Buying vs. Building: Scaling Beyond a Single App — Josh Peleg, BlueThrone

With VC money, bought almost 100 small apps (QR code scanners, flashlights, radio apps) ranking on ASO keywords in their titles. Screened mainly on EBITDA and revenue, treating apps as financial assets, and paid little attention to retention, churn or conversion.

Screen for apps with product-market fit, a lot of organic traffic (word of mouth, K-factor, App Store search), a significant brand, strong retention and resubscriber rates, and a strong founding team. Minimum ~$500K annual revenue; budgets $2M-$50M. Deal structure flexes: founders can stay (some for 3 years) or take cash and leave after a short handover. Then invest in team to keep the app a category leader as a standalone company.

Bought a solo founder's music entertainment app at ~200K MAU (seven-figure deal, closed in two months). Hired a GM from Spotify to run it and grew the team from 5 to 15 people.

Multiple people across disciplines research and produce UGC videos showing the app with a CTA at the end. Individual UGC videos can cost as little as ~$5, but the team time is significant.

Built a physical merch line for RAID: Shadow Legends. Analyzed player segments and preferences; framed merch not as a new revenue stream but as a way to raise LTV (and so support more marketing spend). Price ladder: mug ~$6, t-shirt ~$20, premium hoodie ~$50, aimed at whales (~2% of users spending thousands).

Subscription captures most of the value; consumables and power-ups (e.g. discover two times more songs in your area) capture extra spend from users willing to pay more.

Solo technical founder in Brazil built from his bedroom, learned UA, backend and frontend himself, raised no VC, and sold to BlueThrone about 18 months after launch.

Target knowledge workers and argue that cutting screen time by 50% a week makes them more money in their job than the $120/year the app costs.

Started with a scrappy app that did not fully do what the marketing claimed, sold it through strong distribution, then built out the underlying tech. Priced at $29.99/year.

Seen several times: ahead of a sale, founders redesign the paywall to push a lifetime plan (e.g. $100 lifetime vs $50 monthly and $10 weekly), pulling revenue and EBITDA forward. Acquirers spot it and value the app lower.

Founder spending ~$50K/month on marketing cuts to ~$10K ahead of a sale to show profit for a better multiple; the app coasts on previously bought cohorts until downloads fall. Guest instead asks every founder their monthly marketing budget and how high they have pushed it, and prefers seeing spend pushed up.

Introduce a soft currency (gems, flowers, coins). Then offer a rewarded ad worth e.g. 10 coins, and coin packs (5, 10, 15 coins) at different price points, on top of the weekly/monthly/yearly/lifetime subscription steps. Deconstruct economies of top mobile games (RAID: Shadow Legends, Candy Crush, Supercell games) or hire a game-economy consultant.

Use the 'ROI of a dollar' framework: know what $1 of marketing returns on your current app (e.g. $50 by month 3, $200 by month 12). For a candidate acquisition, estimate the return on its price from its revenue, resubscriber rate, retention, churn and LTV, and compare like-for-like with spending the same amount on marketing your current app. Especially useful for apps in your own niche.

In Sensor Tower, stack downloads (and revenue) by app over time for a category. If each new entrant grows the total rather than taking share from the leader, there are untapped users, so a non-leader can still be worth buying.

After acquiring Runna, Strava kept it standalone and started offering subscriptions that include access to both products. Host did not know whether the bundle is priced higher or used to win more subscribers.