WildCard Games’ Josh Chandley on Scaling Retention into Profit

How mobile marketers can apply WildCard’s systematic growth playbook to boost LTV, creative effectiveness, and incrementality.

Disclaimer: The opinions represented here are those of the individual and do not necessarily represent those of their current or former employer.

Mobile marketing leaders know that user retention is the lifeblood of long-term profitability. But how do top app companies actually organize teams and design growth systems to maximize retention, monetization, and personalization? Adikteev sat down with Josh Chandley, Co-Founder, President, and COO of WildCard Games, to see how his team built a foundation for recording profitability by focusing on retention and systematic growth.

Watch the full interview below, or read on for a selection of key takeaways.

Key Takeaways 

1. Make retention a company-wide priority to multiply lifetime value and profit. When product and UA teams co-own retention, every dollar spent on acquisition and engagement works harder, creating durable long-term growth.
2. Implement universal feedback loops to accelerate learning and scale portfolio wins. By formalizing testing and building modular architectures, teams can compound insights across products, driving faster, lower-cost innovation.
3. Empower creative teams to own research, testing, and performance analysis. Giving creatives end-to-end control removes bottlenecks, speeds iteration, and produces higher fidelity insights that directly improve UA efficiency.
4. Align marketing promises with in-app experiences to improve retention outcomes. Honest creatives that reflect the true product attract stickier users who stay longer and deliver higher lifetime value.
5. Design portfolio-level A/B tests to uncover true incrementality and lift. Testing strategies across parallel apps or groups ensures insights are accurate, reducing waste and preventing misleading data from seasonality.

1. Treat Retention as a Company-Wide Profit Multiplier

To Chandley, retention isn’t just a KPI for the product team, but a profit multiplier that should be everyone’s priority. Extending how long users stay engaged in your app drives exponential gains in lifetime value (LTV) and efficiency of all marketing spend. If you improve D30 retention by even a few percentage points, you significantly boost the revenue each user generates after acquisition, effectively multiplying the ROI of your UA campaigns. Smart mobile marketers treat retention as the backbone of their business’s LTV and profit margin and ensure both product and growth teams are jointly accountable for improving it. Breaking down silos is key: when product teams build stickier features and UA teams acquire the right users to benefit from them, retention becomes a force multiplier on revenue.

“LTV is just ARPDAU times days played. So retention is one of those two primary yield multipliers. ...Retention defines how much money you make after [the ROAS window] and after your break even. It defines the durability of your business. If your D30 is 3%, you know, that game is toast once UA slows down... That’s why I think of retention as the backbone of LTV, but also secretly the backbone of your profit margin. It’s the multiplier that makes every other lever work harder.”

Candy Crush Saga is a prime example of retention’s multiplier effect. Developer King continuously pours effort into retention, releasing new levels every single week so players never run out of content. As of 2025, Candy Crush has over 16,000 levels with 45–60 new levels added per week, an endless stream that keeps users engaged long-term. The payoff for this retention focus is enormous: Candy Crush has generated over $20 billion in lifetime revenue. By aligning the whole company around keeping players coming back, King multiplied each user’s LTV and achieved a steady, compounding revenue stream far beyond the initial install.

Ready to take your mobile game’s retention to the next level? Adikteev specializes in re-engagement campaigns and personalized retention strategies. Contact us to learn how our solutions can help you keep players coming back.

2. Build Feedback Loops and Modular Frameworks for Fast Experimentation

Driving growth in modern mobile apps requires rapid, data-driven experimentation, which means putting feedback loops at the center of your product and marketing processes. Chandley recommends establishing a universal testing framework that every new feature, campaign, or creative goes through. By formalizing steps for hypothesis, test design, data gathering, analysis, and decision, you create a culture that values evidence over opinions and speed-to-data over speed-to-launch. Equally important is making your product architecture modular, so that when something works, you can replicate it quickly across your portfolio.

“Every new feature, every new creative, every new UA campaign goes through the same core framework... There’s a hypothesis, a test design, a data gathering phase, and then an analysis and decision phase. It sounds simple because it is. We’ve made a conscious decision to prioritize data over opinions, and speed to data over speed to ship. …Once we’ve learned something, we want to apply that learning as broadly as possible. All of our games share a common architecture. If a feature tests positive in one game, then it moves to them all at a tiny fraction of the cost. …That’s how we scale – not by chasing one-off hits, but by learning faster and then compounding those learnings across a portfolio.”

Booking.com illustrates the power of relentless feedback loops and portfolio-level reuse of insights. The travel platform is famous for its experimentation culture, running 1,000+ concurrent A/B tests across its website and apps at any given time. This “always-be-testing” framework is so ingrained that product teams can deploy tests to millions of users across 75 countries in under an hour. Over time, Booking’s infinite testing loop created a compounding effect on conversions and revenue. In fact, analysis shows that at ~10% success rate per experiment, running 1,000 concurrent tests could roughly double total revenue by stacking many small wins.

3. Let Creative Teams Own Their Learning Loops for Faster Iteration

At WildCard, Chandley’s creative unit operates as an autonomous insights engine: they rapidly prototype ad ideas, run A/B tests on creative performance, and feed the winners back to the UA team as ready-to-scale assets. The result is faster iteration (because creatives don’t have to wait on a separate team for results) and higher-fidelity learning (because the people making the ads see directly what resonates). At the heart of all of this is a desire to break down walls, making creative experts an integral part of growth experimentation, not just an art department.

“With creative, the biggest mistake is treating the team too much like a production shop. At WildCard, the creative team owns their whole feedback loop so they can just go and learn as fast as possible. They do the research, the concepting, the production. They even run their own creative tests and are trained to report and analyze that data. And so what the UA team gets is a prioritized backlog of things to promote for every channel. It’s amazing.”

MobilityWare, the company behind popular Solitaire games, saw huge benefits by reorganizing its growth teams in this way. In 2022, MobilityWare separated its UA and creative functions into distinct teams, explicitly so the creative experts could focus on rapid iteration and testing of ad concepts without being bottlenecked by UA managers. This change empowered the creative team to experiment freely and deliver proven winning ads to the UA team. The impact was immediate: in a trial across two of its titles, MobilityWare achieved a 38% increase in iOS user growth while cutting cost-per-install by 13.5%. By letting creative strategists own their loop, they produced more effective ads that drove efficient growth.

4. Align Creative Messaging with In-Product Experience to Boost Retention

Using gimmicky or misleading ads might juice short-term install metrics, but you’ll pay for it later with poor retention and low LTV as disappointed users churn out. Chandley cautions that “cheap trick” ads like claiming “no ads in the game” or showing fake gameplay attract the wrong audience. The most sustainable strategy is to craft creatives that highlight a truthful, compelling aspect of your app, then ensure the onboarding and early gameplay deliver on that theme, and finally have your late-game features amplify it. When the acquisition funnel and the product experience are in harmony, you create a virtuous cycle: you attract users who actually want what your app offers, and they stick around longer because they get what was promised.

“Creative is your first impression. It sets the expectation that players carry down funnel into the game. Cheap tricks, like a fake “Update now” ad or a promise of no ads when there’s totally ads in your game, they slash CPI, they also slash LTV... they never engage deeply. The promise and the product don’t match. So when you’re thinking about retention, the most sustainable creative is when the UA makes a promise, the onboarding delivers it, and then the elder play is almost a caricature of it. If you can create that alignment, retention starts to just magically go up.”

The mobile gaming industry learned this lesson the hard way through the era of “fake ads.” For instance, Playrix, maker of Gardenscapes and Homescapes, long used flashy puzzle-based ads that weren’t representative of its actual match-3 gameplay. They gained cheap installs, but many players left quickly when they realized the game was different. In response, Playrix and others adapted by integrating those ad concepts into their games. They added the advertised puzzle-mini-games into the early levels so the product would meet the expectations set by marketing. So whether it’s a game feature, an e-commerce app claim, or a promised service level, make sure your user experience fulfills the expectations set by your ads.

5. Use Portfolio-Level A/B Tests for True Incrementality Insights

Instead of simply looking at before-and-after metrics, which can mislead due to seasonality or external factors, Chandley encourages marketers to design experiments where one set of users sees the new strategy and a similar set serves as a control. If you operate multiple apps or game titles, leverage that portfolio: for example, apply a new retention campaign on one game while keeping another similar game as a holdout. By running changes concurrently and comparing apples-to-apples, you isolate the true lift to get trustworthy results that you can confidently act on.

“I think the balance [in incrementality testing] is rigor at speed. Design tests that are fast enough to drive iteration but disciplined enough to keep you honest. The most valuable thing you can have is a portfolio so that you can A/B test rather than [rely on] before-and-after. If you’re able to have some games run one strategy and some run another, that is a much better incrementality test than in Q3 do one thing and in Q4 do the other, because it’s just not going to be easy to compare. And so at WildCard we think about that rhythm, how to keep ourselves scaling without misleading ourselves, removing any confounding factors.”

One of the most famous incrementality experiments came from Uber. The growth team at Uber suspected that a chunk of their massive ad spend wasn’t truly adding new riders. In 2017, they ran a bold test: turning off portions of their paid mobile ad campaigns in different markets and measuring the impact. They started small (10% spend reduction) and saw no change; eventually they paused $100 million and observed no measurable drop in app installs or user acquisition. By evaluating strategies with proper control groups, you get the ground truth on what actually moves the needle. In Uber’s case, the truth saved them millions; in your case, it can ensure you double down on tactics that genuinely drive additional retention or revenue, rather than chasing mirages.

If you’d like to hear more from Josh, follow him on LinkedIn where he regularly shares insights on ad tech, growth loops, and building companies that last through market shifts. Want to boost your app’s retention, monetization, and personalization with confidence? Discover Adikteev’s app re-engagement platform and learn how our data-driven approach can help you apply these principles to achieve meaningful growth. Let’s turn your retention strategy into your strongest profit multiplier.