Antoine Le Nel
speaker
219 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Oct 2024
last heard Oct 2024
Antoine Le Nel’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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If you're a good product manager, you don't need an A-B test. You should be able to know what is the right product. I think the less you believe in, the better it is. I have no belief in anything. I have no belief in anything. There's no CAC discussion. Why? We only talk about ROI. Because if you talk about CAC, you'll always acquire the worst cohorts.
I think the idea of localization is completely overrated. Growth is a bidding war. It's a bidding war. It's about whether you're able to bid above everyone else.
You have now arrived at your destination. Antoine, I am so excited for this. First, thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you for having me. Now, we have many mutual friends, mostly also hailing from your start at King. So I want to start with that. When you look at the insanely successful growth of Candy Crush, what did King do well that was instrumental to the success and growth?
I think, first of all, everyone thinks there was a huge amount of luck. I think the idea that what King did really well, I think they've tested extensively everything. So it was a volume game, you know, at some point. They understood that super quickly, saying, you need to try as much as you can. At some point, something will pick up. And I think they did that super, super, super well.
And I think then there was this super fast pace. I remember we were launching a game like every quarter, pretty much, we were launching a game. And not all of them were successful, but just like the pace at which we were producing games, releasing the games and so on. I think we did that super, super well.
The thing you have to get very good at, though, is cutting when you see the data isn't showing signs. How long is enough data or how much data is enough data to know that it wasn't working?
I think that's the thing that probably has changed over time at King. I think at the beginning, we were cutting things very quickly. As time went, we started to wait longer and longer. Oh, you know what? Give it another chance. Give it another chance. Give it another chance, you know?
That's the whole point on when and that's how you probably can measure the agility of the organization is how quickly you kill projects versus how many more chances you're giving to them.
So if testing and speed of iteration and testing was something that you did very well, what was something that King really messed up?
It's definitely the most data-driven organization I've ever been in, in the sense that really data was driving the organization. If you take the thing literally, the company was driven by data. I think it was so powerful that at some point we just went way too far in the sense that, for example, when we're launching games, sometimes we're probably looking more at the data than the game itself.
You know, it's like you're going to have meetings and then you just look at the numbers and you're like, is that wrong? That's the big difference, for example, with Revolut, I think. We're a lot more product-driven, which means we spend more time looking at the product than looking at the data. Is the data not an input? Exactly, it's an input. It is an input.
At King, it was, at some point, it was the only decision-maker. It was very black or white and the data was the decision maker. And I think we pushed it probably a little bit too far in this space and not spending maybe the right amount of time on the user experience and on just the quality of the product itself.
If you were to say between art and science growth, like numbers, ratio, what is it for you? 50-50, 70-30?
Product and growth is very different. So I think product should be more about art and a bit less about science when growth should overrate on science.
In terms of performance marketing, I spoke to many from King and they said, you've got to ask him, what did he learn about performance marketing and its limitations?
First of all, performance marketing, mastering performance marketing gives you a huge competitive advantage. Because it is a complex thing. And if you do it really well, it makes a huge difference, you know, to your company growth. So that is the power of performance marketing. And the performance marketing is very deep.
And I don't know many people who know all of it. How have you seen that change over time? Because when you were doing that at King in the early days versus today, when it's so much more polluted, crowded, expansive, how's it changed?
Well, it has changed a little bit, but not so much fundamentally. It is still the same game. It's still a bidding war, you know. Now, it's true it's getting a little bit more complex because you're losing some attribution and so on. So you need to be a little bit smarter in your measurement framework. But you just need to, I mean, you reinvent yourself every other year.
You have to reinvent the whole measurement framework and so on. But at the end of the day, the game is still the same game, you know. It is the same. It's the same bidding war. You just have impressions. You need to go to the highest bidder and that's it.
You know, that's what the game is. You have King, as we said there, incredibly iterative, data-driven culture, data-driven company to the extreme. What's the biggest difference between King and Revolut? I think that's what it is.
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