Why AI Probably Won’t Kill Your App (But Ignoring It Will) — Eric Crowley, GP Bullhound

Strava (app for self-identified athletes, weak at price tiering) bought Runna, which takes people from couch to 5K/10K and turns them into athletes. Rationale per the seller's banker: (1) TAM expansion to non-athletes, (2) Runna adds a second paid tier Strava can offer as a bundle upsell to existing paid Strava users. Runna had integrated with Strava well before the acquisition. Post-deal the apps are kept separate (different use cases: episodic race training vs. ongoing activity posting) rather than merged, with integration decided later.

Co-founder Ben was a former coach for triathletes and runners, so knew what people pay for; co-founder Dom's team built an AI-native app that personalizes each run ('you ran a little slower on this block', how to speed up). Timed with the run-club trend among younger people. Integrated with Strava early. Runs strong performance marketing around episodic goals (training for a race).

Over the last two years every GP Bullhound CSS client has built or is actively evaluating web funnels, now that court rulings stop Apple jamming app review over external payment links. Use payment providers such as Paddle, Solidgate or Stripe to handle subscription billing and tax. Worth most at scale ($100-200M revenue means multiple millions of profit); Eiting says roughly past $1M/month revenue. Caveats from hosts: mature subs already pay 15% so the gain is not the full 30%, porting an existing subscriber base takes time, and some apps convert better in-app.

Bending Spoons buys apps/subscription businesses (e.g. Evernote, AOL) and within the first month lets go of ~97% of the acquired employees, lifting the product onto its existing ~600-person team rather than shutting it down. Then optimizes pricing and marketing, where it is expert. Hosts add: products with years of locked-in user data (Evernote) tolerate higher prices, and a large user base (AOL's older email users) can be cross-marketed other apps.

Tractive's GPS collar tracks the dog's movement; the app sends a notice when the dog has not been walked for a day ('Time to get up and go') and shows activity levels.