Konstantin Sakhnov became a minority owner of the Moscow studio Justforward. He plans to help the company become a full—fledged mobile publishing house, as well as provide it with a pool of new projects – including with the support of the HSE.
Konstantin Sakhnov with the founders of Justforward, brothers Taepov
The amount of the transaction is not announced.
Sakhnov, who previously held the position of managing partner at Datcroft Games and head of mobile development at Rocket Jump, announced the use of his own funds and did not rule out the possibility of additional investment.
Justforward is a Moscow studio founded in 2015. Since the launch, she has been developing hyper-casual projects. Initially, she made them to order and for sale to third-party companies.
Since mid-2017, the studio has been working on its own portfolio of hypercausal projects. To date, they have generated more than 1.5 million organic installations.
Sakhnov explains his interest in the company by its stable revenue growth. Since the launch, the studio has been increasing revenue by 20-30% per year. At the same time, as noted in the financial documentation, its profitability is 90%.
At the moment, the company is interested in developing the publishing division. It is now a priority for Justforward.
“We plan to take mid-level hyper-casual games that have not passed the requirements of top publishers, but still have the potential for monetization, and build a funnel. Any GK developer can contact us, we will pour him traffic for the test if we think that the game is interesting. If the metrics are not bad, we will transfer best practices from our other games to the product and continue to pump traffic further,” explains Sakhnov’s business model.
One of the sources of future projects is HSE courses. On the basis of the educational platform, it is planned to launch a direction in which they will teach the development of hyper-casual games. The most interesting projects that students have obtained will be able to immediately receive Justforward support.
By the way, Justforward itself was also founded by former HSE students — Timur and Daniel Taepov.