Sachel Ghani, Senior UA Manager at exmox, shares insights on user acquisition management and the gaming industry.
Sachel joined exmox in August 2023 as an experienced performance marketer. Having already been promoted to Senior UA Manager, he is a valuable member of the user acquisition team and his creativity and initiative are appreciated by all.
Originally from Lahore, Pakistan, Sachel moved to Hamburg seven years ago to earn his master’s degree at the Hamburg School of Business Administration. Although the only thing he knew about Hamburg before moving was the football team, he quickly came to love the city. After exploring a few industries, he settled into the gaming industry which he’s been passionate about since playing his first video game at six years old.
Read on to discover his favorite parts of UA, exmox, and the gaming industry, as well as advice he’d give to people wanting to enter the world of user acquisition.
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Q: What is your job title and general responsibilities at exmox?
A: My job title is Senior User Acquisition Manager. My tasks include acquiring new users for our apps: Testerup, Testerheld, and Empfohlen. These activities are based on completely different kinds of channels that allow us to acquire high-quality users.
Q: What drew you to the mobile games industry?
A: I’m a gamer myself. If I’m not doing anything, I’m playing games. I think mobile games are one of the most interesting industries to be in. You meet gamers, so there’s always something that you can talk about. Whenever we go to conferences, it’s very easy to meet people, because you can talk about the games you like and you have common ground. I’ve been interested in gaming since I was six; I think I played my first game on the Atari. Then we had a Sega 2 at home, then we had a PC for the longest time. Then I switched to Playstation 1, 2, 3, and Xbox. So I basically had every console that came out. And when I got the chance to switch to the gaming industry, I thought, “Okay, this is where I feel the most at home.”
Q: How has your role transformed from when you started?
A: It has been really exciting to be part of the growth of exmox and our team. When I first started I was able to contribute significantly to the growth of our networks, and the onboarding of new networks. Nowadays that is still the majority of my work, but I am also part of bigger, more strategic topics such as hiring and overall strategy.
Q: What’s your favorite part of your day or a task you genuinely look forward to?
A: The thing that I look forward to the most is after the weekend, when you come in and get to see the current status of the campaigns and create action items based on that. Then basically figuring my week out based on the data that I see on Monday, and I really enjoy that. I really feel like a kid sometimes when I launch campaigns and then get to look at the results. I really put in a lot of time into campaigns that I want to launch.
I love coming up with a creative idea and starting a campaign, and then seeing how it performs.
Q: What is your favorite thing about coming to work here?
A: My favorite thing about working at exmox is my team. You can do UA in different companies, the job itself doesn’t change that much. But the team is what makes a really big difference.
Q: What do you think makes exmox special? Why do you love working here?
A: My team, of course. But more importantly, for me, there’s a lot of autonomy to do my own things here. I feel very trusted to make the changes that I want to, not only for campaigns, but also for structure or new ideas.
My team is very open to testing new things and generating new ideas.
Q: If you could give advice to someone wanting to work in UA, what advice would you give them?
A: Don’t shy away from numbers. User acquisition is storytelling, where each number becomes a narrative element, contributing to the compelling story of a user’s journey and experience. Numbers just help you substantiate that you understand your audience.
Q: What’s a little known fact about yourself?
A: I host meet-ups for international people every two weeks. I tend to keep it a small group so that it’s easy for people to talk to everybody, but you basically gather at a place and get to know each other. The meet-up is called Socialising While Drinking, which matches a hobby of mine. I came up with the concept after the pandemic. I made most of my friends at events like this before the pandemic, so afterwards I wanted to start making more friends and meeting new people.
A lot of people stopped doing things like this, so I thought “If nobody’s doing to do it, then I can do it.”
I have a lot of favorite memories from these meet-ups. I know at least 20 to 30 people who have met other people at the meet-up and then became good friends that still hang out together. And I know some people who are dating, who met at this meet-up and they’re still dating after two years. Things like this are my favorite part of hosting these meet-ups, because I can actually see there is an impact to what I’m doing. I, myself, also made a lot of friends through this meet-up. So I’m really glad that I started this, otherwise, I wouldn’t have met them.
