Interview with Carl Livie, CEO at JustPlay
Building a resilient business model requires leaders to understand what drives value, protect flexibility and adapt before complexity outpaces the business.
As economic uncertainty, shifting consumer expectations and rapid technological change reshape the business landscape, resilience has become as important as growth. For Carl Livie, Co-Founder and CEO of JustPlay, building a resilient business model means staying close to the fundamentals: understanding what creates value, testing assumptions, protecting optionality and knowing what an organisation is uniquely good at. Drawing on experience across investment banking, adtech and technology, Livie explains how leaders can balance ambition with adaptability and build businesses capable of navigating an uncertain future.
Your career has taken you from investment banking and adtech to leading a high-growth technology company. What was the turning point that changed the way you think about building businesses that can adapt to change rather than simply grow?
The biggest shift came when we started building JustPlay with our own money. Investment banking taught me how to analyse a business from the outside. AppLovin taught me how mobile products, advertising and user acquisition work from the inside. Bootstrapping teaches you something more basic: the business has to work outside the spreadsheet. From the beginning, we could see what it cost to acquire a user and how much revenue that user generated. We could not assume profitability would appear in five years because the market was huge and filled with well known players. So we had to think differently. That forced us to stay close to the mechanics: what creates value, what does it cost and what could break? How could we build our system and business model differently to others? Growth is great, but growth without understanding can simply mean a larger problem is arriving faster.
Economic uncertainty has become part of the business landscape. How should leaders evolve their business models to remain resilient in changing market conditions?
Leaders need to understand the assumptions underneath the model: demand, acquisition costs, pricing, access to capital, or dependence on one platform or partner.
A resilient business should not depend on one perfect version of the future. Leaders need to understand the assumptions underneath the model: demand, acquisition costs, pricing, access to capital, or dependence on one platform or partner. Then ask what happens when one assumption is wrong and how to react to a dynamic market and fast-shifting economics. The answer is not to stop investing or become permanently defensive. It is to preserve the ability to make decisions fast. We kept JustPlay lean for a long time, but being lean was never the mission. Nobody gets excited about joining a company whose grand purpose is to employ as few people as possible. However, growth is also not defined by headcount but by impact. The advantage was clarity. We could see what worked and invest behind evidence. Companies become fragile when their complexity grows faster than their understanding of the business.
Consumer expectations continue to shift across digital markets. Which trends do you believe will have the biggest impact on businesses over the next few years?
Attention is becoming more valuable, and users are becoming more aware of that value. Digital products have traditionally made a slightly vague promise: spend time here and perhaps you will be entertained, informed or connected. Users will increasingly ask what they receive in return. We flipped the script. At JustPlay, the exchange is direct. People play casual games. Advertising generates revenue. We share part of that value with the player. The reward is not a substitute for entertainment. Nobody wants to spend an hour with a terrible product because there may be 20 cents at the end. But rewards can make a good experience more exciting. I believe more digital companies will be forced to rethink who benefits from user attention in the near future. That does not mean every platform will pay every user. A few CFOs would probably stop sleeping. But the assumption that platforms capture all the value while users provide all the attention will face more pressure.
Sustainable growth depends on creating real value for customers. What do the strongest organisations do differently to build trust that lasts?
They make the value exchange clear, and then actually deliver it. In rewarded gaming, many products historically relied on high withdrawal thresholds. Users could see that they were theoretically earning something, but many gave up before they could cash out. The platform benefited from that breakage. We took the opposite approach. We tried to put even very small amounts into players’ hands quickly. In some cases, the first payment could arrive within minutes. From a narrow margin perspective, keeping the money would have been attractive. Most businesses enjoy keeping money. But paying users early created trust, and that trust led to stronger engagement. Strong organisations align their economics with a positive user outcome. When a business performs best because the user misunderstands the product, gives up or forgets to cancel, it may have growth at the beginning, but probably not much trust and therefore the growth will be capped sooner or later.
As businesses scale, maintaining focus can become just as challenging as achieving growth. What strategies have helped you balance ambition with long-term priorities?
Ambition is not measured by how many initiatives appear on the roadmap. It is measured by how large a problem an organisation can solve without losing clarity.
The most useful question is: what are we unusually good at? There are always adjacent opportunities. Some are strategic. Others create six meetings, a project team and eventually a product nobody remembers asking for. At different points, we could have expanded more aggressively into B2B, built a broader portfolio or followed strategies that might have produced a more fashionable valuation story. But every new direction has a cost. It requires people, management attention and new operating knowledge. We separate opportunities that strengthen the core platform from those that simply look exciting from a distance. Ambition is not measured by how many initiatives appear on the roadmap. It is measured by how large a problem an organisation can solve without losing clarity.
Leadership often means making difficult decisions without having all the answers. What principles guide your decision-making when the path forward is uncertain?
First, identify what can be tested rather than endlessly debated. Our industry produces a lot of data, so experimentation is central to how we work. But teams need to distinguish between testing a fundamental assumption and optimising a detail. You can spend weeks debating whether a button should be green or red. That feels scientific because everyone has charts. But when the underlying product is wrong, you have only created a beautifully tested failure. We learned that after building around 20 apps that did not work. They were not misunderstood masterpieces. Most were simply not very good. But it taught us tones. Second, protect optionality. When the future is unclear, I prefer decisions that let us learn before making a large irreversible commitment. Third, conviction should not become ego. My co-founder and I have worked together for more than a decade, and we disagree regularly. That is useful. A co-founder who agrees with every idea is pleasant for a week and expensive for the next ten years. Leadership without all the answers does not mean guessing confidently. It means creating a process that gives you a better chance of finding the answer.
What leadership qualities do you believe will matter most as businesses navigate an increasingly complex and fast-changing world?
Clarity, humility and trust. The world will remain uncertain. Good leadership is not pretending otherwise. It is giving people enough context and evidence to make strong decisions within that uncertainty. Leaders also need to know when their involvement is useful and when it turns them into the bottleneck. We did too much ourselves for too long at JustPlay. That helped us understand the business deeply, but eventually the job is not to prove that founders can do everything. It is to build a team that can do many things better than the founders. The strongest organisations will not be those where one person has all the answers. They will be those where people understand the goal, know the trade-offs and have the autonomy to act.
