🎮💰 Triumph’s Story: From Brick Breaker to the $100Mil

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Welcome everybody.

This is two and a half gamers and we have extra mega special episode.

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So now it's like super rare and super super rare.

We'll talk ultra rare after that.

Ultra rare, yeah, exactly.

So today we're gonna talk about triumph.

but before we go into the topic and our special guest, my name is Mattejancerich.

I'm Felix Brauberg.

And I'm Mayako Bremer.

And I'm Colin Hayden.

And

I think we should automate it because there's no way this ever gets good.

We do AI stuff.

We do AI stuff, man.

That's the nice thing.

AI stuff is overrated.

Anyway.

I mean, we did an AI episode last week.

Colm, welcome to the podcast.

Can you introduce yourself to the audience?

Who are you?

Where do you work?

and uh and all the fun yeah my name's colin i am uh the head of growth here at triumph i've been uh with the company pretty much before we ever started marketing the app right before our launch and it's been about two and a half years of triumph three years and it's been a good ride and i think we're a very different company than the rest of the people in the skill-based gaming space and i'm happy to talk about it here very cool yeah if you're at it maybe we can do some definitions here for people that are like what what are we talking about like skill-based gaming space, real money gaming space.

Maybe let's start there, right there.

Yeah, so skill-based gaming and triumph is an app where people are allowed to wager on themselves playing a video game.

So, we have an app with 12 or 13 different games within it, and you can wager on yourself versus an opponent, and all of the aspects of the game are even.

So, if we are going to deal with the same spawns, the same obstacles in each one of our games, and it's entirely up to you and your skill level to beat your opponent and you know, take their money from them and we are live in 38 states in the United States we're on the app store no Android yet and

we I'd say what makes us unique is like we're probably one of the only skill-based games that targets a younger demographic you can see a lot of like solitaire caches bingo caches that target people over 60 but like I think what makes us unique is that we really go after that younger demographic so to summarize like do i get dry today is pretty much like zero power progression i can't buy any power ups nothing it's just like as you said pure skill and it's kind of a a little bit of element of luck, I guess, on top of it.

Just not just that skill.

It's not just like skill.

In the actual gameplay itself, we have no progression.

We do our best with putting progression features in what we call the SDK, which is like the non-gaming experience in the menu and like how much you end up wagering and like unlockable skins and stuff that doesn't necessarily give you like a

advantage in the actual gameplay.

But we really try to make our games as fair as possible.

It's very important to like what we do.

I I love when I said Colm, can you introduce yourself?

Then it was nothing.

And then you asked, Did you just cut off?

And then you started introducing yourself, and then I disappeared.

Anyway, we went into the definition of the genre and what it is and how it's defined.

So that's yeah.

And Colm, your website has posted some really big numbers.

Can you just basically maybe talk a little bit about that so the listeners get a sense of the scale you guys are at right now?

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You can share the numbers, okay?

I see.

It's like one of those, like, very, very easy typical games.

Just go and click view more in the description.

There's all the, all the, all the games in there, there, and then the end.

You mean Brickbreaker?

From the past,

okay, list of games included.

Chaos Cannon, Pegmaster, Blockpart, Tipo, Prepare, okay, Doodle Jump.

Okay, so everything's multiplayer yeah yes everything what we have a few different game modes um our biggest is our async game mode where me i am paired up against with another player and we match them asynchronously so like i submit a score on a single player game somebody else is dealing with the exact same spawns they submit a score in the same game and whoever the best has the best score wins the wager

we have our challenge mode where you get matched up with everybody else in the app who can compete all for like the day and whoever wins that takes home like a big cash prize so you might be one out of a thousand people that win that game but if you do you're taking away all of the money from every single entry and we do this for every single game on our app how did you pick the games how did you

it started with games that we like to play but i think now what we noticed is that like these really fast game i think there's a few we're still hunting out on this but there's a few things that i think make a good game for triumph like you need to have the game be about like 30 to 40 seconds long the shorter we can actually make the game the faster that feedback loop is.

I think that's really good for us.

You need to be able to die in the game.

So if you have a game where you're submitting a turn and like every

length,

I don't think that's good.

I think like the satisfaction of staying in the game longer when you're winning or having a better high score is going to be a better option.

Like, yeah, I'd say that's basically it.

But it started with the game, like that game, Brickbreaker, was like the first game we ever did.

It was just the one we liked to play.

And then we just started kind of picking up on like rules that we thought would make a good game after that.

Was Brickbreaker good, you think, because it just was really big with the kind of Blackberry generation and that's kind of the generation of people you're targeting, or was it just because of the gameplay?

Yeah, I think people we target are generally males age like 21 to like 30, 35.

And then like the concept was like we want games that people used to play like in class in school, back when they were in school.

And yeah, like the money on the line makes it fun in the modern day.

Like otherwise you just like wouldn't be playing these games as an adult because I I remember when I was kind of running some real money gaming game, it was mainly solitaire or pool or

something like this.

This was kind of surprising to me.

Like, it wasn't really like Brickbreaker and stuff.

But you have these games, you know.

We have them.

They're definitely not our top games.

Our top games are the ones that we've made ourselves.

Like this game, Chaos Cannon, is like one of our top ones.

The experience for a solitaire, I think people will wager on skill-based games for solitaire because it's a game they've been playing their whole life.

They feel like they're good at it.

It's like a little bit different value prop for us.

We try to focus on games that we think are fun, games that like not many people play that we can kind of reinvent into like a really fun way and just have them be like really fast and hyper casual.

And just out of curiosity, right?

So how does the revenue model work?

Do you guys take a vague go off the winnings or how does it work?

Yeah, we take a fee for facilitating each game.

Depending on the game mode, it can be from like 10 to 20%.

And so

each one of our game modes has a fee, and that's how we make our money.

Sweet.

And just so, yeah, I have to ask this is a bit like cheesy, but what's the like the player that has gotten the biggest payout?

How much is that?

But what is also the average payout for players?

The biggest payouts are from our challenge mode.

You can win north of like five, six thousand dollars from a good challenge mode.

I'd say average is actually really small.

So, like, our average winter for an individual game is about three dollars.

Oh, people put like you're not making any money based on since or taver, so I'm not sure what you're talking about.

Yeah, no IAP revenue for us.

We use payment processors within the app, so like our sensor tower is probably going to be pretty blank, which I think is a lot of people, why a lot of people might not know about Triumph.

Exactly.

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Bye-bye.

But, you know, I think we're like kind of a low-key up and comer, and like, it's been cool to see the growth.

But yeah, like, not much you can find on Sensor Tower.

Yeah, it's even in the category that's called like mini games hub.

Yeah, yeah, like go, like, you know, go unified apps, and you'll see it if you get to the the main page.

Like the category where you have like offline games, no Wi-Fi games, it's like number six.

Mini game.

Yeah, stuff like that.

And it's like it's just that I guess the taxonomy isn't really ready for this kind of a genre yet in in Census Tower yet.

So right where you wanna be though, right?

Yeah, exactly.

Yes.

Yeah, I mean this is kind of as lucky as possible.

Because this is definitely like the the real money game.

Interesting as I'm looking at it because

some of those looks like

two top hyper schedules that we look at, but also you have those like staples like

combined there.

So I guess so.

And there's no events metagame or like some kind of live option between those?

Yeah, not really any metagame apart from like, I guess, your balance in the app as you continue to wager and continue to win and lose games.

I would call that metagame.

We're trying to think about how to have a good metagame because I think ultimately we want our players coming back and playing a lot.

And like unlockable skins, things that like change the cosmetics of a game, things that like give your player more standings we also have leagues um depending on how much you wager in the game um you're gonna be placed in a certain league and you can rank up or break down the leagues tab i think this adds a lot of progression as well but compared to like a free-to-play game not nearly as much progression yeah but you can't even because again by the nature of the you know the skill kind of uh

skill gaming uh paradigm of like you cannot have the advantage otherwise you wouldn't be able to wager because you know it's pay to win as as usual as it's there but like yeah stuff like this is definitely skill skill based also i couldn't help but notice right we're on sensor tower as well that there's no android app right so what's going on there um so the play store currently doesn't allow skill-based games to advertise or even launch a skill-based game on android i think skill-based gaming has had an interesting past i mean like you look at companies like skills and papaya and like they're just straight up very different than us.

Like they're doing Solitaire Cast.

There's been a lot of lawsuits about, you know, historical replays and everything of that sort.

Our hope is that we could really like just change how the industry is perceived.

I think our app just targets a completely different user.

It's almost a completely different experience than like a single game skill-based app like Solitaire Cash.

And like, we hope we can change the industry and make it legal for the Play Store.

And I think a skill-based game could just be a lot bigger than it is today.

Okay.

Do you also get a lot of friction from the app store, right?

Because they're not getting a cut from this, right?

So I don't know, like, do you get a lot of friction from them or how does that work?

We've had, we've had no complaints from from the App Store.

I think, for the most part, they're generally cool with us.

You know, we have good legal opinions for everything we do.

We have good payment partners that we work with.

And the fact that you can withdraw money makes us like

being on the app store without the Apple tax.

Yeah, for the most part, compliance-wise, once we were able to get the licenses and opinions that we have in place, it's like then generally breezed for scaling.

Not really any complaints from Apple.

Yeah, could be if you go to two countries, and I'm not sure why the internet today for me is terrible, but anyway, it's 94% 94% U.S.

basically.

Exactly.

Do you go active user-based instead?

Yeah, I think it's more indicative.

But I just want to say it's not worldwide,

kind of the legal side of this.

And also, it's not also like all the countries, all the states in the U.S.

Yeah, it's 38 of the 50 states currently.

So the laws dictate skill-based gaming in the US at least.

They're rather unique.

They actually go back to the 1930s when people were playing pinball for money.

And each state regulated pinball games in different ways.

Some states came and like burned all the pinball machines, other ones fully endorsed it.

So, everybody in Scobase Gaming, what they do is they take these laws and then they have legal opinions based off of how the laws worked in like the 30s and 50s for these games.

And we come up with very good arguments for why we can be live in a certain state and why we can't.

And that's currently how the whole industry works for the U.S.

And is it expanding or

getting smaller?

Like, what's the state of this?

Like 38 for last 20 years, or like, what's the state of that?

I mean, since I've been doing it in the last two years, I haven't really seen any difference here.

Our hope is it can expand.

I think we just need like really solid players that do things by the books.

And that's the biggest thing.

So until Trump gets to play this, like, yeah, that's there.

So, what's the kind of the golden metrics in this?

Because it's very different from free-to-play, right?

Like, you're not measuring on IEP and retention, right?

Is it the amount of games played per user that's the North Star metric?

Or how does this work?

well at least for ads or north stars return on ad spend i think like the big difference here for advertising is that um

in a game like monopoly go like somebody might download from an ad play it for like an hour two hours maybe even a week and then like pay paying is very core to the triumph experience we have a free-to-play mode but generally to get the most out of triumph you're paying almost immediately like our average time to pay is five minutes for the users that join so we need to convince them in the ad to pay and then like, that first-time pay is actually a lot more top-funnel than I think a lot of these games that are out there.

So, we can put ROAS as like a really strong metric for us, like within our day zero, our day one.

Like, we have models that predict out and bake this out to day 90, day 180.

And we can have like a pretty good idea of like how things are going to pay back and how things are going to work based off of the product.

So, I'd say ROAS for almost everything.

But, if I understand the game is, well, the game, the app is more like free to start than free to play.

Yeah, so we have a free-to-play mode where you can earn gems.

You can then play a game where you like you spend your gems and convert this into cash.

And you can also watch ads to get gems on the app.

And people,

like a general paying user, might play like two, three, four of those games and then decide to pay right afterwards.

So like I think our users pay upfront probably a lot more than a regular game.

Can you talk about, again, you don't have to, but the usual kind of conversion within free-to-play, something like mid-core stuff, it's like, what, like 5% of users ever pay?

95% is free-to-play forever.

Is the ratio dramatically different for you?

I will say it's a lot higher than that.

I will definitely say that.

Okay,

look at the DAU.

Look at the DAU.

These players are playing because they are kind of depositing money.

So the conversion is dramatically higher.

Obviously, when I worked at Real Money Gaming, I would say like

it was

pool and it was Solitaire.

So Solitaire was definitely on the higher end of the CPIs but I was seeing like 30 35 40 50 depends on iOS in the US on Facebook sometimes in value optimization it was 50 80 easily so that's that's the biggest difference yeah because we are targeting this like younger demo though i assume versus the solitaire cache and the bingo caches of the world um we're gonna get a lower cpi yeah yeah yeah also all the bingos and all the like the cooking uh skill based games they were just like the old ladies, which were absolutely crazy, crazy expensive.

Yeah,

I think those games have like a

longer lifetime value curve.

They can get

away with like five, I've heard 5% on day zero sometimes for like 180-day payback period from some competitors.

And then they can really roll that.

Our revenue is a little more front-loaded than that.

But like when you do one of these games for like that older skill-based gaming demographic, I think like that revenue is like really sticky yeah but that's front-loading of the revenue that's kind of works in your favor in the ua right you get so many events exactly we can um you know not have to rely on loans or vc money like our revenue is what goes right back into the ua spend which is really nice nice yeah interesting man like it's there a lot of over

sorry i just want to say it's such a different kind of uh ua activity than the rest of the like the free-to-play stuff yeah i'd say our ua is different it probably comes from um just not being in the UA before this, I'd say a lot.

But like, I think it comes back to the experience.

Like a lot of this, we need to convince players to pay for this within five minutes of them downloading.

So our UA has to be trust-based.

So we use a lot of celebrity advertisement for this reason.

Like you can see Soldier Boy playing our game.

Like we use a lot of rappers.

Soldier Boy.

That's nice.

Yeah.

I think a lot of this is like people see someone they know and they trust playing the game, then they're confident they can get a withdrawal from the app.

So we really try to lean into that a lot it's essentially what jakob has spent his entire career trying to do get people to pay in the five minutes the first five minutes it's nice and also there's there's a reason that we we can't play this on the emulator because jakob is android only right and then he would never

he would never pay anywhere so this also kind of fails his

filter

i'm not sure if that proves if you are here maybe this is a good question for you because as i said the category here it was kind of all over the place, which is, as I said, mini games have with like offline games.

No, definitely not the category I'm looking for.

If you can enlighten a little bit, like who are the current biggest market players so we can see the scale and just kind of what are we talking about here?

Yeah, pretty much all of our competitors do solitaire and big oats style games.

And we have papaya, avia, skills.

Voodoo also has blitz cash, which is probably the most similar app to us, I'd say.

Really?

I didn't even know.

Okay.

Voodoo.

Blitzcash.

Voodoo has their fingers in every pie known to man by now so yeah and um yeah so there's a few people that do it that's for sure um but yeah

yeah that's what i hear always when i kind of they've been around in this space for quite a while as well so like they've been able to like be the first movers for that solitaire sort of core game um also for first movers that can run campaigns on google especially yeah i i heard that they're uh grandfathered in there yeah yeah wait what wait wait wait talk more about that.

I don't know.

I've just heard, I've heard some rumors, but I've heard that Papaya

or ABL or Papaya, I'm not sure which one, but I heard that they're allowed to run on Google and like other people are not allowed to run on Google currently in the space.

And this is, I have this information for three or four years, so they are very close to the Google guys, and also they're making a shit ton of money.

So, you know, there are always exceptions when there are rules.

There are always exceptions.

Especially in ads.

Especially, yeah, especially in the gaming industry.

Like, what can we come on?

What can we do?

Okay, so this is Papaya's portfolio, yeah?

Solidar Cash, Bubble Cash, Bingo Cash, Zero Revenue, of course,

but why the way?

Oh, fuck.

Yeah, this is a different podcast.

Sorry, no, they're making money.

They're definitely making it.

Yeah, so it's like what do we have monthly?

So it's something like

200, 300k downloads a month.

Yeah,

pretty much.

This is considered big, yeah.

Yeah, like yes, Just like looking at it because, like, yeah, Cole, I'm dying to ask, right?

Because basically, the main monetization, of course, is you taking the fee, right, of any played game.

Do you guys also do ad monetization?

We do a little bit.

Right now, it's like less than five percent of our total revenue is admon, but we have one placement right now, and that's um, we have a free mode where you earn gems in order to get gems.

We give you a certain amount on download, and then past that, you have to watch an ad.

You can convert these gems into cash for in a free cash tournament as well.

And we need free games because if people can't play the game for free their first time, they probably won't pay for it.

That's the main reason.

But we do have like a subsect of users that like will constantly just run these free games, watch ads, run these free games, watch ads.

And that's like our sort of mini in game economy is our gem mode.

Our hope is that we can get our admon good enough in this mode to do some like MAI install campaigns and like run up those free users and really see like a big lift from there.

But I think it's going to need to be more than like 5% of our revenue to really run blended or do any of that well.

That being said, we only have one placement.

We've thought about putting interstitials in the games and stuff like this, but I think it's really not good for like what we do because we really want to ensure this brand of being a fair and trustworthy game that doesn't rig matches, that doesn't have bots.

If we start putting ads or banner ads in the middle of the game, it's just going to completely ruin that look.

And so the only ads we do right now are like in between games.

You can watch a rewarded ad to get more gems.

Yeah, makes sense.

And which networks?

Because I've worked on some like real money stuff, and there's a couple of ad networks that don't let you run ads at all, right?

If you have anything associated with real money, right?

Yeah.

Which networks love you and which hate you?

Well, I mean, we're on Macs.

Max does a lot of the bidding.

Mintegril, I think, also bids a lot.

And Unity.

Generally, we haven't really had any problems.

I think a lot of these

issues, like, are you talking about for Admon or for Admon for Admon.

Yeah, I'm talking about Admon.

Google, absolutely, as soon as they find out there's any money component in an app, they will shut you off quite quickly.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean, that's the same thing with UAs.

Yeah, I don't think we've added Google to our stack yet.

So that's probably why.

But

all of the players I mentioned like have been good.

And I think it's like generally like a 20-30% split between them.

But you said you didn't have a problem.

You mean you didn't have a problem with UA?

I mean,

channels

a lot.

Yeah, I've heard from like people that do these solitaire style games.

Like their ads are like pretty insane.

It's like paypal logos like 20 times over like a million bucks and then those people get banned from um advertising in games quite a bit i've heard so that that can be a little challenging for them we generally don't show those paypal logos in our ads like we show you can win money but it's like purely through gameplay in the actual game which i think kind of just changes that experience and makes our ads like a lot more compliant with everybody but compared to like running ads on tick tock or like any social network like running ads on apple event is like much more of a free-for-all like you can get away with a lot more, that's for sure.

I mean, no surprise, no surprise.

But like, there were times where, even

now, I mean, some reverted UA channels are kind of not able to run TikTok, even, and then I saw like you have so many TikTok ads.

So, I'm pretty sure like TikTok is pretty big for you guys.

TikTok is big for us.

It comes down to our player demographic.

Actually, that was like the first channel we really cracked.

We're able to scale big with this app.

TikTok has a rewarded gaming program.

So, like, we're in that program.

Nice.

And they don't let anybody with just a regular ad account advertise skill-based games.

Yeah.

But they are quite strict in terms of like what we actually can and can't advertise.

So we have to constantly go back and forth with our policy team, make sure everything's compliant to their standards, which makes sense.

But like, it's there's a lot of ads that we can get away with running on meta that we can't run on TikTok.

Um, and they're they're rather strict about it, but like TikTok was definitely the first place we were able to see scale.

Nice.

And Apple, I mean, so Apple, I mean, like, what kind of data you send back to Applause for the ROS campaigns, Or you do just CPP campaigns?

We do the day seven and day 30 ROAS campaigns with them.

Okay.

We're integrated with our MMP AppSlar and we just send them all.

So the purchase is basically the deposit?

Yes, our AF purchase event and AppSflyer is our deposit event.

Okay, and it's first-time deposit or just all deposits?

It's for all deposits.

So like

most of our campaigns are maximized value campaigns.

Okay, okay, okay.

I'd say that's where most of our UA goes to.

Nice.

Okay.

So you have Appla I see, I saw TikTok.

I mean, I can

you show show it because if I disappear again, then it's going to be better.

I see some creatives.

Yeah, just go to creatives.

Yeah, just go to creatives and we're just going to talk about it.

Because, yeah, I see Aplavin, I see TikTok.

I see the liftoff.

I see some so many others.

I didn't see Facebook, but I was like, no, you're definitely running Facebook.

Let me guess.

Not a real person?

No, he's real.

I don't think we've actually worked.

We've done any AI ads yet.

We've We've been playing around with Sora though.

So we might start doing it soon because it's getting really good.

But

like using real people, making it seem real is like a big part of like so it tells basically a little bit of a story that the guy wants to buy Elden Ring on the Play Store and then he plays the app and he wants wins it and then he can buy it.

Yeah, that's nice.

It's like pretty relatable, I would say.

Yeah, but then

then I saw like some some of the rewarded UI channels had like this like $150 that that you can win or get from

playing other games, that's not really

that relatable.

I don't think you can trust that that much.

Although this is way, way easier than

the actual

PayPal logos and like millions of money that you can actually earn by the money.

Yeah, I think the big difference between the PayPal logos and actually showing this is like we're actually showing our

when we show money like going up, you know, so it makes it a lot more believable.

yeah this is definitely

we

picked the worst ad that we've ever done oh my gosh it's amazing i mean i love me to literally great it's like brain rot the horror ad basically we've done some uh we've done some experimental ads that's for sure but you know we we try everything we have fun in the marketing team that's that's great i mean you have to you have to oh yeah how do you do your ideization for creatives i mean we were just all in this room together thinking about how can we make like seven to ten ads a day.

And then a lot of it just comes from that.

These texting stories, we've done a lot of really roncy texting stories.

This is one of them.

But like, if you see user engaged, I'd say it's like very natural to the platform.

You know, you're scrolling TikTok and then you see an actual text.

You think it's a real text.

You're going to stop and watch that whole video.

This one is actually one of our top spending ads.

This one's really good.

You can see Soldier Boy playing the game.

He's just asking a lot of questions about the game.

And then he plays it himself and he just really enjoys it.

And then we have an offer at the end of the ad.

Like those are really, really key to us is also running currently maybe i'm able to find it i believe it's still running yeah yeah he was really big for us in like july here's me i see yeah i see so yeah hello

i'm in a decent amount of the ads too i mean this is exactly like it's super easy to to record you your team and whatever and that's it you don't really need anything else yeah i think like i i came from a background where like i was making tick tocks i was growing my last app that i did completely organically never doing paid so it just like got me in the habit of like pushing out these videos I think so many people in UA just look at the data a lot and they don't like nearly do as much creative as they need to.

They're really good at doing the creative here.

Because this is super important.

This is super important.

And the background with the TikTok and making the videos, like that unlocks another level of creativity and the creative production in general.

That's it.

I mean, like you record yourself, your teammates, colleagues, and whoever else, and then suddenly you have those five videos a day.

Super clever.

I can see Yakub would never record himself for a creative.

Actually, I was doing development diaries live on

stream back then when I was at the company.

Back when?

It was

a dev stream.

It was 2019.

It was quite a long time ago, man.

And

he wasn't even the main person on that stream.

You were a sidekick.

Matthia, when I'm in Bratislava next time, I want to be in a creative.

Let's do one together.

I did a creative with John Wright for the playable maker.

Perfect.

Easy.

I mean, it's you.

I would prefer game, though.

Yeah, this looks fun.

It is.

It is.

I think I recommend all you a managers to just do your own creative.

Also, if you're like, since I've done it and I've seen like how my ads do, I can tell some celebrity to actually play it right and to like say the right things to actually get people to go and download.

That's that's like that's a gold right there.

That's really fun.

Because you work with, you work with like some creator, some TikToker, and you're like, make an ad for for us.

They're going to do something that they think is really creative.

They're not looking into like single source of truth data and like figuring out which ad is like the best performance, the best ROAS.

Like if you make the creative yourself, you can do that as well.

Obviously, you can't be as good as a TikToker, but like even just having your foot in the door there will like help you direct other people to do it really, really well.

Yeah, so Dan, what are the elements of good ads that if I want to record an ad tomorrow, what should I do?

Well, I think it's specific to your product, right?

Like, cause like we look at, we make an ad and we look at how the ROAS goes up after we put a little bit of spend behind this ad.

And what we've noticed for us is it needs to be trust-based.

You need to ensure trust in the person.

You need to show the gameplay.

If we don't have the game in the ad, it's not going to work.

And we need to incentivize the person to actually download or deposit.

So we have to say download.

We have to say deposit money.

Okay.

And play the game.

There are different keywords that you need to say multiple times to just 100%.

Yeah.

Nice.

How did you find Soldier Boy or where?

Like, is it cameo or is it on like for agents or like how does how did that work?

Through agents mainly.

We just

figured we should try it with one of them and it ended up working like really incredibly well.

Yeah.

We

look at like the returns for each individual celebrity we do.

Sure.

Like we'll group all the Soldier Boy ads into one ad set, into like one campaign, and then we'll see if that ad set performs versus other ones um and then that's kind of how we like get good prices for like all these people it's like okay this is a price so you know we can afford to pay just based off the ads of the past person that's very similar to this guy it's like doing well and you can kind of go from there there's a lot of that that's done into like making the actual deals with the celebrities that's quite interesting like have we seen um who was there homelender was there at the last four creatives like they had him and it was like this kind of very clever ploy of uh last four having home lender but not explicitly saying that they had home run that they just had the actor, but he was having like laser eyes and shit.

So yeah, but he was kind of acting as a home render.

Yeah, it was quite clear.

So you had Soldier Boy doing something similar in a way?

Yeah, we well, what we do is we actually have him live stream the game for like about an hour

to live stream the game.

And then similar to like how Kai Sanat or Speed might get clipped up and posted,

we'll clip up our people and like post them live playing.

I think that makes it native to the platform, right?

Because like when you're advertising on Instagram, you want to seem like you want it to seem like the ads from Instagram.

And like you do an actual stream clip of an actual celebrity.

It just adds a level of genuineness.

Because I know I was working with Heroes of Fortune, Felix Mike, and they were doing some streams, basically one, two-hour long streams, and then we just use like cut-down versions from those streams actually in the ads.

And some of them working really well.

Yeah.

Yeah.

We found that works really well.

We get them to say stuff too, like off-camera.

We'll record them saying, if you bet $50 you'll get $50

and stuff like that like things that we can say to get encourage people with like our offers or deposit offers and stuff.

And stream by stream you mean on Twitch or some kind of normal commercial platform?

Yeah, we'll stream on on kick.

Oh kick

that many viewers and we can actually live stream.

The main point of doing it is just to actually clip up those streams.

Yeah.

Of course, of course.

It's a stream is actually

I was a little bit surprised by the kicks make sense, much more sense in this case.

I guess for me, I'm just looking at this, right?

I'm assuming the LTV is quite high, right?

Like, do you guys do a lot of retargeting as well, or is it just UA?

We actually only just started retargeting about a month, a month ago.

It's returning really well.

So I think we have a lot of juice to squeeze out of that.

But yeah, generally, like

95% of our UA has been from UA and not retargeting.

Yeah, welcome to gaming industry.

People do a shit ton of UA, but then it's like retargeting doesn't work.

If you measure it properly, then it might.

Yeah, you need to measure it properly.

You need to start slowly as well.

And that's really interesting.

Which is interesting, by the way, because people usually say, oh, retargeting on iOS doesn't exist, but it does.

It does.

Do you do it like on, like, you started on Facebook and now expanding to like the other channels, like Addictive, Remerge, or whoever else?

Or the other way around?

Yeah, I mean, like, we started with the social media networks.

We cracked TikTok, and then we put all of our eggs in the crack in Facebook.

Then now we're expanding we're in the team too so we can have more channels and like expanding to

nice everything the one thing i think we need to do more for you is playables like we almost have no like

i wanted to ask yeah i wanted to ask like because i saw like few of them only and uplavin is come on man like it's that's the playable place so how is it possible that you have only like few of them yeah i mean like it's just never been a priority like if we like from an economics perspective it would probably make sense but like from like having like two or three people on on the growth team it's like if we put our eggs into doubling our facebook spend it just seems like a lot better roi than like making playables and like increasing app level now we're at the point where like we're really trying to hone in on that so like in a month or two you'll see playables from us nice and um same background that's game you can you can you can just go to playable maker.com and use it

that's it and that's you don't even need three people you can do like half of the person you can spit out like so many different credits from actually from this gameplay, like that's super easy.

So, yeah,

yeah, I would definitely try that.

But man, yeah, I mean, if the return is better on like doubling Facebook, then that's like no-brainer, absolute no-brainer.

And I know, like, how big it can be.

Is that Jeffrey Dahmer in the creative?

Yeah, that was Jeffrey Dahmer meme stuff or something.

Sorry,

you've done some funny ones for sure.

This is exactly, I mean, I love this.

I love this.

This is exactly the creatives

I want to do for any of my ads or whatever games.

This is exactly it.

The users love it too.

Like, we get so many positive comments on our ads.

Never skip a triumph ad.

Like, that's a lot of the ones we get.

When we were doing the really funny ones, what we've noticed is that when we just show the gamer in a stream, it typically does better with Roads.

But those memes, those funny ones for brand awareness are like a really good way of expanding the funnel.

Nice.

So you said like seven to ten ads a day.

that means exactly like how many you do like every day on on average it might be like five but yeah like we we do a lot of creative

how do we test that man how do we test it yeah like if you have five pieces

we'll throw it all in uh different ad sets um so like most of our testing is done on i guess like facebook and tiktok is the two places

i mean it makes sense we have a creative ad set anything that's like we look at the row as per ad and then any ad that's like positive row as we'll put in its own ad ad set.

And then we group that together, spin that live, put that in our deposit or campaign, kind of go from there.

And what we found is, like, we just deal with a lot of fatigue for these ads, like really fast.

Like, on TikTok, the average ad can last like two weeks.

So, we need to do quite a bit of creative in order to keep it fresh, keep that frequency low.

And on meta, you know, if we're lucky, and that's like lasting a month long.

Some of these creatives are great.

Yeah.

Yeah, they're really good.

I think, Matte,

walk through it, because there's definitely some that are like pretty crazy.

Yeah,

that's really nice.

What's kind of next for Triumph, right?

Like, how do you guys expand?

Is it by gaming genre?

Is it by adding events?

Or

how do you guys fuel this expansion?

Yeah, by the way, just saying it's still expanding, like, downloads-wise.

That's not the right one.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's the right one.

Yeah, sorry, continue.

Yeah, well, I think Scobies Gaming can just be so much bigger than it is.

The fact that we're the only people really targeting younger males in the space, I think is still pretty incredible.

Like there's not really any competition that has done something just like Triumph yet.

We can make way more games.

I think we totally should make way more games.

Like it may seem like that we have a lot having 12 to 13, but we see like a really big lift in like what we can do when a new game works and it becomes a hit for the app.

So I think investing in that.

Also just going live in more places.

Like skill-based gaming can totally be bigger than the US.

Like there's a lot of countries in Europe that we can go live in today if we wanted to.

I also think eventually we can get this live on the Play Store and have a good standing with Google as well.

That's one of our big goals.

And ultimately, I just can see a lot of people my age like playing this and actually doing it.

Move mediation platform.

That goes a long way out here.

Wink.

Can you show downloads over time, Jakub?

Only for Triumph?

Yeah, this is it, right?

That's so much for Triumph.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's quite impressive.

It kind of like reminds me a lot of our chat when we were talking about offline no Wi-Fi games, right?

And I met the developers and basically they kept saying like how important some of the games are and then that adding the right mini games or games basically can fuel so much growth so do you guys just have a list of what you're going to be adding next or is it just looking at the hyper casual hits and then you're like yeah this will work and you roll it out on a small user base or what we we have a list the specific games i don't want to really say until they're out yeah of course like as of lately we're we're trying to hold ourselves to a standard of like releasing one a month.

And generally, like like you'll see this canon game, you'll see Brickbreaker a lot in our ads.

The more games that we can actually get to work in the ads, I think the better the product's going to be for.

Because, like, if you're looking at an ad on a ROAS basis, it's more than just the ad.

Like, people need to see that game, come into the product, play that game, really like it, and then they actually stay.

Yeah, very cool.

Honestly, I don't think I have any other questions.

If there's anything else we missed asking that's interesting about skill-based gaming, I'd love to know.

But yeah, fascinating.

And like, I know I learned a ton.

Oh, is that John Cena as well?

Yeah.

You know, you go on the edge when you can.

That's like how this game is played.

So much great stuff, my internet can't handle it.

All of it seems too much, too much, too much great, uh, great memes and everything, man.

We were kind of just wrapping up and asking our final questions, Martin.

Do you want to ask anything to cap us off?

I think I got all any kind of future plans for

expansion in terms of the UA and scaling, like, where do you want to push the most?

And what, what would be the like, what I really look up to companies like PrizePicks, like a lot of these bigger

companies.

I think the way they do advertisements and,

you know, user acquisition for those sort of apps is like how I really want to be thinking about it as a company, other than gaming.

So,

you know, a PrizePicks, a FanDuel, DraftKings, like those sort of companies, I think like just doing our ads to like that level of professionalism standards and really will like allow us to get the most people.

It's really important, as you say, that like the demography is kind of different than the usual market competitors and it really shows and i guess just by expanding the portfolio of those games i guess it will be just you know great correlation on just the engagement and overall metrics as it will go further i mean i am pretty sure we will add trim to the creative uh trends from now on yeah

oh man i mean this is this is such a great stuff i haven't seen this these great ads for a while so i mean the variation is really well done yeah very well done definitely like some of the things that uh oh my god that mate always says at the end of some of the games.

This is literally it.

Like what we're reading.

Yeah, it's exactly it.

Because then we talk about the span and the sk the creative depth and then there's like one or two pages of creatives and it's like this is just never ending, which is exactly how it should be.

If you scroll

on the top.

Like, well, what most people don't understand is like, even when you make a good ad, that ad's only going to last a month long.

And you're going to have to make one.

At least if you're advertising on meta.

Exactly.

So if you make a, if you make a great ad and you immediately see such a great result, you have two problems.

First, I mean, it's gonna outperform everything else.

And then the second one, like by far, and the second one is like the finding the finding the replacement of the new creative winner.

It's like yeah, like you are so happy and then so sad at the same time because like, oh, now I'm gonna spend another two months or three months at the best to find the better definitely, definitely.

This was amazing.

Even though I so good.

Thank you so much for coming.

Yeah, yes.

Finally,

I now understand much more about this whole genre.

Yeah.

Yeah, I'm happy to do it.

And I got to mention to the pods, like, I learned a lot of UA from just watching your guys' stuff.

Like,

I've been watching for quite a while.

Yeah, but you listened as well.

Not everyone does.

Yeah, people watch us a lot, but they don't do what we say.

Exactly.

So it's pretty cool to be like on the pod.

Yeah.

Yeah, happy to help here.

Always.

And thanks.

Thanks again for coming.

If anyone wants to contact you, they can do on LinkedIn or whatever.

Or the company.

Or the company.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You can add me on LinkedIn.

I'm also in the two and a half gamers Slack.

You can message me there, like either or.

And then thank you very much for listening.

Hope I'm still here.

For now.

For now, if I disappear.

It was a great,

great show.

Thanks, Com, and thanks, everybody, for joining.

Join the Slack channel.

If you have any comments, I put it under the video as usual.

And then join the Slack channel and see you next time.

Thank you very much.