Sociaaal · B2C · AI-native app studio
Buy apps that went viral and are now declining, then grow them again
Bought 6-year-old Celebs mid-decline; now bigger than ever, ~$300K+/month
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What they did
Look for apps that look like short-term viral hits but tap a broad, lasting interest (e.g. celebrity lookalike curiosity). Buy them after the viral peak while revenue is falling and sellers don't know how to grow them. Judge on data: can we scale it profitably long-term and 20x revenue, making multiples of the acquisition price. Then run the studio's UA machine plus dozens of A/B tests a month per app to lift ARPU (the LTV/CAC loop).
What happened
Celebs is 6 years old and bigger than ever; similar size to Litstick (~$300K+/month).
In their words
The Superwall Podcast · Patrick Stuart-Constant & Pablo Sánchez - $16M AI CEOs: How to Make $1.3M/Month With AI Apps“It's spotting mainly by looking at data um apps which may look like a short-term viral sort of success. And you know, like that's one, we bought it, and like a lot of our apps, we actually bought after they had a viral peak when they were declining.”
“if we can buy an app and we can 20x its revenue and make a lot of money doing it, and, you know, make multiples and multiples of the acquisition price, then it's been a good uh it's been a good investment for for us.”
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More from this episode
- Sociaaal: Run the same style of test ads for apps you might build or buyStrong ad results count as a key data point in buy decisions; no numbers
- Celebs: Drop the paywall after onboarding; show the lookalike result fast and ask laterMore revenue per user; later paywalls converted the users who used to drop
- Sociaaal: Rerun old A/B tests that lost once the rest of the app has changedOnboarding paywall removal lost several times, then won big
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