The Growth Loop Explained
4 min read
By
Justin Stolzenberg
Co-founder
Jan 22, 2025
Lessons from the Trenches After 22 Years In Gaming
All CMOs will recall a moment like this: revenue metrics stall, fingers point, and suddenly you’re stuck in the blame game. The UA team insists it’s a product issue—“We need higher LTV!” Meanwhile, the product team fires back—“We need better traffic!” It’s frustrating, unproductive, and all too familiar.
For over 22 years in gaming—scaling companies, optimizing UA, and co-founding businesses—I’ve seen this scenario play out countless times. It’s not about bad intentions; it’s because we put people operating in silos. And the cost of these silos is immense. When teams are disconnected, we lose opportunities to maximize growth, retention, and player experiences - and ultimately revenue.
In this post, I’ll share why aligning UA and monetization is critical, unpack the obstacles to collaboration, and highlight how a unified approach can transform your game’s trajectory.
Let’s dive in.
The Blame Game: Where Misconceptions Take Root
When performance metrics falter, the tension between UA and product teams often rises and the argument between needing “better LTV,” versus, needing “better traffic”, ensues. But the reality is that traffic quality and product performance are deeply interconnected. One cannot thrive without understanding the other.
Here are two pretty common examples:
Misunderstanding LTV’s impact on UA scaling:
Yes, boosting LTV is essential for sustainable UA growth—but when and where those improvements happen makes all the difference. LTV gains in the first 7, 30, or 60 days have the most impact on scaling campaigns effectively. Why? These are the timeframes that UA teams and ad networks focus on for profitability and optimization.
On the other hand, content updates that extend LTV far into the future—like in years 2, 3, or 5—don’t help UA. These late-stage improvements aren’t captured within the optimization windows that networks use to assess campaign performance, or the UA team’s profitability reporting.
For example, a LiveOps team might do an amazing job increasing overall LTV through endgame content, only to be puzzled why UA hasn’t scaled further. The disconnect lies in the timing of the LTV growth—it’s outside the optimization and reporting windows UA teams and networks rely on. It’s good for the business, but not useful for UA scale.
To make UA more scalable, LTV improvements need to align with early-game metrics that feed directly into UA profitability models. Otherwise, the efforts, while valuable in the long run, won’t translate into immediate growth opportunities.
The “Just Spend More” Fallacy:
It’s exciting when a UA team discovers a new channel, campaign, or creative that performs well and scales. But simply scaling ad spend doesn’t mean you’ll get the same quality audience—it changes the type of players your campaign reaches.
For example, imagine a campaign initially reaches a high-spending audience that engages deeply with your game. As spend increases, the audience might broaden to include players less inclined to make purchases or retain long-term. This shift can lower profitability if not handled carefully.
Instead of the UA team “just spending more,” they should work closely with their Product colleagues to evaluate the incremental audience’s potential. Together, they can work on optimizations, such as adjusting onboarding flows or in-game offers, to ensure the new players convert and engage effectively.
A Toolkit for Collaboration: Unified Metrics and Mindsets
In my experience, the best outcomes happen when UA and Product teams treat growth as a shared responsibility. This means aligning on a single set of success metrics—business case metrics, not siloed KPIs like installs or ARPDAU.
What’s a better metric? Net revenue minus UA spend, Or forecasted total net revenue (based on organic and UA cohort revenue forecasts) minus UA spend? The latter!
Here’s what successful collaboration looks like:
Shared Goals: Both teams should be driving towards a unified goal with shared growth strategies - UA can identify a specific audience target and work in close alignment with Product to have the right creatives, monetization and onboarding to conquer that audience.
Frequent Interaction: Recognize the interdependence of traffic quality and product performance. Monthly syncs won’t cut it. Teams need to share insights and educate each other about opportunities and their view on the numbers frequently. If the teams work from different locations: spend time together in person to overcome cultural barriers.
Overcome Legacy Constraints: Outdated infrastructure often forces teams to spend most of their time managing complexity instead of driving growth. Tooling that allows UA and Product to look at the same numbers and have enough time to collaborate is an investment with huge ROI.
For teams in younger markets like Vietnam, Pakistan and Central/South/South-east Asia in general, this integrated approach often comes naturally. For more established studios, the transition can feel daunting. But it is essential. Avoiding pulling off a band-aid doesn’t make it any easier. In this case, the longer you leave it, the higher the risk.
Lessons Learned: The Case for Integration
I feel so strongly about this because I’ve experienced both scenarios first hand. In the past, I’ve worked with studios that treated UA, monetization, and product as separate entities. The result? Missed opportunities. But I’ve also worked with the success stories where seamless integration and unification of goals has unlocked exponential growth. Just these past few months my previous company, Phoenix Games, was able to more than double profitable ad spend on their evergreen title Emergency HQ resulting from a concerted effort between UA and Product. They achieved this by?
Focus on monetizing incremental audiences: After UA highlighted the incremental audience opportunity in traditionally ad monetized territories, the game team introduced additional ad placements, tripling ad revenue and enabling profitable spend on different campaign types.
Culturalization of the full funnel: Using culturally relevant elements—like localized vehicle skins in UA creatives—boosted campaign performance. When Product and UA teams worked together to extend this cultural adaptation to custom store pages and the in-game tutorial, the localized market showed significantly improved results.
Why I Said GoodBye to My CMO Role to Join Metica
Breaking down these silos is a huge motivator for me, and I believe is a game changer for the industry. In my previous role I looked at maybe 50 studios as potential acquisition targets in any given year, but we would only acquire and get involved with a handful. I decided I want to be able to work with a larger number of developers to help their games grow. I came across so many studios who struggle with siloed teams and disconnected strategies. Now, I get to be part of a platform that bridges these gaps. At Metica, we’re enabling studios to unite UA and monetization with AI-driven personalization at the core. It’s not just about optimizing LTV or reducing acquisition costs; it’s about creating a continuous growth loop where every player interaction drives results.
If I could offer one piece of advice to today’s studio founders, CEOs, CMOs, CFOs and Studio Leaders, it’s this: pull the band-aid off. Break down the silos. Growth isn’t a marketing problem, a product problem, or a monetization problem. It’s a shared opportunity. Let’s approach it that way.
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