How Southeast Asia’s coolest gaming startup was inspired by a fart app

Anton Soeharto onstage at Tech in Asia Jakarta 2015 earlier today.

Anton Soeharyo’s startup now looks like one of Asia’s best-funded and coolest gaming firms. So much so that it all looks so easy. But that’s not quite the case, explained Anton today onstage at Tech in Asia Jakarta 2015.

The Indonesian native founded Touchten back in 2009 even though he’s not a coder. Not being held back by the technicalities of a game helps him to think up new ideas, he explained to the audience. “I know my limitations,” he added. And so he focuses on the ideas.

The startup came about when he and his brother were gifted US$1,000 by their parents. They decided to pool the money to build something that can make a difference. Feeling that Indonesians are usually end-users of products rather than creators, the duo wanted to build something new. He brought in his cousin as the CTO – and that’s how the startup got off the ground.

The proliferation of iPhones was fuelling a boom in all kinds of apps and was changing the face of gaming. Gamers no longer needed to buy extra hardware or pricey games from a store, so Anton was drawn to Apple’s App Store. That’s when he noticed something else. There was a fart app from the US that was making US$60,000 per day. “If a fart can sell so much money, I wanted to get into the game,” he quipped.

Gaming the system

Inspired by that fart soundboard app and with a casual game in mind, he needed a theme to go with it. So he looked towards what he calls his passion – eating. “You can see my size,” he said to the giggling audience. The end result was Sushi Chain, which he made initially only for iOS because that’s where the monied users are.

Touchten team.

Anton picked out sushi after searching through the App Store and seeing that there were few apps at the time that used the word sushi. He thought it would be a good way to drive organic downloads in the increasingly crowded App Store. The team still uses that strategy when it’s coming up with new games, but now it’s done in less of a hit-or-miss way.

antonsoeharyo recommends tools such as SearchMan & Sensor Tower for developers looking to improve app store SEO #tiajkt2015 #TechInAsia

— Anna Ercilla (@annaercilla) November 12, 2015

The naming is important, Anton explained, because it ensures the game won’t be buried under the millions of other apps available – and it also saves on marketing expenses. With cost-per-install becoming insanely expensive (as much as US$5 for an ad that leads to an install on Android, he added), it’s a way to avoid “throwing money at ad networks.” This SEO-baiting explains the name of the recent Target Acquire – because Target is a popular US retail chain, so it gets a lot of searches.

Leveling up

Milestones