Exclusive: Interview with devtodev

At the end of September, devtodev, a domestic tool for collecting mobile analytics and advertising, appeared on the market. We contacted Dmitry Kravtsov, the CEO of the service, and asked him about how the work on devtodev began, how it differs from foreign analogues and what the startup has in common with IMI.VC .

Dmitry Kravtsov

Hi! First, tell me a little about yourself. What did you do before devtodev?

I have always been interested in technology and tried to develop in this area. He graduated from the State University of Informatics and Artificial Intelligence in Donetsk; for two years he led the sales of one of the largest PC assemblers in Ukraine, received excellent experience at Samsung. 

In 2011, Sasha Vashchenko (Vice President of Game Insight products) suggested that I develop technical support for Game Insight users. So there was a large and well-coordinated Game Insight technical support center in the city of Ivanovo. At some point it became clear that he no longer needed my close attention, and it was decided to develop an equally important direction for GI – the analytics department. I had a global task in front of me — to create an effective mobile analytics tool inside Game Insight that would improve the company’s business performance. 

In short, having launched with the next major update, the analytics platform has become so powerful and effective that Igor Matsanyuk himself, the founder of the investment company IMI, whose portfolio includes Game Insight, became interested in it. After negotiations and discussions, it was decided that we have every chance to create a successful independent service, despite the large number of competitors in the market. So the project ended up in the IMI portfolio, and so devtodev was born. 

There are a lot of offers on the analytics market right now. How is your solution fundamentally different from what Flurry or Fiksu offers, for example?

Unlike our competitors, firstly, we have collected in one analytical service everything that can be useful to developers – these are both app store statistics and user behavior analytics. None of the competitors are doing this now: there are services like App Annie and Distimo that provide data from app stores, and there are Flurry, Google Analytics and other analytical systems that analyze user behavior. We combine both of these functions in full. 

In the future, the functionality will be expanded. Our task is not just to create another analytical system, but to provide developers with the widest possible range of tools. This is an analytical system, an advertising network, and SDK collections with various useful functions. 

Returning to the analytical system, firstly, we collect data from two sources at once: the developer can integrate our SDK and connect his account to iTunes Connect or Google Play, thus expanding the amount of available data.

Secondly, the whole system is built in such a way that it is convenient for users to work with statistics by application groups, comparing data from different applications on the same graph. This is useful if you need, for example, to compare the average lifetime in your applications on different platforms. For studios with a large number of projects and multi-platform projects, such an opportunity is very important, and it is not available in the bulk of popular analytical services.

In addition, we have a section with reports where you can create and save a report in a form that is convenient for you (tables, graphs, sector charts), and open access to it for other users. 

You can output data on different metrics to your own dashboard, creating widgets with data on user behavior, or on application positions in app stores — and all this on one screen.

For mobile game developers, we will provide even more interesting reports based on data on levels in the game: the distribution of users and paying users, the dumps of players, the number of purchases and the amount of payments, the top most purchased items at each level. And that’s not all.

As we noticed, devtodev pays special attention to the presence of a Devstore from which developers will be able to download, as we understood, numerous SDKs. Actually, the question is why offer users multiple SDKs. Why couldn’t one be made?

Speaking about Devstore, it is important to understand that it is not just about our SDK for connecting to the analytics system. Each SDK in this section is a separate functionality that the developer can download and embed into his application so as not to waste time developing additional functions. For example, an SDK to prevent fraud related to payments inside the application: by connecting it, the developer will be able to receive information about users who use third-party programs for free access to paid functions inside the application and prevent these actions.

By the way, how much will your base SDK weigh?

The basic SDK has the ability to collect an unlimited number of user events, specialized game data, for example, on the accrual of in-game currency to the user, and much more. At the same time, it compresses the transmitted data to save traffic and takes up only 68 KB for Android, and about 3 MB for the three processor architectures of iOS. 

Will there be a Russian version?

The Russian version is in the plans, as well as localization into other languages. But we are primarily an international project focused on developers around the world, so English was chosen at the launch stage.

If we talk specifically about tools, how does devtodev consider retention (one day/7 days)?

We define Retention as the percentage of users who continue to use the application after a certain period of time. This is the percentage of users who came during the period you selected, who logged into the app over the past week. 

In the demo, we did not find a breakdown by cohort. Will she?

Cohort reports are in the plans, and they will be implemented a little later.

Will it be possible to define installation channels?

At the moment, there are no absolutely accurate ways to track the sources of downloads if they come from some external sources. Systems that provide channel data do this based on various indirect rules, so the accuracy of such forecasts is not 100%. In devtodev, such an opportunity has not yet been implemented, but we have this functionality in our plans, as well as ROI calculation for applications. 

How often will it be possible to receive postbacks?

If we are talking about our internal advertising grid, information about installations will be updated every five minutes. As for the analysis of external traffic sources, as already mentioned, we do not have such functionality yet. 

Is there an opportunity to work with you as with 3-d party tracking – if so, what do you use for iOS and what networks do you work with.

I think it will be relevant to talk about this after the launch of our advertising grid, now it is important for us to provide our own convenient tool for developers and advertisers to monetize and attract traffic. Our advertisers will be able to access detailed information on further traffic conversions and the behavior of attracted users, thanks to our SDK. In the future, we will probably implement something similar for third-party advertising grids.

Devtodev is not only a tool for collecting analytics, but also an advertising grid. What type of advertising are you going to offer to customers?

The advertising grid is still under development, and we have something to offer developers and advertisers. In a word — you will be pleasantly surprised. As for more detailed information, we will definitely provide it together with the official announcement very soon.

And the last question: the devtodev website states that your startup is “funded and advised by IMI.VC “. As you know, Game Insight is an IMI portfolio company. Some of our readers have a question in this regard: how closely do you work with the company headed by Alice Chumachenko?

Devtodev, like Game Insight, is one of the portfolio projects of the investment company IMI, which, in turn, purposefully gathers innovative ideas and projects related to mobile technologies around itself, being the leader of this segment of the investment market. With all companies in the IMI investment portfolio, we have good partnerships based on a common desire to develop the mobile market.

As for Game Insight, it would be more correct to say that at the moment they have chosen devtodev as an independent and independent service providing a high-level analytics tool. Now the marketing effectiveness of all Game Insight games is determined using devtodev, and this is a unique experience for our team.

This allows you to improve the service and functionality with a market leader setting a high bar. And we would like to convey this sense of success and enthusiasm to all our customers in the future, regardless of whether it is a large company or an indie developer.

Official website of the service: https://www.devtodev.com/