2 superwomen in games: Getting featured by Apple and Google, growing a small studio, knowing when to scale (and more!)

It’s great to meet amazing women in tech, as our COO Susan Kuo knows well. Even better is meeting two who know what it’s like to get featured by Apple and Google … not once, but six times.

And, who can talk through the challenges and triumphs of running a small games studio in a non-traditional development environment: Melbourne Australia. Their company is Lumi Interactive, and their games include Critter Clash and one they can’t talk much about, but is close to being released.

They’ve got amazing insight into how to get featured, what that’s like, and how to parlay that into long-lasting mobile success:

You can subscribe on Anchor right now, but Growth Masterminds is currently propagating to Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and pretty much every other podcast platform on the planet. It’s also already available on Spotify.

But if you prefer to read your information rather than hear it, here are the highlights and a full transcript, lightly edited for readability.

Lauren Clinnick on player retention

That’s really something about mobile gaming that is very, very different and specific. You have to offer an experience that’s easy to grasp within seconds, but to retain the players, you have to have a meta-game or some kind of longer term sort of reward and engagement strategy.

Christina Chen on getting featured by Apple and Google

we were only getting at most a few hundred on the App Store in Australia. And the early access featuring was exposing us all of sudden to 16,000 users. That was already a big step up for our featuring. The next step is, preregistration featuring, that’s a second step of the program. And that put people like put our game in the hands of people on preorder and shows interest before live.

And that gave us about 600,000 preregistration users.

Christina Chen on scaling too early

We did find significant differences in the audience in beta audience versus live, which means we made some mistakes in live and we put in money way too early to advertise, where the quality of traffic isn’t the same.

Lauren Clinnick on getting featured by Apple

In terms of Apple, a lot of people would think that looking at Android and Apple, they’re very similar. We’ve actually found that they can be similar but different. Google does have a lot more tools and a lot more processes and funnels for how to get through a prelaunch period to launch. Apple has differences in how they can support you prelaunch. We chose to soft launch in Australia to start testing for functionality and testing for cross play between Apple and Android before launching first on Android with Critter Clash.

But by doing that, what we didn’t know and what we couldn’t get warning on would mean that we could not then enter the preorder program, the prelaunch pre-ordering system that Apple had, which is different to Google Play.

Christina Chen on smart targeting for lower CPI and higher LTV

Unfortunately with cost per acquisition in games being very high right now, especially in strategy with big games buying out the market, the App Store starts becoming a winner takes all sort of thing where big game makers buy out the market by keeping and retaining the most valuable paying users.

Because of that, it’s very hard for studios  to compete in that space. So, we are thinking of our next project is something that we can appeal to a niche market. Not mass market, but to a niche market  where we can actually lower the cost per acquisition in our market for people being, you know, not traditionally targeted by games.

Subscribe to the podcast … and check out the full transcript

The podcast is brand new right now, so it’s not fully propagated to Apple Podcasts and Google Podcasts. (It will be in a week.) But you can listen here, or on Anchor, or subscribe on Spotify.

And … here’s the full transcript, lightly edited for length and legibility.

John Koetsier: Welcome to Growth Masterminds, where we get insights from experts to help smart mobile marketers get even smarter.

This is the second episode. We only have one in the books so far, so I’m still super excited to bring new guests to you, and we have two guests today. Both are very successful women in gaming.

They’ve been featured by Google four times. They’ve been featured by Apple, not once, but twice. And you bet we’re going to talk about those things. My first guest is a chief game officer. She’s a cofounder of Surprise Attack Games. She was a senior producer for PopCap games in Shanghai. You remember Plants vs Zombies … still  out there,  still very successful. Bejeweled: also a big game. She was also a program manager for Microsoft, and here’s where it gets a little insane. She’s got a master’s degree in psychology and a master’s degree in electrical and system engineering … and a bachelor’s in software engineering. Insanely qualified.

Her name is Christina Chen, and she’s the chief game officer of Lumi Interactive.  Welcome to Growth Masterminds.

Christina Chen: Thank you John. I’m very happy to be here.

John Koetsier: Wonderful, and we have another superwoman with us. She’s a CEO of a game company. Might even be the same one. Before being in games, she worked in hardware encryption. She was a luxury fruit juice marketer, so she’s well-rounded in marketing strategy. She went to business school. She has a background in HR, marketing, and PR, and a bachelor in languages.

Guess what? It’s Japanese. A good one for games, and she’s now the CEO of Lumi interactive. Please welcome Lauren Clinnick, CEO of Lumi Interactive. Welcome to Growth Masterminds.

Lauren Clinnick: Thank you so much for having us. I hope everyone enjoys our beautiful  Australian accents.

John Koetsier: I’m sure I do. So I’m sure everybody else will too. So off the top, I mentioned that you two have had games featured six times in Google play and the iOS App Store, that’s something every game developer clearly wants. They wish for it, they scheme for it, they sacrifice interns for it … okay … just a rumor … probably. And we’re going to talk about that, but first let’s start and talk a little bit about your latest game.

Can you tell me a little bit about it?

Lauren Clinnick: Definitely. So Critter Clash is a player-versus-player-battle-in-the-jungle game that’s available on Android and on iOS right now. So listeners can head over to the store and give it a download!

Critter Clash is a game that we have been operating for over a year now. And we have partnered with developers based in Shanghai to do co-development together. We’ve been working on the monetization, on the design, on the first-time user experience, and yeah, working on Critter Clash has been a great experience. We’ve achieved a lot, we’ve learned heaps and we’re just really excited to share that with your listeners.

John Koetsier: Excellent. What’s the thing that you’re maybe most excited about by that game? What did you learn the most doing that game?

Lauren Clinnick: What we love about it is that it is very much a strategy title, but it really appeals to that Angry Birds audience because we’ve got slingshot game play and it’s just got really cute animals in the game itself.

So it’s a game that’s very easy to learn, but hard to master. It really rewards players that want to go deep. But it really does have that family friendly appeal and it has a really comedic tone as well, which we really love.

Christina Chen: We love seeing a lot of parents and their kids playing together and they make and sing videos, playing together and so you can see it appeals to both kids and parents at the same time.

John Koetsier: Nice. One thing that you said there, Lauren, really resonated with me because you’re saying that it was simple to get into, but very hard to master.

There’s a bunch of games like that. One of the ones that comes to mind is that hit from, what was it a couple of years ago, Flappy Bird, where it couldn’t be simpler, right? There was one thing to do in the game, which was to tap the screen, but it was insanely challenging to go far in that game. And there’s something to that kind of gameplay, that kind of experience that seems to draw people in.

Lauren Clinnick: Mmm … that’s really something about mobile gaming that is very, very different and specific. You have to offer an experience that’s easy to grasp within seconds, but to retain the players, you have to have a meta-game or some kind of longer term sort of reward and engagement strategy.

So simple to understand, but to have something to keep the players coming back is definitely something challenging.

And that is something different about being more in the mid-core space rather than hyper casual, which I’m sure you know, you’ve spoken to CMOs that are part of hyper casual. Our space for Critter Clash is a little bit different. We designed for a little bit longer term, multiple play sessions in a day and for players to retain, and that is something quite different and specific, and it really is just a different approach to game design these days.

John Koetsier: Super interesting. Let’s talk a little bit about getting featured. I joked a little bit about it off the top.

Every game developer, every publisher wants to be featured and they’re just salivating thinking about the downloads that are going to come, the attention that’s coming, the recognition that just that fact of being featured, is, and portrays to the world as well.

How’d that happen? I know it happened six times, so maybe you have to talk about several different ways it happened, but how did it happen?

Christina Chen: So, initially the game was in a soft launch mode. Soft launch means that you release in a few limited markets that are similar to the market you eventually want to release in, and test for viability. So the soft launch market for us at the time was Australia.  We were local, we were sure we could get enough players to test.

The problem is, in order to know if the game is viable enough, you need to have a statistically significant population in order to see the retention, the monetization, if the game is doing well enough to go through life. That was, this featuring actually stems out of the problem that we found that in Australia as a soft launch strategy, which has been practiced in the game industry for a long time … it no longer works very well for a small studio, because we just simply did not have enough money to keep pumping in to get enough users.

Natural discovery and the organic install process on the App Store was way down, which means that it was very, very hard to get enough organic users without paying for advertising to get them. So we talked to Google by that stage, and we figured out that Google has this Start on Android program, which I encourage everyone to have a look at.

Start on Android program is basically a program where a select group of developers will be able to get in and Google will really help you. They look at your stats with you, and as well as, helping you expose your game to different groups of people, by featuring you along the way. Eventually leading to live featuring if they think your metrics and your stats look really really good.

So that’s the first step of getting featuring.

Then we had to go through the process that was first what they call it, early access featuring. So that was the one that you have a tab in Google Play school that’s called early access and only beta users were in it. That really exposed us to a lot of people.

So just in comparison, we were only getting at most a few hundred on the App Store in Australia. And the early access featuring was exposing us all of sudden to 16,000 users. That was already a big step up for our featuring. The next step is, preregistration featuring, that’s a second step of the program. And that put people like put our game in the hands of people on preorder and shows interest before live.

And that gave us about 600,000 preregistration users. So that’s the second step.

John Koetsier: That’s impressive! Very impressive.

Christina Chen: Yeah. It’s a really good program. And then last bit is the live featuring where we got them featured by live. We did find significant quality because it was designed to help you to test right.

So we did find significant differences in the audience in beta audience versus live, which means we made some mistakes in live and we put in money way too early to advertise, where the quality of traffic isn’t the same. So then we got live featuring and live featuring was a pretty good, it’s smaller than previously anticipated because it’s smaller than before. But we still got close to a few hundred thousand users. Excluding the preregistration, that’s just from the live featuring.

So I would say the Google program is very good if we can get off, but it’s very strict as well. You have to make sure your review score is above four. Anything below four you’ll be kicked out the program forever. And you have to make sure your metrics and performance is very good because they check in with you.

I’ll invite Lauren to talk to Apple. After that, you just keep relationship with the group of store manager and they will feature every 90 days if your performance and your view score is above four. So that’s Google. Lauren, you can talk to a little bit about Apple Store.

Lauren Clinnick: Yeah, definitely.

Just generally speaking, it is very wild and very exciting to be in the growth space and in the marketing space where the distributors themselves, your own business partners being Google and Apple, they themselves are still experimenting with their business models and how much that can almost disrupt or actually surface really amazing opportunities …

It does mean that you do have to be open to a roller coaster kind of experience. And John, your community would understand the same. It can just be so surprising to see. Wake up one day, login, and Apple’s just announced something that’s a new tool that could really help you. Or maybe they’ve reorganized the way that the store layout looks, and then all of a sudden discoverability changes or your store conversion changes. So you just have to have an appetite for risk and you have to have an appetite for experimentation just in general, which obviously you communicate like your company and your community would understand.

In terms of Apple, a lot of people would think that looking at Android and Apple, they’re very similar. We’ve actually found that they can be similar but different. Google does have a lot more tools and a lot more processes and funnels for how to get through a prelaunch period to launch. Apple has differences in how they can support you prelaunch. We chose to soft launch in Australia to start testing for functionality and testing for cross play between Apple and Android before launching first on Android with Critter Clash.

But by doing that, what we didn’t know and what we couldn’t get warning on would mean that we could not then enter the preorder program, the prelaunch pre-ordering system that Apple had, which is different to Google Play.

They’ll allow you to have the preregistration system, even if you’ve been soft launched. So, you know, it really is a different pathway to market and pathway to live for the different stores. For the Apple App Store, my team and my game and my performance for the team still has a ways to go.

Because with Apple, we’ve been really happy to be supported with Australian and regional featuring and some featuring within collections on the Today tab. You know, not in the Games tab, but in the Today tab. Things like games to play while commuting or monkey-themed games. Critter Clash has come up in that a couple of times.

That’s very different to a game-of-the-day feature or being featured in the new and updated carousel in the games tab, for example. So, you know, not all featuring is made equal and how to actually cut through beyond your region and get through to the US market, or for us Russia and Brazil, is important.

We’ve been trying to do a lot to get attention in those regions, but you have to go through your own regional manager to do that. Coming from Australia makes that a bit harder. I feel that there might be some more results or some more traction for Critter Clash on Apple, had we been based in Canada or had we been based in the US and that our app store manager was closer to HQ, so to speak.

So it does make some of these things a little bit harder.

John Koetsier: Thanks so much, both of you for sharing what it’s like getting featured and what the steps are in stages for Google Play as well as Apple in the iOS app store. So getting featured is really awesome. Obviously it’s excellent, but it’s only really part of success and having longterm success in games.

What are some of the biggest challenges you’re having there? What’s your next project? What did you learn from the existing one that you’re applying to it?

Christina Chen: Yeah. So I want to speak to that a little bit. So I think any project or any business at the end of the day, you have to have your revenue greater than your acquisition costs. And that’s no different in games. So what we measure, by the way in the gaming industry there is huge amount of data and we use data science. We use lots of behavior markers to understand where people are really engaged or not engaged, and retained or not retained.

So, we do that analysis all the time. And our formula is basically to figure out whether the lifetime value is greater than the cost of acquisition. So that’s the formula you’ve got to keep looking at. Unfortunately, if you only rely on featuring alone it is actually very hard to have enough lifetime value. Even though our game actually has really good performance and monetization now,  it’s still really hard to get enough lifetime revenue even with good lifetime value. For a studio of four or five people that’s just not possible. Maybe a few years ago with the scale of featuring much, much larger, it would happen better.

But nowadays, just rely on featuring alone. … you can’t do that.

So you have to keep making sure you do advertising and keep lowering down your cost for acquisition. So unfortunately with cost per acquisition in the games being very high right now, especially in strategy with big games buying out the market, the App Store starts becoming a winner takes all sort of thing where big game makers buy out the market by keeping and retaining the most valuable paying users.

Because of that, it’s very hard for studios  to compete in that space. So, we are thinking of our next project is something that we can appeal to a niche market. Not mass market, but to a niche market  where we can actually lower the cost per acquisition in our market for people being, you know, not traditionally targeted by games.

I’ll let Lauren speak a little bit more through that cause it’s very exciting for us and Lauren been thinking about that a lot. But that’s main thing. So the challenge is always trying to lower the cost per acquisition and get good LTV. And we are trying to do that by aiming at a huge  audience.

Lauren Clinnick: Definitely. So, yeah, we have just had so many challenges and everything that we’ve gone through with Critter Clash has helped us have an understanding of what is modern user acquisition. What does the marketing landscape actually look like? What’s doable for a small team versus what’s doable for a large team?

And what we’re finding for us is that in terms of strategy and what’s viable for us  … we’re not a huge 20-person data science and marketing asset creation team. So we’re going to have to get creative about how we compete for some of those same players … and some of that means not competing for those same players, but it means marketing creatively.

It means unusual user acquisition strategies. It means marketing to niche audiences. So for the next project, whereas Critter Clash was more mid-core, a little bit more of a general kind of audience, we’re applying some marketing-first principles in parallel with our game development for the next title, and we’re basing it around a specific market segment. And we’re developing in tandem and in consultation with that niche segment, because that segment is not one that is targeted in a very homogenous way with the current UA landscape.

We’re very interested to see how user acquisition will go with that niche, with that niche subset, and whether we can retain and really collect a community around niche segments, more so than competing just based on genre fan, for example.

John Koetsier: That’s super interesting. I mean, obviously it’s challenging as a smaller organization to enter the game space. And so what you’re doing is you’re adopting a blue ocean strategy. You’re looking at where it’s super busy, super noisy, super expensive, and you’re saying, hmm, maybe there’s different ways of accessing the market we want to access. Maybe there’s a different market that’s not being accessed right now.

So … as you build out your new project, when do you know that it’s time to scale?

You’ve got to obviously build out the game. You’ve got to have a sense of what it costs for user acquisition. You have to have a sense of what’s happening in terms of LTV and what your payback model is. When do you know that it’s time to scale?

Christina Chen: This is again based completely on the formula of LTV over CPA. So we actually measure our LTV every step along the way, there will be a signal to us if there is more than, for example, 60-70% ROI, this is potentially a time to scale it in a small way, because when you scale, hugely, when you buy, when you purchase user acquisition in a significant way on Facebook and Google, the CPI changes again, the cost per install, or CPA, you can call it cost per action.

They completely change again. So you got to scale in different stages. So when we do a soft launch, as well as, I would probably this time go out at early access, again with Google, because we find it’s a lot more traffic. So if we go with Google for early access again, we test the signal, we will know that we can scale once it’s at least 60-70% ROI.

John Koetsier: Interesting. Very interesting and … good that you noted as well that what works at small scale is often not what works at large scale. And accessing the early parts of an audience is not the same as accessing a large audience. Your costs do change and your way of acquiring them does change and there are significant challenges there.

What’s it like doing it in Australia? What’s the tech scene like there?

Lauren Clinnick: So Australia is a tricky one because we have a highly educated, comparatively affluent Western society and consumers here. Australia’s tech scene and Australia’s startup scene is quite behind. Some of that is contributed by having a previous reliance on manufacturing and mining industries, more primary industries and being a bit behind the ball when it comes to internet infrastructure or looking at what’s happening with tech and what’s happening with startups.

We’re getting more traction now, but we’re still solidly years behind in terms of understanding, comfort, interest in government backing when it comes to startups and tech. The game scene that we have domestically is very small compared to other countries. The state of Victoria that we live in has 50% of all of Australia’s game development scene. A vision that I have and that my team have for this region is that we can be like Finland. You know, we can be like Scandinavia: small countries, small population, high education, high tech adoption. But this could be a great opportunity in a great industry for us to support.

We’re very remote from a lot of the world. So digital distribution makes a lot of sense for Australia, where we’d still need a lot of internet infrastructure. We’d still need legislation changes, tax changes and things like that to really grow that tech scene, but the quality of life is really great here.

We’re hoping to build teams that are really people-first companies with really scalable projects with really great outcomes, and to help basically restore the rainforest, so to speak, to give Australia different sizes of game company, because right now we really only have very small companies, like really small, scrappy indie teams, a couple of larger ones, but we’re totally missing what we call the triple A space or the really large mobile studios that we see in Western countries that are otherwise demographically quite similar to us.

John Koetsier: Interesting. And let’s also hit as we near the end of this podcast, you are both very accomplished women in technology and there have been extremely documented challenges of women in technology. In a lot of different places … in the core places you think of as technological societies, and tech-driven economies, the United States, you mentioned Scandinavia, other countries like that in the biggest companies from the Googles and Facebooks of the world to the smaller companies and startups as well.

Can you talk a little bit about some of the challenges that you’ve faced or if you haven’t faced challenges? And challenges of leadership in technology as women who lead a tech startup?

Lauren Clinnick: Yeah. Well, Christina, if you’re happy for me to jump in on this, for me it has been very interesting being a woman in tech and a woman in games really is just one axis of basically diversity.

So games and tech has a lot of diversity issues that comes from the background that you come from in terms of education and work. It can come based on gender, race, sort of minority background, even age. So we have a big homogeneity problem in tech and in games. There’s been a lot of focus on women in tech and women in games.

Some of the women in games conversation can come from the way our consumers behave. We’re actually quite happy to be in mobile gaming because there’s a lot less of an entrenched opinion on what mobile games should be. What is a real game? What is a real game out when it comes to mobile?

And if we’re not interested in engaging with or focusing on or prioritizing a certain consumer segment, we will just not build games for them. We just won’t target them, which is especially what we’re doing with the next upcoming project. So we avoid a lot of that entrenched opinion about feminine games or mobile games and things, which I’m really looking forward to. There are some unconscious biases when it comes to having conversations around investment, around having professional trust, around having your ambition or your competitiveness seen as a positive sometimes, and a lot of the time that’s very, very unconscious.

And even the surprise of talking to industry partners or store partners and talking about some of these difficulties and having these male executives say “I’ve never thought about that before,” but that’s something that we think about all the time, you know. And the energy, the conversations, the gaps that you need to bridge that your other counterpart doesn’t have to expend that energy.

That can be something that can be really, really frustrating. So what does help is having conversations like this, having male allies such as yourself, actually give space and room to non-judgmentally say, can you share your experience? I want to listen. I want to understand. That definitely really helps and for us to also help each other and have the opportunity to talk about ourselves as professionals first as well.

John Koetsier: Wonderful. I’m super happy to hear that. And if you ever do come out to any events that are near San Francisco or other places where Singular is, you should definitely check out Thrive, which our COO Susan Kuo has started, which is about women connecting, about women networking, and about women mentoring each other in games, in tech and in growth and super exciting stuff.

Christina, did you want to chime in on that as well?

Christina Chen: Oh, I just want to quickly add the cultural differences. I was born in China, and then I went to US to work for a long time, and then also worked in Shanghai and also worked extensively in Australia. So to be honest, like most people think, I don’t know much about China and being in a communist country, the advantage was that you grew up without thinking there’s a difference between male and female.

So women and men … in China, women has the highest participation workforce anywhere in the world. So it’s a well studied research that also in games there is no difference between women player and a man player in China versus the West. So their concept that women and men, might be different or different target games is actually a concept only in the West, not necessarily in China.

So when I worked in China, I did not feel that I needed to be worried about I’m a woman in tech. It’s only when I started working … I grew up in China until I was sixteen, and I came to Australia at seventeen, and only when I moved to Australia, I was reminded: I’m different.

Not only because I was, you know, a different color scheme.

I did get yelled at actually, like to “go home.” Only when it’s really, really bad when Pauline Hanson was a very racist politician. So when politicians allow people to treat other people differently, that’s what happens.

The racism definitely went up but otherwise Australia was really good. Nobody openly yelled at me or only at one point when Hanson was in power. And then I got yelled at and I started feeling really different. And just because things used to work for me no longer work and I don’t know why, because Australian culture is a sort of culture that they don’t really tell you. Not like US, they tell you, they go “I don’t like you.” They will tell you, but Australian culture is more like British, they are a little bit more reserved and it’s more implicit. So here, we can’t really say to someone, you are discriminating against me. It’s really hard to prove that. But there are definitely subtle differences.

And I definitely had my struggles back in the Australian game scene, where I felt really empowered when I was working in Shanghai, but when I came back here I felt a little bit harder and had a lot of struggles. So I just want to highlight there are a lot of the talk about these differences and I want to highlight the cultural differences as well.

John Koetsier: Well, thanks for sharing that. I really appreciate hearing that and I apologize for some of the things that you may have faced there. And I’m glad that you have been so amazingly successful, both of you, in spite of some of those challenges: super, super impressive. I want to thank both of you for being on the podcast.

I want to thank both of you for sharing your insights. It was such a pleasure for me to listen to what you’re doing, what you’ve learned, how you’re applying that to your next projects. And I’m very, very excited about seeing what’s going to come next out of Lumi Interactive and what you’re going to be doing. So thank you so much.

Christina Chen: Thank you very much. We really had fun with you on this podcast, it was great.

Lauren Clinnick: Thanks so much John.