Why business modeling your F2P mobile game is important?

The answer lies within two basic principles:

1. Healthiness of your product in terms of LTV > CPI
– Have your e.g., ROAS profiled properly against your UA efforts.
– One step down more from ROAS? Overall, you can look into your retention metrics, retention curve, monetization KPIs, UA metrics, cohorts, etc.
– Helps you to realize if you have a business case, or not.

2. Prioritization for your roadmap, to improve your business case.
– By knowing your numbers from the top of the funnel approach down, e.g., from Dx ROAS % to retention, monetization, and UA metrics, you can prioritize what’s important to move a needle according to your next goals and current product stage.
– For example, if your goal is to increase ROAS, you can find from business modeling means to achieve it through improving engagement metrics, monetization metrics, UA metrics (e.g., getting lower CPI), or through tie-ins of all of these; which can look easily like a basic excel exercise to some level, but going beyond that to product level you’ll be able to choose your must-win battles better, especially when you know what is achievable on e.g., product, game design and UA side as well as what you have as strategy and product vision for your product in terms of taking it further in its product lifecycle.
– Basically helps you to walk in the right direction with the right mindset and priorities, when you understand business, product management, and distribution all together, including their tie-ins.

Business modeling can come along, but at many times, on top of it, benchmarking is a way to advance it further.

By combining business modeling. with benchmarking, you can go deeper in your healthiness check and roadmap prioritization; where you can compare, and adjust to your product stage, are you e.g., on track properly to different benchmark targets like top 10 percentile, top 25 percentile, etc. in a category, based on constructed targets and goals for your product.

I’ve posted about early-stage mobile games benchmarking (link in comments) previously, which can act as a starting point for benchmarking — and taking it further from that, by e.g., building, as mentioned above, target profiles for your product based on different targets on e.g., getting your game to top 10 percentile, you can advance business modeling with benchmarking to more mature product stage, and further.