About Cantuğ: LinkedIn | Codeway Studios | Careers at Codeway Studios

ABOUT ROCKETSHIP HQ: Website | LinkedIn  | Twitter | YouTube


KEY HIGHLIGHTS

🍊 Paid UA for sustainable app growth.

🍋 The approach to testing and scaling new apps.

🫐 How to diversify marketing channels while evaluating the blended impact on performance.

🌽 Social media and unconventional sources for creative ideas.

🍳 Fostering a culture of teamwork and knowledge sharing across the organization.

FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW

Shamanth

I’m excited to welcome Cantuğ Sugün to the Mobile User Acquisition Show. Cantuğ, welcome to the show. 

Cantuğ

Hey Shamanth, thanks for having me.

Shamanth

It’s an honor having you. I’m excited to speak with you because you have a very unique set of experiences that we will dive into today.

A lot of these experiences are around growing post-ATT and growing at massive, significant volumes. We’ll dive into all of that. 

To start, your team is the most downloaded subscription app publisher in the world today. Some of your teammates posted over the weekend, No.9 is this company called OpenAI and you guys are the top subscription app publisher for 2023, by a fairly big margin.

You guys do make a lot of AI apps as well. A lot of your growth has been due to paid UA – in many circles, paid UA can be a dirty word. Can you speak to the why of relying on paid UA for growth?

Cantuğ

I can speak of many whys for paid UA, but let’s start by discussing what else you can do to grow your app if you’re not doing paid UA. You can use another paid channel such as influencer marketing, or you can choose to prioritize organic channels such as app store optimization. ASO or ASA is where I see many developers going in the first place and I see them focusing on it maybe a little too much. Don’t get me wrong, ASO can be an excellent and less risky way to start growing your app. But there you are limited by the existing awareness people have of your services. It’s not always super scalable, to be honest. 

Let’s say you’re marketing a ChatGPT app. ASO can be an amazing channel for such a concept because people will be already searching for your service on the app store and you can drive a lot of downloads, just by ranking for relevant keywords.

But if you prioritize this strategy over paid UA, your growth is only limited by the existing awareness of your service: in this case, people who are searching for a ChatGPT app. Also, you become very vulnerable in case there are occasional ups and downs in the trends or increased competition and there are millions of ChatGPT apps on the app store.

For example, when OpenAI launched its official ChatGPT app, it disrupted ASO. Many apps that were relying on ASO faced huge drops in downloads. This is where paid UA can come into play for us and make a huge difference. It offers you a path to sustainable growth to the point that would be impossible if you were only doing ASO.

This was also how our Ask AI app kept growing at an amazing scale even after OpenAI launched its official app. Because with paid UA you’re not limited to the immediate meaning of the trend. What I mean by it is you can look at trends and you can extract different use cases out of that trend.

For example, while growing Ask AI, we realized that many people were already aware of ChatGPT, but most of them didn’t know what to do with this amazing technology. Here we started to extract different use cases. We positioned Ask AI for different use cases instead of just relying on being a regular ChatGPT app on mobile.

We worked together with our creative team and came up with ideas. We discussed maybe a creative about how to start a business and make money with Ask AI, or a creative about how to get help from Ask AI to fix their relationship. Suddenly we unlocked a tremendous growth by showing people all these different use cases in engaging and innovative video creatives.

And that’s the short story of Ask AI for you. One final note that I have to mention – paid UA can also be too addictive sometimes, which makes you disregard the potential of ASO. This is something we’ve been tackling lately and started seeing amazing results already. So I don’t want to discount the importance of ASO, but I guess paid UA is our strong muscle.

Shamanth

I fully agree that it is much more stable and predictable than ASO or even ASA. I find some of these questions often come to me from people who have worked a lot on the web. I also point out that on the web, it’s very different because you have companies that build on content marketing and they’ve gone to IPO.

If you look at HubSpot or Yelp, they don’t need paid UA because they have SEO and content marketing. On mobile, you don’t have an equivalent of SEO which means you have to rely on paid ua to scale. 

You guys do rely significantly on paid UA. So when you’re launching new apps, and I know you guys have several apps that are active and running, can you walk me through the process of testing for new apps and how it works in practice? Because you have to figure it out and understand that paid UA is workable for a new app, not just in terms of CPA, but also scalability. Walk us through how the testing works for a new app.

Cantuğ

I guess this is another part where paid UA can play a huge role for us. I’m not going to lie again. The very first thing we do when launching an app is launch a paid campaign for it.

So this way we can start analyzing metrics. From day zero, from the first few hours. And this is a luxury that we sometimes take for granted. But something that I’m grateful for is, that having a large portfolio of apps also helps because when we first launch an app and launch the first campaign, we look at the overall marketing funnel and different metrics of the app and compare each step of the funnel with our existing apps and we tend to be very optimistic about it because that’s the only way to bring new ideas to life and keep the team motivated, keep people working on it. And we look for a spark in at least one or two metrics.

For example, maybe your CPI is too low, but in-app metrics aren’t there yet. In that case, we say, okay, let’s work on the product, let’s add new features or let’s work on finding creatives that will attract audiences with better intent. Or maybe it’s the campaign optimization strategy. You can do a lot of things to work on different metrics.

Sometimes, in-app metrics are great. They show a great sign of product-market fit. But ROAS isn’t there yet because the upper funnel is expensive. In that case, we double down on creative testing until we can lower the upper funnel costs such as CPI or maybe increase CTR, etc.

Once we see a good number at a decent scale in our target market, this is usually US iOS, then we try to scale it within US and beyond and see how it goes. Of course, once you start scaling, you become more vulnerable to creative fatigue. So we increase our creative efforts as well if we decide to scale it beyond the testing budget.

Shamanth

What all of that also underscores to me is it’s not like flipping a switch where you get a yes or no very quickly. Sounds like it is an iterative process where you are looking at the scalability in the product metrics and upper funnel metrics as well. If the metrics are strong enough across the funnel, then you have a good sense that this can scale and that’s what I’m taking away from this.

You also mentioned that your team was born into iOS 14 and that a lot of your growth happened post-ATT so was it easier or harder because you didn’t know a world that was IDFA-focused? How did that timing impact how you guys approached marketing and UA?

Cantuğ

It’s hard to tell because I was in a different industry and also

Codeway was founded in 2020 and we started doing paid UA in late 2020. So we didn’t have any window to a pre-IDFA world. But I guess it helped us in the long run because, from the get-go, we accepted SKAN and the privacy-centric world and tried to adapt our strategies to that.

As we were working on new product identifications we tried to prioritize concepts where we could reach a broader audience and we avoided niches, and we started with apps like Cleanup or Facedance, which can entertain a lot of people.

Cleanup can provide utility to any iPhone user. For our creative efforts, we avoided going too niche and tried to be more inclusive for different use cases and different motivations, and I guess targeting users from the app level, from the creative level, how it is right now helped us in that sense.

Shamanth

I think that can be a great advantage because I do know several folks who ran marketing pre-ATT that struggled with the changes simply because they insisted that they wanted to see deterministic data.

Some folks I know, basically said we’re just not even going to do iOS because we can’t measure as clearly as we used to. I think for them, it was a bit of a struggle to adapt. Having a clean slate was an advantage for you guys. 

The last time we spoke, you mentioned sticking mostly to Meta, Google, and TikTok for marketing. Talk to me about what the typical approach to diversification is. What channels do you generally start with and what the expansion process looks like? Do you explore channels other than Google, Meta and TikTok? Google doesn’t play very well with SKAN. How do you deal with that? So talk to me about the general approach to channel diversification.

Cantuğ

We tend to stick with these SANs to start with Meta, Google, TikTok, ASO and ASA those five focus points while you’re launching an app. We don’t prioritize one over the other.

The one we’ll launch with can also depend on the type of app we’re dealing with. If it’s more suitable for TikTok, maybe we go for that. If it’s more like an app with a search intent, maybe we’ll go with Google first. But in the short term, we try to launch all these five channels.

Usually, these are enough for us, if there is a product-market fit, we can unlock tremendous growth with these channels, but of course, depending on the app and the concept, we can prioritize expanding beyond these channels to SDK networks or different DSPs.

So I guess whilst you’re sticking with several channels, it’s easier to look at the blended metrics on a country level. You also have SKAN, which gives a good idea. You can look at the blended metrics and you can play with budgets of different channels and try to understand their impact on overall blended metrics. This is how we go by it usually. 

For Google, it’s a different game. Especially on iOS. We try to understand Google’s impact, but by looking at maybe utilizing app store connect data to the point where we can, or again finding an estimation for Facebook, TikTok and organic and trying to understand Google that way.

Overall it’s such a big network that you cannot—disregard it just because you cannot measure it. It has to be there in the mix and it does drive performance. I can tell you that, but I accept that it’s tricky.

Regarding different channels especially when you’re on the scale of Ask AI such as we were in June – the most downloaded app in the US in a couple of days, and with paid UA, you don’t have that much organically, you’re still relying on paid UA, but you’re driving an amazing number of downloads.

And there, we say, okay, let’s diversify beyond TikTok, Facebook, Google. And, we launched different channels, but what we experienced was, those channels are just attributing everything because they have probabilistic attribution. And then you’re paying for the installs for that channel.

So it was a tricky situation where we started relying on SKAN metrics for those networks as well, but sometimes the problem is, SKAN metrics don’t work properly for some networks, and it can become a complete mess to deal with.

So if you’re marketing an app at the scale of Ask AI and mainly relying on networks that go under organic, when you look at your MMP user-level data and you don’t want to add the new network and have that network get all the attribution from organic source to itself because Facebook won’t do it for itself.

So it’s a tricky situation, but we do believe that you can increase your audience. You can increase your reach by diversifying your channels. 

Shamanth

I agree that with the multiple channels, measurement is the chief challenge. I think what you said briefly was you’re still looking at the different budget levels of each of the channels at a country level and seeing how your blended CPA changes according to the budget. That’s the general approach you’re using because you cannot trust the measurement of any of these channels individually. And that’s also the approach we take, and it’s also what we recommend just because there is no way around it.

Cantuğ

I think that blended analysis is the perspective of looking at what’s going on overall for your country. I think that’s something that you should keep doing, even though you can measure every network deterministically. Because you cannot always trust the numbers you see even if they claim to be deterministic you should always be looking at what’s happening in the big picture,

Shamanth

And I think one of the takeaways that I’ve heard from a lot of people is, even pre-ATT this was a problem and just nobody wanted to look at blended metrics because they were like, yeah, I’ll just look at my campaign numbers. There was a lot of misattribution happening. What ATT forced everyone to do is just really understand that there is misattribution happening and to look closely at things.

I think that data is really useful for within-platform analysis of different creatives and different campaigns, different optimization methods. But you know, it can be tricky to compare across channels, for example, by looking at such metrics.

I know you spoke briefly about your creative processes. Talk to me about how you guys look for new ideas for creatives when you’re already at a significant scale. Because again, when you are one of the larger apps in the world, I imagine it’s hard to do competitive analysis, so what, how and where does the team look for inspiration?

Cantuğ

I think the game has changed a lot in recent years when we were starting in 2020-2021. We had a couple of competitors that we looked up to and tried to adopt their strategies for creative testing.

They were mainly UA creatives, focusing on what you would call gameplay creatives in the gaming sector. I think that translates into UA creatives and the non-gaming side. We started with such creatives like our competition and then UGCs came into play, we started utilizing different UGCs and influencers to make our creators more authentic, and to help resonate with our audience.

Then we came to a point where we looked at ad libraries, we dug through SensorTower and the inspiration you can get there is very limited because you are the leader of your category. Maybe you are the one who is bringing new ideas to the table and it’s really hard to get inspiration from others.

Social media overall is a great source of inspiration. For example, you’re marketing a ChatGPT app. But you shouldn’t be limited to the content creators who are just talking about ChatGPT.

Previously we talked about different use cases, so why not go and search for those use cases? Inspiration can come from anywhere as you’re scrolling through different social media channels or as you’re watching a film – sometimes a practice that we do is just sit in an empty room and stare at a blank piece of paper and just try to write down our ideas.

You’re now in the business of consuming a lot of creatives, you’re trying to brainstorm. And after that comes a point, where you just sit with a pen and paper, and you can come up with great ideas that will shape the sector and shape the industry. So I think we diversify our channels of inspiration before we diversify beyond Meta, TikTok and Google.

Shamanth

I like what you said about looking at the organic posts to get inspiration because when you’re at your level of scale you have to look beyond what’s in the marketplace. It’s not always enough to just look at what everybody else is doing. That certainly makes sense. 

To switch gears a bit when you’re operating at the scale you are at, how do you vet for and what do you look for in new team members during the interviewing process, considering not very many people will have spent multiple millions a month? So what’s the interviewing process like and how do you onboard and train new team members given they may not have comparable experience in the past?

Cantuğ

Non-gaming in Istanbul, Turkey is a very new thing.

AI apps and utility apps overall are relatively new concepts but especially in our region, it’s very new. So, it’s a luxury to look out for people who manage millions of dollars of non-gaming spend before. That’s not something that we look for as we are adding new team members.

We don’t expect them to manage millions of dollars before. But we expect them to somehow extract as much knowledge as they can before coming and speaking to us for the interview. For example, research everything that they can find on the internet, stalk our company, and try to understand our UA, organic or product diversification.

I guess, the first keyword will be curiosity. We try to see that spark in their eyes to come and make a difference because they’re curious.

The second thing will be ownership and that sense of responsibility because now we’re at a point and at a scale that it will be impossible for me or my director or anyone who’s leading the team to be aware of everything that’s happening in every region.

We should be able to trust people with these immense budgets that they’re spending every day and making decisions daily. They will know better than us, about decisions they should be making that day. So we should be able to trust them and we expect them to take full responsibility And have that full sense of ownership of their product or what they do.

The last thing I want to mention is being an amazing team player because this is something that pushes us forward and puts us ahead of the competition. We have a portfolio of apps, and we have different teams or different individuals working on the UA of different apps, but we try to emphasize the fact that they are marketers of Codeway overall, not their specific app. 

For example, you’re working on an app that spends 1K a day compared to your colleague who is working on an app that spends 10K a day. But something you discover on a specific network, a specific region, a different sort of creative, a different sort of optimization method etc. can translate itself into like an amazing win for the most scaled app. We experience this all the time. 

So we try to create this culture of sharing and the sense of being a marketer of Codeway and prioritizing Codeway’s success over anything else. So that’s why sometimes other teams make fun of us for very long meetings of all of us coming together, discussing different learnings, et cetera.

But I think that’s important to have that sense of teamwork.

Shamanth

Indeed, because one person can’t drive the kind of impact and the kind of scale you guys are at. I think it’s so important to have everybody in the team moving in the same direction. 

This has been great. Thank you for sharing. This is perhaps a good place for us to wrap up, but before we do that, can you tell folks how they can find out more about you and everything you do?

Cantuğ

You can reach out to me on LinkedIn.

Shamanth

We’ll link to your LinkedIn and of course, we’ll link to your team, your apps, and your website as well. 

Cantuğ

So I think this is a good place for me to make a hiring announcement as well. 

We’re growing our team in Product, AI, and Marketing, so if you’re curious about these topics overall please apply and take on this challenge.

I also want to mention that exciting things are awaiting us in 2024. As we expand our AI app portfolio beyond APIs or open source technologies, we’re building our own technologies and we’ll be marketing those new apps that are unique. I think that will be an amazing experience as well.

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, 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@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!