Today I'm speaking with Boyana Nikolova, CEO of ad monetisation revenue management solutionSmartie Pants on the companies journey and choosing to open the solution to developers worldwide.

Hi Boyana, could you tell us about yourself?

Hey John! Sure! The last 9 years of my experience have been an exciting journey in the gaming industry, I had the opportunity to be at the forefront of various domains from mobile game development, to UA, monetization and publishing. Looking back on it, I wouldn't change a thing and I'd chose he gaming industry as my field once again. With degrees in Business Economics, my background has always been in business and business development.

Since January (2020) you’ve been heading up the Smartie Pants team. Can you tell us more about Smartie Pants?

Smartie Pants is an innovative automatic solution for Ad monetisation management.

We’re dedicated to encouraging and enabling more and more developers to unlock the full potential of their apps/games by helping them increase their Ad revenue.

Smartie Pants manages both traditional waterfall and bidding while building and managing custom monetisation setups for your game/app automatically, tailored and targeted to the smallest possible detail. This helps with eCPM increase across the board and consequently, ARPDAU and revenue increase for our developer friends.

Where did the idea for Smartie Pants come from?

The idea for Smartie Pants came solely from the unsatisfied needs in the market. Firstly, we spent a great amount of time listening to game developers, recognising and really establishing the problems that they face when it comes to ad monetization. Afterwards, we spent around 2 years really digging very deep into R&D in order to find various ways to solve these problems. Only then, we developed the first version of the product which was very different from what you’ll see today. The direction in which we’ve developed the solution today was guided by the changes in the market, the needs of developers and by the results of hundreds of tests that we have run and continue to run.

Smartie Pants manages both traditional waterfall and bidding

What are the early results you’ve seen with Smartie Pants at Halfbrick?

We started running tests on few of the biggest titles from Halfbrick quite some time ago. Smartie Pants was working with Fruit Ninja, Jetpack Joyride and Dan the Man for more than a year and a half now. The initial results we saw were incredible - between 30% and 40% ARPDAU increase on average. Once we saw the amazing results we continuously added all of Halfbrick’s titles to the platform. Not only, but we decided to gradually open up the platform to more developers in our community. We wanted to make sure that we can all benefit from using Smartie Pants.

How easy is it for teams to start using Smartie Pants?

Using Smartie Pants is extremely easy, as the solution is well automated. All that a developer needs to do is to create an account and register on the platform. There is no SDK integration or any development work needed whatsoever. This makes the solution easy-to-use and extremely straightforward, risk-free for all developers, which is our exact end goal. Basically, a no-brainer solution.

You’ve partnered with Storms to bring Smartie Pants to developers worldwide. How did that partnership come about?

Storms is one of our first clients outside of Halfbrick Studios. They are early adopters of the Smartie Pants solution and have been a trusted partner of ours since November 2020. As Storms saw the amazing results we were able to achieve for Zombeast, their first published title (56% ARPDAU increase), they were excited to work with us, not just as one of our partners served by the platform but also as a partner in scaling the solution globally.

Storms is a game publisher, so they can relate to how mobile game developers are often focused on delivering quality games and why dedicating resources to manage ad revenues is not a priority. Coupled with the ad revenue increase that it has seen after activating Smartie Pants, Storms believes that the solution should be seen and used by more and more developers. We then decided to take this partnership to the next level and share the Smartie Pants solution with the world together, tapping on Storms’ vast industry network.

What does the business model for Smartie Pants look like going forward?

Smartie Pants was built with a very strong vision in mind - the product has always supposed to be and will always be a win-win solution.

We are extremely strong believers in bringing value to the market. With that said, we’ll always want to make sure we prove results to the developers who are part of our platform first, before even thinking about the commercial side of things.

The business model is extremely safe and fair for developers. We offer a free one-month trial during which we customize the Ad setup according to the title and monitor the results. This is when developers gain first-hand experience of SP and what increase it brings to the app.

Once our algorithms start working and we measure and show the Ad ARPDAU increase, we place the specific app into one of our pricing tiers which are based on the Ad ARPDAU increase. In case we can’t show an increase in ARPDAU and prove our value, we don’t charge the developer anything.

Honestly speaking, given the fair pricing model and the fact that there’s no SDK or development work involved whatsoever, no commitment, the developers have no reason not to try our solution. There are no obligations of any kind and anyone can terminate our service and walk away at any time.

Now, with all the iOS14 and IDFA changes in the market, and more to come, it’s more important than ever before to have an automatic solution which actively monitors and manages performance on a daily basis for you, increases your revenue and makes your life easier. Look at SP as the additional ad revenue which you’ll realize on top of what you already achieve.

We’ve built this solution to be a win-win for every side of the platform. We’re strong believers in bringing value to the industry and we’ll always keep it that way.

Our mission today is to help and be of use to as many developers as possible. We know your pain-points, as we have experienced them ourselves and we have solved and automated the problems every mobile ad monetisation team has.

Now we’re happy to share all that with the World.

What’s next for the Smartie Pants team?

We’re a very small but extremely enthusiastic and innovative team. We have a prioritized list of short-term goals and a huge number of long-term goals and plans in our pipeline. The industry is extremely dynamic, as we all know, and we’re working very hard to stay ahead of the curve. Being small and agile, gives us the opportunity to be very quick when needed and always make sure we take care of our developers’ needs, as well as constantly provide value, increase your revenue, and always provide dedicated and fully-catered support.

Also, our size and way of work helps us proactively understand and predict the dynamics of the market, think about our partners’ needs and meet them even before they think of a potential future issue.

Apart from that, we will be growing the Smartie Pants platform to a different level and entering a whole new space in the industry. We have a huge ambition for the product and given the amazing results we managed to achieve already; we know we can scale easily. In addition, we’re listening to the market and our current and future partners’ needs. This always helps us validate our vision against reality and keeps our eyes in the direction we’re supposed to head.

Boyana Nikolova, thanks very much for taking the time to speak to me. 

Find out more at Smartiepants.com

By John Speakman for Gamesforum