10× Growth Mindset: The growth system behind scalable mobile games in 2026

Welcome back to the 10× Growth Mindset series. In this project, we speak with experienced growth operators to understand how app companies break through growth ceilings in practice. We look beyond isolated tactics and talk about the systems behind scale: product readiness, monetization, retention, creative testing, analytics, and the decisions that help teams grow without burning efficiency.

Today’s guest is Eva Juretić, a mobile gaming growth leader who has managed over $100M in ad spend and works with mobile gaming founders through the SCALE Method, a framework she developed for diagnosing and fixing UA systems.

Eva’s superpower is curiosity and connecting dots across systems. She helps founders stop renting UA expertise from agencies and build it in-house, so the growth knowledge stays with the team. For her, growth and user acquisition are related, but they are not the same thing. Growth happens when product and paid UA work together. When product and UA operate in silos, nobody wins.

In this conversation, we talk about founder fantasies around scaling games, why cheap installs can mislead teams, what needs to happen before aggressive scale makes sense, and how serious operators think about LTV, ROAS, retention, soft launch signals, creative testing, and growth in 2026.

If your game is preparing to scale, this interview will help you separate real growth signals from metrics that only look good on a board deck.

What founders often get wrong about game scale

Campaignswell: What’s the most common fantasy founders have about scaling a game?

Eva: <highlight-green>The fantasy is that a great product or a great game will market itself.<highlight-green> Some founders believe that if the game is good enough, word of mouth and organic growth will carry it. In mobile, that is rarely how it works. Discovery is a paid problem, and it has been that way for a long time. With growing competition, AI, and everything moving faster, this is even more true now.

Having a good game is the starting point. It gives you something worth scaling. But it is not the growth engine by itself.

Campaignswell: What’s one uncomfortable truth about scaling games that serious operators eventually have to accept?

Eva: <highlight-green>Most games shouldn’t scale.<highlight-green> Aggressive UA spend exposes product problems faster than the product can solve them. If retention is weak, scaling simply means losing more money at higher volume.

Sometimes the right answer is: fix the product first. You can still spend to test and learn. You should do that. But before you scale seriously, you need certain product foundations in place. Otherwise, it becomes the classic leaky bucket problem: scaling means losing money faster, at higher volume.

Eventually, you have to pay to acquire users, and that price usually goes up. There are exceptions, of course, but that is the overall trend. <highlight-green>The window where organic traffic or cheap paid traffic could carry a game is mostly closed.<highlight-green>

Teams that accept this early can build the infrastructure and qualifications for scale. Teams that keep looking for shortcuts usually run out of cash faster.

Campaignswell: Do many founders understand this, or is it still a common misunderstanding?

Eva: Most founders understand the concept at a high level. The problem is usually the gap between theory and practice. People may say, “Yes, we understand product market fit, retention, paid acquisition, unit economics.” But when you look at how the team actually works, the product and UA connection is often missing. That is where a structured audit, which is how I start every SCALE engagement, is useful. You can look at the system and say, “If we change this, or if we think about that differently, the whole thing may work better.”

So it is less about educating everyone from zero now. The bigger issue is helping teams see where their actual operating model does not match what they believe in theory.

Campaignswell: What mindset patterns consistently show up in teams that scale hard and stay profitable?

Eva: The strongest teams understand that marketing is everyone’s job, not only the paid UA team’s job. They don’t sit in separate corners pointing fingers. Product doesn’t blame UA, UA doesn’t blame product, and nobody waits for one magical creative to fix everything.

The healthy mindset is: <highlight-green>we are one team against the market.<highlight-green> We look at the same reality, we share data, and we solve the hard problems together. That matters because scaling usually makes problems visible. CPI goes up as you spend more. If the product can’t create enough value from those users, CPI starts growing faster than LTV. That is where foundations get tested.

Good teams accept this and work on the system. Weaker teams turn it into “whose fault is it?” And once that starts, you stop solving the actual growth problem.

Why scale needs more than budget

Campaignswell: Can a mobile game still scale with a small budget, or is that mostly a comforting myth?

Eva: Mostly a myth. Of course, there are exceptions. If you have a very strong, organic, content-friendly game with a community that naturally creates UGC, you may be able to punch above your budget. But that is more of a product design conversation than a pure user acquisition conversation. It is still a growth conversation, because <highlight-green>UA plus product is what makes growth happen.<highlight-green>

Most games don’t have that kind of organic engine. For them, a small budget can help you learn, test, and build feedback loops. And you absolutely should do that. But small budgets usually don’t create real scale.

The healthier way to think about it is: <highlight-green>use the budget you have to learn before you scale.<highlight-green> Build internal knowledge. Understand what works, why it works, who your users are, and what the product can actually support. That becomes the foundation for future scale.

Campaignswell: How much of game scaling is really about marketing, and how much is about product and monetization design?

Eva: Growth is where product and paid user acquisition work together. That is the part many teams still underestimate. UA can bring users in, but it can’t compensate for weak retention, poor monetization, or a product experience that doesn’t match what the ad promised.

If product is treated like a black box, and then one day the team says, “Hey, we have a new feature, go advertise it,” that usually doesn’t work. The market is too competitive now. Growth needs to be planned as a system.

So I wouldn’t separate it into “marketing versus product.” For mobile games, scaling is the result of both sides working together: product, monetization, retention, creative, paid UA, and data. When those teams operate in silos, nobody wins.

Campaignswell: What red flags tell you a team will stall, even with budget and decent product-market fit?

Eva: One red flag is when teams <highlight-green>optimize campaigns only for installs instead of cohort quality.<highlight-green> The moment you can optimize for something beyond the install, you get closer to higher-quality users. But if the team is still celebrating install volume as the main win, that’s a problem.

Another red flag is <highlight-green>when UA and product don’t share the same data, or they look at different dashboards.<highlight-green> This is still surprisingly common. Product often looks at activity-based data, like what happened yesterday. UA looks at cohorts, like people who installed last week and what they did after that. Both views can be useful, but if teams don’t connect them, decisions get messy.

And then there is the classic one: <highlight-green>waiting for one magical creative to fix everything, including the funnel.<highlight-green> That creative doesn’t really exist anymore. AI made production faster, fatigue is faster too, and no amount of great creative can fix a broken product. If the product has weak retention but the team keeps scaling because revenue comes back short term, problems usually show up later. As spend increases, CPI rises. If LTV doesn’t rise with it, the economics break.

What has to be true before a game can scale

Campaignswell: At what point is a game truly ready for aggressive scale, and what signals say it’s too early?

Eva: A game is ready to scale agressively when the team has enough evidence that the product can hold the users they are buying, and that monetization can support the cost of bringing those users in. <highlight-green>If retention is weak, it is too early.<highlight-green> If the team is only optimizing for installs, it is too early. If UA and product are not aligned on the same data, it is too early. If the economics only work at a small spend level, it is too early.

You should have UA budgets before this phase, but the goal should be learning, not scaling. Use budget to test, understand users, validate creative directions, and see where the product breaks.

Aggressive scale becomes rational when the early product signals, monetization signals, creative performance, and cohort quality all point in the same direction. Otherwise, you are just buying more evidence that the system is leaking.

Campaignswell: What retention numbers actually matter before you even think about scale?

Eva: Day 1 and Day 7 retention matter a lot, but the exact benchmarks depend on the genre and the product.
As a general rule, for most casual games, <highlight-green>Day 1 retention below 35 to 40% is usually a product signal,<highlight-green> not a UA signal. It means you should look at the product before blaming acquisition.

Shape of the retention curve depends on the type of game, but the biggest long-term growth lever is long-term retention. If every cohort fully churns at some point, you have a growth problem waiting to happen. Day 30, Day 60, one year, the timing changes but the math doesn't.

To maintain the same number of daily active users, you have to keep spending more and more just to replace the users you lose. But if even a small percentage of users stay for a very long time, that becomes the lever you can build on. Long-term retention is what allows growth to compound over time.

This is also where the CPI and LTV problem appears. If you keep acquiring users and they all churn, CPI eventually grows faster than LTV. Then the team has to stop and figure out what is broken.

Campaignswell: What does a team need to see in soft launch before scaling becomes rational?

Eva: First, <highlight-green>stable Day 1 and Day 7 retention.<highlight-green> And I mean stable, not one good cohort that makes everyone excited for five minutes. Day 1 and Day 7 matter because they are early enough for UA teams to react to. You don’t have to wait months to understand whether something is working. You can see real user behavior after a week and use that signal.

Then you need <highlight-green>at least one monetization signal<highlight-green>, even a small one. Usually, that's the conversion rate on in-app purchases or early ARPU above zero. Once you have that, you can start working backward: what is your ARPU, what is your CPI, what does that mean for your payback window, and where does ARPU need to be for scale to make sense?

You also need <highlight-green>creatives that can acquire users at a cost that still leaves room for LTV.<highlight-green> And finally, you need enough data to understand which users or segments retain best. Who are we acquiring? Who are we building for? Who are we creating creatives for? Those answers matter before scaling becomes rational.

Campaignswell: What belief about scaling games sounds smart in board meetings but falls apart in the ad account?

Eva: <highlight-green>“We’ll figure out monetization after we scale the user base.”<highlight-green> It can sound reasonable. Build the audience first, monetize later. Some companies still work this way. But in paid UA, it usually falls apart.

The users you acquire cheaply at the top of the funnel are rarely the users who pay. So again, you end up optimizing for installs instead of cohort quality.
By the time you turn on monetization, those cohorts may have already churned, CPIs may have increased, and the math you were using before no longer works. Monetization needs to be designed before scale, not after.

The metric traps behind unprofitable scale

Campaignswell: What’s the most expensive “good-looking metric” you’ve seen teams fall in love with?

Eva: Low CPI or install volume. Teams can celebrate 100,000 installs as a big milestone, but that number can be completely meaningless if users churn. Install volume alone doesn’t tell you much about long-term growth. Click-through rate is another one. A high CTR can feel like validation because people are clicking and engaging with the ad. But CTR measures curiosity, not necessarily intent.

A misleading creative can get clicks and still bring terrible users. That is why you have to look at the whole funnel. Are people converting in the store? Does the ad set the right expectation? When users enter the product, does the experience match what the creative promised?

If those things are not aligned, users leave quickly. So there needs to be a sanity check. A metric can look good and still be bad for the business.

Campaignswell: Well, you’ve challenged CPI as a vanity metric. So what should teams optimize for instead?

Eva: What matters is CPI relative to predicted LTV for that cohort, from that channel, from that creative. You need the full picture. For example, imagine two creatives. Creative A has a CPI of $1.20. Creative B has a CPI of $3. Everyone wants to scale Creative A because it looks cheaper. But then you look at ROAS and retention. Creative A may have 30% ROAS, while Creative B has 80%. That is not rare. Often the creative with higher CPI brings users with stronger retention, better ROAS, and better fit beyond the install.

So the question should never be “which creative has the cheapest CPI?” <highlight-green>The question is “which creative brings users whose value can support scale?”<highlight-green>

Campaignswell: If LTV doesn’t beat CPI yet, what should teams improve first: retention, monetization, targeting, or creative?

Eva: I almost always start with retention. If users aren’t staying, nothing else can compound over time. You can improve creatives, optimize campaigns, reduce CPAs, find better conversions, and all of that matters. Creative is a big lever in paid UA. But if I had to choose one thing first, I would choose retention.

That brings us back to product and collaboration. Retention is not something UA can fix alone. It requires product and UA to work together and understand what kind of users are coming in, what they expect, and why they leave.

The new rules of scaling games in 2026

Campaignswell: What used to work in scaling games a few years ago that doesn’t work anymore in 2026?

Eva: The idea of one creative that works for months. That used to be the case for most. It almost felt like a rule. A team could find one strong creative, keep running it, and nothing would beat it for a long time. We see that less and less now.

Today, the ability to test creative iterations quickly and learn from them is critical. But I usually recommend one mindset shift: <highlight-green>don’t focus only on finding winners, first, eliminate losers.<highlight-green>

If you test a hook, concept, or trend several times and no variation of it works, cut it fast. Then spend more time on the top 10 or 20% of concepts and figure out how to improve them.

And always keep testing new concepts. In 2026, this is becoming faster and more aggressive. The next step is automation, and many teams are already starting to ask how much of the creative testing process can be automated. That can feel scary, but it is the realistic direction.

Campaignswell: What does a healthy creative testing system look like in 2026?

Eva: Test with understanding, don’t just throw spaghetti at the wall. You need novelty and variety, of course, and you also need reasoning behind what you test. Watch the creatives before launching them. Give them a sanity check. Ask whether they make sense, whether they set the right expectation, and whether they match the product experience.

One thing that is changing is the old setup where you have a testing campaign and a BAU (business-as-usual) campaign. Depending on your scale and spend level, I like having something I call a traction test. For example, on Meta, if you have many creative concepts, you can put them into a traction stage before full testing or evergreen campaigns. The goal is simple: see what the algorithm decides to spend on. It doesn’t take long. Sometimes 24 hours is enough to get an early signal. If the algorithm doesn’t spend on something, fine, move on. For high-volume testing, waiting until every creative gets a certain number of installs just to prove it doesn’t work is a slow way to lose. The market is too fast for that now.

Campaignswell: If you joined a gaming company tomorrow with a mandate to build 10x growth capability, what would your first 90 days look like?

Eva: The first month would be diagnosis only. I wouldn’t rush into changing things. I would want to understand what the company is doing, how it works, what the expectations are, where the product is now, and where it is going long term.

The people factor is very important when you join a new company. You need to understand the team, the goals, the UA system, the product, the data, and the processes before proposing changes.

I would look at cohorts from the last six months or year, depending on the company. I would review what creatives were tested, what worked, what didn’t, and what direction the team was taking. Just by looking at creative data, you can often understand a lot about the team’s thinking.

Then I would talk to people. What were the goals? What were they trying to learn? Where are the mismatches between goals, data, and execution?

In the second month, I would identify one or two key levers with the most room for improvement. Usually, that is retention, creative velocity, or the way teams work together. I would focus on the most upstream problem first.

In the third month, I would build or improve the testing infrastructure. That means a clear creative approach, processes, feedback loops, and a system for how the team learns from creatives and campaigns.

I would also spend a lot of time with data people: analysts, data engineers, data scientists. You need to understand what is behind the numbers, how they are calculated, and how they are presented.

By Day 90, I would want the system running. Not just better results from manual effort, but a better connection between paid UA, product, live ops if they have it, data, and company goals.

A quick note from Campaignswell

Quick intro if you’re new here: <highlight-green>Campaignswell is a SaaS BI and predictive analytics platform for app and gaming teams that are scaling paid acquisition and need earlier, cleaner answers on performance.<highlight-green>

We connect data from ad networks, MMPs, product analytics, stores, and revenue sources, then turn it into one clear view of what is actually driving growth. That means your team can look past surface-level wins and understand which cohorts, creatives, channels, geos, and campaigns are building real value.

<highlight-green>For gaming teams, this is especially useful when scale decisions depend on early signals.<highlight-green> Campaignswell helps you see how retention, predicted LTV, ROAS, monetization, and cohort quality are forming before you commit more budget. You can spot when low CPI is hiding weak users, when a creative is bringing players who stay, and when a channel deserves more spend because the downstream numbers support it.

The same visibility <highlight-green>helps teams working with complex funnels, multiple monetization flows, subscriptions, IAPs, ad revenue, or web-to-app journeys.<highlight-green> Instead of stitching together reports from five dashboards and hoping the numbers line up, you get a single system where marketing, product, and revenue data can be read together.

So if 2026 is the year you plan to scale harder, Campaignswell can help you do it with better signal, less guesswork, and fewer “looks good in the ad account, hurts later” moments.

Book a demo and let’s look at your growth setup together.

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