Meet The Crew: Ricardo, Business Development Manager

Dec 09, 2021

Meet the Crew is a series of interviews directly coming from the TapNation team!

The floor is given to our team members, from the devs to the managers, from the young talents to the experienced experts, everyone has their say. You will discover who they are, their career, their inspirations, their thoughts on the industry and beyond. Hopefully you will be able to learn more about our company and about the hypercasual market overall. You could even join our crew if this gets you thrilled!

Who are you Ricardo, how did you get there at TapNation?

I am Ricardo 24, I studied engineering biotechnology and I graduated from university not so long ago. Entering TapNation was a lucky strike, I didn’t chose to come there but TN chose me. After I finished university end of 2019, the pandemic was coming, I wanted a job very soon so started I doing freelance, translating. I sent multiple emails to developers on the stores and all that. I reached out to TapNation and offered them to do translation for Ice Cream Inc. They told me they had another job for me as a business developer. I did not know a lot about this industry but I knew the games, I knew Voodoo. I got into it and I ended up being good at it. I am now the manager of the business developers.

What is your vision of business development?

To me, it is building up relationships with partners, communicating properly with them, accompany them and always trying to reach new frontiers. We need to put our values upfront to be able to have long term relationship. We have to be completely transparent, it is very important. You can’t mess to keep the trust going on.

What is BD for you, how do you picture this sector?

It is kinda new to me as I didn’t have any past experience, it is a challenge I had to deal with. We are working with people around all the world. That’s why we have our proper tools like Slack and communication channels. We are very close even if we are far. I started managing the business development team because we needed proper communication channels from the start, keeping track of everything and everyone. If our partners need help, I will as I can. We have a lot of meetings. and we are working really close to each others.

What do you do exactly at TapNation?

First of all, I am sending multiple emails to many different studios every day of course. See if they can give us a chance to have a meeting so we can talk about our values, start our relationship, etc. We try to be communicative. To set up the actual deal, we have to note what our partners are expecting, we try to develop a good solution for them. Not only do we test the games, but we test the CPC concept. We can also pitch them concepts with high potential. We can even help them on the ideation process, so we can put the input of our game designers, and all the experts in the app industry working within our team. In the end, we can start working with them at any development stage.

How do you measure your success?

Success is not something we go for immediately, even if it is indeed a big deal for us. But true success is when we see that our partners are happy with us. We don’t want to test only 1 game with them, but 2, 3, 4. The success to me is being able to set multiple partnerships like this. That’s what leads us to hit games eventually.

What are some ways business development can fail?

A business developer should not put the interest of the company upfront. It has to be a mutual interest, we have to aim for a mutual benefit. So as soon as this is broken, I think that it is a failure for the business development. We need that balance when we are not only working for us, but understanding the actual needs of our partners, which will actually lead to a win-win situation anyway.

Have you got any advice for future business developers?

Self growth mentality. To have an open mind, learning something new every day. To think that you will not only get in a meeting with a customer but you will get a chance to know a new person. This is very interesting because of course, we have multiple cultural backgrounds, and we should really value this.

Thank you, Ricardo. 🙂