🎮💰 Triumph’s Story: From Brick Breaker to the $100Mil

0:00 I I came from a background where like I was making Tik Toks. I was growing my last app that I did completely organically, never doing paid. So, it just like got me in the habit of like pushing out these videos. I think so many people in UA just look at the data a lot and they don't like nearly do as much creative as they need to. We're really good at doing the creative here. >> It's the dice drops of golden coins with the two and a half. Midnight crew talking UA advers and game design too.

0:31 Mat feeling shak bringing the insight. We're rocking those vibes till the early daylight master eyes on the prize. Tracking data through the cyerspace skies. Felix stacks like a wizard in disguise. Jack lift us to the high. Two and a half gamers talking smack. Slow hockey stick got your back. Ads are beautiful. They like the way. Click it fast. Don't delay. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Aha.

1:02 Aha. Ah. Ah. >> Welcome everybody. This is Two and a Half Gamers and we have extra mega special episode. I'm I'm running out of the megas and specials because we did all the specials already. So now it's like super rare and super super rare. >> It goes ultra rare after that. >> Ultra rare. Yeah. Exactly. So today we're going to talk about triumph. But before we go into the topic and our special guest, my name is Matthew.

1:34 >> I'm Felix Brawber. >> And I'm Colin Hayden. >> And who? >> We are your host. >> I think we should automate it because there's no way this ever gets good. Now we do AI stuff. We do AI stuff, man. That's the next >> AI stuff is is overrated. Anyway, I mean, we did AI episode uh last week. Cole, welcome to the podcast. Can you introduce yourself to the audience? Who are you? Where do you work? And uh and all the fun.

2:02 >> Yeah, my name's Colum. I am the head of growth here at Triumph. I've been uh with the company pretty much before we ever started marketing the app, right before our launch. And it's been about 2 and a half years of Triumph, three years, and it's been a good ride. And I think we're a very different company than the rest of people in the skillbased gaming space. And happy to talk about it here. >> Very cool. Yeah. If you're at it, maybe we can do some definitions here for people that are like what what are we talking about? Like skillbased gaming space, real money gaming space. Maybe let's start there. Right there.

2:33 >> Yeah. So, skillbased gaming and triumph is an app where people are allowed to wager on themselves playing a video game. So, we have an app with 12 or 13 different games within it and you can wager on yourself versing in an opponent and um all of the aspects of the game are even. So, if we are going to deal with the same spawns, the same obstacles in each one of our games. And it's entirely up to you and your skill level to beat your opponent and um you know uh take their money from them. And uh we are live in 38 states in the United States. Uh we're on the app store. No Android yet. And um we I'd say what makes us unique is like we're probably one of the only skillbased games that targets a younger demographic. You can see a lot of like solid hair caches, bingo caches that target people over 60.

3:19 But like I think what makes us unique is that we really go after that yogurt dip. >> So to summarize like do I get try to taste pretty much like zero power progression. I can't buy any powerups nothing. It's just like as you said pure skill and it's kind of a a little bit of element of luck I guess on top of it. Just not just that skill. It's not chess like skill >> in the actual gameplay itself. We have no progression. We do our best with putting progression features in what we call the SDK, which is like the non-gaming experience in the menu and like how much you end up wagering in like unlockable skins, stuff that like doesn't necessarily give you like a um advantage in the actual gameplay. Uh but we really try to make our games as fair as possible is very important to like what we do.

4:00 >> I love when I said column, can you introduce yourself? Then it was nothing and then you ask like did you just cut off and then you started introducing yourself and then I disappeared. >> Anyway, we went into the definition of the genre and uh what what it is and how how it's defined. So that's that's >> Yeah. And and Cole, your website has posted some really big numbers. Can you just basically maybe talk a little bit about that so the listeners get a sense of the scale you guys are at right now?

4:26 >> Oh, hello. Hello there. I didn't see you. Thank you very much for coming to this episode. Uh, it's brought to you by our sponsors, PVX Partners, the simplest and most effective credit line for marketing. If you're scaling your business uh, and need funding, here's the deal. With PVX Partners, you can grow your game easily and your business. There's no equity dilution. You can repay as you get paid, and it's flexible and fully tailored to your growth. So, you can secure funding in 30 days and get a term sheet in just 24 hours. Don't you wait. take control of your UA budget without giving away uh a piece of your company. Visit pvxpartners.com and uh see how they can help you grow your game faster and stronger. Don't wait. Go to pvxpartners.com.

5:13 >> Yeah. So, we have millions of users to date. Over $und00 million has been paid out to players in our tournaments. So, over $und00 million won from these cash tournaments that we do. Yeah. I mean like it's grown pretty tremendously over the past like year especially since we've really amped up our UA spent. >> That's very interesting cuz I'm just like briefly looking at this on our usual setup on sensor tower and >> it's like just by >> you can share you can share the numbers.

5:39 Okay, I see >> it's like one of those like very very easy typical games. >> Just go go and click view more in the description. There's all the all the all the games in there. There. And then at the end, you mean Brick Breaker >> from the past. >> Here we are. Okay. List of games included. Chaos Cannon, Peg Master, Block, Quart, Brick. Okay. Doodle jump. Okay. So, everything's multiplayer. Yeah. >> Yes. Everything. Well, we have a few different game modes. Um, our biggest is our async game mode where me I am paired up against with another player and we match them asynchronously. So, like I submit a score on a single player game, somebody else is dealing with the exact same spawns. They submit a score in the same game and then whoever the has the best score wins the wager.

6:20 >> We have our challenge mode where you get matched up with everybody else in the app who can compete all for like the day and whoever wins that takes home like a big cash prize. So you might be one out of a thousand people that win that game. But if you do, you're taking away all of the money from every single entry. And uh we do this for every single game on our app. >> How did you pick the games? How you >> That's my question here. It started with games that we like to play, but I think now what we noticed is that like these really fast game I I think there's a few we're still honing in on this. There's a few things that I think make a good game for Triumph. Like you need to have the game be about like 30 to 40 seconds long. The shorter we can actually make the game, the faster that feedback loop is, I think that's really good for us.

7:02 You need to be able to die in the game. So if you have a game where like a turn and like every same length, >> I don't think that's good. I think like the satisfaction of staying in the game longer when you're winning or having a better high score is going to be uh a better option. Like yeah, I'd say that's basically it. But it started with the game like that game Brickbreaker was like the first game we ever did. It was just the one we like to play and then um we just started kind of picking up on like rules that we thought would make a good game after that.

7:29 >> Was Brickbreaker good you think because it just was really big with the kind of Blackberry generation and that's kind of the generation of people you're targeting or was it just because of the gameplay? Yeah, I think people we target are generally males age like 21 to like 30 35 and then like the concept was like we want games that people used to play like in class in school back when they were in school and yeah like the money on the line makes it fun in the modern day like otherwise you just like wouldn't be playing these games as an adult >> because I I remember when I was kind of running some real money gaming game it was mainly solitire or pool or some some something like This this was kind of surprising to me. Like it wasn't really like Brick Breaker and stuff, but you have these games in >> We have them. Um they're definitely not our top games. Our top games are the ones that we've made ourselves. Like this game Chaos Cannon is like one of our top ones. The experience for a solitaire. I think people will wager on skill-based games for solitire because it's a game they've been playing their whole life and they feel like they're good it. It's like a little bit different value prop for us. We try to focus on games that we think are fun, games that like not many people play that we can kind of reinvent into like a really fun way and then just have them be like really fast and hyper casual.

8:43 >> And just out of curiosity, right, so how does the revenue model work? Do you guys take a vague off the winnings or how does it work? >> Yeah, we take a a fee for facilitating each game. Um, depending on the game mode, it can be from like 10 to 20%. And um, so each one of our game modes has a fee and that's how we make our money. >> Sweet. And just so yeah. Yeah, I have to ask this is a bit like cheesy, but what's the like the player like that has gotten the biggest payout? How much is that? But what is also the average payouts for players? The biggest payouts are from our challenge mode. You can win north of like5 $6,000 from a good challenge mode. I'd say average is actually really small. So like our average wer for an individual game is about $3. People put >> Well, you're not making any money based on sensors, so I'm not sure what you're talking about.

9:32 >> Yeah. No AP revenue for us. We use uh payment processors within the app. So like our sensor tower is probably gonna be pretty blank which I think is a lot of people why a lot of people might not know about Triumph. >> Exactly. >> Hello everybody. Thanks for uh joining this episode. Our sponsor Fast Spring has delivered D2C at scale for over 20 years. They power top mobile publishers around the world and are reliably fast growing, profitable, and very financially secure. So, Fastpring isn't just figuring out D2C on the heels of the recent VC investment. Their developer first platform and deep gaming and payment expertise have helped democratize global commerce for over two decades. There's no drama D2C partner.

10:21 The real world experience at scale. Fast spring is a partner that you can trust with your players. Quickly launch a new web store replace an existing D2C vendor or just add redundant D2C vendor at fastspring.gg. Thank you very much guys for sponsoring this episode. Now let's get back to the content. Bye-bye. But, you know, I think we're like kind of a low-key upandcomer and like it's been cool to see the growth, but yeah, like not much you can find on sensor tower.

10:52 >> Yeah. It's even in the category that's called like mini games hub. Yeah. Yeah. Go go go like you know go unified apps and you'll see it if you get to the main page like the category where you have like offline games, no Wi-Fi games. It's like number six >> mini game. >> Yeah. Stuff like that. And it's like it's just that I guess the taxonomy isn't really ready for this kind of a genre yet in in so >> right where you want to be though, right?

11:16 >> Yeah. >> Yeah. I mean this is kind of >> as low as possible >> because this is definitely like the the real money. >> Quite interesting as I'm looking at it because some of those look like >> that would be the category >> the top hyper casual that we look at but also you have those like staples like sol combined there. So I guess all the story and there's no events met metag game or like some kind of level stuff between those.

11:39 >> Yeah, not really any metag game apart from like I guess your balance in the app as you continue to wager and continue to win and lose games. I would I would call that metag game. We are we're we're we're trying to think about how to have a good metag game because I think ultimately we want our players coming back and playing a lot >> and like unlockable skins, things that like change the cosmetics of a game, things that like give your player more standings. We also have leagues. Um, depending on how much you wager in the game, um, you're going to be placed in a certain league and you can rank up or rank down in the leagues tab. I think this adds a lot of progression as well.

12:11 But compared to like a freeto-play game, not nearly as much progression. >> Yeah. But you can't even because again by the nature of the, you know, the skill kind of skill gaming uh, paradigm of like you cannot have the advantage otherwise you wouldn't be able to venture because, you know, it's pay to win as as usual as it's there. But like, yeah, stuff like this is definitely skill skill based. >> Also, I couldn't help but notice, right, when we're on Sensor Tower as well, that there's no Android app, right? What's going on there?

12:41 >> Um, so the Play Store currently doesn't allow skill-based games to advertise or even launch a skill-based game on Android. I think skillbased gaming has had an interesting past. I mean, like you look at companies like Skills and Papaya and like they're just straight up very different than us. Like they're doing solitary cast. There's been a lot of lawsuits about, you know, historical replays and everything of that sort. Our hope is that we could really like just change how the industry is perceived. I think our app just targets completely different user. It's almost a completely different experience than like a single game skill-based app like solitary cash and like we hope we can change the industry and make it legal for the play store and I I think skill-based game could just be a lot bigger than it is today.

13:19 >> Okay. Do you also get a lot of friction from the the app store, right? Because they're not getting a cut from this, right? So, I don't know, like do you get a lot of friction from them or how does that work? >> We've had we've had no complaints from the app store. I think for the most part, they're uh generally cool with us. Um, you know, we have good legal opinions for everything we do. We have good um payment partners that we work with. The fact that you can withdraw money makes us like >> being on the app store without the Apple tax. Yeah, for the most part compliance wise, once we were able to get the licenses and like opinions that we have in place, it's like been generally a breeze for scaling. Not really any complaints from Apple.

13:55 >> Yeah, could be if you go to to countries and I'm not sure why the the internet today for me is terrible. But anyway, >> it's 94 94% US basically. Can you go active user base instead? >> Yeah, I think it's more indicative. >> But I just want to I just want to say it's not worldwide kind of the legal side of this and also it's not also like all the country all the states in the US, right?

14:16 >> Yeah, it's 38 of the 50 states currently. >> So the law dictate skill-based gaming in the US at least. They're rather unique. They actually go back to the 1930s when um people were playing pinball for money. And each state regulated um pinball games in different ways. Some states came and like burned all the pinball machines, other ones fully endorsed it. So everybody in Scobas Gaming, what they do is they take these laws and then they have legal opinions based off of how the laws worked in like the 30s and 50s for these games and we come up with like very good arguments for like why we can be live in a certain state and why we can't. Um, and that's currently how like the whole industry works for the US.

14:54 >> And is it expanding or you know getting smaller? Like what's the state of this like 38 for last 20 years or like what's the state of that? >> I mean since I've been doing it in the last uh two years I haven't really seen any difference here. Our hope is it can expand. I think we just need like really solid players that um do things by the books. Um and that's the biggest thing. >> So until Trump gets to play this like yeah that's there. So, what what's the kind of the golden metrics in this?

15:20 Because it's very different from freeto play, right? Like you're not measuring on AP and retention, right? Is it the amount of games played per user? That's the Northstar metric or how does this work? >> Um well, at least for ads or Northstar is return on ad spend. I think like the big difference here for advertising is that um in a game like Monopoly Go like somebody might download from an ad, play it for like an hour, two hours, maybe even a week, and then like pay. Paying is very core to the Triumph experience.

15:48 We have a free-to-play mode, but generally to get the most out of Triumph, you're paying almost immediately. Like our average time to pay is five minutes for the users that join. So, we need to convince them in the ad to pay and then like that first time pay is actually a lot more topfunnel than I think a lot of these games that are out there. So, we can put rorowaz as like a really strong metric for us like within our day zero, our day one. like we have models that predict out and bake this out to day 90, day 180 and we can have like a pretty good idea of like how things are going to pay back and how things are going to work based off the product. So I'd say robots for almost everything.

16:23 >> But if I understand the game or the game the app is more like free to start than freeto play like >> yeah so we have a freeto play mode where you can earn gems. You can then play a game where you like you spend your gems and convert this into cash. And you can also watch ads to get gems on the app. And people like a general paying user might play like two, three, four of those games and then decide to pay right afterwards. So like I I think our our users pay upfront probably a lot more than a regular game. M can you talk about again you don't have to the usual kind of conversion within freeto play something like midcore stuff it's like what like 5% of users ever pay 95% is free to play forever is the ratio dramatically different for you >> I will say it's um a lot higher than that I will definitely say that >> okay way more than a >> free look at the DA look at these these players are playing >> because they are kind of depositing money >> y >> so the conversion is dramatically higher Obviously when I worked uh real money gaming I would say like uh it was it was pool and it was solitary. So solitaire was definitely on the higher end of CPIs but I was seeing like 30 35 40 50 depends on iOS in the US on Facebook sometimes in value optimization it was 50 80 easily. So that's that's the biggest difference.

17:44 Yeah, because we are targeting this like younger demo though I assume versus the solitire cache and the bingo caches of the world. Um, we're gonna get a lower CPI than >> Yeah. Yeah. Also, all the bingos and all the like the cooking uh skillbased games, they were just like the old ladies which were absolutely crazy crazy expensive. >> So, >> yeah, I think I think those games have like a a longer lifetime value curve. like they can get um get away with like five I've heard 5% on day zero sometimes for like a 180day payback period from some competitors and then they can really roll that. Our revenue is a little more front-loaded than that. Um but like when you do one of these games for like that older skill-based gaming demographic I think like that revenue is like really sticky.

18:30 >> Yeah. But that frontloading of the revenue that's kind of works in your favor in the UA, right? You get so many events. >> Exactly. we can um you know not have to rely on loans or VC money like our revenue is what goes right back into the UA spend which is really nice. >> Nice. >> Yeah. >> Awesome man. Like it's there a lot of over sorry I just want to say such a different kind of uh UA activity than the rest of the like the freetoplay stuff.

18:56 >> Yeah. I'd say our UA is different. It probably comes from um just not being in UA before this. I'd say a lot. But um like I think it comes back to the experience like a lot of this we need to convince players to pay for this within 5 minutes of them downloading. So our our UA has to be trust based. So we use a lot of celebrity advertisement for this reason. Like you can see um Soulja Boy playing our game like we use a lot of rappers.

19:20 >> Boy, that's nice. >> Yeah. I I think a lot of this is like people see someone they know and they trust playing the game then they're confident they can get a withdrawal from the app. So we really try to lean into that a lot. It's essentially what Yakob has spent his entire career trying to do. Get people to pay in the five minutes, first five minutes. It's >> nice. >> And also there's there's a reason that we we can't play this on the emulator because Yakob is Android only, right?

19:44 And then he would never >> emulators. >> He would never pay anywhere. So this also kind of fails his >> filter. I'm not sure if that proves. If you are here, maybe this is a good question for you because as I said the category here was kind of all over the place which is as I said mini games hub with like offline games. No, definitely not the category I'm looking for. If you can enlight a little bit like who are the current biggest market players so we can see the scale and just kind of what are we talking about here?

20:13 >> Yeah, pretty much all of our competitors do solitire and big oat style games and we have Papaya, AIA, Skills, Voodoo also has Blitz Cash which is probably the most similar app to us I'd say. Really? I didn't even know. Okay. >> Voodoo. >> Voodoo has their fingers in every pie known to man by now. So, yeah. >> And um yeah, so there's a few people that do it, that's for sure. Um but yeah, >> because I would say >> yeah, that's what I hear always when I kind of >> they've been around in this space for quite a while as well. So like they've been able to like be the first movers for that solitaire sort of core game.

20:48 Um, >> also first movers that can run campaigns on Google especially. >> Yeah, I I heard that they're uh grandfathered in there. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> Wait, what? Wait, wait, wait. Talk more about that. >> They have >> I don't know. I just heard I've heard some rumors, but I've heard that Papaya uh or AVI or Papaya, I'm not sure which one, but I heard I heard that they're allowed to run on Google and like other people are not allowed to run on Google currently in the space. And this is I have this information for three or four years. So they are very close to to the Google guys and also they're making [ __ ] ton of money. So you know there are always exceptions when there are rules.

21:24 They're always exceptions >> especially in ads. >> Especially Yeah. Especially in the gaming industry like what can we come on what can we do? >> Okay. So this is Papa's portfolio. Yeah. Solita cash, bubble cash, bingo cash. >> Zero revenue >> of course. Why do I Oh [ __ ] Yeah. This is a different podcast. Sorry. No, they're making money. They're definitely making money. >> Yeah. Yeah. So, it's like what do we have monthly? So, it's something like uh 200 300k downloads a month, which is enough for them.

21:56 >> This is considered big. Yeah. >> Yeah. Like just like looking at it because like >> Yeah. Cool. I'm dying to ask, right? Because basically the main monetization of course is you taking the fee, right, of any played game. Do you guys also do ad monetization? >> We do a little bit. Right now it's like less than 5% of our total revenue is admon, but we have one placement right now and that's um we have a free mode where you earn gems. In order to get gems, we give you a certain amount on download and then past that you have to watch an ad. You can convert these gems into cash for in a free cash tournament as well. And we need free games cuz if people can't play the game for free their first time, they probably won't pay for it. That's the main reason. But we do have like a subset of users that like will constantly just run these free games, watch ads, run these free games, watch ads. And that's like our sort of mini game economy is our gem mode. Our hope is that we can get our admon good enough in this mode to um do some like MAI install campaigns and like run up that those free users and really see like a big lift from there. But I think it's going to need to be more than like 5% of our revenue to really run blended do any of that. Well, that being said, we only have one placement. We've thought about putting interstitials in the games and stuff like this, but I think it's really not good for like what we do because like we really want to ensure this brand of like being a fair and trustworthy game that doesn't rig matches, that doesn't have bots. If we start putting ads or banner ads in the middle of the game, like it's just going to completely ruin that look. So, the only ads we do right now are like in between games you can watch a rewarded ad to get more gems.

23:26 >> Yeah, makes sense. and and which networks because I've worked on some like real money stuff and there's a couple of ad networks that don't let you run ads at all. Right. If you have anything associated with real money, right? Yeah. Which networks love you and which hate you? >> Well, I mean we're on Max. Max does a lot of the bidding. Mint I think also bids a lot. Um in Unity generally we haven't really had any problems. I think a lot of these uh issues like are you talking about for admon or for uh >> admon? For admon. Yeah, I'm talking about admon google. Absolutely. As soon as they find out there's any money component in an app, they will shut you off quite quickly.

24:01 >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's the same thing with UA. >> Yeah. I I don't think we've added Google to our our stack yet. So, that's probably why. But, um, all of the players I mentioned like have been good and I think it's like generally like a 20 30% split between them. >> But, you said you didn't have a problem. You mean you mean you didn't have a problem with UA? I mean, uh, channels because I had a lot.

24:24 >> Yeah. I I've heard from like people that do these solitary style games like their ads are like pretty insane. It's like PayPal logos like 20 times over like million bucks and then those people get from um advertising in games quite a bit I've heard. So that that can be a little challenging for them. We generally don't show those PayPal logos in our ads. like we show you can win money but it's like purely through gameplay in the actual game which I think kind of just changes that experience and makes our ads like a lot more compliant with everybody compared to like running ads on Tik Tok or like any social network like running ads on append is like much more of a free-for-all like you can get away with a lot more that's for sure >> I mean no surprise no surprise but like there were times where even even now I mean some some reverted UA channels are kind of not able to run Tik Tok even and then and I saw like you have so many Tik Tok ads So, I'm pretty sure like Tik Tok is pretty big for you guys.

25:16 >> Tik Tok is big for us. Comes down to our player demographic. Actually, that was like the first channel we really cracked. We're able to scale big with this app. Tik Tok has a rewarded gaming program. So, like we're in that program. >> Nice. >> And they don't anybody with just a regular ad account advertise skillbased games. >> Yeah. >> But they are quite strict in terms of like what we actually can and can't advertise. So, um, we have to like constantly go back and forth with their policy team, make sure everything's compliant to their standards, which makes sense, but like it's there's a lot of ads that we can get away with running on meta that we can't run on Tik Tok.

25:49 Um, and they're they are rather strict about it, but like Tik Tok was definitely the first place we were able to see scale. >> Nice. And Apple, I mean, so so Apple like what kind of data you send back to Apple for the the ROS campaigns or you do just CPP campaigns? >> We do the day seven and day 30 rorowes campaigns with them. >> Okay. We're integrated with our MMP Appsier. We just send them. >> So the purchase is basically the deposit.

26:13 >> Yes. Our our AF purchase event and apps is our our deposit event. >> Okay. And is first time deposit or just all all deposit? >> We have it's for all deposits. So like most of our campaigns are maximized value campaigns. >> Okay. Okay. Okay. >> I'd say that's where most of our UA goes to. >> Nice. Okay. So you have Applavin. I see. I saw Tik Tok. I mean I can Can you show Can you show show it because if I disappear again then it's it's going to be better. Yeah, just go to Yeah, just go to creatives and we're just going to talk about it because Yeah, I see Apple.

26:43 I see Tik Tok. I see Liftoff. I see some so many others. I didn't see Facebook, but I I was like, "No, you're definitely running Facebook." >> Let me guess. Not a real person. >> No, he's real. Um >> this guy I don't think we've actually worked we've done any AI ads yet. We've we've been playing around with Sora though. Um so we might start doing it soon because it's getting really good. Um but um like using real people, making it seem real is like a big part of like >> So it's tells basically a little bit of a story that the guy wants to buy Elden Ring on the Play Store and then he plays the app and he wants wins it and then he can buy it. Yeah, that that's nice. It's like pretty relatable, I would say.

27:23 >> Yeah. Then then I saw like some some of the rewarded UA channels had like this like $150 that you can you can win or get from paying uh while playing other other games. That's not really that relatable. I don't think you can trust that that much. Although this is way way easier than than the actual PayPal logos and like millions of of money that you can you can actually earn >> by the big difference between the PayPal logos and actually showing this is like we're actually showing our >> Yeah.

27:56 >> when we show money like going up, you know, so it makes it a lot more believable. >> Yeah. This this definitely >> What am I looking at? >> You picked the worst ad that we've ever done. Oh my gosh, >> it's amazing. I mean, I love it already. Great. It was like brain rot. It's a horror ad, basically. >> We've done some uh we've done some experimental ads, that's for sure. But, you know, we try everything. We have fun in the marketing team.

28:19 >> That's That's I mean, you have to you have to Oh, yeah. >> How do you do your ideization for creatives? >> I mean, we're just all in this room together thinking about how can we make like seven to 10 ads a day and then a lot of it just comes from that. These texting stories, we've done a lot of really ronsy texting stories. This is one of them. But like it keeps the user engaged. I'd say it's like very natural to the platform. You know, you're scrolling TikTok and then you see an actual text. You think it's a real text.

28:45 You're gonna stop and watch that whole video. This one is actually one of our top spending ads. This one's really good. You can see Soulja Boy playing the game. He's just asking a lot of questions about the game and then he plays it himself and uh he just really enjoys it and then we have an offer at the end of the ad. Like that those are really really key to us. >> Is Soulja Boy running currently? Maybe I'm able to find >> I believe he's still running. Yeah.

29:04 >> Yeah. >> He was really big for us in like July. Here's me. >> Oh, I see. Yeah, I see. So yeah. Hello. >> I'm in a decent amount of the ads, too. >> I mean, this is exactly like it's super easy to to record you, your team, and whatever. And that's it. You don't really need anything else. >> Yeah. I think like I I came from a background where like I was making Tik Toks. I was growing my last app that I did completely organically, never doing paid. So, it just like got me in the habit of like pushing out these videos.

29:30 I think so many people in UA just look at the data a lot and they don't like nearly do as much creative as they need to. They're really good at doing the creative here >> because this is super important. This is super important. Like and the background with the Tik Tok and making the videos like that's unlocks another level of creativity and uh the creative production in general. That's it. I mean like you record yourself, your your teammates, colleagues and whoever else and then suddenly you have those five videos a day.

29:56 >> Super. >> I can I can see a would never record himself for a creative. Actually, I was doing development diaries live on stream back then when I was at the company. >> Back when it was it's a it's a it's a dev stream. It was 2019. It's quite a long time ago, man. And he wasn't even he wasn't even the the main person on that stream. >> You were sidekick. >> Mate, when I'm in Bratislava next time, I want to be in a creative. Let's do one together. I did I did a creative with with John Wright for the playable maker.

30:32 Easy. I mean it's about for game though. Yeah. This is looks fun. >> It is. It is. >> I think I recommend all you a managers to just do your own creative. Also, if you're like since I've done it and I've seen like how my ads do, I can tell some celebrity to actually like play it right and to like say the right things to actually get people to go and download. >> That's that's like that's a gold right there. That's really funny.

30:55 >> Yeah. you work with you work with like some creator or some Tik Tocker and you're like make an ad for us. They're going to do something that they think is really creative. They're not looking into like single source of truth data and like figuring out which ad is like the best performance, the best row as like if you make the creative yourself, you can do that as well. Obviously, you can't be as good as a Tik Tocker, but like even just having like a your foot in the door there will like help you direct other people to do it really really well.

31:20 >> Yeah. So then what are the the elements of good ads that if if I want to want to record an ad tomorrow, what should I do? >> Well, I think it's specific to your product, right? Like cuz like we look at we make an ad and we look at how the rorowaz goes up after we put a little bit of spend behind this ad. And what we've noticed for us is like it needs to be trust based. You need to like trust in the person. You need to show the gameplay. If we don't have the game in the ad, it's not going to work. And uh we need to like incentivize a person to actually download or deposit. So we have to say download. We have to say deposit money. Okay. Um, and play the game.

31:51 >> There are different keywords that you need to you need to say multiple times to just Okay. >> Yeah. >> Nice. >> How did you how did you find Soulja Boy or where like is it cameo or is it on like for agents or like how does how did that work? >> Through through agents mainly. Um, we just uh figured we should try it with one of them and it ended up working like really incredibly well.

32:18 Yeah. Uh we look at like the returns for each individual celebrity we do. >> Sure. >> Like we'll group all the Soulja Boy ads into one ad set into like one campaign and then we'll see that adset performs versus other ones. Um and then that's kind of how we like get good prices for like all these people. It's like okay this is a price so you know we can afford to pay is based off the ads of the past person that's very similar to this guy. It's like doing well and we can kind of go from there. There's a lot of that that's done into like making the actual deals with the celebrities.

32:47 >> That's quite interesting. Like have we seen um who was there? Homelander was there at the last war for creatives. Like they had him and it was like this kind of very clever ploy of uh last for having Homelander but not explicitly saying that they had Homelander. They just had the actor but he was having like laser eyes and [ __ ] So it >> Yeah. But he was kind of acting as a Homelander. It was quite clear.

33:08 >> So you had Soulja Boy doing something similar in a way. >> Yeah. We Well, what we do is we actually have them live stream the game for like about an hour. get them to live stream the game and then similar to like how Ka Snod or Speed might get clipped up and posted, >> we'll clip up our people and like post them live playing. >> True. So, >> I think that makes it native to the platform, right? Cuz like when you're advertising on Instagram, you want to seem like you want it to seem like the ads from Instagram and like you do like an actual stream clip of an actual celebrity. It just adds a level of like genuiness because I know I was working with Heroes of Fortune, Felix, Mike and they were doing some streams basically one two hour long streams and then we just use like cut down versions from those streams actually in the in the ads and some of them working really well.

33:54 >> Yeah. Yeah. We found that works really well. We we get them to say stuff too like off camera. them saying, "If you bet $50, you'll get $50." Um, and stuff like that. Like things that we can say to get encourage people with like our offers or deposit offers and stuff. >> And stream by stream you mean on Twitch or some kind of normal commercial platform? >> Yeah, we'll stream on on kick. Um, we get that many viewers when we actually live stream. The main point of doing it is just to actually clip up those >> streams. Of course, of course, of course.

34:22 >> It's a stream is actually getting >> Yeah. Yeah. Of course. I was a little bit surprised but the kicks make sense much more sense this case >> I guess for me I'm just looking at this right if if I'm assuming the LTV is quite high right like do you guys do a lot of retargeting as well or is it just UA >> um we actually only just started retargeting about like a month a month ago it's returning really well so I think we have a lot of juice to squeeze out of that but yeah generally like 95% of our UA has been from UA and not retargeting >> yeah welcome to gaming industry that's like people do [ __ ] ton of VA, but there's like retargeting doesn't work.

34:58 If you measure it properly, then it might >> Yeah, you need to measure it properly. You need to start slowly as well. And that's really >> which is interesting by the way because people usually say, "Oh, ret retargeting on iOS doesn't exist." But it does. It does. Do you do like on like you started on Facebook and now expanding to like the other channels like Addictive, Remerge or whoever else or the other way around? >> Yeah, I mean like we we started with like the social media networks like >> Okay. Tik Tok. Um, and then we put all of our eggs in the crack in Facebook.

35:28 Then, um, now we're like expanding. We're in the team, too, so we can more channels and like expanding to >> nice >> everything. The one thing I think we need to do more of for UA is playables. Like we almost have no like >> I wanted to ask. Yeah, I wanted to ask like because I saw like few of them only and Applavin is Come on, man. Like it's that's the playable place. So, how is it possible that you have only like few of them?

35:52 >> Yeah. I mean, like, it's just never been a priority. Like, if we like from an economics perspective, it would probably make sense, but like from like having like two or three people on the growth team, it's like if we put our eggs into doubling our Facebook spend, it just seems like a lot better ROI than like making playables and like increasing app. Now, we're at the point where like we're really trying to hone in on that.

36:12 So, like in a month or two, you'll see playables from us. >> Nice. >> And um >> same background. >> Let's scale. You can you can you can just go to playablemaker.com and use it. That's it. That's it. And that's you don't really need three people. You can do like half of the person. You can spit out like so many different credits from actually from this game play. Like that's super easy. So >> yeah. >> Yeah, I would definitely try that. But man, yeah, I mean if the return is better on like doubling Facebook, then that's like a no-brainer. That's a no-brainer.

36:43 >> And I know like how how big it can be. Is that Jeffrey Dmer in the creative? >> Yeah, that was Jeffrey Dmer meme stuff or something. >> Sorry. >> We've done some funny ones for sure. >> This exact I mean I I love this. I love this. This is exactly the creatives I I want to do for for any of my apps or whatever games. This is exactly it. Yeah, >> the users love it too. Like we get like so many positive comments on our ads.

37:09 >> Um never skip a triumph ad. Like that's a lot of the ones we get. When we were doing the really funny ones, what we've noticed is that like when we just show the gamer in a stream, like it typically does better with rorowaz, but those like memes, those funny ones for brand awareness are like a really good way of like expanding the funnel. >> Nice. So you said like seven to 10 ads a day. That means exactly like how many you do like every day?

37:33 >> On on average it might be like five, but yeah, like we we do a lot of creative. >> How do you test that, man? How do we test it? >> Yeah, like if you have five, we'll throw it all in different adsets. Um, so like most of our testing is done on I guess like Facebook and Tik Tok is the two places. >> I mean, it makes sense. >> We have a creative ad set. Anything that's like we look at the rorowaz per ad and then any ad that's like positive rorowaz, we'll put in its own ad set and then we group that together, spin that live, put that in our deposit or campaign, kind of go from there. And um what we found is like we just deal with a lot of fatigue for these ads like really fast. Like on Tik Tok, the average ad can last like two weeks. So we need to do quite a bit of creative in order to like keep it fresh, keep that frequency low. And on Meta, you know, if we're lucky and ads like lasting a month long, >> some of these creatives are great.

38:24 >> Yeah. Yeah, they're really good. I think my >> Yeah, you guys walk walk through it because there's definitely some that are like pretty crazy. >> Yeah. Yeah. That's so really nice. What's kind of uh what's kind of next for Triumph, right? Like how how do you guys expand? Is it by gaming genre? Is it by adding events? Or like how how do you guys fuel this expansion? >> Yeah. By the way, just just saying like it's still expanding like download wise.

38:50 >> That's not the right one. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's the right one. Yeah. Sorry. Continue. >> Yeah. Well, I think Scoies Gaming is can just be so much bigger than it is. The fact that like we're the only people really targeting younger males in the space, I think is still pretty incredible. Like there's not really any competition that has done something just like Triumph yet. We can make way more games. I think we totally should make way more games. Like it might seem like that we have a lot having 12 to 13, but I I we see like a really big lift in like what we can do when a new game works and becomes a hit for the app. So I think investing in that also just going live in more places like skillbased gaming can totally be bigger than the US. Like there's a lot of countries in Europe that we can go live in today if we wanted to. M >> I also think eventually we can get this live on the Play Store and like have a good standing with Google as well. Like that's one of our big goals and ultimately I just can see a lot of people my age like playing this and actually doing it.

39:42 >> Move mediation platform that goes a long way I hear. >> Wink. >> Can you uh show downloads over time, Jakob? Only for Triumph. Yeah, this is it, right? >> For Triumph. >> Yeah. Yeah, it's quite impressive. It kind of like uh reminds me a lot of our chat when we were talking about offline no Wi-Fi games, right? And I I met the developers and basically they kept saying like how important some of the games are and then that adding the right miniames or games basically can fuel so much growth. So do you guys just have a list of what you're going to be adding next or is it just looking at the hyper casual hits and then you're like yeah this will work and you roll it out on a small user base or what's >> We have a list of specific games I don't want to really say until they're out.

40:19 >> Yeah, of course. Like as of lately, we're we're trying to hold ourselves to a standard of like releasing one a month. And generally like like you'll see this cannon game, you'll see Brick Breaker a lot in our ads, the the more games that we can actually get to work in the ads, I think the better um the product's going to be for because like if you're looking at an ad on a basis, it's more than just the ad. Like people need to see that game, come into the product, play that game, really like it, and then actually stay.

40:43 >> Yeah. Very cool. Honestly, I don't think I have any other questions. If there's anything else we missed asking that's interesting about skillbased gaming, I'd love to know. But yeah, fascinating. Like I know I learned a ton. Was that John Cena as well? >> Yeah. >> Yeah. Yeah. You know, you go on the edge when you can. That that's like how this game is played. >> So much great stuff. My internet can't handle it. All of it >> seems >> too much. Too much >> too much great great memes and everything. Man, >> we were we're kind of just wrapping up and asking our final questions. Monte, do you want to ask anything uh to cap us off? I think I I got all any any kind of future plans for expan expansion in terms of the UA and scaling like where do you want to push the most and what what would be the like what I really look up to companies like prize picks like a lot of these bigger companies I think the way they do advertisements and um you know user acquisition for those sort of apps is like how I really want to be thinking about it as a company other than gaming. So, you know, a prize picks, a FanDuel, DraftKings, like those sort of companies. I think like just doing our ads to like that level of professionalism standards and really will like allow us to get the most people.

41:50 >> It's really important as you say that like the demography is kind of different than the usual market competitors and it really shows and I guess just by expanding the portfolio of those games, I guess it will be just, you know, great correlation on just the engagement and overall metrics as it will go further. I mean, I I'm pretty sure we will add Trium to the creative uh trends from now on. >> Yeah. >> Oh, man. I mean, this is this is such a great stuff. I haven't seen this these great ads for a while. So, I mean, >> the varation is really good.

42:23 >> Well done. Yeah. >> Very well done. Definitely like some of the things that uh Oh my god. that Mate always says at the end of some of the games, this is literally it like what we're missing. >> Yeah, it's exactly it. Because then we talk about the sp the creative depth and then there's like one or two pages of creatives and it's like this is just never ending which is exactly how it should be. >> If you scroll on the top >> and like well what most people don't understand is like even when you make a good ad that ad's only going to last a month long >> and you're going to have to make one at least if you're advertising on meta.

42:55 >> Exactly. So if you make a if you make a great ad and you immediately see such a great results you have two problems. first I mean it's going to outperform everything else and then the second one like by far and the second one is like the finding the finding the replacement and the new creative winner because far >> it's like yeah like you are so happy and then so sad at the same time because like oh now now we're going to spend another two months or three months at the best to find the better >> definitely definitely >> this was amazing even though I >> so good thank you so much for coming >> yeah finally I now understand much more about this whole show. I'm happy.

43:34 >> Yeah. >> Yeah. I'm happy to do it. And I got to mention to the pods like I learned a lot of UA from just watching your guys' stuff like um I've been watching for quite a while. >> You listened as well. Not everyone does. >> Yeah. People watch us a lot but they don't do what we say. Exactly. >> So it's pretty cool to be like on the pod. Yeah. >> Yeah. Happy to help here always.

43:53 >> And thanks thanks again for for coming. If anyone wants to contact you, they can do on LinkedIn. I will or whatever >> or the company >> or the company. Yeah. >> Yeah. Um you can add me on LinkedIn. Um I'm also in the two and a half gamer Slack. You can message me there like either or. >> And then thank you very much for listening. Hope I'm still here >> for now for now if I disappear. It was a great uh great show. Thanks com. And thanks everybody for joining. Join the Slack channel. If you have any comments, put it under the video as usual. And then join the Slack channel. And see you next time. Thank you very much. Peace.

44:28 Go. [Music] Heat. Heat. [Music]