Menlo Ventures is excited to announce that we’ve doubled down on our investment in Good Job Games, co-leading their $60M Series A alongside Anthos Capital, with Bessemer Venture Partners also participating. At our last announcement, I had just beaten my 1,000th level of Match Villains, and now I’m proud to say I recently beat my 2,000th and am still just as addicted to the game!
In the seven months since Match Villains launched globally, co-founders Ilker Ilicali and Nazim Akmandil and their exceptionally talented Turkish team have not just consistently grown the game, but also beat every metric they forecasted since the Seed round. A top casual mobile game requires a team to be world-class across product, marketing, and monetization.
On product, the team has improved retention rates since launch and as they’ve scaled past 350,000 DAU (daily active users). Retention is the single most difficult metric to improve materially in a consumer product; the GJG team has done it via consistently polished and well-paced core content, introducing a rich variety of mini-games and live-ops tournaments to engage players, and a data-driven optimization of level design. The result? Match Villains currently has the highest D30 (30-day) retention in the match-3 mobile genre in the App Store.
On marketing, the team has decreased CPIs as they’ve scaled marketing spend every month. They’ve done so by introducing richer formats of playable ads, UGC and influencer marketing, and optimizing across their UA channels. On monetization, the team continues to experiment with monetizing different segments of players with rewards that feels fun rather than extractive.
We are so thrilled to deepen our relationship with the Good Job Games team, now with new partners Zack Zaharis from Anthos Capital and Ariel Sterman from Bessemer, in the team’s next chapter.
Amy came to Menlo Ventures to grow the firm’s consumer technology and gaming practice and back founders building new products at the forefront of emerging platform shifts. As an investor, Amy seeks founders who share her obsession with products that define how people work, live, and play. She believes that emerging…
