When Lucky Kat Studios decided to create a game inspired by Super Nintendo’s game design and cats, they had an extremely low budget, but they knew the game had potential be a hit. Lucky Kat, an indie game developer, had a user acquisition budget set at zero for Nom Cat, but realized the company could use the social media of popular online cats to drive downloads.

Lucky Kat Studios then went on to reach out to the Facebook pages of Garfield, Grumpy Cat, and more to ask the celebrity cats for endorsements. This technique resulted in the organic reach of 40m people on day one, followed by 2m app installs in the first few weeks after launch.

Eventually, Nom Cat hit #1 in the app store, but not without the help of ironSource, a mobile monetization platform for game developers. Included on ironSource’s dashboard of features is an engagement rate tab and A/B testing tool, which Lucky Kat Studios used most commonly in the Nom Cat campaign. Lucky Kat Studios continues to use ironSource’s mediation platform for their other games, including Beat Street, Kaiju Rush, Thunderdogs, and Nom Plant. 

“Our success is largely due to the fact that we continually optimize and improve our monetization strategy. ironSources A/B testing tool has been invaluable in enabling us to efficiently test any theory we have without hurting our bottom line. In one example, we tested the size of our waterfall setup, and saw better results when we increased the number of instances, which was contrary to our assumption. The ability to regularly run tests through ironSource was crucial in optimizing our waterfall strategy and achieving the growth that we did,” said Herdjie Zhou, Co-Founder and CEO of Lucky Kat Studios.

“Our goal at ironSource is to become the go-to growth platform for developers, and working with a company like Lucky Kat is a dream for us. Its incredible to see the impact that solutions like our A/B testing tool can have on their immediate results, and how it empowers them to make changes to their monetization strategy and gameplay that otherwise would have been extremely challenging or damaging to test,” said Nadav Ashkenazi, VP global partnership at ironSource.