If you are an entrepreneur or have an entrepreneurial mindset, you’re very likely to be the same as I am: ambitious and impatient. To my surprise, 2017 was a year which surpassed my big plans and evolved at a surprisingly high pace. Find out below why this was the best year of my career.
New agents
2017 was the first official year, from a legal standpoint, when the business entity was founded in January after a year and a half of freelancing. Sebastian Pacetti, an ex-business development manager at Ubisoft and Amazon, pushed me a bit to leverage affordable talent in Prague during our chat in the summer of 2016. Since then, I’ve focused on building a strong multi-disciplinary team and grown AppAgent from 3 people to 9 full-time members within a year.
As a result, we help our clients in all mobile marketing fields: such as strategy, over data analytics, creative services, user acquisition and growth management. It’s a big chunk to chew but I strongly believe in the importance of a 360° approach and see if it works for clients better than if we focus on one piece of the puzzle and miss the big picture.
Amazing network
From very early on we’ve been relentless with our hunger for pushing things forward, which has led to reinventing ourselves numerous times, working on better processes and learning from the best. We’ve established a great partnership with Moritz and Andy from Phiture who might be considered as our direct competitors but are our closest industry friends. I’m grateful for the support Thomas Petit from 8fit has provided and who is always willing to help as well as give advice on numerous growth topics. Also, in the last few weeks we have been mentored by the data project manager Lior Barak from Zalando who is leading us to a new – more data oriented – future at AppAgent.
What we’re proud of
From a financial perspective, we’ve tripled revenues and maintained a healthy profit despite significant investments into our new office for 15 people where we’ve moved recently.
Our brand new office located at Andel offers a lot of space for work, chatting or… taking a nap
We helped our client, Kiwi.com, double revenues from mobile focusing mostly on ASO and user acquisition including designing all assets for store listings and campaigns.
After a year of cooperation on the product and user acquisition, the founder of Tapito successfully exited news readers with a unique lock screen news feature for the mobile carrier O2.
Another achievement was the relaunch of New York based startup called Inscape in just 6 weeks followed by a user acquisition campaign, building app and marketing analytics this fall.
It’s now 14 months and we support the Swedish Gold Town Games including expert game reviews by former EA Mobile and Kongregate producer Jeremy Gross. Today, AppAgent is running profitable campaigns in the US, Switzerland, Germany and Austria with 4000 new installs daily.
Besides these four showcases, we’re proud of working with the Berlin based Wooga, one of the top mobile publishers globally, Polish CI Games and their popular console IP Sniper Ghost Warrior. We are also excited about starting cooperation with a Russian publisher called Pixonic for which we will create video creatives promoting their game called War Robots. And there are more top global brands that are already in the pipeline!
And what’s next?
Next year will be heavily focused on data: building the data infrastructure for our clients, providing actionable insights into marketing efforts and building automation processes in the UA space.
2017 showed us that in many cases, prefab app analytic tools aren’t enough to fully understand users and that ownership of raw data is a strong advantage. Since then, we’ve completed 3 custom analytics projects and see great opportunities ahead of us.
Closely connected are marketing analytics and the freedom of working with data in a more flexible and faster way than in Excel. Helping clients setup the pipeline and tools is another smart investment for the long-term.
Once we collect the data and use it on a daily basis, it’s time for the third stage – automation. There are dozens of daunting tasks in the UA space and even creatives will be automated and fully personalized at some point. UA will become a war of algorithms and we’re now creating our weapons to leverage that data for the client’s success.
Thank you for a great ride in 2017!
Agents: Richard Horin, Martin Brykner, Martin Jelinek, Jakub Chour, Vit Volsicka, Jiri Chochlik, David Pertl, Vojta Buchta.
External co-workers: Eduard Krecmar, Olga Pastuszuk, Jan Masek, Pavel Trejbal, Vojta Kolacek, Petr Stefek, Michal Acler, Tomas Kafka, Tomas Zeman
Advisors: Petr Zidek, Thomas Petit, Lior Barak, Kirill Sofronov
Supporters: Moritz Daan, Andy Carvell, Gessica Bicego and many others!
