Clear data performance views for hyper-growth with a small team

Lessmore is an independent studio, focused on making great games for mobile! The company was established in 2021 based in Germany, with staff throughout Europe.

They currently have two profitable games – Eatventure and Pocket Chess, with Eatventure trending toward the top US charts in free games. The company’s business strategy has roots in hypercasual, and their approach has been to develop games within weeks, test them quickly in the market, and tweak or drop accordingly, so the pressure to monetize quickly is much higher.

Small profits per game are not an option for the Lessmore team; a game needs to be performing considerably enough with traction toward being a chart-topper.

“I’ve been a UA manager for a decade and seen my fair share of MMPs. I started out with cookies on Google Analytics, moved on to Adjust, Branch, Kochava, Appsflyer multiple times, and even Tenjin, and my best experience to date was with Singular,” said Gus Viegas, Head of Growth at Lessmore.

In this case, Singular had already been picked by the team for its easy-to-use integrated dashboards, best product demo, and most competitive offer.

But on arrival to the company months later, Gus noted, “When using other MMPs, I had noticed that their focus is more about the sales team and less about the engineering; yet with Singular, there was no overt focus on the sale itself, or engineering but rather on using the engineering in a supportive way that meets the business objectives of the company.”

He says that this feeling rang true when he worked at Rovio, now at Lessmore, and in what he’d seen with other businesses that he has consulted with about switching or choosing their MMPs.

When it comes to features, Gus shared that Singular provides a very robust package out of the gate. “For studios that don’t have the necessary data capabilities, they can grow within the first, say, 1 million dollars of revenue just using Singular alone, as we did. It took us a very long time until we actually needed to develop our own systems.

Now that we are starting to develop our own solution, Singular is providing us with quality support to develop it.”

Gus explains that the way Singular is set up and able to share data has made it so much easier for Lessmore to work with its partners (DSPs in particular) and grow ad revenue. “Because it’s so simple to set up data connectors between different networks and Singular, it was very easy for us to develop new ways to pass data from our app to different networks, which helped to optimize our user acquisition campaigns in a way that allowed us to scale to double digits, tens of thousands of spend per day per network across a variety of networks.” He added that Lessmore has used the Singular capabilities to easily develop new types of campaigns that haven’t been done by Singular clients. “It was just a matter of exploring the pipelines that were already there, so it was fairly easy to pass in-app purchase and in-ad revenue events to different partners.”

All this aside, for Gus and the Lessmore team, the cornerstone for why they would recommend Singular over other MMPs lies in the very reason they chose Singular in the first place – the support they receive from the team.

For the Lessmore team, Singular has been a major factor in their ability to grow so quickly. They’ve enjoyed that all the data is in one place and easy to check; at the beginning using the Singular dashboards, now using the ETL that automatically pipes their data through to BigQuery and soon, their own custom solution. “Now we can manually create our own exports of data to new databases seamlessly.

Gus explains that “someone like me, who is not very technically savvy, or a data engineer, could set up a dynamic pipeline from Singular to BigQuery to Google spreadsheets, and we can analyze the data with very minute details and freshly updated data that enabled us to scale very far, very fast, even before getting a dedicated data engineer in house.”

He adds, “Understanding why we grew and how Singular helped has a lot to do with our staff count. We started off with a handful of developers in Europe who, by themselves, grew the game to millions in revenue without any marketing or data teams of any sort. To think that a table’s worth of people using Singular’s capabilities would be able to grow to millions in revenue; that is impressive.” But even after adopting a small growth team, Lessmore has managed to grow UA spend of millions a month without many data problems “because of how out-of-the-box everything is with Singular.”

Anecdotally, Eatventure has reached the top 10 in iOS in the US alongside other hit games like Survivor.io and Subway Surfers, which have been built and grown at that scale by teams of tens of professionals, while at Lessmore, “we’re a couple of UA managers achieving the same, at the same scale, and I think it wouldn’t be possible if the data pipelines were not as simple as they are right now.”

Diversify networks – don’t over-rely on one.

“I understand a lot of people use Facebook or TikTok or even Unity to analyze a game ahead of or at soft launch, and that’s inevitable. You may not want to diversify between the first 1-10 thousand dollars. But in the past, you could go to even half a million without diversifying; Now, it’s impossible to even get to 100k without doing so.