Buy under-monetized apps and fix their paywalls instead of spending more on ads

Ryan ThorpeAnd I think that's kind of a case study of how we've been over the years, trying to do what we think is realistically the best idea. And what that led to was we had another option. So, we were able to acquire a habit app uh called Done. It's now called Do Habit. And we acquired that, and it came with a portfolio of extra apps, as well.

Ryan ThorpeYeah, so we the we quite we acquired this one. It came with uh another five or six apps kind of like as a bundle. And what was really great about this is we paid uh a pretty good price for it, but it was quite under-monetized, um there was room for growth. We knew that there was improvement in like paywalls and in-app subscriptions that we could make.

Ryan ThorpeAnd so, we we acquired the app and then within sort of 12 to 18 months, we made our money back. And then we thought, "Well, if we were going to spend the same amount of money on adverts, uh it's less reliable that we're going to make that same amount of money back, and we still own the habit tracker or the mobile app asset, and we own all the user base and the tech, as well, that we can sell on afterwards if we want to."

Ryan ThorpeSo, we kind of thought, "Maybe there's an opportunity here to build a portfolio, to build a- a roll-up of apps." And to be honest, that's what we did. So, for the next 5 years, 2020 to 2025 roughly, we just went at it. We we acquired another 30, 35 apps in total, and yeah, build that portfolio.

Joseph ChoiInteresting. Cuz January is the cheapest month, you're saying?

Ryan ThorpeYeah, exactly. And being that we had an app portfolio, our big mindset was always like, where do we allocate capital the most efficiently? Do we buy more apps or do we run ad spend? Most of the time, buying more apps was a better way to grow. But in periods of of the year like January, ad spend was was king, because that created a new baseline for the whole company every year of MRR, ARR kind of numbers.

Joseph ChoiYeah. Super like systematic. I I love it. And this is like where we've been going down like the scientific just the step-by-step for scaling. But let's look into these actual ads. So, do any of these like stick out to you immediately that could be interesting to look at?