I launched QuantMar as a platform for quantitative marketing education in June 2019. The genesis of QuantMar was that I wanted to find a way to index answers to the same basic questions that kept surfacing in the Mobile Dev Memo Slack team: fundamental things like how retention impacts LTV, how LTV can be calculated, how to optimize ad campaigns, how to optimize in-app events for campaign ROAS, etc. The fact that these questions kept being asked convinced me of a few things:
- There is no free source of quality information around performance user acquisition and quantitative marketing. Most vendor content marketing is, at best, of poor quality or, at worst, purposefully misleading. Similarly, since quantitative marketing sits at the intersection of statistics, computer science, and marketing, university students don’t get exposed to it in their formal education;
- Performance marketing and quantitative marketing talent is actually fairly scarce — and where it exists, it is mostly concentrated in start-up hubs, having been incubated at large, successful consumer-facing start-ups. This means that companies have a hard time recruiting for these roles, but because of #1, can’t expect to nurture talent internally. An inability to grow a performance marketing team can kill a consumer tech company in its infancy; I wanted QuantMar to be a place where someone new to the field could acquire enough of a core competency to effectively start a performance marketing team from zero;
- Because of #2, the very best performance marketers really have nowhere to showcase their skills in order to facilitate recruitment and advance their own careers. For many companies, performance marketing is seen as some ancillary function that they need to staff but that doesn’t really materially impact their business. But what if the very best performance marketers were able to exhibit their skills in a way that highlighted how effective, purposeful user acquisition is obviously drastically accretive to consumer tech businesses? It would stratify the labor pool and allow the most elite performance marketers to command much higher compensation.
QuantMar started as a question-and-answer site, but it will evolve in 2020 into something much bigger: a true education platform, featuring an expert system and a curriculum of courses on a variety of topics. That said, even as a simple question-and-answer site, QuantMar has seen more success than I imagined, generating more organic traffic now than Mobile Dev Memo does. To that end, below are the 10 most popular QuantMar threads by pageviews from 2019:
How does Facebook’s advertising targeting algorithm work?
Do you have a rough number of creative assets that you aim to make per $15k of spend?
What are the best practices for setting up waterfalls on mediation providers to maximize revenue?
What are the most important metrics to track in mobile advertising campaigns?
Should the revenue of organic installs be included in a ROAS calculation?
FB ads: What are the exact conditions which reset the learning phase of the ad set?
What are the best acquisition channels for apps outside of Facebook and Google?
What is the impact of Retention on UA performance?
What is the difference between AEO and VO bid types on Facebook?
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