Interview with Luca Giacomel from Bending Spoons
Luca Giacomel is a Data Scientist with a strong entrepreneurial attitude and interest for product growth. After graduating he founded his first startup, PolicyBrain, where he analyzed parliamentary data and made predictions on vote results for lobbyists and big companies. Later he joined Bending Spoons as a data scientist, where he is currently also helping out with App Store Optimization and User Acquisition bringing his knowledge.
Get to know more about Luca!
Quick quiz Luca Giacomel – Bending Spoons
Do not miss Luca’s interview! He will join us at Applause 2018 on Friday 1st of June at W Barcelona Hotel and he will tell us about App Store Optimization 😉
1. How and when did you arrive to the mobile industry? Why did you decide to stay and work on this sector?
As best things in life the opportunity arrived quite of nowhere. I have always worked with business customers (yes… I was going to meetings wearing a tie), but when I met the founders of Bending Spoons who introduced me to the app business I decided I wanted to experience a more competitive and dynamic market to accelerate my professional growth. Nowadays I don’t regret my choice and I have to say that it’s thrilling to be in such a competitive and constantly evolving market.
2. What project are you working on now?
I try to put my scientific reasoning at work by analyzing App Store users’ behavior. My main area of interest at the moment is to figure out how to maximize and test app conversion in the app store but I also spend a lot of time trying to crack the textual side of the App Store.
3. What is the most important professional quality an app marketer can have?
- Persistence & perseverance: You will need to try 99 things that fail before finding one that actually makes your app skyrocket. At the same time don’t feel bad because something didn’t work and take it as a learning point for the future.
- Absolute objectivity: Don’t force correlations where there are none and try to always re-test what you consider to be consolidated knowledge.
4. What KPIs do you control every day? Which ones are the most important?
Total downloads, organic downloads, keyword rankings, chart rankings and more.
5. What problem do you face in your everyday as an app marketer?
The impossibility of perfectly knowing if metadata are going to work before rolling them in production.
6. What is the best option to monetize a mobile app?
Depends too much on the app (and the market) to give an answer. My suggestion: always test all of them and pick the one that works best.
7. What advice would you give to a company or startup before launching a mobile app?
- Find smart ways to test the market before launching your app.
- Be agile and ship early; there are so many poor apps that make it in the top 100 most downloaded.
- Iterate quickly and keep an eye on your competitors, they are very fast.
8. What are the biggest challenges facing the mobile app industry?
Remaining profitable with advertising over the medium run and finding the best talent to help you in your journey.
9. What trends will mark 2018?
I really hope that 2018 will be the year in which testing of store listing creatives becomes a real thing both on iOS (maybe with custom creatives on search ads?) and the Play Store. At the same time, I expect textual ASO to lose importance as Search Ads will roll out to more and more countries (and UACs will start delivering even more).
10. How do you keep up to date with all the news in the app marketing industry? What sources do you consult?
I love community-run slack channels:
- For ASO: the ASO Stack (created by Phiture/Incipia) slack is amazing.
- For PUA: MobileDevMemo (created by Eric Seufert).
There is also an interesting group to follow on Facebook: Mobile Marketing Experts (created by André Kempe / Stefan Bielau)
11. What will you talk about in Applause 2018? Why the attendees shouldn’t miss your keynote?
“You suck at ASO (and so do I).”
I will be talking about the state of the art of ASO, the main drivers of downloads and why you need to have a scientific approach if you ever want to learn anything in ASO. I will also show some recent results of successful ASO at Bending Spoons.
12. To finish, what apps or games have surprised you in the last year?
- Games (console level on mobile): PUBG, Fortnite
- Apps: Lemonade (beautiful concept and UI), Focos (portrait mode as it should have been implemented in the camera app), Darkroom (my favorite app for photo editing)
- Unexplainable Virality: Sarah, Lipsi, TBH
Learn more from him next 1st of June at Applause 2018 and purchase now your tickets!
