority of your superfans. If a segment “Urban 35–40 year old male” is where the game’s session lengths and retention metrics skyrocket, it’s very likely the superfan segment that is in need of being nurtured.

Once you know who your superfans are, the challenges are simpler:

• Open up a feedback loop for superfans — Keeping a solid support line open to users, and managing the user community.
• Finding more of them — Top Ad platforms (Google, InMobi etc.) offer great lookalike targeting.
• Improving the game for superfans — And let it scale to other users. This typically needs more development and design effort, but has a much higher return on investment.

Turn “Game” into “App” or “Product”, and the philosophy still holds.

All the best.