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KEY HIGHLIGHTS

🔥 How FunRun ended up trending worldwide on Twitter and became the top downloaded app on the iTunes charts in 2012. 

⚡️ How the DirtyBit team discovered that the virality had originated in high schools in America.

🎨 Why the DirtyBit offices have one wall designated for fan art.

🤝 What DirtyBit’s approach to community and live ops is like today.How DirtyBit works with in-game ambassadors – and how they incentivize them.

💰 Why DirtyBit started thinking about paid UA in 2017.

🔎 What Anette and her team did when they noticed the older versions of Fun Run were cannibalizing the newer ones.

🚀 Is it realistic to expect to attain massive organic growth a la Fun Run in 2020?

KEY QUOTES

Tweet to win

We asked the players to tweet about #FunRun for a chance to win coins in the game. And the funny thing is that we can read about all the best practices and everything, but there wasn’t even a share button or a button for Twitter. So people just went to social media and tweeted about #FunRun to win this, and then we saw that the number of downloads doubled in a day, and then it just doubled again, and doubled again, and then it went viral.

How nostalgia created virality

Thanksgiving in 2018, we went from the office on Friday evening, and in Norway Thanksgiving is not that big a deal, so we were just going home as a regular weekend and then we saw something happening on the servers, and we thought there was a mistake, some errors or something going on. But it was just installs. There was a tweet from someone who remembered a Thanksgiving where everyone was playing Fun Run. So the tweet was retweeted 150,000 times within a few hours and then we started trending in search, and this was totally unexpected, this was 2018, the game was quite old already.

Remember the humans on the other side of the app

In our office, we have one wall designated for fan art also to remind us to look up from those spreadsheets and analytics just to see that these are the players; this is what they like and they make memes and videos.

Creating user delight

So we make sure that every week we have posts. We try to engage the player community; we also have ambassadors in game, so we recruit ambassadors from time to time. They get their set of special ambassador equipment since in this game you can have different characters and you can dress them up in all sorts of cool swag, and people do that, it’s customization of their character, they don’t run faster; it’s just for the customization and for the bragging.

The path to paid UA

So when we reached 100 million downloads—I think it was 2017—we started talking to a lot of studios, especially in Finland; and we saw that comparing downloads, we were doing great; but when we looked at how much money we make on each user, there was a lot of room for improvement. And then we started also trying out paid UA, setting up some campaigns and it was very clear to us that we have been very mild on the monetization, scared of scaring away the users, so we could push it a bit more. So then we shifted the focus as well, because up until then the main goal was to increase the user base. So doing UA and then building our own internal processes for that, hiring an analyst and doing some internal work to set up that, we are now doing paid UA, but still organic installs is 80% of our daily installs. 

FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW:

Shamanth: I’m very excited to welcome Anette Staloy to the Mobile User Acquisitions show. Anette, welcome to the show. 

Anette: Thank you for inviting me. 

Shamanth: Yeah, and I’m excited to have you because you and your team have a story that is so unlike nearly every game or every app that we have seen; and if anything, I myself wrote this article, just a few weeks ago, about why paid user acquisition is primarily the most important way for most apps to grow. But you and your team’s experience illustrates just the way you guys have done the exact opposite in growing to a 100 million installs with no user acquisition. Definitely a perspective I want to dig into.

Anette: Yeah, I think, it’s, it’s good that we talked today because the more people I meet, the more people I hear that yes, everybody is talking about paid UA and paid UA is the only way to success. And, and I think there are still companies who grow and succeed, of course, paid user acquisition is getting more and more important, but it’s also nice to hear the stories that it’s actually possible. So yeah, I’m glad to be talking to you. 

Shamanth: Exactly, exactly. Yeah, to get started, can you break down what organic growth means for the games that you and your team have worked on – does that mean referrals, like people organically finding you on the app stores, virality, what, what, what does organic mean, can you break that down for us? 

Anette: Yeah, I think I want to go back to 2012 when our story started, because the founders of the company, they grew up together and they were playing Sonic and Mario Kart and they were sharing these experiences, you know, playing together, sharing the screen, and they wanted to recreate this competitive feeling on mobile phones. So they didn’t find a lot of games in the story that was real-time multiplayer, it was more turn-based, so they wanted to, to make a real-time multiplayer game. And yeah, so they came up with Fun Run which had also a bit of unusual graphics, and you could play together with friends, regardless of, you know, phone or type of phone. 

So what happened is that we launched the game in September 2012, we saw some installs, mostly from friends here in Norway, and then we started – we added a competition to the, just the info screen in the, in the app itself, and where

We asked the players to tweet about #FunRun for a chance to win coins in the game. And the funny thing is that we can read about all the best practices and everything, but there wasn’t even a share button or a button for Twitter. So people just went to social media and tweeted about #FunRun to win this, and then we saw that the number of downloads doubled in a day, and then it just doubled again, and doubled again, and then it went viral.

So we actually trended on Twitter worldwide. So we tracked the start of this to a school in, in Texas I think where some kids at school were playing during their break, and what happens if you get a game that’s new and you can play together with your friends and it’s intense and competitive, so people would sit there and, you know, scream and shout if they win or lose, and then it gets a lot of attention and everybody wants to join in. 

Shamanth: Yeah. 

Anette: So then they start talking about this game called Fun Run which was a short catchy, catchy name. And so word of mouth was spreading this game all over the world and, as I mentioned, trended, trending in Twitter, and in search. We went into the top list in the US, so we were the number one app, not even games, it was the overall app, it was a game made by a very small young team in Norway. So that’s how our story started.

Shamanth: Yeah, it’s crazy. And, you know, you spoke about how the school in Texas really, was a starting point of this crazy virality. 

Anette: Yeah. 

Shamanth: How did your team discover that it’s the school in Texas, and once you noticed that, what, if any, were some of the things that your team did to improve on this, to optimize this? 

Anette: Yeah, we checked social media. It was a lot on Twitter back then and we saw a lot of videos people sharing, people filming, you could see hallways in schools where everybody was sitting in on the floor playing together. And we also saw that, for example, on Twitter, they used some language that we didn’t know, so it was, for example, I want to catch an L. So we didn’t understand what it meant but we saw a lot of people sharing and tweeting about it. So we added some custom text in the game, so you could after the game ended, and if you won or whatever position you came in, you could press this button and then it would tweet the image or at the text. So we tried to build on what we saw that the users were already talking about, and then we kept on updating the game and trying to make, like our mission today is to let people create memorable moments so that they would want to share. So if it would be either winning over the friends or playing together either at school and/or on holiday or at the beach or wherever they were, they were just making a lot of content and also videos. So they kind of marketed the game for us.

Shamanth: Right. So it’s almost like you guys rode the wave that you guys saw was building up in these high schools in America.

Anette: Yeah, and we also saw that in different periods of the year typically when people are, for example, studying to their exam, and – or if you have some other things you need to do, you like to do something else, procrastinate, and we could also see that on the, on the trends, on the install analytics, so… But I think it’s, it’s a lot about having, you know, a new game, type of game experience on the phone, and this was 2012, the first game, so it was kind of new. Today, it’s a different, it’s a different offering in the stores, but what we see even now that people still remember they have clear memories from that Christmas they played together the whole family; and like

Thanksgiving in 2018, we went from the office on Friday evening, and in Norway Thanksgiving is not that big a deal, so we were just going home as a regular weekend and then we saw something happening on the servers, and we thought there was a mistake, some errors or something going on. But it was just installs. There was a tweet from someone who remembered a Thanksgiving where everyone was playing Fun Run. So the tweet was retweeted 150,000 times within a few hours and then we started trending in search, and this was totally unexpected, this was 2018, the game was quite old already.

Shamanth: Yeah, yeah.

Anette: So these things happen, so I like to talk about optimizing for luck and for things like these to happen if you, for our part, it can be, you know, in general, making a game that people will remember. We still see stories or people have met each other getting to be friends because of the game or even, you know, with that summer vacation or that bus trip, so they have these memories, and they will talk about it to the friends. And we still see that now with three games in the series, we see that more than half of the installs come from people searching for either Fun Run or something that sounds like Fun Run. It can be Fan Ran or they have heard about the game, so they know what they are looking for. 

Shamanth: Yeah, you know, and what you said reminds me that oftentimes, at least people like us in the gaming industry, we can be – it’s easy, at least for myself, to get lost in spreadsheets and ARPDAUs and LTVs, and oftentimes stories like these remind us that, you know, at the end of the day, a lot of games can be joyous and fun experiences. 

Anette: Yeah. 

Shamanth: Yeah.

Anette: Absolutely, and we keep

In our office, we have one wall designated for fan art also to remind us to look up from those spreadsheets and analytics just to see that these are the players; this is what they like and they make memes and videos

And one of the things we have seen great results from is for example to have a newsfeed in the app and then we can inform if there is a big update or – but we can also feature videos. So if we find some good videos on YouTube, we can feature that in the app, so we will also send the users to their channels. So when we did that, we saw an increase in the number of videos because people try, oh maybe, I can get my video featured in here. 

Shamanth: Yeah.

Anette: So if we post like usually on Fridays, we have Fan Arts Friday or Fun Run Friday, and then people can, you know, draw something or make something and then we draw some winners and they win something in the game. 

Shamanth: Yeah. 

Anette: And these, these types of posts, they have a lot higher engagement, compared to just informing about the new update for example.

Shamanth: Sure, sure. And it sounds like from the very beginning, community was a big part of why the game took off, and I understand it still is to some, to a great extent. 

Anette: Yeah. 

Shamanth: So how have you guys managed or thought about community – is there a community manager with a specific mandate to engage X number of people every week, is there sort of a live ops calendar, can you talk more about what the community management approach is? 

Anette: Absolutely. We do have, in the game itself, we have things happening like events going on, we have frequent updates to the game itself, so we engage by, you know, informing about updates, but we – yeah, we have a community manager and we have a team working on live ops.

So we make sure that every week we have posts. We try to engage the player community; we also have ambassadors in game, so we recruit ambassadors from time to time. They get their set of special ambassador equipment since in this game you can have different characters and you can dress them up in all sorts of cool swag, and people do that, it’s customization of their character, they don’t run faster; it’s just for the customization and for bragging.

Shamanth: Yeah.

Anette: Bragging of the new character, and, and we have a program for them where we have developers and our community manager engage in their discussions and we share some information to them before we inform all the players. So what we see is that the ambassadors that we have, they also create engaging content, they have maybe in communities they have different competitions and they help new players and they make – if we have a new feature, they might make you know, introduction of the new feature or the new powerup. So it’s, it’s very clear to us when we look at, you know, impressions that community made content is more engaging often than a typical sales pitch or a sales post would be. 

Shamanth: Sure.

Anette: So we also monitor, you know, content that is engaging, and we also monitor our own content and we have now our community manager, she looks for all the trends of all things like, now something with the guitar, there can be something about cats, there was the Dolly Parton challenge with meme on Twitter a couple of weeks ago. So just staying ready to jump on if there is anything trending, and we have so much, so much content made from community people playing, you know, or the songs from the game on piano and they post videos, and so – and then even more people would join in and share that as well. So we try to stay close to the community, and also, of course, if they have feedback, we also look for that. There are various groups, channels that we follow, and we also have across all our own social media channels, we have 1.6 million followers. So there is a lot of people who either play or have played once upon a time, and still follow us, so yeah.

Shamanth: Sure, sure. And are there specific metrics you use to monitor the impact of community and community management? 

Anette: Yeah. So we monitor impressions and reach on the different channels, like on Instagram and Twitter and Facebook, and then our community manager works also close with the product team. So every week we have a weekly meeting, like we have on Friday mornings where she will also share the, you know, the statistics of the week, how many new followers that we have compared to last week; and we can see that, okay, we experiment with when, during the day, when is the best time to post, because most of our players are in the US, so we don’t – we follow their time instead of our time. So usually when we leave work, the players wake up. 

Shamanth: Yeah. 

Anette: So we use different tools to, you know, schedule posts and all that, yeah.

Shamanth: Right. yeah, if you’re building so much engagement with the users who are choosing to contribute and engage so, so deeply, I would imagine that that is accessing users who are already engaged with Fun Run. Are you able to attribute a lot of new users or new user acquisition to that community management effort as well? 

Anette: Yeah, we try different things with trying out links, deep linking and all that to see if we can also reach. So we try to aim that about half of the effort we do in community management is aimed at new users, and we also try like recruiting campaigns in the game. So there is different things we do, but we also do paid UA now, right?

So when we reached 100 million downloads—I think it was 2017—we started talking to a lot of studios, especially in Finland; and we saw that comparing downloads, we were doing great; but when we looked at how much money we make on each user, there was a lot of room for improvement. And then we started also trying out paid UA, setting up some campaigns and it was very clear to us that we have been very mild on the monetization, scared of scaring away the users, so we could push it a bit more. So then we shifted the focus as well, because up until then the main goal was to increase the user base. So doing UA and then building our own internal processes for that, hiring an analyst and doing some internal work to set up that, we are now doing paid UA, but still organic installs is 80% of our daily installs. 

So, and as I mentioned, the organic installs, most of them are from people who heard about Fun Run or they know about Fun Run, so they go and actively search for that. And of course we also work with app store optimization to make sure that we are visible and looking at keywords and search terms and all that. 

Shamanth: Right. And when you say app store optimization, does that mean also localization, how important is that in the grand scheme of things for you guys? 

Anette: Yeah. We have localized the game both in game and in the product descriptions in some countries. When it comes to localization, we haven’t seen that big game changer for us, and today 40% of our installs are in the US, and historically it’s been about more than 50%. So, but of course, we do have, we monitor which languages people have on their phones to play our game and where we see potential, so we do localize and we, and we test icons, we test screenshots, and yeah, so there a lot going on. But again, it’s the word of mouth, having the game that people want to share and play with their friends is absolutely the main, main part of the success of Fun Run. 

Shamanth: Absolutely,  Anette for somebody from the outside looking in, it might seem like you guys just grew straight up to a 100 million and you’re going to keep going. But I’m curious, if there are mistakes that you guys made along the way that you’d be open to sharing.

Anette: Oh yeah, absolutely. We’ve made lots of mistakes, and, you know, everything from having that game, as you mentioned, it wasn’t, well, you have hopes and you want to succeed with your game, but having that massive success almost overnight, it, what happened is that they formed the company, after that started hiring. And then, of course, you make, you have this huge success, it was their second game, you try, they started working on a new game and then you have a new team and you don’t know how to form the team, how to work together, who decides and everybody, everybody had a voice. 

So what happened is that instead of taking six months, the project took 12 months, and then we didn’t even soft-launch, we just strayed into worldwide and we launched a game that was, it had horrible numbers. So luckily, we were able to, you know, realize that we need to stop now, we should have stopped long time ago, and then we saw that there was an opportunity to launch a new game before Christmas, so this was in September I think, 2014. So learning from all the mistakes with this game was not a success, they reused the back end and all the tech that had been developed and launched Fun Run 2 right before Christmas and right back into the top list again. So learning from that, how do you define the roles and the team, who gets to decide and everybody can’t decide everything, so that’s been one of the learnings. And of course, working with the trademark that we built with Fun Run, we also saw that when we released Fun Run 3, we still had the two older games available in the store, and it took us maybe a bit too long time to realize that we were competing with our own apps. 

Shamanth: Right. 

Anette: So I think when we deep dived into the numbers, we could see that, you know, we were making a lot more money on Fun Run 3, so the ARPDAU to  Fun Run 3 was two to four times better than Fun Run 1 and 2, because we learned while making these games, and also retention was a lot better in the newer game. But still the older games was getting all the attention in the store, and this was all about, you know, historical data and algorithms picking up on all that, so we even tried to unoptimize, you know, to remove keywords to send the traffic to the new game, but it didn’t work. So at some point we started testing to see what happens if we remove Fun Run 1 in Turkey, and then what happened is that basically all of the downloads went to Fun Run 2. So we didn’t lose any, so probably people were just searching for Fun Run and they found the Fun Run the first game that was presented. So then when we removed Fun Run 2, everything, almost everything went to Fun Run 3. So then we decided to just remove the old games from the store worldwide. 

Shamanth: Yeah, crazy. 

Anette: So yeah.

Shamanth: Yeah, I can imagine how huge a decision that can be also because you guys were such a small team. 

Anette: Yeah.

Shamanth: Yeah, that’s crazy. 

Anette: Yeah, and also, you know, being a small team has a lot of advantages, but it’s, of course, it’s also tough because we compete in the same market as everybody else, and for the visibility, and, and usually when we go to conferences and meet with other studios, they maybe have for one-fourth of my position, they have a team of 10 usually. 

Shamanth: Yeah.

Anette: So for us it’s about being very strict on how we prioritize and, because we do, we develop and we publish ourselves as well, so everything happens from here. And our studio is also, you know, geographically located quite far from most of the games industry itself, so – but we have a great network and everybody is willing to help each other out in this industry. So it’s been okay. 

Shamanth: Indeed, indeed it’s been way better than okay, I would bet.

Anette: Yeah. 

Shamanth: I’m curious, you guys grew so significantly and a lot of that growth was primarily organic, even now a lot of it’s primarily organic. Now, let’s say, Fun Run was to launch in 2020, would that same sort of purely organic traction or growth, do you think that could be possible? 

Anette: Well, I would like to be very optimistic, but probably, cannot rely that much on organic growth, but I think you – for us, it’s about having a game experience that people will notice and want to share with others, and to stand out a bit in the market. So, you know, if you look at the other games, we’re kind of in the middle of genres because there are racing games but it’s mostly cars or motorbikes, and there are running games but it’s mostly endless runners and other real-time multiplayer games are a bit different. So we hope to be able to still stand out and, you know, having 125 million installs already, a lot of people know about our games. So why do they still play or they play once in a while, so we have a big opportunity to cross-promote in our existing games, and to, you know, retarget old, old players, and we’re also working on, you know, improving monetization in newer games that we have, we have several projects in the works. But yeah, I think you will need to focus on paid UA as well. But I want to say that it’s, yes, absolutely still possible to have significant growth organically and that’s what we aim to do at least. 

Shamanth: Indeed, indeed. and thank you for that refreshing perspective on how you guys really bucked the trend of really going down the route of paid UA, and still unlocked massive, massive growth and traction for yourselves. Thank you for sharing your story Anette, it’s truly a pleasure to have you on the Mobile User Acquisition show.

Anette: Thank you for having me. 

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