Growth Masters: A peek behind the scenes with the people making games a success

Mastering mobile app monetization and user acquisition is no easy task. Unity’s Growth Masters series shines a light on the community of mobile marketers who are tirelessly working to grow their apps. Each Growth Masters interview showcases this community’s expertise, career trajectory, challenges faced, and vision for the future.

To kickstart the series, we sat down with monetization managers from Concrete Software and Kooapps, and with user acquisition managers from TapNation and MY.GAMES, to discuss what happens behind the scenes when it comes to growing and monetizing a game.

The work of monetization and user acquisition managers can often go unnoticed in an industry full of flashy graphics, 3D renderings, and cool gameplay design. The reality is that without the work these marketing professionals do every day, most of those games wouldn’t be successful in generating revenue and getting more people to play them.

At Unity, we believe that the world is a better place when more people can succeed in doing what they love, and a big part of that success comes from the efforts these managers put into creating revenue streams, advertising, and running user acquisition campaigns that get a game – and its studio – in a position to grow and succeed in a saturated market.

The goal of Growth Masters is to shine the spotlight on the people responsible for that growth, and build a community where they can share their experiences, offer advice, and exchange ideas about the industry and its future.

Conversely, we hope these interviews will offer guidance to other professionals looking for inspiration, troubleshooting, and valuable information coming directly from peers.

We are kick-starting this program with four amazing mobile marketers: Jatin Mittal from TapNation and Ekaterina Zueva from MY.GAMES, who both sat down with us to talk user acquisition.

We also had the pleasure to interview Joe Dean, former advertising and monetization manager with Concrete Software, and CK Wang, CEO of Kooapps, who discussed their experiences and challenges with monetization.

Read ahead for snippets from each interview and to see what these experts think about the opportunities and challenges they face to make their games a success. Make sure to check back in as we’ll be expanding the series and publishing more interviews.

When we sat down with Joe Dean, who (at the time of this interview) was the advertising and monetization manager at Concrete Software, it was clear he had an intriguing outlook on industry challenges and insightful advice for people of all levels of experience, despite being in the early stages of his own monetization career.

In the interview, Dean shares how he got started in the industry, offers advice for getting started, and considers the most effective strategies and tactics for approaching monetization in games.

Read the interview with Dean.

Our discussion with Jatin Mittal, user acquisition team lead at TapNation, covers his professional journey, talks shop about user acquisition, return on ad spend (ROAS), cost per install (CPI), and provides a peek into his vision for where the profession is going.

Read the interview with Mittal.

Ekaterina Zueva, senior user acquisition manager at MY.GAMES, pushes titles like Rush Royale, Evolution 2: Battle for Utopia, and World Above way beyond the finish line. In our interview with Zueva, we discuss her journey into mobile marketing, her perception of where the industry stands today, and the three tips she would give to anyone to increase performance.

Read the interview with Zueva.

In this interview with Kooapps CEO CK Wang, he shares how his team has taken the company’s games to the next level with innovative monetization and user acquisition strategies and the tricks he wishes he knew when starting out.

Read the interview with Wang.

As we build our community of mobile marketers, we want to extend an invitation to monetization and user acquisition managers to join the conversation and be featured in our program.

Know anyone in your network who should be featured, or do you have what it takes to be a growth master? Simply nominate your candidates – or yourself here.