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The mobile gaming industry has a capital efficiency problem that most participants donāt realize they have. Studios that could scale profitably sit capital-constrained, unable to deploy into ROI positive user cohorts via paid UA channels. Meanwhile, those with access to capital often misallocate it, chasing growth metrics that obscure whether...
Thereās a deceptively simple question I ask teams who want to scale their user acquisition: āWhy arenāt you spending more on UA?ā It sounds bluntāmaybe even dumb. But over ten years working with CFOs, founders, and UA teams, this single question has consistently exposed theĀ realĀ bottleneck: eitherĀ performanceĀ (you canāt profitably buy users)...
In every mobile gaming and app businesses, user acquisition and monetization are the engine room of growth. But theyāre also where financial discipline tends to blur. In many companies, revenues, ad spend, salaries, and server costs often flow through the same account, leaving founders and their finance teams guessing about...
Welcome the Capital Stack! A decade after founding Pollen VC and having lent hundreds of millions of dollars into the sector, Iāve seen the same question surface again and again across mobile gaming and app studios: āIf our UA machine is working ā where can we find the capital to...
Debt and revenue based finance options for early/growth stage businesses has become much more mainstream over the last few years, as founders seek alternative sources of capital to fund their growth. Rather than relying purely on equity financing which is dilutive to their ownership positions, they are increasingly seeking more...
The market for new ways to fund mobile user acquisition is exploding. But there is still a lot of confusion among publishers about the different financial products and how to understand the pros and cons of each of them. We created this definitive guide to funding mobile user acquisition to...
In the fiercely competitive mobile gaming landscape, marketers are constantly seeking strategies to better understand their metrics and enhance their chances of success. A critical, yet often overlooked, aspect of this is the concept of duration. In an environment where ROI positive user acquisition is hard to achieve, understanding not...
Until ad networks raise their game and figure out how to use the financial information widely available to them to evaluate credit risk in a much more dynamic way, structural their inefficiencies in the ecosystem will continue to persist. This hurts not only their own ads business, but also curtails...
Until ad networks raise their game and figure out how to use the financial information widely available to them to evaluate credit risk in a much more dynamic way, structural their inefficiencies in the ecosystem will continue to persist. This hurts not only their own ads business, but also curtails...