How to scale your indie studio to a major publisher - a Kooapps case study

Kooapps is a mobile gaming studio and publisher. They have over 250 million users across their portfolio of games with notable titles such as Snake.io, Stacky Bird and Pictoword.

TENJIN USE CASES

The Challenge

Back in 2017, the Kooapps team needed to efficiently grow the user base of their ad-monetized apps. Since Kooapps started as a bootstrapped indie studio, they needed to find a smart way to scale their business. When you don’t have an investor or publisher, every dollar counts. Kooapps needed a tool to help them figure out whether their UA spend was profitable, to enable them to invest in ROI-positive campaigns.

The Solution

As the first MMP to support ROI/LTV calculation for ad revenue, Tenjin was the obvious choice for Kooapps. The studio started with the free plan and gradually grew into an advanced user that utilizes Tenjin’s DataVault and APIs. To this day, Kooapps uses the Tenjin dashboard with session-based Ad Revenue LTV calculation alongside DataVault for true metric transparency. Even though they have access to impression-level revenue data (ILRD) from their mediation provider to calculate LTV in DataVault, Kooapps choose to rely on Tenjin’s generated LTV metric. Session-based LTV estimation is based on aggregated values, therefore it provides a more conservative view that is inclusive of ad opted-out users. Industry privacy changes reduced the amount of granular data available to advertisers. Therefore, aggregated metrics like Session-based LTV becomes more and more useful.

Chun-Kai Wang

"Revenue is up 8x since we first used Tenjin a few years ago and paid UA spend is up 30x so Tenjin has completely transformed our business. We love Tenjin!"

Chun-Kai Wang, Co-founder & CEO at Kooapps

The Result

8x Revenue Growth after starting to use Tenjin, 30x Ad Spend Growth after starting to use Tenjin, 3x LTV increase for Snake.io ad campaigns