Pollen VC - A guide to financing your user acquisition with Martin Macmillan

[00:00:20.470] - Olivier Destrebecq 

Welcome, everybody. Today I was supposed to have Jeff with me to help me introduce our guests, but it's actually 6:00. I'm going to do all the work myself, but I'm still super thrilled to have Pollen VC co-founder and CEO Martin Macmillan. Welcome to the show, Martin. How are you doing today? 

[00:00:35.950] - Martin McMillan 

All good. Thanks very much for having me, Oliver. 

[00:00:37.960] - Olivier Destrebecq 

Yeah, you're welcome. So you're the first guest on the show that has actually worked at UBS. You are director for fixed-income trading. My software engineering background is software engineer so I have no clue what that is. Can you actually tell me what fixed-income trading is in short version? 

[00:00:54.310] - Martin McMillan 

Yeah, sure, it's trading bonds, government bonds, corporate bonds, whatever. It's basically it's all about interest rates and curves. The strong analogy between what I used to do a long time ago and mobile apps and gaming is it's also about curves. It's just about LTV curves rather than yield curve. So there's a lot of... When you look through there's a lot of similarities between the maths of trading fixed income instruments and then the maths of user acquisition. 

[00:01:20.770] - Olivier Destrebecq 

So back in 2010, you also founded Soniqplay, and then in 2014, you founded Pollen VC where you provide line of credit for app publisher. Can you tell us about that journey a little bit? 

[00:01:31.450] - Martin McMillan 

Yeah, so after the banking days I spent, I had a little foray with enterprise software and then I created a music remixing app from scratch. It was on launching the music remixing app they gave me the idea for Pollen VC because what happened is essentially a bootstrapped five-person studio. We came across the payment delay from Apple. 

[00:01:51.850] - Martin McMillan 

In our case, we were monetizing through Apple IAPs and we had a payment delay of up to 67 days before we saw the cash. I went to all the different invoice finance houses in London. No one could really understand the model because it wasn't a traditional invoice model. 

[00:02:04.540] - Martin McMillan 

But with my, obviously, my prior careers as an investment banker and short-term credit risk trading, I'm looking through to and say, why can't you guys understand this? 

[00:02:13.030] - Martin McMillan 

On one hand you've got a payment delay from Apple, super strong credit risk. You can digitally verify it through a feed from the app stores and it was that really that was the nascent idea if you like for Pollen and everything that followed. 

[00:02:27.040] - Olivier Destrebecq 

Nice. So we'll talk more about exactly what you do at Pollen but I really want to take advantage of you being here to get a bit of a finance one on one for founders because we don't get people with your background very often. Can you tell us what are the different ways a founder can get money to fund their startup? The ones that are not selling more stuff essentially? 

[00:02:47.680] - Martin McMillan 

Yeah, sure. I guess it depends on the scale and the aspirations. But typically, if you have an idea, you have a prototype, you're going to need some equity capital to actually build it out. At the smaller end, you may have angels, further up the scale, you may have VCs. If you've got a much bigger market opportunity, maybe you're able to go out and raise venture capital. 

[00:03:09.340] - Martin McMillan 

Even though the markets for VC have slowed down a lot, more of the slowdown is on the later stage stuff. Lots of early-stage companies are getting funded. That's typically the path some people try and bootstrap doing work-for-hire projects on the side and create the apps on the side. There's lots of different ways to skin the cat. 

[00:03:30.010] - Martin McMillan 

Obviously, if you're creating something from scratch and it's a high-risk activity, then equity is the best way to fund that. Whereas, later down the track, if you've figured out that you've got a user acquisition machine that really works and you just need to put money into it, it's a much lower risk strategy and therefore you can look at different funding options and debt options if you like to fund that. 

[00:03:51.640] - Martin McMillan 

It's really a case of getting the right capital mix, using high-risk, high-cost money, equity cost for developing product, and using low-risk, lower-cost product for scaling through paid acquisition. 

[00:04:06.010] - Olivier Destrebecq 

The high-risk capital is going to an angel or venture capitalist and saying, I've got this great idea. I have some clue that it's going to work. Please give me money essentially. Am I correct? 

[00:04:18.280] - Martin McMillan 

Yeah, essentially you've got some conviction, you've got some confidence what you're looking to build. You can prove some addressable market and some market demand for it. It may be taking... It maybe takes half a million, maybe takes two million, maybe takes five million bucks to build. And then you're hoping then that people are going to be into it and come and buy it and subscribe to it, etc. 

[00:04:37.510] - Martin McMillan 

There's always an element of risk capital upfront. Yeah, I mean, if you fund that through your own savings or you fund that through angels, you find that through VCs, it just takes money to build product. 

[00:04:47.950] - Olivier Destrebecq 

Yeah. You guys at Pollen VC don't focus on that at all. You focus on providing a line of credit to do user acquisition later in the cycle. Can you tell us a bit more how that works? Your end of the bargain, I guess. 

[00:05:02.250] - Martin McMillan 

Yeah, sure. So basically, once the studios figured out, hey, we have a product, people like it and we have figured out our unit economics so that we can put money into paid acquisition, whether that's on Facebook or Google or TikTok or whatever the channel is that works for acquiring for the app or the game. 

[00:05:21.360] - Martin McMillan 

You've got some predictability about economics so you know that if I put a dollar in, I'm going to get a $1.50 out in six months or three months or one year, whatever the number is. So once you understand those economics, and you believe they're scalable, then you can build a financial model that shows, if you want to go from a level of, say, 1,000 a day to 20,000 a day and spend, how much capital are you going to need to do that, and then what are your various different ways of funding that? 

[00:05:49.230] - Martin McMillan 

Pollen VC as a business, what we do is we provide what we call revolving lines of credit. That revolving line is basically, it's based... The amount of available credit is based on two things. First of all, we digitally ingest all of the sales data directly from all the platforms for IAP data and also mobile advertising networks for any ad monetization. 

[00:06:08.910] - Martin McMillan 

We look on a daily basis and we figure out what's the total amount of revenue you've earned but is waiting to be paid out and we give you a line of credit for everything that you can borrow again at the next day. Then more recently, what we've done is we have figured out a way to price the what we call residual cohort value. 

[00:06:27.180] - Martin McMillan 

This is for users you have already acquired where there is a predictable cohort journey you can model how much is left in expected value from those users and we can lend into that. So essentially the way to think about it is if you press stop on all user acquisition today, then what would they expected run-off profile of the users you've already acquired? 

[00:06:46.290] - Martin McMillan 

So it's really the area under the curve and you can borrow a little bit into that. So typically once you put the amount of receivables plus residuals together, you get a very, very flexible product that enables you to scale very, very efficiently without relying on equity capital. 

[00:07:01.920] - Olivier Destrebecq 

I'm curious, is it a one X? Let's say, Apple pays me within 60 days. I know over the next 60 days I should get that much money. Do you lend one X to that amount or is there also a formula that you apply to? Like is there a multiplying factor to that? 

[00:07:16.650] - Martin McMillan 

So if you are just looking at receivables, typically you're looking at 1.3 to 1.4 times monthly revenues depending on the skew of your monetization. If, for example, you have a super long LTV game or app, you can find that there's much more value trapped in the residuals than there is actually in receivables. 

[00:07:36.180] - Martin McMillan 

If we can model and see very strong residual value from cohorts and users that keep paying and playing after months or even years, then theoretically you can borrow up... The line of credit can extend to four times your monthly revenues. 

[00:07:49.500] - Martin McMillan 

It's important to note here, and this is how the revolving credit model is very different to other models that you see. Market entrants have come in over the last couple of years in revenue-based financing space. This isn't a one-shot loan that is repaid over six months or seven months or eight months or whatever the usual formula is. 

[00:08:05.910] - Martin McMillan 

This is something that is revolving and recalculated every day. So what happens is if your user acquisition is successful and you're returning, you're earning revenue and earning LTV, then the amount of credit you can access increases over time. 

[00:08:20.040] - Martin McMillan 

So we've had studios we work with have gone from let's say 100,000 starting point to more than two million just over a year, something like that. If the UA is working, you have access to more credit. If it's not, then your amount of credit is going to be more constrained. That helps keep the guardrails on and helps you stop getting over your skis and spending on users that aren't profitable. 

[00:08:44.690] - Olivier Destrebecq 

Yeah, that's a very interest model. It's good to hear in a way that it's money that comes in based on your success and not on success in how you presented to the VC, but just the hard number of we're matching to acquire user, we know how much we get for each user and so this is how we can get extra money from you guys potentially. That's really nice. 

[00:09:05.880] - Olivier Destrebecq 

This is clearly a model for financing days, probably not applicable at every stage of the startup. Obviously, if you don't have any users yet, then can't come see you. But when is the best time for startup founders to come to you to get a line of credit or a revolving line of credit? 

[00:09:24.260] - Martin McMillan 

We like to make connections early because one of the most satisfying things that we do in our business is where we can help people with a relatively modest starting point of revenues and help them achieve much bigger scale. We have a minimum onboarding revenue threshold of 25K a month. But most of our sweet spot is typically in the hundreds of thousands up into the single-digit millions. 

[00:09:48.000] - Martin McMillan 

But it's really, really satisfying when you can help someone who's got modest revenues of 25, 30K a month, and then they recycle this money back into user acquisition faster and they help grow that business without having to dilute their equity. 

[00:09:59.850] - Martin McMillan 

We've had someone go from 25K to almost two million dollars over a two year period without raising additional equity. So that was like, yeah, that's super satisfying from a lender perspective because you're able to really, really help people grow. 

[00:10:13.350] - Olivier Destrebecq 

We've interviewed Idan Waller, founder of BluesThrones, where they partner/acquired the app, and the developer can potentially stay on board. So your model is different and we see a lot of studios like Voodoo Publishing, helping developers sometimes with money or people or tools such as yours. How do you work and how do you compete with them and how do you see all that evolving over the future? 

[00:10:39.120] - Martin McMillan 

Okay, so we have a pretty distinct business model as a lender. So we lend money. We don't get involved in user acquisition earning. What we do is we help model scenarios, right? So we have a whole suite of tools on our website that help people model either free-to-play, also subscription, ROAS, LTV, etc. 

[00:10:56.070] - Martin McMillan 

What we want to be doing is act as a consultative partner. Help people figure out those unit economics and then provide capital to scale. Now, so this is really for self-published studios. 

[00:11:06.570] - Martin McMillan 

There are a lot of people that have come into the market recently whose business is more like a mini tech version of a private equity play where they want to buy up loads of either floundering or sometimes forgotten about assets or games and roll them up into one big model where they publish them, they rejuvenate them, etc. That's a totally valid and quite cool business model. 

[00:11:27.660] - Martin McMillan 

Then obviously sometime you've got a spread of founders, some are really into user acquisition and understand that really well. Some just want to make great apps and games and they're just not interested or they don't have the skill set to do the whole gamut. 

[00:11:39.420] - Martin McMillan 

This is very much an analogy from the games industry. You'd have game developers who then want to seek a publisher to publish their game and you have people that are in the business of games, and this is exactly the same, the business of apps. 

[00:11:51.360] - Martin McMillan 

We are creating an app business and that is not just about the app, but it's about the business development, the user acquisition, the marketing, everything else around it to make it a proper company as opposed to just an app. I think and we feel pretty strongly about this. It really comes down to one thing, it's what apps or games are you actually looking to create? 

[00:12:11.640] - Martin McMillan 

If you are looking, if you have aspirations to grow a business, if you venture funded a business and you want to grow that business and ultimately sell it, you have to self-publish. I don't have stats for apps specifically, but we run some analysis from publicly available data from InvestGame last year so between March 21 and February 22. 

[00:12:31.770] - Martin McMillan 

We looked at the gaming sector and said, of all the M&A that happened in that sector, what was the primary business model of the studio that was sold? Was it one, self-published? Was it two, they themselves were a publisher of third-party games? Or three, did the studio rely on a third-party publisher to get their games to market? 

[00:12:51.210] - Martin McMillan 

The results were pretty stark, 85% of all M&A activity was self-published studios, 15% were themselves publishers, and around zero were people that relied on a third-party publisher to get their intellectual property to market. 

[00:13:09.360] - Martin McMillan 

Not every founder out there wants to create something and try and sell it for billion dollars. Some are very happy creating games and then shoving them down the conveyor belt for someone else to monetize. So it really just depends on your aspirations. What studio do you want to be? 

[00:13:22.620] - Olivier Destrebecq 

Yeah. What day job you want to have essentially, and what you want to be working on. Interesting. 

[00:13:28.530] - Martin McMillan 

Yeah. I mean, it could be the day job or it could be like, this is my life's work. 

[00:13:32.650] - Olivier Destrebecq 

Yes. Preparing for the interview, I spent a bit of time on your blog, and I discovered on your blog the concept of clean room accounting for user acquisition and monetization. Can you give us the gist of what that is for our listeners? Because I think that's a goldmine for founders. 

[00:13:52.080] - Martin McMillan 

Yeah, and this was something that we just saw empirically. Obviously, we've worked with hundreds of studios over the years and we've just seen what emerges really as best practice for how people run their operations and particularly their financial operations. So one thing that came out and we just noticed it last year was this idea of clean room economics. It sounds fancy, but it's actually very simple, really just... 

[00:14:14.370] - Olivier Destrebecq 

You don't need a building. 

[00:14:15.210] - Martin McMillan 

Well, it's really just a segregated bank account. All of your monetization and user acquisition goes in and out of one bank account so you can monitor how efficient your UI spend is. Now all of your day-to-day expenses, all of your salaries, your office, your all known non-UA related spend gets segregated at. 

[00:14:35.280] - Martin McMillan 

Then what you're able to do if you have just this clean room accounting, all of the revenue that comes in is all the different monetization channels, all of the spend that goes out is your user acquisition. You will be able to see, monitor just from your bank balance whether this is working and it helps you make better financial decisions because you've got a segregation between operating capital and then what's basically the user acquisition machine. 

[00:14:58.230] - Martin McMillan 

You'll be able to see like, if those amounts of money starts to increase over time on your UA machine, then your UA is successful. If, however, you keep spending on user acquisition that's not profitable, then gradually your machine is going to run out of path. 

[00:15:11.600] - Olivier Destrebecq 

Yeah. It reminds me one of the best advice that I had when I started my business was to have a separate banking account for salaries, taxes, and operating expenses. That's still how I run my business. Hearing that comes at applied to a mobile app for user acquisition, I find it is genius. 

[00:15:32.780] - Olivier Destrebecq 

Because that really, as you said, you can just open your mobile app to your bank account and say, is it higher than last week or is it lower than last week? Then you know whether you're making progress or not. So you like that? 

[00:15:43.010] - Martin McMillan 

Yeah, and you can look at how much you're owed, how much the platforms are you, etc. It just it's a super simple hack but it's very effective because... And particularly when you get into all the cash flow management stuff, it's just really helpful to have that stuff segregated. 

[00:15:58.730] - Olivier Destrebecq 

Yeah. Over the last, I don't know, years, two years, I don't know how long actually, you guys have been focusing more and more on subscription apps and maybe away from games. What's motivated you guys to go that way? 

[00:16:10.040] - Martin McMillan 

It's really just customer demand, right? We used to be about 70-30 free-to-play games versus apps and subscription apps. Now it's come to roughly 50-50 in terms of the portfolio. I think it's just a factor of two things. Free-to-play game user acquisition has got harder with the changes around IDFA and so on over the last couple of years. 

[00:16:33.230] - Martin McMillan 

Also people have got way better at pricing subscriptions, modeling subscriptions, etc. Finding out consumer niches where the subscription model can really work, finding out what people want to pay for and establishing positive economics on ad spend for that. So it's really more of a factor of the market rather than anything that we've done specifically. 

[00:16:54.080] - Olivier Destrebecq 

How do you see that evolving over the next couple of years? You see that trend continuing? 

[00:16:59.990] - Martin McMillan 

Yeah, look, we think subscription economy is great. It's obviously from a user acquisition point of view, it's very hard. I mean, if you look in gaming, the single-shot free-to-play one-shot is hard and particularly if you don't have proper attribution so and so. 

[00:17:16.640] - Martin McMillan 

Lots of people just looking at this financial trade behind it, the ability to create something that becomes part of somehow people's daily life or routines or whatever they are, prepared to pay for and continue to pay for and get utility for and then just the overall economics of that art are very different. 

[00:17:34.970] - Martin McMillan 

You're able to model out rather than like a few weeks for a hyper-casual game. You're talking about months or ideally years if you get into multi-year subscriptions for something that becomes part of people's routine. Obviously, you have seasonality. Obviously, now's a very busy time for fitness and weight loss apps and so on. So you're going to have inherent seasonality. 

[00:17:56.180] - Martin McMillan 

But overall, I think a lot of people looking to build a business with greater longevity are turning to subscription apps because there's more money to be made over a longer period of time as opposed to the one-hit wonder free-to-play game that's dead in 30 days. 

[00:18:12.380] - Olivier Destrebecq 

Yeah. If our listeners want to keep learning more about those revolving line of credit and how all of that worked, where can they go to learn more? 

[00:18:20.570] - Martin McMillan 

Well, first thing I'd suggest is looking on our website at the calculator section. We have put...Over the last few years we've created, I think there are nine or ten on there now different suite of calculators to help developers basically unpack different financial topics back into something that's simple and digestible. 

[00:18:37.760] - Martin McMillan 

We have different calculators that help unpack different models that aren't revolving credit. Either there are some factory model or there are revenue-based financing. Very often these models are designed to obfuscate the true cost of funding. 

[00:18:51.590] - Martin McMillan 

One of the things we do is we just break everything down to a simple interest rate, which that you can then use to compare different models. I think probably the main calculator on there for listeners in the podcast is going to be our subscription app, ROAS, LTV, and cash flow calculator. 

[00:19:06.860] - Martin McMillan 

That's basically that helps you...You put in information on the different subscription plans, the churn rates, the skew, etc user acquisition costs. What it's going to help model out is basically the LTV curve. It's an investment equation. 

[00:19:20.630] - Martin McMillan 

At what point do I reach 100% ROAS? How long does that take? At what point do I cap my LTV and say this is, it's going to be at six months or one year or 18 months or whatever. Then basically how much profit am I making in the middle? 

[00:19:33.020] - Martin McMillan 

It's just going to visualize this as just an investment equation. Then if you can figure out you've got these positive economics and on the cash flow tab, it's going to model out basically the scenario. If you were to have a revolving credit facility to support faster user acquisition, then what could your economics look like? That's the one that really helps people. It helps a light bulb go off in people's heads. 

[00:19:54.710] - Martin McMillan 

So first of all, basically, do I have a user acquisition machine that works? Then after that, and only after that, if I'm able to leverage it by putting in a credit facility to help me scale faster, then what could the economic outcome look from that, provided those economics holds? 

[00:20:10.800] - Olivier Destrebecq 

Yeah, two follow-up questions. LTV, I've heard enough to know that that's a lifetime value for the customer. But ROAS, what's that? 

[00:20:20.670] - Martin McMillan 

ROAS is like... ROAS is return on ad spend. So people use... Certain marketers use different acronyms. ROI is return on the ad spend... Sorry, return on the investment. ROAS is return on ad spend. So typically, people focus on at what point do they achieve 100% ROAS. A hundred percent ROAS is just basically if you've paid five bucks to acquire a customer, at what point do you make the five bucks back? 

[00:20:43.920] - Martin McMillan 

It's just like, can I break even on my ad spend? Now reality's a lot of people can't break even on their ad spend, which is sad because then they don't have a business they can scale through paid acquisition. The other thing that people do is they get very focused on at what point do I achieve 100% ROAS and think that job's done at 100% ROAS. 

[00:20:59.940] - Martin McMillan 

Absolutely not. The point at which you break even on the ad spend, all the money has just gone into Google or to Facebook or to TikTok or whatever to acquire the user. The bit that you start making money is after you've broken even until your ultimate LTV cut-off point. 

[00:21:16.440] - Martin McMillan 

People really need to remember that. It's really important to understand how long it takes as well. We've recently introduced a concept of monthly ROI because we saw a lot of lack of understanding about how long it takes to get the outcome. 

[00:21:31.620] - Martin McMillan 

Getting 130% ROAS, making a 30% return on the ad spend is a totally different scenario if it takes you a month or two years. Don't focus on the number, focus on how long it takes to get there and think about a monthly metric rather than the headline numbers. 

[00:21:48.000] - Olivier Destrebecq 

Interesting. That's a good tip. So you said, people could go to the website. Is it pollenvc.com? 

[00:21:55.950] - Martin McMillan 

Yeah, the website is just pollen.vc. Calculator's tab is right there at the top and we have a fairly active blog as well. What we try and do on the blog is just write about the stuff that no one else writes about. So you can go to a million blogs and find out about user acquisition and monetization and user behavior and stuff. 

[00:22:14.970] - Martin McMillan 

Very, very few people think about writing about the financial topics and concept. That's one of the things we've been doing this. We did our first lending in 2015, so we've seen lots and lots of scenarios that people either crash and burn or do really well. Essentially we're in a mission as well as being a lender to try to improve the financial literacy of app developers to help them make better-informed decisions. 

[00:22:37.800] - Martin McMillan 

Hopefully it's a lot of good stuff on the blog there. Then there's a calculators to actually to help model some of this stuff live without having to wire up your data sources or a sandbox environment you can use as a resource. 

[00:22:49.770] - Olivier Destrebecq 

Awesome. That was so valuable. There was so many great answers from you on how to help founders finance their user acquisition. I really want to thank you for joining us today. It was really great to have all those thoughts of yours. 

[00:23:03.180] - Martin McMillan 

Not at all. It's great to be on. Thanks for inviting me. 

[00:23:05.790] - Olivier Destrebecq 

You're welcome. 

[00:23:06.600] - Voice Over 

On behalf of the Purchasely team, thank you for listening to the Subscription League podcast. If you've enjoyed what you heard, leave us a five-star review on iTunes or other audio platform. To find out more about Purchasely and how we can improve your subscription business, visit purchasely.com. 

[00:23:23.670] - Voice Over 

Please hit subscribe in your podcast player and don't miss any future episodes. You can also listen to previous episodes at subscriptionleague.com. See you soon.