Before buying an app, compare its return per dollar with more ad spend

Josh PelegSo, starting from the first question, I would always tend to agree with you, which is, stick with the thing that works because at the end of the day, the top five apps are making 400x more revenue than the bottom 25% of apps. And if you've hit that product-market fit, it's a bit like a flash in the pan, so you want to kind of hold on to it.

Josh PelegNow, building again from that and trying to build a second app comes with very similar risks to the first app and there's no guarantee you'll do it again. So which is why I would encourage a lot of founders out there to actually start exploring buying apps. And yes, this does add competition to my industry, but that's fine. There's enough to go around. And here, it's much easier to measure the ROI of your dollars spent. And one of the frameworks we use at Blue Throne is really the ROI of a dollar. So, if I have a current app and I know that if I invest $1 into this app today, I'm going to get back $50 by month 3 and then $200 by month 12, whatever it might be, you have this data.

Josh PelegWhen you're looking at buying another app that you want to apply your playbook to, you can say, "Hey, this app is going to cost me a million. And the ROI I expect is going to be X because I know their revenue is Y and their resubscriber rates is Z," et cetera, et cetera. You're then in a position to directly compare the ROI of that dollar to whether you spent a million more dollars on marketing your current app, because you should know that data. So, as founders, you're probably in a much more powerful position than you realize to actually go and analyze other apps in the market, especially if you're looking at apps within your niche, because you can directly compare what's their retention, what's their churn, what's their price points, LTVs, et cetera. And you can do a like-for-like comparison. And there's so much supply in the market because AI is enabling developers to build and execute and publish faster. You'll probably be able to find stuff that's kind of interesting to you.

David BarnardYeah, it's fascinating. I hadn't thought about it from that perspective. And this is one area I think a lot of folks, especially who are early in the App Store, like my peers who were building apps in 2010, 2015, and today they're doing millions of dollars a year in revenue, whether it's ASO or something else, having some kind of organic channel that's succeeding oftentimes is what helped propel those apps into the position that they're in today.