I’ve talked to hundreds of extremely successful mobile app entrepreneurs. But I’ve literally never heard anyone tell me exactly what Daniel Stammler, former CEO of Kolibri Games (makers of the Idle Tycoon games) told me about the path he and his co-founders took towards massive mobile success and an eventual 9-figure exit to Ubisoft.
Think market research.
But turn up the dial to 11. Or maybe 111.
And, of course, much more. Hit play, and keep scrolling …
Massive mobile success: 2024 vs 2016
From our perspective right now in 2024, building a massive mobile success in 2016 might seem relatively easy. So many huge apps hadn’t even been released yet. The subscription model wasn’t really a thing. Smart hybrid monetization with IAPs and ads wasn’t as common, and Apple was handing out IDFAs like Oprah at an end-of-season party.
But it wasn’t easy.
It really wasn’t.
“Nowadays everybody is saying it’s too late to go into mobile … it’s so crowded, it’s so hard,” says Stammler. “But actually back then, in 2016, everybody told us exactly the same thing.”
Candy Crush and Clash of Clans were billion-dollar enterprises even in those days. In 2016 Tiktok was just getting started as Musical.ly, LINE was a top-grossing global app, and many of today’s giants of mobile monetization were already around: Tinder, HBO, Netflix, Spotify, YouTube, Pandora …
So how do you break in?
Stammler and his co-founders set their sights pretty low, actually.
“We played Clash of Clans, we played Candy Crush,” he told me on a recent Growth Masterminds episode. “We looked up the numbers. We realized they’re making a billion or more per year. So we felt like if we can make like 10% of that, we’ll be a great successful business.”
Then they did something truly unusual.
Market research … AKA playing all the games
They played every single game in the top 200 highest-grossing list.
It took 6 months in between development of their first few games, and believe it or not, it got a little tedious and boring to play so many games.
But the experience was almost literally invaluable.
“After you play 20 or 30 of them, it starts to be really tough because of course, it’s usually the same core loop, same game, same monetization, and so on,” Stammler says. “But you really, really learn a lot about the mobile gaming industry, learn what works, what doesn’t work.”
It will also reveal where there might be a gap in the market: a niche that is underserved or not served at all. In 2016, that was an idle game that has elements of games like Clash of Clans, where you build up your world, but also like casual games that are easy to get into. In other words: easy start, but growth over time.
(Which makes me wonder: where’s the gap now?)
A critical choice: agile development
Then the team made another fateful choice: agile development.
“So we built an MVP … very agile … it took us eight weeks to build the very first iteration of the game,” Stammler says. “We just released it because again, we were too naive to do something like a soft launch. So we just pressed go live both on Google and Apple, and then we got like a few hundred organic downloads per day. So this is basically how we approached it, and then the organics actually grew to like a few thousand per day.”
Inventing a new genre helped with that, and Stammler thinks the same approach of finding an underserved niche is still valid today. He doesn’t believe in the “McKinsey approach” of checking all the App Store and Google Play analytics to find out what’s hot and then copying it.
Building agile was critical to getting that initial organic traction.
Agile development helps teams avoid “a lot of product related mistakes,” Stammler says. Because they were building agile, Kolibri just built a very simple mine. They initially planned to make the mine more complex, adding features and options, which would have made the game’s core loop more complicated.
“We thought that people would get tired of this repeating core loop, and we need to add more complexity,” Stammler told me.
But since they had only allocated 8 weeks to build the game, complexity and additional features didn’t actually happen. And instead early users said what they wanted was just more mines … a diamond mine to go along with the gold mine.
Maybe a platinum mine. But not more detailed and challenging mines.
“And we quickly realized what people actually want is they want more of the same experience,” Stammler says. “They don’t want a more complex core loop, but they like to play the same experience again and again.”
If the team had decided to take 3 months or 8 months to build the game instead of just 8 weeks, they would have built a much more complicated game. That, Stammler says, would have killed the game.
In other words, less was more.
Way more.
And building agile saved the team from doing exactly the wrong thing.
Luck was also a factor
Every successful person who is honest (and self-aware) acknowledges that chance is part of the process. We don’t choose where we’re born, what opportunities we get very early in life, or the broader circumstances within which we build products and companies.
When I asked Stammler what factors enabled Kolibri and Idle Tycoon to grow so big, here’s what he said:
“I think the first factor is just luck. I think we were at the right time, right place … there were so many things that could have gone wrong that didn’t go wrong just because of luck. So I think that’s always very important to appreciate.”
100,000 other developers were likely working on mobile apps at the same time as he and his partners were building their games, but not everyone — even talented, experienced, and driven people — gets the same success.
That’s just life.
Of course, when the opportunity arises, you then have to grab it and make a thousand good decisions and likely invest tens of thousands of hours of hard work to fully take advantage of it.
Focus on retention, but start from the front
Another key factor in Idle Tycoon’s massive mobile success: Kolibri focused on retention.
Everyone wants players who last for months and eventually years, but you have to start from the front, not the back, Stammler says. That means focusing on day 1 experience.
“I believe you can’t start from the back. You need to start from the front, which means Day 1, Day 7, Day 30, but you need to have a concept in mind of how you can build the game, in a way where it it is able to grow for many years.”
Of course, that’s easier said than done.
And most games lose 70% of their players right on day 1, Stammler says. Also, this is not really predictable. You will never know, he says, how good your retention will be until you actually release the game.
(Which is another argument, of course, for agile development: investing months and millions is risky!)
But retention is where the value is:
“You want to build a company that has value in itself and you don’t want to build just a game that makes a few million for a few months that basically just goes down,” Stammler says. “Because the real value is in those long term successful games. If you have a game like Candy Crush that is growing year over year, your franchise is worth many, many billions. If you have a game that is declining after launch, it’s super hard to actually create any long term business value with it.”
That is the advantage of hybrid casual: you can get players started and into the game relatively quickly and cheaply.
The AAA space: not so much.
Much more in the full podcast
There’s so much in this great discussion with a mobile expert who’s achieved huge success. Check it out on your favorite podcasting platform.
