Hobby Startup KPI Update #7
So this is the first post after officially graduating to a fulltime indie developer! My most precious belongings have been put in storage, the rest sold, and I am writing this post from a hotel room in downtown Seattle where I will stay until Saturday the 25th of July. If anyone want’s to meet up, DM me on Twitter!
It’s been almost 2 months since my last KPI update and there is finally some good news. Namely that Solitaire FRVR has generated $5,024.22 worth of revenue since the last update.
Revenue
Notice that Ad4Game is no longer on the graph as there is been $0 in revenue since the last update.
$2,142.49
- From Life Street Media
$2,407.08
- From Google AdMob
$474.55
- From Google AdSense
Total revenue: $5,024.22
Live Street Media is revenue generated exclusively from the Facebook version of the game. So far I have elected to not put ads on the web version as I want users to get the best possible experience there.
As the last time around Google AdSense revenue is directly attributed to new user acquisition tests. More on that later.
Goole AdMob represent revenue from the iOS and Android version of Solitaire FRVR. The revenue further breaks downs as follows:
- iOS: $1,557 at $5.78 RPM
- Android: $850.51 at $1.78 RPM
For whatever reason I make about 3x as much money per ad impression on iOS as on Android, but this is apparently quite normal.
Looking at revenue per day we get
Until a few days ago I seemed to have found a very nice ~$150/day plato, however iOS and Facebook revenue have dropped over the last few days for reasons yet unknown. Hopefully I can bring these back up over the next few days.
Note how I only recently added ads to Facebook (green), quite frankly I struggled to find a model that I did not found incredibly interruptive. For now I show a banner at the bottom of the screen when the user starts a new game.
While my new AdSense user acquisition tests initially looked very promising, I was once again unable to make it cashflow positive at scale. I ended up only running the ads for about a week. Quite apparent which week from the below graph.
Same issue as before, users simply do not stick around after the ads are turned off. I will return to this when I have a better retention model for web.
Expenses
Since the last update, I only managed to put in 37.35 hours towards FRVR, a far cry from the 24 hours per week I was originally aiming for. Seems like leaving your job, closing down your life and preparing to travel the world is quite the time sink. Hopefully I will be able to get back up to speed now the trip has begun.
Administrative > 1.00 Hours > -$200
- Misc paperwork related to FRVR (Including some baseline accounting)
Marketing > 15.27 Hours > -$3053
- Created and experimented with Adsense ads.
- Wrote this blog post.
Research > 0 Hours > -$0 (Yay)
Development > 22.58 Hours > -$4517
- Updated the mobile web to mobile install flow
- Worked on streamlining the build process for FRVR to prepare for the development of more games using the FRVR pipeline
- Updated game to have install banners on iOS
- Added banners to Facebook
Expenses > -$602.14
- $50 - AppStart advertisement test which seems to have been worth absolutely nothing.
- $552.14 - Google AdWords campaigns
Total expenses: -$8,372