Turning an App-Store Ban Into a Funnel
Gaming & EsportsSplitting a real-money tournament app in two: a free tier the app stores would host, used to retarget players into the paid product.
Overview
A Pakistan-based mobile gaming marketplace needed a first product leader to fix a weak MVP and the business model underneath it, inside a four-month engagement during the company's stealth year. Canvas Labs Partners rebuilt the product and the tournament economics, and designed the acquisition funnel that got around the platform policy blocking the category.
Thousands of paid signups
converted through a free tier the app stores would host
1,000 to 15,000+ participants
growth of a university gaming event used as the public launch moment
Pre-seed round closed
on investor materials built during the engagement
Challenge
App stores do not allow real-money competitive gaming, closing the category's normal distribution channel entirely. The company had a weak MVP, no product leader, and a business model that did not yet work at the small ticket sizes its market could support, all to be fixed inside a four-month contract during a deliberately quiet year before launch.
Solution
Canvas Labs Partners split the product in two: a free-to-play tier the app stores would host, with prizes small enough that losing cost nothing, built to acquire users the paid app could not reach directly. The paid app, with the larger competitions, was distributed outside the app stores entirely.
The free tier captured phone number and email on signup, turning an unmonetizable free player into someone retargetable through paid social, SMS and email campaigns back onto the paid product. Canvas Labs Partners also rebuilt the entry-fee and payout economics underneath both apps, and revamped the games and tournament-hosting logic, working directly with engineering and design as the company's first product function.
Canvas Labs Partners also supported the company's fundraising, building the pitch deck and financial model and handling the data side of investor conversations: revenue projections, CAC and LTV, and runway. A distribution partnership with a major telecom's gaming platform extended reach beyond the company's own apps, and a university gaming event in Karachi drove public launch awareness.
Results & benefits
The free-to-play funnel drove thousands of signups onto the paid product, the clearest evidence that the acquisition problem the app-store ban created was solvable rather than fatal to the category. The company closed its pre-seed round using the investor materials and financial model Canvas Labs Partners built, and launched commercially at the end of the four-month engagement. A university gaming event in Karachi that started around 1,000 participants grew into an extended, multi-thousand-student event used as the public launch moment, evidence that the funnel and the product work held up once real users arrived.
Customer
Pakistan-based mobile gaming marketplace
Services
- Product growth & operations analytics
- Go-to-market strategy & distribution
- Fundraising & investor materials
Tech stack
About us
Canvas Labs Partners is a software consulting team that designs and ships production agentic AI systems: multi-agent pipelines, tool-calling architectures, and human-governed automation, together with the trading infrastructure, blockchain, mobile, and product engineering those agents plug into. We publish our work as a case ledger rather than a portfolio, so every claim on this site links to the engagement behind it. Engagements follow the same four-step discipline, Map, Bound, Instrument and Govern, whatever the stack, and every entry in the ledger carries a result we are willing to be measured against.
Delivered individually, in a prior role, by one of Canvas Labs Partners’ founding team members. Not by the firm itself.
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