GTM Sauce

Harpagia · B2C · idle RPG game

Share big game updates on Reddit every few months, within subreddit promo rules

Each post brought a jump in new players; revenue rose from $10K to a ~$18K/month peak

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What they did

Reddit became the main (only) marketing channel after year one. Many subreddits cap developer self-promotion at once a month, so he only posted major updates, once every few months. Posts that sparked the most discussion, especially the most criticism, performed best. Results varied post to post.

What happened

Almost every post gave a significant jump in new players; revenue grew from ~$10K to a peak of ~$18K/month with $0 ad spend
Stage
After the first Reddit post, ongoing
Effort
A post every few months over about a year

In their words

This app replaced my 9-5 ($155K/year)

Play from 7:59

Gus… kind of sounds like a little bit of what you did. That's cool. Okay, let's get into the growth. I'm really excited to talk a little bit more about this. So you mentioned in your first year you spent $0 on marketing. And you also mentioned something about how Reddit has been a useful marketing tool for you. So let's get into it. What were some of the like main marketing distribution strategies you used to help you go from 0 to $10,000 a month?

7:59

KenYeah, so my main marketing strategy after the first year was posting on Reddit. Almost every single time that I've posted on there, I'd receive a significant jump in new players. While the results weren't consistent, Reddit has been my number one marketing tactic. I think one challenge, though, for Reddit is that many subreddits don't allow developers to promote their product more than once a month. Because of that, I generally only shared major updates once every few months. One thing that I found interesting was that the posts generating the most discussion often performed the best, especially the ones that received the most criticism. The very first post that I made just showed some screenshots of the game and kind of just explaining a little bit about what the game is and a few metrics about, you know, how the free-to-play it is, because a lot of people, especially in the gaming community, want to try out a game before they want to pay for the game. At the time, it was really rough around the edges when I first advertised the game, but that honestly didn't matter because it brought in so much conversation and criticism from the Reddit users that it actually helped boost my game so much. And every single one of those posts, I get a huge jump in new users again. Over time, revenue grew from around 10,000 a month to a peak of roughly 18,000 a month just posting on Reddit.

9:05

GusYeah, I think Reddit is something we've seen over and over again on Starter Story as a place where people start to get that initial traction and obviously for you it took you, a lot of these posts helped you get from that 0 to $10,000 a month. The main lesson I'm getting from this brief section is like all publicity is good publicity, and it gave you users, it gave you traction and probably, I'm assuming, it gave you some feedback that you ended …

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Tags: reddit, update-posts, cadence, subreddit-rules