ABOUT SOPHIE: LinkedIn  | Voodoo.io




ABOUT ROCKETSHIP HQ: Website | LinkedIn  | Twitter | YouTube

KEY HIGHLIGHTS

✨ The critical components to create a new game

🧐 How focus on culture builds a longterm mindset

🔭 Why the longterm mindset sets you up for success

🌊 The challenges of swimming against the tide of quick wins

🧘 How to hire mindfully with an undefined product

☯️ Going slow to go fast and far

🌱 The importance of hiring people with a growth mindset

🧗‍♂️ How the settling phase for a team can be rocky

🕸️ Personal and professional lives influence each other

🦘 How to work from a different blueprint: casual in a hypercasual environment

🛸 How concepts from one game type can be brought successfully into another

👓 The importance of transparency in the studio environment

🎤 Why communication is paramount in building trust

💪 How to address hard times effectively

🔥 There are times when innovation is not the right way forward

KEY QUOTES

There were clear priorities with the team

I really wanted to understand, what were the expectations? What were the fears or concerns, What was the knowledge? That was my priority at the beginning. To build trust. And that may sound a bit obvious. But it was not the case when we started. They didn’t know me. So, I wanted them to understand more about my vision, my approach. So that was a lot of informal moments that could have been after work, drinks, events, crossing in the hallway, having a five minute conversation, having spontaneous chats. A lot of this happened during these three months. And it was very critical that I spent this time to build the trust, understand them, and build it the right way.  That was my very first priority. 

Slow and steady for sustainable wins

I’ve been long enough in the industry to see that when you build things really fast, even a game or a team, then things don’t go well. When people leave, it’s actually much more work and much longer to rebuild the team. So I drew for myself several scenarios. Where the worst one could be, I hire really fast.  I have people, who’re on a journey that they don’t know about, I don’t know about, they’re frustrated, they leave, and I find myself in March 2020 with no team. I have to start over and then very likely, I will not reach my goal. So I was willing to invest really, more from the beginning to ensure the long term viability of a team. And with a team, we will figure out like a smart team with our collective intelligence, we will figure out what is the best game we could release.

How to experiment effectively

My very first hire was a developer, actually. Because, in my opinion, with a developer we could already start to prototype. The first position you can have is to have a developer so you start to test your assumptions, experiment, test your theories and release things quickly. With the first developer we prototyped two free games. So I could learn the whole process of how to test marketability, how to make creatives myself.  So I was just recording the gameplay, very hyper casual style, and putting it as a creative on Facebook. I learned the whole process of how to release the game. That was a good training ground before others came.

The importance of a growth mindset

I had people who moved country to come to Berlin to join the team, to join this journey. And they barely saw Berlin or they barely met people in Berlin. It was a bit of a shock for some of them.  Actually, they all stayed in the end. They had a very strong resilience, growth mindset. They committed to come, they committed to live the experience of an expat. So they tried the whole year. That was one hard thing, I think, to balance the emotional state of people who are just starting a new job, come to a new country, things don’t go according to plan. 

The importance of staying calm in the face of stress

So, I had my plans of how we should structure the team and how we should go forward. But there were a lot of frictions and resistance at the beginning. And I didn’t understand at that time, I thought it was that, maybe we are not aligned. But I completely missed the point. And I wrote about it in my personal introspective, that people were really stressed, some of them were really stressed. And you couldn’t even take a step back, and be able to project themselves further, because they were just trying to survive. So once it clicked, things got much better for the summer. I took time for myself.  To take a step back, handle my own emotions, my fears. My fears of everyone leaving, the things I try to avoid by spending the time to really hire a team. And then, I thought, Okay, well, that was inevitable, because everyone would leave, given the circumstances. So of course, I was really stressed. And when I started to let go a bit, and thought “Okay, I have to let people decide, Everyone is responsible for their choice in their life.” Things actually got much easier, because then I was in a position to listen, to support, to explain, while staying calm, and also keep the focus of the team towards what we were trying to build.

The differences between hypercasual and casual games

a hyper casual game could be released in a weekend. And then within a month, you’re done, you put all the things that you need, like SDK, ads, you’re ready to go, and you can start to be profitable from the month after, in the best case, right? A casual game is impossible to make in a week, release it and be profitable, just a few days after. This is a completely different model. If you’re familiar with the model, sometimes you pay a lot up front, and only a year after you see the money back, and only a year after you’re profitable. It’s a different model. And where were the challenges, then behind that was first velocity. So of course, there were sometimes the questions of, why is it taking so long? Not understanding, what are all these people doing in a team of nine, compared to a team of three in hyper casual. Not understanding the depth of game development, because it’s much more complex, when you create something that has to last for a year than something that can last for a month. The system and the thinking is different. It was a bit of an adjustment to understand this difference in the velocity and team size.

How retention is the key to high LTV

if you look at the LTV prediction model, you see that the biggest leverage to really have high LTV is retention. So then it’s not so much about adding lots of ads from the beginning. Okay, you can do that from the start. But what is really important is having a product that can really engage players for a long time, because that’s what makes your prediction solid.

Extreme transparency and some hard questions

We have an AMA every week, very openly, anonymously, on a weekly digest. And someone wants to know, what are the casual teams doing? They’ve been working on what? Again, for x months? When do we see something they released? Was it a good investment?  These are really hard questions to read. And of course, you are always happy to answer and talk about long term things. So here, patience was really a thing.

How to turn a failure into a success

So we did really drastic changes to pivot the game, to really analyze correctly, do a maximum of player research. And then when we released and we had a change it was really significant. That saved the game! Then we started to get positive attention. Okay, this team, they know what they’re doing. Maybe we didn’t give them the time or the credit to prove it. But they proved through a test that they can change the fate of the game after two, three play tests. And that’s what we continued on doing. 

Clarity comes from the leadership

there was a realignment, a discussion at the beginning of the year directly with him first, for me to understand, what is my perception, or fears that are imagined on my end, because I’m so isolated in Berlin with my team, and where is the reality? And the reality is in the voice of the CEO, right. So that has helped a lot. And I think it gave awareness for him as well. But when he thought we were fine, he realized, actually, we were going through a really hard time. And giving support was actually important, and maybe a responsibility he could take to help us to succeed here and not just let us be, and then we have to fight to prove that we exist and also to succeed, you know.

Clear channels of in-team communication.

So when we’re bringing up some things like, “Oh, do we have the support of the company? It feels like maybe they’re not, or seems like people are questioning what we’re doing.” They were asking me, what do I think about it? In this moment, I shared what I think, what was my position, and what I believed in. I had confidence and trust in what we were doing. But that was not necessarily shared across the company. But nevertheless, I said that’s the confidence I have. I believe in what we’re doing. It’s just a matter of time. So at least it was reassuring on that part. So at least, you know, one of us has confidence, that can also inspire confidence in others. However, I was also very transparent about explaining the context. It’s a hyper casual, traditional company, and where they come from that’s what they value. That’s what they see. That’s what they know, it doesn’t make them bad. So trying to explain and give the rest of the team a bit more empathy for the leadership or the other teams.

FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW

Shamanth: I am very excited to welcome Sophie Vo to the Mobile User Acquisition Show. Sophie, welcome to the show. You bring a very unique perspective to building a team and to team culture.  And I’m also impressed that you don’t just have ideas, but you also implemented a lot of them. You have been willing to talk about what’s been working and what has been challenging.  You’ve been very open about a lot of your personal challenges and struggles as well, all of which I find very inspiring, and certainly I hope to learn a lot from you today. So welcome to the show. 

Sophie Vo: Thanks for inviting me. 

Shamanth: To get started, when you started at Voodoo you had a blank slate. Your mandate was to start a casual studio, in a company that had been traditionally hyper casual. Tell us about what were some of the first things you thought about as you were getting started. What did your first 7, 30, 60, 90 days look like, what was important to you in those early phases, and what was not important?

Sophie Vo: It actually happened almost two years ago. And I do remember clearly that time because it was actually also a big transition for me. My whole background has been in casual games. Voodoo is known for hyper casual and hyper growth.  It was thrilling, exciting and a bit scary. Having this difference in mind, that defines a lot of my personal strategy on how I started there. 

My first priority when I joined was to understand the founders. From the very beginning, I knew that I wanted to build a studio in Berlin, and I was in transition moving from Finland. I was still working at Rovio when I left, and I was moving from Finland to Berlin, and I barely settled in Berlin. But I decided to spend three months in Paris immediately when I started. Because I wanted to understand, first of all, the company. I wanted to spend some time with the co founders. What was their mindset? What was their vision? Because very little was discussed in detail when I was hired. So we were aligned on the high level vision. 

I really wanted to understand, what were the expectations? What were the fears or concerns, What was the knowledge? That was my priority at the beginning. To build trust. And that may sound a bit obvious. But it was not the case when we started. They didn’t know me. So, I wanted them to understand more about my vision, my approach. So that was a lot of informal moments that could have been after work, drinks, events, crossing in the hallway, having a five minute conversation, having spontaneous chats. A lot of this happened during these three months. And it was very critical that I spent this time to build the trust, understand them, and build it the right way. That was my very first priority.

I used that time to explore more of what Voodoo is, what is strong about their culture? What can I leverage as I build this team? And if I don’t have this answer, then I cannot build a team. And it takes time to hire. So it became very clear for me that it was not so much about the games we would do, but how we would make them. 

I established very early core fundamentals and values and mindset that were important in the studio I would build. To mention a few, for example, a growth mindset was really important for me. Because with a growth mindset, you embrace the changes, the pivots, what you don’t know today that you will know tomorrow. And some people enjoy that a lot. They want to grow, they want to learn, they are open minded, they will try things. And I absolutely wanted that kind of people from the very beginning. To be able to embrace the fact that this is what we will do now. But in three months, we will do something different. So I was focusing more on the culture I wanted to build. I wanted to build a team that was here for the win as a group and not as individuals. It’s very competitive in games, in hyper casual.  I didn’t want this mindset where we will make a game that one can win, and then exit, you know. So we were really on a journey, maybe a long one, together.

And another point I had was about innovation. So I understood very quickly that if we start a casual studio, in Voodoo, we cannot go by the same books as a traditional casual studio like King, Rovio, or others.  We have to find our own path. And that means exploration, innovation, understanding what key leverage is for Voodoo, but also finding our path. 

And so towards the direction of innovation and creativity. I felt like it was really important to have good cognitive diversity in the team. And one of my core values  with the team I studied early was what I call intellectual humility. So it’s really valuing different viewpoints, seeing strength in it, seeing growth through it, rather than seeing it as a threat.  I wanted people who know how to work with other cultures, or other people who think differently. People who embrace it and love it. A few things like those I mentioned here were what defined how I hired at the beginning. I spent time on this even before I started. I spent time hiring people who would really embrace this mindset, because I trusted that they would stick around and they would go through this wild, tough journey that was ahead of us, where I didn’t even know what to expect. But I was trusting that people would be there for good reasons. Because that’s how we love to work.

Shamanth: There’s so much I want to dig into, especially the fact that your approach was not very conventional. You spent time building relationships with the founders, and defining the kind of values you wanted to have in the team, even before there was a team, even before there was a game. And, for a number of other studios, I would imagine the approach would have been: let’s figure out what kind of game you want before figuring out who we’re going to hire.  A lot of the cultural aspects can come as an afterthought. So interesting how you just approached it from the complete opposite end. 

I’m curious, was there skepticism for this approach, where you really took the time to figure out what kind of team you would have before you went about actually building the team? When you had the mandate to build this new studio, you had financial expectations, financial targets. So, was there skepticism? And if yes, what were some of the things you said or did to address some of the reservations early on?

Sophie Vo: So coming back to the goals of what was my mission from the founders when I started.  That of course, ultimately, was to release a game, and start to generate revenues.  So when I joined, it was 2019. So for the end of 2020, a year after, this is, of course, very ambitious, because it takes time to build the team. And then finding the game, and we know the success rates on releasing games, it’s also very low. So I thought, okay, I have very little buffer here for a target that is very ambitious. 

And so I thought backwards from this goal of having the biggest odds to release a successful game in 2020, in a gaming soft launch. What do I need to ensure that I would be capable of doing that by the end of 2020?

I’ve been long enough in the industry to see that when you build things really fast, even a game or a team, then things don’t go well. When people leave, it’s actually much more work and much longer to rebuild the team. So I drew for myself several scenarios. Where the worst one could be, I hire really fast. I have people, who’re on a journey that they don’t know about, I don’t know about, they’re frustrated, they leave, and I find myself in March 2020 with no team. I have to start over and then very likely, I will not reach my goal. So I was willing to invest really, more from the beginning to ensure the long term viability of a team. And with a team, we will figure out like a smart team with our collective intelligence, we will figure out what is the best game we could release.

And what could potentially be, you know, a success in casual for Voodoo. 

And, back to your question about the skepticism. There’s always been skepticism to this approach in starting to look more into people. In the industry, we use a lot of short term thinking, we look at what’s happening in the next three months, next six months. And we think very little about one to four years. Whereas in reality, everything you want to create takes at least one to two years. So when you start to think a bit longer, you realize that realizing something quick, may not be the best tactic in the long term. You can be lucky, of course. So I would say skepticism, though, is there in general, and was there even before I joined Voodoo, where I didn’t feel this way. 

When I joined, with the support of the founders where I really explained to them, I tried to understand their vision, and they were really thinking long term. I think founders want to see the long term.  But, the reality hits hard, where there’s pressure from external points, like investors, and when they may have to think in the short or mid term. So it’s always a balance. But from the beginning, in principle, they were really happy to have me. They really believed in my vision. They hired me for this, and so they supported me. It’s where I promise, in six months, I will build the team. That’s what I committed to. And they were okay with that. And I think this is where we had fine alignment from the beginning. I didn’t promise, for example, that I would build a team in three months. 

Shamanth: I like what you said about, you know, you could totally have moved fast. But that could actually mean more work. If you move fast and make the wrong decision. I also found it interesting that you built a relationship with the founders to make sure that expectations were aligned. You had the milestones defined, so everyone was clear. And it’s also like you front loaded a lot of the work of preparation, so you wouldn’t have to scramble later. I’m reminded of this quote, it’s perhaps apocryphal, I think it was Abraham Lincoln, “give me one week to cut down a tree. And I’m going to spend like the first six days sharpening the axe”. And I think that sounds very true here. Right? Because you could just rush but that isn’t the best. It’s much better to sharpen the axe, so to speak.

Sophie Vo: I like the analogy. It’s very accurate.

Shamanth: So you had a timeline to start building out a team. And this was before you figured out what kind of product it would be, what kind of game it would be. So you had to make your first few hires who would be category agnostic or genre agnostic. Who were the first couple of hires?

Sophie Vo: It was not completely genre agnostic, because I was a defining factor, as well. I joined Voodoo by my own experience.  I worked on a lot of casual games. However, I didn’t want to leave myself to just hire people who have worked on puzzle games. My main experience has been a puzzle game. But what I consider myself an expert on, and which was a good overlap with Voodoo, was the audience. I have a very good knowledge of what we call the casual audience. How they enjoy an experience. I understand a bit of their motivations, so I wanted to double down on his knowledge, like really from a pure audience point of view. Also, there are many teams that were being formed not only at Voodoo, but in the industry, where they go for audience that could be more mid core, hardcore, strategy. And I felt like what is the best positioning that I can have with my knowledge, with my view of the world. And I felt that it was very obvious that we would go for an audience that is majority female, and also an audience that has a good overlap with the audience of Voodoo hypercasual. So that was the defining factor, thinking of product kind of limitations. 

However, I was quite open when I started to hire people. I wanted to have a good mix of people who either already worked in free-to-play mobile games, and others who hadn’t, because I wanted to create something new and different.

My very first hire was a developer, actually. Because, in my opinion, with a developer we could already start to prototype. The first position you can have is to have a developer so you start to test your assumptions, experiment, test your theories and release things quickly. With the first developer we prototyped two free games. So I could learn the whole process of how to test marketability, how to make creatives myself.  So I was just recording the gameplay, very hyper casual style, and putting it as a creative on Facebook. I learned the whole process of how to release the game. That was a good training ground before others came.

And very quickly after came key positions, like product positions, especially. So my colleague Mark, who is a Product Manager, came. Art leader, and designers, first designer. These people were really important to consolidate, What is the product vision? Where are we going with the studio? Where do we want to go? And then from this core, we expanded to more artists, more developers, more designers, a producer, and today, we’re 14. But we started with one person. We were together for three or four months, which was quite long. And then we became five, and then we became nine. And now we are 14.

Shamanth: Interesting. We talked about how you took the time to think through things. But when it was time to start hiring and moving, you also optimized for speed.  Where you’re like, look, let’s hire a developer so we can prototype quickly, we can test quickly, we can get something out quickly. And I think that’s such an interesting way to see that. You know, just because you’re front loading a lot of the thinking, it does not mean you’re moving slowly.

Sophie Vo: Yeah, not at all, actually. To come back to the time I had a developer working with me prototyping. I could also kill some assumptions that I had, because it was just me thinking alone. And thinking we could do this or that. So we could test quickly.  The learning we have had was the learning we used to start the foundation of the studio when more people were here. And I could discard some directions because I saw them as not viable.

Shamanth: Yeah, you could validate a lot of assumptions or invalidate them, which I imagine is just as important. And you started more than two years ago. And that is well before the pandemic. So if my somewhat rusty math serves me right, the pandemic hit a couple of months after you started. So what happened? What had to change in the way you were planning? What are some of the key challenges at the time?

Sophie Vo: Yeah, I remember very clearly, because it was something I didn’t plan for. So I was really convinced that the team I wanted to build would be on site. We would have a lot of time together, interactions, even personal time to get to know each other. Especially for the big journey we had. I had planned a lot of this when everybody joined in March. In March, we were nine people. I think we had one first week to experience life at the office. And the week after it was the announcement of the lock down. And I was, oh my!

There were multiple challenges that were also personal to acknowledge.

 

I had people who moved country to come to Berlin to join the team, to join this journey. And they barely saw Berlin or they barely met people in Berlin. It was a bit of a shock for some of them. Actually, they all stayed in the end. They had a very strong resilience, growth mindset. They committed to come, they committed to live the experience of an expat. So they tried the whole year. That was one hard thing, I think, to balance the emotional state of people who are just starting a new job, come to a new country, things don’t go according to plan.

And at the same time, the high demand on: okay, we need to prototype this, we need to launch this, we need to test this. And I didn’t understand that when it happened.

So, I had my plans of how we should structure the team and how we should go forward. But there were a lot of frictions and resistance at the beginning. And I didn’t understand at that time, I thought it was that, maybe we are not aligned. But I completely missed the point. And I wrote about it in my personal introspective, that people were really stressed, some of them were really stressed. And you couldn’t even take a step back, and be able to project themselves further, because they were just trying to survive. So once it clicked, things got much better for the summer. I took time for myself.  To take a step back, handle my own emotions, my fears. My fears of everyone leaving, the things I try to avoid by spending the time to really hire a team. And then, I thought, Okay, well, that was inevitable, because everyone would leave, given the circumstances. So of course, I was really stressed. And when I started to let go a bit, and thought “Okay, I have to let people decide, Everyone is responsible for their choice in their life.” Things actually got much easier, because then I was in a position to listen, to support, to explain, while staying calm, and also keep the focus of the team towards what we were trying to build. 

And so the first three months during the lockdown were really hard. In the stages of forming a team, if you know about it, there’s a storming phase, I think we went like full tilt into the storming phase, we were really in it. So there were a lot of frictions, not to the point of, “Okay, I don’t want to continue”, but it was hard. People were trying to find their position, their responsibility. And then it started to fit slowly, organically. As people got more comfortable, the trust was built. We started to ship things together, organically. And since then, it’s been a year, we are doing a retrospective religiously every week. And that has helped a lot, to talk about the things that didn’t go well, and learn about each other. And that created more trust inside the team, to trust that conflicts are not bad. We are a good team, people with good hearts, and we will manage conflicts, and we will get over it. And since then, there has been that strong foundation and trust. We have had tough moments during the year. But we get much stronger as a unit over time. That was part of, I would say, the challenges I can think of. 

And when it comes to the part of creativity, in how we brainstorm and mingle, we found solutions to meet in some way. We found ways to stay connected as humans. That was really a need we had, and brainstorming and being creative. And we use a lot of software and tools that could support this. And one example I can give to simulate a bit our office life, we have used the Discord. Basically, everyone is hanging out in a virtual room like they would be at their desk. So you don’t ask permission to talk to someone, you just jump in the room and say, “Hey, I need to talk to you about this.” And then you’re already talking. That has helped a lot, to simulate, a bit, the office life of the conversation. And many other tools we use like this.

Shamanth: It sounds like there was a lot of emotional upheaval, not just because of the pandemic, but because a lot of folks had just moved to Berlin. You know, the number of variables in your life is somewhat proportional to the amount of stress you have. So in this case, there was the new city, the new company, the new game and the pandemic. So that can just make for a lot of stress. And it sounds like it took you by surprise, much like it took everybody. And it took you a while to figure out what was going on. But eventually, you guys came out stronger because you took the time to figure out what was happening and how to cope with it as a team.

Just to switch gears a bit, you talked about how you were tasked with building a casual studio in a hyper casual company. And I imagine that can come with cultural challenges, because there’s specific ways of doing things in a hyper casual company, and completely different ways of operating in casual, right? And I know you can speak to a lot of the specifics much more eloquently than I can. So, tell us a bit more about some of the challenges by virtue of the fact that these are very, very different genres.

Sophie Vo: I think the first main difference is the business model. So hyper casual operates on games that can scale a lot with low cost of acquisition. Their revenue is mostly through ads. And casual games traditionally, are more from IAP. And the cost of acquisition can be crazy if you’re in a very competitive market. This was, at least from a pure business model point of view, a root of many differences we had. 

It’s very natural as a company to compare the performance and the velocity of teams working on hyper casual and casual. And it took time for the founders, the leadership, to not compare things that couldn’t be compared. To give an example,

 

a hyper casual game could be released in a weekend. And then within a month, you’re done, you put all the things that you need, like SDK, ads, you’re ready to go, and you can start to be profitable from the month after, in the best case, right? A casual game is impossible to make in a week, release it and be profitable, just a few days after. This is a completely different model. If you’re familiar with the model, sometimes you pay a lot up front, and only a year after you see the money back, and only a year after you’re profitable. It’s a different model. And where were the challenges, then behind that was first velocity. So of course, there were sometimes the questions of, why is it taking so long? Not understanding, what are all these people doing in a team of nine, compared to a team of three in hyper casual. Not understanding the depth of game development, because it’s much more complex, when you create something that has to last for a year than something that can last for a month. The system and the thinking is different. It was a bit of an adjustment to understand this difference in the velocity and team size.

And second, I think, was really understanding where ads could play a part in casual games. You already know about ads, and I think it’s a great opportunity for revenues. That was, I think, new for Voodoo as well, too, as a hyper casual company to even understand the value of IAP revenues, you make in a game, what it is to build an economy, meta progression, these things are never discussed in a hyper casual game. So it was a lot of back and forth to really give visibility. And education, of what we are spending our time on.  That’s something that I wouldn’t have to justify in a traditional casual company. But how are we spending our time? What do we need to build? Why is it important to actually spend time with data and forecast to really show the numbers? And

if you look at the LTV prediction model, you see that the biggest leverage to really have high LTV is retention. So then it’s not so much about adding lots of ads from the beginning. Okay, you can do that from the start. But what is really important is having a product that can really engage players for a long time, because that’s what makes your prediction solid.

Otherwise you have nothing. It took some time for the adjustment. And it’s from the past six months that we found our way a bit more. Thanks to more data people, analysts who joined us to help create the language, the common communication, to show through forecasts and business models what we are doing here. I think what I underestimated for me it’s that I’ve worked most of my life in this model.  But probably for the co founders, they couldn’t make sense of it even whatever I could explain. So we had to find a common language more through the financial model to understand what is the casual gamer.

Shamanth: Yeah, now that you explain it that way, I realize how much of a difference there is – just from the LTV curves to the velocity of building the game itself. And how the monetization curves, the retention curves are shaped because they are so radically different. And I can imagine if all they are used to is making apps that make money back within a week, but also don’t have a long shelf life or have a relatively low probability of success longer term, I can imagine how they would be like, “Why do you need nine people and a year to put out a game, when you could just run marketability tests right out of the gate to release it in a week, right?” It sounds like how you addressed that was over communicating from the get go. Really explaining. And it sounds like a lot of that is just noticing that a lot of people needed that kind of understanding and education about what somebody in a casual game company would just take for granted.

Sophie Vo: Yes. And it’s really interesting for me to learn from the hyper casual business model. I think I have incorporated some very good concepts of it into how I make a casual game. And I think that’s what makes it so special, how we created a casual game inside Voodoo.

Shamanth: Yeah. Are there examples that come to mind as elements that could have been borrowed from hyper casual to casual?

Sophie Vo: For example, marketability is essential when you want to have your hyper casual game succeed. In casual games, I think now there’s more awareness. But it’s a part that has been overlooked, sometimes, over the past years. And we approach it from the same angle from the very beginning. So we went with a very rough prototype, we made creatives out of it, we tested it in our target market to see it’s marketability. Of course, we know that it’s not a guarantee that it will stay there because it’s with an early prototype. But at least we know, it starts on a range that is acceptable. Not like at, I don’t know, 8, 11 dollars, where we know investors just will drop the idea. There’s no way that we can make it back, you know. So testing marketability early on of the idea of a game is very valuable. 

And second, I had never considered the potential of ads until I could see numbers of how it looks in hyper casual games. And I think it’s still underestimated, because maybe I truly believe that audiences are getting bigger. There are people who are adopting more for interaction with ads and actually value it. And what can a more mature game look like when ads can be more incorporated. And that’s what I’ve been exploring as well. It is very interesting, because it’s definitely changed some beliefs I had about ads, working in casual games. So I updated my view about it and my knowledge about it by trying different things. And integrated it in our game as well.

Shamanth: Sounds like you were open to everything you could learn from what was out there in the hyper casual culture, too. You talked about how you communicated and over communicated as much as you could. But, I imagine when you’re a small studio in a large company, trying to build something very different from what the core company is doing. I imagine there could still be reservations or skepticism. I imagine it could also just be because there are multiple people within the leadership team. I can speak to some of that because I was a part of a five member studio that was acquired by a public company. But, I’m curious in your case, I can see how there can be a lot of questions asked, a lot of reservations. So how did you uncover any reservations spoken or unspoken that people might have had that would be questioning your work?

Sophie Vo: Yes, so of course it has happened. I learned a lot last year. I learned self management, emotional management, because it can, of course, be perceived quickly as an attack, as a threat. And people are questioning your existence. Why are you here again? I did have some conversations like that. Not necessarily with founders.

We have an AMA every week, very openly, anonymously, on a weekly digest. And someone wants to know, what are the casual teams doing? They’ve been working on what? Again, for x months? When do we see something they released? Was it a good investment?  These are really hard questions to read. And of course, you are always happy to answer and talk about long term things. So here, patience was really a thing.

For us, especially as a studio it’s really important.  First, I trust my work, I trust where I’m going.  That was not always the case, there were some moments a bit in the dark. But trusting what I know, what I believe in, what I do not know, and what I should verify. And with the team also believing the same things, and keeping sharp focus on doing tests, making progress, not be too affected by the judgment or skepticism, because that’s part of life. And over time, when finally, we started to have results, so I think it was the end of last year. So when we launched our game we had our d1 retention , it was a very early test – it was low. So when I say low, it was around 30%, something, which isnt nothing, I would say not great. And in some cases, you would even kill the game at this point. But that was our early test. 

And in these moments, we already made the scenario that we would at least try for one to three months to really correct the early funnel. Because we know these points are really hard at the beginning. And we cannot get it right from the first time. But for example, the company was like, okay, if it’s that low, why spend that much time to fix it?  It’s either you fix it, or you don’t, and you move on, you know? So then we had to, I think we can really focus on it. 

Okay, let’s forget about the deadline here. What do we need to do now? How much time will we have? And what can we do in this short time?

So we did really drastic changes to pivot the game, to really analyze correctly, do a maximum of player research. And then when we released and we had a change it was really significant. That saved the game! Then we started to get positive attention. Okay, this team, they know what they’re doing. Maybe we didn’t give them the time or the credit to prove it. But they proved through a test that they can change the fate of the game after two, three play tests. And that’s what we continued on doing. 

There were some moments a bit low like, okay, maybe the CPI is like this, maybe even what integration is like this. We understand quickly, we analyze, we make our assumptions, we release quickly and then we turn around on numbers. Over time, after we’ve done that multiple times, trust started to build and they started to understand, “Okay, actually, this team has different skills, different competencies.” 

But since everybody speaks the same language in this company, which is data, this is how we started to have more recognition from other teams. Because data spoke for us.  But when it was just pure development, it was really hard to have a buy-in because it’s a different language. Whereas in hyper casual, you get your results quickly, you don’t have to evaluate the quality of the game by playing it. You just look at the numbers.  In casual games, you don’t have that for a year, or sometimes you’re in the dark.

Shamanth: Yeah, I imagine that can be nerve wracking, because you were building against the clock. And when your first early numbers aren’t great. And you’re like, we have to go back to the drawing board. And I can’t imagine how much pressure that could have felt like. 

You spoke about people asking questions in the all-hands. I am curious if there were conversations you had to have to address any reservations that people had. Like people questioning “Oh, is the casual game shipping?” Was there a somewhat critical conversation that comes to mind that you can speak about and can share?

Sophie Vo: I think I did two important things. First, restoring my confidence in what we were doing here and why. So the first one was really having a direct conversation with oneself.  I think it was the end of the year, as we closed the year it was a really hard year for us. We were not sure of continuing with the game, but we managed to turn around the numbers. So you know, a lot of things were happening. And I took the time to reflect. I wrote a big retrospective of my year, how was my experience from a team located in Berlin, far from the Paris office headquarters and how things were perceived on my end.  And really giving feedback to the CEO. So, we had that conversation. 

And I told him, look, I would really like to ask to discuss this because maybe I’m missing some points. Maybe I’m confused on some points, I really need to understand, have clarity, visibility, on where we are heading to. What do you expect from me, from us, so I can navigate better and actually execute the goals you expect from me. So

there was a realignment, a discussion at the beginning of the year directly with him first, for me to understand, what is my perception, or fears that are imagined on my end, because I’m so isolated in Berlin with my team, and where is the reality? And the reality is in the voice of the CEO, right. So that has helped a lot. And I think it gave awareness for him as well. But when he thought we were fine, he realized, actually, we were going through a really hard time. And giving support was actually important, and maybe a responsibility he could take to help us to succeed here and not just let us be, and then we have to fight to prove that we exist and also to succeed, you know.

So that was the first thing. 

And second was really, I think it was a month ago, when we started to actually have real progress to give an update in front of the whole company. Retrospective as well, we’ve done that’s how we turn around game numbers. That’s why we’ve been working on it and why it took that time. So giving full transparency to the company in a presentation or full hands meeting. For them to understand that we exist, we’re doing this and give them more of a context. Because people in the end did not really have bad intentions. But when people are curious, you know, they just didn’t understand, coming from hyper casual teams. They really missed information and transparency. And actually, that was much better too. And I realize, we are not from the same point of view, and we may not see the same things. And maybe my responsibility here is to give more visibility to the rest of the company in what we’re doing. So pending a better internal communication as well.

Shamanth: I want to underscore how just taking the initiative to have both those conversations to provide the full retrospective and also to have that sort of candid conversation with your CEO. That’s not obvious, and not easy. And, I can also see what you said about the CEO assuming everyone is going to be fine, because that’s a mistake I’ve made. We have a very small team, and we’re fully remote. There’s times when I’ve just assumed things are okay. And one of the lessons I’ve learned is to over communicate with the team, and check in and make sure, and tell them everything is okay. I also tend to be very, very optimistic as a person. I just tend to assume everything is fine. Whereas, I’ve learned somewhat of the hard way that not everybody thinks that way. But I can totally see how courageous and how important those conversations can have been for you. 

About that first conversation with the CEO. How were you? You were clearly interfacing with a lot more stakeholders than your team was. So you were clearly getting a lot of the skepticism, the curiosity, the questions, you were confronting a lot of that. What were you sharing with your team? And how was this impacting your team?

Sophie Vo: So, when there were comments in the AMA, all the team could see it. Sometimes we have our own internal AMA inside the team. And we have open conversations. I think it’s important for me that there’s a feeling of safety in my team. 

So when we’re bringing up some things like, “Oh, do we have the support of the company? It feels like maybe they’re not, or seems like people are questioning what we’re doing.” They were asking me, what do I think about it? In this moment, I shared what I think, what was my position, and what I believed in. I had confidence and trust in what we were doing. But that was not necessarily shared across the company. But nevertheless, I said that’s the confidence I have. I believe in what we’re doing. It’s just a matter of time. So at least it was reassuring on that part. So at least, you know, one of us has confidence, that can also inspire confidence in others. However, I was also very transparent about explaining the context. It’s a hyper casual, traditional company, and where they come from that’s what they value. That’s what they see. That’s what they know, it doesn’t make them bad. So trying to explain and give the rest of the team a bit more empathy for the leadership or the other teams. 

Because we are also in a real bubble of what we understand we are doing, but it’s not the case for other teams. So what I was explaining  is what I just told you. The only way we will be recognized is through the universal language that happens in this company, through data. So we have to prove results. So let’s focus our time, our energy in making a great game, be patient, let’s make it happen. And then things will follow. But let’s not try to convince them in the process as we’re doing it, because it will be hard. And they understood. But of course, it’s disappointing. And they were sad. But I’m really happy how my team is really mature about that and understanding. Like, you know, okay, fine. Now, let’s use our energy to really build a game, and prove what we’re doing here. And that has helped a lot. So, yes, there were some disappointments. But again, out of maturity, they really understood, to be able to not judge too quickly.

Shamanth: Certainly, certainly. This is something you mentioned a couple of times today. You focused on building a common language, which was data. You focused on understanding with the other stakeholders, and with your own team. You had the conviction that this game could work. And it wasn’t just blind conviction. It’s because this is not your first rodeo. You’ve seen enough games. And I imagine that conviction is born of your experience. Knowing this thing is going to work. And you said your game is in soft launch, if I understand correctly. So it’s going to be approaching global launch, sometime soon, I imagine. When you look back in hindsight, through this journey, what were some mistakes, for want of a better word? Or what are some of the things you felt you could have done differently along this journey?

Sophie Vo: I think one main thing, and I think it hit us hard, actually – it was really the share of proven versus innovation. I had a team who was very creative, very diverse. So they come with a lot of ideas, they have a lot of inspiration. And I think here, the mistake was we were forming the team as we were building a new product and some choices we made were maybe more forming the team than actually serving the product. 

Because it made our life harder, where we innovated in some areas. Not saying looking back, but it was the wrong choice. But it definitely extended our development time, made our life harder, and was putting us to have even harder time to justify the development. So I think the mistake here was not how we approached the development of this game. But was it maybe the smartest thing to go for our very first game to ship in a new studio? So that is one thing that I still reflect on today. But we are happy because the choices we made early that were bringing us problems are actually the opportunity that allow us to maybe launch well because then the game is different, unique, very novel. Yeah, so it turned out quite well for us. But these moments where we were thinking, really, of killing the game because it was just too complex. You know, I was really thinking, was it the smartest choice to start with this?

Shamanth: Yeah. And so this is obvious in hindsight, I would think. In these months, what were some of the things that were the most surprising to you? 

Sophie Vo: I think the main thing that was the most surprising is that ads, ads can make revenue. I think that’s the thing I really discarded. And I was really an organization that really were anti ads. And I cannot be anti ads being at Voodoo in a hyper casual company. So until I actually worked on it and saw value in it. That surprised me, because finding myself valuing it actually is something I didn’t expect.

Shamanth: Yeah, I can imagine, right? So certainly a number of game developers that have worked in casual or somewhat traditional games, I can see, ads can be almost an afterthought. Certainly. Sophie,  I’m just thinking back about our conversation.  There’s so much that I feel like I’ve learned from you, just in the last hour or so. This is perhaps a good place for us to start to wrap. I do want to thank you for the openness and transparency with which you’re told your story. It’s certainly something I find very, very inspiring. Thank you. But of course, before we let you carry on. Would you tell folks how they can find out more about you and everything you do?

Sophie Vo: Yeah, I would say the best way is LinkedIn. And at the beginning of the year I started an initiative that is very dear to me about conscious leadership and a master class called Rise and Play. So you can check it as well on riseandplay.io . And you have a lot of the things I have shared about today that may be more practical for you, if you are in a position of leadership.

Shamanth: Wonderful. We will link to all of that including riseandplay.io.  And the master classes, they’re all free. You’re offered them in the spirit of sharing. Certainly, we will link to all of that Sophie. But for now, thank you so much for being on the Mobile User Acquisition Show.

Sophie Vo: Thank you. Thanks for inviting me and I really enjoyed our conversation.

A REQUEST BEFORE YOU GO

I have a very important favor to ask, which as those of you who know me know I don’t do often. If you get any pleasure or inspiration from this episode, could you PLEASE leave a review on your favorite podcasting platform – be it iTunes, Overcast, Spotify, Google Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast fix. This podcast is very much a labor of love – and each episode takes many many hours to put together. When you write a review, it will not only be a great deal of encouragement to us, but it will also support getting the word out about the Mobile User Acquisition Show.

Constructive criticism and suggestions for improvement are welcome, whether on podcasting platforms – or by email to shamanth at rocketshiphq.com. We read all reviews & I want to make this podcast better.

Thank you – and I look forward to seeing you with the next episode!