How I Grew My Revenue By 218% In 10 Weeks
7 steps that I used in my company
The year was 2016. From October 16th to December 25th, my company broke the weekly revenue record for ten weeks in a row. We went from $4,432.80 to $14,134.32 per week.
It was amazing to see the happy faces of every one of my team when I sent them our weekly report. In this report, I shared all our financial numbers.
Many traditional companies have posters on the office wall with written value statements (like honesty and innovation) that are often vague and ignored. Most people in those companies don’t know about these values or don’t understand why they exist. The executive team probably wrote them because they thought that’s something a company should have, even though they don’t understand its real impact.
As I started studying company values, I realized that could be very powerful. As I wanted to grow my gaming company, I was looking for ways to increase its performance, and working with company values seemed to be a good idea. However, I didn’t want to be one more company that writes them down but doesn’t live them.
It doesn’t matter if you have a company, or is a solo entrepreneur, or even work for a company that is not yours. I believe it is essential to have values or principles to follow. It was by following the company values that we were able to grow our revenue by 218%.
#1 Focus on the user
You may provide a service or build a product. Everything you do is to generate value for someone. You must know who your customer is, so you can provide the best experience for them.
Our target audience was women over 35 years old. I’m used to seeing surprised faces when I tell other people that I made games for that audience, as people usually expect to see younger men playing violent or sports games. That wasn’t the audience for the games we were building.
When you know who is your target audience, you can also work with paid traffic. Do you know those short videos that appear before a Youtube video? That is paid traffic. They are everywhere, and we also worked with them. As our games were on Facebook, we used Facebook Ads to acquire more users.
We’ve been experiencing ads with our target audience a lot for the past couple of weeks. We have learned many things, and we believe we could start investing more money. We didn’t have enough runway to increase the investment the way we wanted. We had to increase little by little as we were getting results.
As the weeks passed and we broke weekly revenue records, we increased the amount spent on Facebook Ads. That allowed us to acquire much more users, and not only that, to acquire the right users. The wrong users wouldn’t play as long as the right users and wouldn’t spend as much either.
#2 Use data to learn
For the past couple of years, we have been listening to many things about security and data collection. Companies like Facebook and Apple want to collect as much data as they can. Many people believe that companies want to do that so they can sell all the information they have.
There is another reason companies want to gather as much data as they want: to learn more about you. But wait, to learn in a good way.
By learning how you interact with an app, companies can find ways to improve your experience with it. It’s not by chance that Instagram releases new features.
They analyze the data they have; create a hypothesis; build some new feature or improve one that already exists; make it available for a specific number of users; wait a period to gather enough data; analyze that data; and finally decide if they will continue or not with the new feature or improvement and release it to everybody. That is call AB testing.
It’s much more challenging to build something valuable for your customer by guessing. That’s why that is essential to use data to learn.
I’ve been doing that with my company tirelessly. We did a lot of AB testing. Most of them didn’t have any significant improvement in our revenue, but once in a while, one of them had a tremendous result. By continually testing new features and enhancements, we learned what the users most valued and built that for them.
#3 Be goal-oriented
Early on, when I started my company, I learned that a startup should grow 10% every week. That is very difficult! It doesn’t have to be revenue, though. It needs to be the metric that makes more sense to your startup. Facebook chose MAU (monthly active users), Youtube chose watch-time, and Airbnb chose nights booked. That is their One Metric That Matters (OMTM).
Having an OMTM helps companies decided what to do. Work is infinite, but time is finite. Leaders need to choose wisely what will generate more value for their customers and more money for the company.
Our OMTM was levels played, but frankly, at that time, we were more worried about money. We wanted to grow our revenue by 10% every week. To get to that, we had some market benchmarks to achieve as goals.
We also used the Pirate Metrics funnel for startup growth (AARRR or Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, and finally Revenue). Improving the top would improve the bottom.
All the team was aware of the company goals. We needed to work on tasks that will get us closer to them. If a task doesn’t help any of our goals, we shouldn’t do it.
Everybody in the company was allowed to talk if they notice that something didn’t make sense for what we want to achieve. By doing that, we grew more than 10% per week in the ten weeks that we broke weekly revenue records.
#4 Keep it simple
A couple of years ago, there was a discussion if games were art or not. I believe they are.
However, when most people think about art, they had a stereotype in their heads of a starving artist: a person that takes a long time to finish art and doesn’t know how to sell it. That is, in fact, one of the big problems of the games industry. People take too long to finish their games and don’t know how to sell them.
That goes far beyond the games industry, though. Creators, in general, want to build perfect things. They want to improve the most they can their dreamed masterpiece. The most a person takes to launch its creation, the most he will take to learn something. You may think that you build something marvelous, but you find out that people don’t even care about it when you launched it.
Keeping things simple allows you to launch earlier and be regularly updating your product or service. That was what we did. That allowed us to be continually improving our games.
We tried the most we could to not lose time building fancy stuff. We could always make another improvement later.
It’s important to say that keeping things simple doesn’t mean building things poorly. Keep it simple doesn’t mean low quality. You still have to focus on your user, use data to learn and work on tasks to get you closer to your goals.
#5 Be a team a player
Many people start a business alone and can make a living on that. However, there is a point if the person wants to grow more, he will need the help of others. As I said before, time is finite, and you need to decide how you will use it wisely. Work is infinite, and you need to know what you should be doing.
It’s impossible to be good at everything. You need to know what your strengths are and work to improve them.
Many people believe that they should work on their weaknesses, but that is not right. That is the same as trying to teach a fish how to fly.
As you work on your strengths, you can get help from other people better than you in your weaknesses. That’s the beauty of teamwork. You cannot let selfishness interfere your way.
Building games demand different capabilities. At that time that we were growing more than 10% by week, we were five people. We were a multidisciplinary team. Each one of us was working on something different, leveraging our strengths.
That allowed us to have better use of our time and work on the things that could generate more value for our users and the company. It was clear that there was no space for selfishness, and we needed to help each other to keep being productive.
#6 Manage yourself
Usually, when we hear the word “manage,” we think about big companies’ bosses micro-managing people. Management is much more than that.
Working as a team alone isn’t enough too. You need to know how to manage yourself to be able to better help your team members. How do you manage your time? How do you manage your productivity? If you want to make more money, you need to understand how you perform better.
At my company, people could work practically whenever they want. We had a few guidelines. We encourage people to work most of the time during business hours.
Building games is a collaborative process, so it is essential to have people online at the same time working so they can change ideas, and the easiest time to do that was business hours. Also, we had a daily meeting at 10 AM, and that was the maximum time to start working.
Besides that, people could work any way they feel more productive. People began from 7 AM to 10 AM and stopped from 5 PM to 8 PM.
I was the one that had the longest lunchtime, as I went to the gym. Sometimes, someone chose to finish a more individual task later at night as they preferred that.
Managing is everybody’s job. I was the CEO of my company, and I was responsible for setting the company’s vision. I didn’t care how everyone did their job.
The essential thing is that all team members help the company achieve its goals by finding ways to improve their work. Everyone understood that they were responsible for managing themselves properly.
#7 Pursue growth and learning
Nowadays, many professional functions are being automatized by the use of machines, and because of that, many people lost their jobs. That is part of evolution.
At the same time that jobs are lost by machines, new ones are created, demanding new skills. Our society is growing so fast that a small part of what we learn in a year is useless in the next one. If we don’t pursue growth and learning, we will be left behind.
When you create a product or provide a service, what you do today may not work tomorrow. Customer needs may change, and the competition may overrule you. One day, it won’t work what you do if you keep trying the same again and again. By studying, we can find new ways to solve a problem. Maybe you can bring a different perspective to a known solution too.
The games industry also grows fast. When a new game comes out with something revolutionary, all the other companies start to copy that. After a while, everyone provides the same experience for the customer and, because of that, it becomes something normal, and it stops generating the same value that it used to do.
All industries pass for that. Think about the smartphone features that are created and copied by different brands.
In order to grow our revenue, everybody in my team should be looking for new ways to not only improve their work but how to generate better results. I had to fire employees who stopped learning and did not adapt to new environments and did not help the company anymore. If you know your customer and have goals, pursuing growth and learning will help you the same way it helped me.
Takeaways
Company values had a tremendous influence on my company’s success. They are the actions you do daily.
When a new employee joined the company, we presented its mission, purpose, and values. We emphasized that we lived everything we talked about, but the person only realized how true that was when he started to live the company’s day-to-day life.
Company values, or any kind of principles, can help you if you genuinely walk the talk.
To grow our company revenue by 218% in 100 weeks we:
- Focused on our users and advertised to the right audience
- Used data to learn and implemented a lot of AB testing
- Were goal-oriented and worked only on tasks that would get us closer to our goals
- Kept things simple and updated our games constantly
- Were a team and worked on our strengths
- Managed ourselves and worked productively
- Pursued growth and learning to adapt to new environments
To grow the revenue by more than 10% every week is really difficult. We never again were able to do that for more than ten weeks in a row. On the 10th week of breaking records, an investor called me. Two months later, he invested US$1 million in the company. That helped us to grow even more.
