Buy about 100 small utility apps valued mostly on profit

Josh Peleg… interesting. So, essentially, Blue Throne's goal is to become the number one app acquirer in the world. And the way it started is pretty different to the way it looks today. So, the way it started was a kind of spray-and-pray approach. Blue Throne saw all these little apps doing decent revenue, and we're talking about QR code scanners, flashlight apps, the small radio apps that we all know and saw back in the day. And the play was to go wide.

Josh PelegSo, initially, Blue Throne raised a bunch of VC money and they bought almost 100 apps, the smaller ones, and it was a very much go-wide approach. And what we learned at that point was that so many of them have been pumped full of revenue at the time of sale. So after you buy them, they start to die. But also, because they're quite shallow products, their longevity is very limited. And we learned the lesson the hard way. So, following this, we had a new shift in strategy. We went from Blue Throne 1.0 to Blue Throne 2.0.

David Barnard… is not interested in, but there's a lot of players in the market who do. So, before we get into the new strategy, what kind of apps were you looking for during that time? And what were the signals of a decent acquisition? What signals said, "Hey, don't buy this app"? Because a lot of people listening to this podcast, maybe they spun up a side project and, "Hey, it's doing 20k in MRR," and maybe they want to flip it. What does that look like?

Josh PelegSo, I would never push someone away from flipping it at the early stage. It's definitely doable. And the ad market today, in terms of buyers and sellers, is in a very liquid position. There are lots of sellers and there are lots of buyers. So if you do want to sell, you'll probably find the right price point. Now, when we were doing the strategy, a lot of things we were looking for were financial based. So we were looking for strong EBITDA and strong revenue, and we were less concerned with the core app metrics, things like the retention, the churn, conversion to paying, et cetera.

David BarnardOkay.