Interview with Jegor Ivanov from Jodel - Applause 2019 Skip to main content

Interview with Jegor Ivanov from Jodel

Jegor Ivanov is a growth practitioner with over 5 years of experience with app products that have a global footprint in Social, Fitness, and E-commerce. As a Growth Product Manager at Jodel (social media app), he’s currently leading an engineering team focusing on monetization and leveraging viral loops for product growth. In the past Jegor managed full-stack mobile CRM efforts at 8fit, having previously lead digital marketing teams at Jumia (Rocket Internet) and Crowd Mobile.

Get to know more about him!

Jegor IvanovQuick Quiz Jegor Ivanov – Jodel

Jegor will join us on Friday 7th of June at the W Barcelona Hotel. Do not miss the chance to learn from him!

1. How and when did you arrive in the mobile industry? Why did you decide to stay and work on this sector?

After the uni, I was working in traditional advertising when my friend and I co-founded a company. While the product we built back then never really moved past the point of testing in a closed user group, later that year I was offered to relocate to Paris and join Jumia (now listed on NYSE:JMIA). This marks the beginning of my career in mobile. I quickly figured here I could connect my passion for numbers with advertising, so that worked for me. A few years down the line I migrated to product.

2. What project are you working on now?

I spend most of my work time now building out monetization at Jodel. Even our users can now promote on the platform directly from the app (and you should test, too)!

3. What is the most important professional quality an app marketer can have?

Rigor for data and the willingness to always challenge results. Especially if the results look like what you’d wanted to see.

4. What KPIs do you control every day? Which ones are the most important?

With monetization growing in importance for us, I am mostly looking after the number of impressions we’re able to serve as we develop our ad products, as well as revenue. However, I still own all our virality initiatives, hence the metrics on our viral loops can often be found on my screen as well.

5. What problem do you face in your every day as an app marketer?

Discrepancies between data sources. Years into mobile, bridging web and mobile data well still remains a somewhat tricky thing to do.

6. What is the best option to monetize a mobile app?

It sure “depends on the vertical”, but the universal rule I’d use is that there needs to be a good enough fraction of users that are able to derive real value from one’s monetization efforts. This is particularly true for community-based products like Jodel.

7. What advice would you give to a company or startup before launching a mobile app?

Hm, I’d think of an organic growth strategy before budgeting any marketing money for growth. It may take a small pivot early on to unlock tons of free installs (e.g. driven by virality).

8. What are the biggest challenges facing the mobile industry?

Let’s find out in our panel at 17:00 on June 7th 😉

9. What trends will mark 2019?

With users getting more control over their phone experience (screen time, notifications, etc), it’s going to be increasingly hard to engineer app growth with hacky/abusive approaches. My hope is that with that, we’ll eventually arrive to the point where users and products have a two-sided, mutually beneficial and pleasant interaction.

10. How do you keep up to date with all the news in the app marketing industry? What sources do you consult?

I mostly read on product & general technology trends these days. Here’s some of the resources I like: Reforge, Andrew Chen’s blog, Benedict Evans’ blog.

8. To finish, what apps or games have surprised you in the last year?

Chatterbug. It just makes language learning a truly delightful experience.

Daniel PM

Author Daniel PM

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