Description
Today’s guest gives mobile developers early access to their app store and advertising revenues, enabling them to scale quickly and efficiently without relying on equity funding. You will discover the fallacy of the marketing budget, how to soft launch and why you really need to obsess about metrics.
Martin Macmillan is the CEO and Co-Founder at Pollen VC.
Show Notes
Capital Efficiency
Pollen VC is all about efficient use of capital. At the right time, they provide an extraordinary efficient way of growth capital. If you come to them stating that you have an idea for an app, it might not be for them as they cannot fund you until they see evidence of revenue. You have to still get some venture money for this. But if you have already raised venture money, built a great game or an app and it’s just purely a case of access to a working capital to grow it further, then Pollen can help you out. This is given that you already have the base of receivables from the platforms; or if it’s a game which monetizes through ads, you already have strong ad revenues. At this stage, help form Pollen means you don’t have to go back and raise venture capital which will dilute yourself. You basically are using your assets or the earnings that you have create from the ad networks and the App Store to fund user acquisitions. It’s all about capital efficiency and using the right form of capital at the right time for the right purpose within the business.
How to Soft Launch
During a soft launch, it’s really important to look at the KPIs around retention but it’s also essential to look at acquisition costs and monetization. The current thinking is that if you have good retention, you can probably fix monetization but this is very hard without good retention numbers. So from a retention point of view, have at least 30 – 40 days launch period as the more data you have, the better you can predict how you will performance. Until you have longer term data, try to be conservative in your day 90 and day 180 estimates as they can skew your calculations.
Show Mention
– Fav app: App in the Air:(iTunes | Google Play)