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Sourcehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B06YNXmPXSE
Readwise URLhttps://read.readwise.io/read/01kv42we7wvava99hfcjctqgpm
Readwise ID01kv42we7wvava99hfcjctqgpm
Date2026-04-10
AuthorApp Masters
Categoryvideo
Cover imagehttps://i.ytimg.com/vi/B06YNXmPXSE/sddefault.jpg?v=69d56225

What is up App Nation? It is Steve P. Young. No matter where I am at in the world, I’m going to be with you live every Friday and today I’ve got a phenomenal guest. I’ve been an advisor for this company for a long time. I’ve got to meet this guy and he’s got such

great insights. How do you build an app portfolio by actually purchasing apps? And as someone who just closed a deal this week, meaning I literally got the app in my app portfolio and the money is already in escrow. It’s a pretty lucrative deal. I’m super excited to learn from him from this entire experience. So without further ado, let’s bring in my buddy Josh.

All right, Josh. Let me give you a proper intro. Josh is the VP of M&A and business development at Blue Throne. If you guys have seen emails from Blue Throne, just definitely reply. He’s deployed and Josh, I think we had the wrong number but over 150 million >> 23. 23 deployed. Uh but I’ll give an intro about the details of the book.

Currently at Blue Throne, we’re over 23 million deployed into killer apps. But you managed like hundreds of millions of dollars in actual like UA, right? As well? >> No, so not UA but my so my background’s in mobile gaming. Um I used to work for one of the biggest game developers in the MENA region, potentially in the world. It was a company called Plarium and some of the gamers out there will know our biggest game which was called Raid: Shadow Legends, which is all over YouTube and pretty heavy marketing, but that game was pulling in 1.2 billion a

year at its peak. Um and so I was managing uh M&A for them and for that we had quite a sizable budget upwards of 100 million to essentially acquire mobile gaming studios around the world. Okay. So, you’ve been just acquiring stuff for a very long time. And I know you >> Trying to Trying to at least, you know, when you when you have these big deals, they don’t always go through because the the price tag can be pretty Um just the funny thing with and listen, you probably know this as well as I do. You work on 20, 40, 50 deals and only

one goes through because cuz that they’re big deals, right? They’re big things and you can’t do that many uh in any given year. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I I got you, man. I think it’s interesting. I’ve been lucky. I mean, the deals I’ve pursued we’ve gone uh gone uh through, but I’m not pursuing a lot of deals either. So, I’m very picky with with what I do. But yeah, man. Well, I know you prepared a presentation for us and I’m super excited. And I honestly, you know, I’ve read a lot of books, Josh, about like, you know, instead of buy versus build, there’s the

Main Street Millionaire by Cody Sanchez. She talked about this a lot, too. And so, it’s very timely for me and I was just kind of refreshing my brain as I was working on this deal. And so, this is going to be a great refresher. Even though I’m already done now, it’s mine and now, but I’m I’m interested in hearing your thoughts. So, let’s pull up this presentation and kind of talk about this Wall Street method to building an app studio. All righty. So, so let’s let’s kick it off with um a touch about BlueThrone, then I’m going

to frame the presentation as to who should be listening to this, who should be ignoring this, and who can learn from this. And then we’ll kind of run through the decks and we’ll show data and case studies and what you should do and you shouldn’t do, etc. So, reversing a few seconds, what the hell is a BlueThrone? Who is BlueThrone? It’s a great question. BlueThrone is essentially a an app portfolio and we’re on a mission to be the number one app portfolio in the world and we do things a little bit differently. Blue Throne called me up two years ago

with a thesis when they were trying to steal me away from my current job. And the thesis two years ago is actually the same thesis today. We’re still deploying on that thesis and I’ll tell you guys what it is. The thesis is it’s never been easier to scale an app to one, two, maybe three million dollars in ARR. It’s not easy. Still requires a ton of time, focus, failures, grit. But it’s never been easier because you don’t need the best product. You don’t need the best UI UX. You don’t need the best infrastructure. All you need is a

product that kind of works and one distribution channel that kind of works as well. Doesn’t even have to be super optimized. And you can hit a million ARR just with Reddit or TikTok or Meta or whatever. That being said, it’s never been more difficult to scale from two, three million ARR to 15, 20 million. It’s really difficult because at that point you’ve got to become an expert in all the different pieces that make up an app or an app business. You have to have very robust testing mechanisms, throwing out a ton of AB tests. You’ve got to

have multiple distribution channels. You’ve got to optimize your infrastructure for cost savings. And at that point it’s very, very hard to do. So Blue Throne was created to find the apps that have done the easy part, found product market fit, done the zero to one. And Blue Throne comes in and says, “All right, you guys have done an amazing job. We want to acquire you with the team, with the app and boost you all the way to 10, 15, 20 million plus and we build the teams to do this.” So the whole team is made up of guys from the app industry, from Apple, from

AppsFlyer, from the ad tech industry, companies like ironSource, and from the mobile gaming industry and consumer tech industry in general. And this is the playbook we’ve been running for quite a few years now, coming up to five years with pretty, pretty good success if I say so myself. Um and we’ll look at one of those successes later on in the deck. So, so that’s the angle we’re coming at this from. Uh, we buy apps. Um, buy apps that are doing anything from 200k a year up to 10 million a year. Um, but enough about us. Let’s jump back

into the slide deck. What I wanted to talk about today, um, yeah, this is about us with a really beautiful spelling mistake at the top. The really I don’t know what that is, but let’s let’s pretend it means the real, okay? Yeah, we’re we’re fully remote. Uh, we’re in growth mode. We’ve doubled our ARR since last year. We raised VC money to get going, but let’s move on. Let’s talk about the viewers cuz this is why we’re here, right? >> Okay. So, jump one more slide for us. Okay. Okay, so we’re going to talk about how to build your studio the Wall Street

way. Um, you should be listening, guys, if you have one of a few things. If you have an app that’s doing, honestly, up to 5k a month, this is interesting for you. Potentially even around two or three k a month, this is interesting for you. If you have an app doing that money and you’re thinking about for my next app, for my expansion, do I buy or do I build again? This is for you. Mhm. Additionally, if you have money in the bank,

anywhere from 5k upwards, and you want to buy an asset or buy a project and you’re interested in the app business, this is also for you. Cuz the beautiful thing about apps is you can find a great profitable strong business that costs you 5k on the smaller side, all the way up to 10 to 50 million. All right? So, that there’s a space for everyone here, but that’s the kind of questions we’re going to be answering. This is not for you if you have not built something yet and you don’t have money in the bank and

you’re just kind of getting started on your entrepreneurial journey and you’re still kind of building out your chops. You’re still trying to figure out what works for you and what doesn’t. If if that’s you and you’re listening, I would really recommend go find the AI tools that work, use Rock, use Lovable, use Claude, use screendesign.com for your UI/UX, use RevenueCat for monetization, use TikTok for marketing, and go and fiddle. Go and try and build something. Just go and play with it because we’re really in a in a kind of golden age of being able to do that um on your own. But, moving forward, we’re going to be breaking down

when should you buy, when should you build, and how do you execute an acquisition of an app. Um and it’s really awesome that Steve just completed an acquisition because we’ll be able to use him for his experience insights at the same time. Um >> Josh, if I may, like, why you said if you’ve never done this, why is it not the path for you? Cuz all these other books say, "Hey, as long as you’ve, you know, want always be If you’ve always wanted to be an entrepreneur, here’s the quickest path

to entrepreneurship." Because part of like this philosophy and what like I like what you said was, “Hey, they’ve already done the and it’s sort of the hard part in these books is finding product market fit.” Part of the the reason why startups and buying is so attractive is one of the hardest things about building a business is just getting it going. And so, you’re buying an asset that is already going. And, you know, as long as you’ve done the due diligence to see that the there’s another path forward, it’s a great acquisition because there’s

money coming into the door. They’ve already have product product market fit. But anyways, like, why do you say, “Hey, if you’ve never done this, don’t buy an app?” It’s It’s a great question, and I’ll reiterate, don’t do it if you haven’t uh you’ve done an app before, and I’ll tell you why. Let’s say you buy an app tomorrow, and let’s keep the number small. Let’s say you buy an app for $10,000 tomorrow. It’s a habit tracking app, super simple. All right, there’s no social elements, there’s no gamification yet. It’s a really simple product, okay? From tomorrow, you as a founder, let’s call the founder Steve. Steve has never

done anything with apps before. From tomorrow, Steve is down 10K. He’s just spent 10K. If Steve doesn’t know how to appreciate, how to grow that app, he’s going to be sitting there with an asset that he cannot change, he cannot upgrade. Let’s Let’s do a few examples, right? If Steve does not know how to run a couple of AB tests, if Steve does not know which markets to expand into, if Steve does not know which distribution channels are going to actually work for this app, and more importantly, how to

operationally execute in those distribution channels, you’re not going to be able to grow the app. If you don’t know how to run a UA campaign, how to make UGC TikToks, how to do Reddit marketing, you’re not going to be able to grow it. So, it’s kind of dangerous, right? And we’re going to talk about this a bit later about making sure you have a plan from day one to grow the asset you’ve just bought. Yeah. Okay, I like it. So, okay, the most important points here is when you’re thinking about building your app studio, taking it from where it

is now to the future, and you’re seriously considering buying stuff, you need to take off your product hackery brain, and you need to put on your Wall Street brain. And you need to start treating apps like institutional assets, not just a side project that you made because you had a cool idea. And this means you want to be thinking about how you’re going to construct your portfolio, which is the apps, and you want to think about thesis-driven acquisitions. And thesis-driven acquisitions, what does that mean? It means you have an

idea, and let’s do an example, you you believe that because vaping is really big right now, and it’s bigger than it’s going to be bigger than cigarettes, you want to ride that wave, and you want to build an app that helps people quit vaping. Cool. That’s what we call a thesis. A thesis is an idea about where the future’s going to go. You need to back up your thesis with data, so you need to find, hey, market share of vapes versus cigarettes is X versus Y, Z percent more people are using vapes. Back it up with data, and then you’ve got a cool thesis, and you can say, "Okay, I’m now ready to deploy

money based on my thesis and you can go buy Vapor. Okay. Second point is the app economy is massively inefficient and this has been true for all the years Steve’s been operating and all the years I’ve been in this business too. Most founders don’t know their apps true value and the gap between their asking price and the value the app is worth to you is often quite large and that’s the delta you guys want to play and that’s where your your returns are going to come from. Third point is that fewer deeper bets

will beat spray and pray every time. Stay focused. Don’t look at a ton of stuff at once. Just be really really focused about what you’re looking for. Blue Throne used to have over 50 apps and we actually sold them all and we started again because we realized doubling down in three, four, five apps is way more effective than having 50 plus. And the fourth point, you need to know your category, you need to know your multiples and you need to have your playbook ready for when the deal closes. Don’t just fall in love with a certain deal because it appeals to something in

your ego, something in your personality. You like the idea of being a buyer, it sounds kind of sexy. That’s kind of a recipe for disaster. You need to know the data behind it. Let’s crack on. What else have we got? Gosh, if I made the I like what you said, fewer deeper bet and tell me like when you had 50, what were some of the complications that that you guys were facing and then you decided, hey, this is not the right path. Let’s really focus on the three or four that we can really get to as you said, hey, they’re

doing one to five, can we get it to 10 to 20 ARR? Yeah, the the issue there what was depth of product. We ended up buying apps that were quite shallow products, things like QR code scanners and PDF scanners and when you buy the app and you’re thinking, how do I double this in 30 days? Your levers you’re able to pull are limited. Compare that to a deep app. Now a deep app is something I define as it has multiple use cases. There are multiple levers to pull. A good example would be

a dating app. Think about all the changes you can make within a dating app on day one. You can change the algorithm for matching. Uh UI/UX decisions will have massive impact on use case. You can change your internal economy. You can mess around with your soft currencies, your pricing, your packages. There’s a lot of levers to pull. Whereas, compare that to a very basic app, like maybe a PDF scanner, there’s just not that much you can do, right? So, how are you going to double it? I see. I like it. All right, speaking of signature scanner, he’s here as well.

Hey, I don’t know the name, but good to see you. And then we got Josh Williams, and we will see him on Monday as well. >> great man, Josh Williams. Yeah. All right, Josh. Buy versus build. Okay. So, when you want to think about buying quite seriously, you are looking for an app that really has a validated user base before before you start. And the benefit of this versus building is you’re building without a user base. So, you can buy a user base ideally you know how

to monetize better than the current app owner. Um the second thing with buying is that all this data already exists. Instead of building and having an idea and and kind of market researching your idea, you can look into the data of that current app. And it replaces your guesswork because they’re real numbers. And you can make an educated decision based on those numbers. Thirdly, if you’re paying, you know, two to four X on annual revenue for product market fit, this can sometimes be cheaper than massive costs when it comes to building. And and this is more

relevant for the app studios, for the guys in geographies that have expensive head counts, like the US or or London or Paris. Salaries are expensive, and operational costs are expensive, and you can save that sometimes by just buying straight up instead of investing two years into building. And I think the best tip when it comes to buying is is if you’re able to buy distribution along with a product. So, a product that has proven distribution channels as opposed to having to build those from scratch in a new app. And

moving on to the build side, like I don’t want to spend the whole time just like crapping on this idea of building cuz building is awesome and I’m also building apps on my weekend and it’s never been more fun. And I think the time to build is when you really are uniquely positioned to have a very unique product insight in a market. And that insight is currently not being executed well upon. Um let’s do an example, right? Let’s go back to the vaping app. If your unique insight is that people want to quit vaping because they

want to be more sporty, they want to do a marathon, they want to do a high rocks, then you can you and let’s say you have dates to back that up, right? You can use that in your app and you can help people quit vaping by then encouraging them to run a 5K. And if you have like this unique insight, that’s super super powerful. Secondly, you want to build when you have distribution already in your app studio and that could be a really well-oiled user acquisition machine, like a really good UA manager, or it could be someone who’s just like cracked on TikTok and knows how to launch 10 UGC accounts within 2 days,

right? That that’s super powerful. Um what else we got here? Uh so, yeah, unique insight plus defensible moat. Defensible moat’s an interesting one and we’ll talk about defensibility quite a lot today. Um defensibility in this age when anyone can just spin up a project on Roark or Lovable is super important and you need to ask yourself if I build this, can I defend it? And if I buy this, can I defend it? And what assets do I have at my availability to defend these apps? Yeah, I love it. I mean, one of the

things that I’ve when I was looking back at like a couple of the different acquisitions that I’ve made, Josh, that I felt like, “Okay, this was a success.” It was your third, one, two, three, your fourth point on the buy. We’re buying distribution, right? When you already have distribution embedded, that’s when I’m like, “Okay, I just need to add one more or two more channels on top of this to grow it.” And what you said was so valuable, and it is true for those who don’t believe it is the app that we acquired, Josh, literally it’s ASO and

Apple Ads. That is it. And they’ve been able to, you know, it was a pretty size, you know, I won’t say the exact number, I told you privately, but like it was a pretty decent size deal, and it was a little bit scary at first, but I did all of the things that you’re talking about, which makes me feel good, too, cuz I really looked at the market to see if it was defensible from AI, like and it’s a category that I really like as well. And so, I felt like, “All right, it was a good purchase.” But the best

purchases, the acquisitions we’ve made is distribution is already embedded in there. Yeah. So, so you’re saying the app you bought had distribution through Apple Search Ads, probably for defensibility, right? He’s defending his own keywords. Uh And ASO. And I got a question with with the ASO, without kind of revealing too much, Yeah. is his real estate split across lots of high-ranking keywords, or is has he just got one that’s a high performer? It’s a couple of um that’s a high

performer. Yeah. Okay, so to the risk of split, right? So, it’s not just one keyword that’s bringing all the traffic that if he loses that keyword, he’s in trouble. You’ve got to split across a few, which is a bit more uh safe. Y- Yeah. I mean, yes, because it’s I mean, the way I to give you guys all the details, it’s the primary keyword has a few long-tail ones, and it was a category that I also already fascinated about. Like I was like, "Okay, this seems like I personally wanted to Back

to your build versus buy, I personally wanted to build this app. But it was in the health and fitness space, and I was just like, “Man, I got to find somebody to actually get in front of the video and do all this other work.” But it was a keyword that I knew of, and I felt like, all right, I know this space, this space is growing, you know, and so when I saw it, I was like, oh my god. And when you said it was easy and I was like, dude, it was easy cuz the guys made it easier because I have a platform. They’re like, yeah, I watch your stuff. I just followed your ASO advice and we built this big business. I

was like, dang, dude, like this is crazy. And so the one thing I would say is, look, I think build versus buy depends on your mindset. Like I built first at Masters and I am building our own apps and then it put me in a position to buy and I almost feel like it’s two different brains, Josh. Like you and I may default to buy because that’s where our brain goes to, right? Like we look at numbers, we see opportunities, whereas a developer out there might be like, hey, I know what to

do. And so I would say almost here when you’re trying to decide buy versus build, like if your default mode is build, I think that’s okay for the beginning cuz like you said, like it took me a lot and it took me a couple of years trying to build our own app to a sustainable level then I was just like, bro, like this is taking up way much too too much time. And for me, Josh, like when I decided to buy, I was like, you know, what? It’s going to force me to really focus on the numbers. Because when I was building, like App Masters agency was the big money thing and so it

was a little like a side project. Now that I bought something, it needs to take up more of my mental space because now I’ve got money on the line and I got to make this investment work, so to speak. Yeah. And I I want to double click on something you said earlier cuz you you kindly revealed that it’s a it’s a health and fitness app. So you know, founders out there, guys, health and fitness should normally be a be like a big red flag if you’re looking at buying or building because I’ll tell you why.

Health and fitness is one of those categories that has many, many very well-funded companies in them. And why is that a bad thing? They generally have really well-oiled UA machines and CPIs in health and fitness are very high. So, if you’re competing with MyFitnessPal, um if you’re competing with with Strava on your UA to actually buy users, then you’re you’re probably going to get outbid by them on the UA stuff. And you guys just can’t compete. It’s kind of not fair, but it’s just how the game

works really. So, what Steve’s done is really smart because he’s found something with what we call organic traffic, which is coming in through ASO and keywords, which is super super smart because he’s not going to have to compete on paid user acquisition. So, that’s super cool. Yeah, I like thanks, man. I mean, you could say it was a bad deal. I’m okay with that, too. What’s up from Bali? We got Peter here as well and my and my buddy Moyo is here as well. All right, Josh, and you got your decision-making. I really like this, so I’m going to key in on this and I’m going to blow this up for you guys.

Perfect. Thank you. By the way, guys, anyone listening and they see something they disagree with or they want to learn more about, throw a comment in the the chat and I will address it and I’ll try and I’ll try and give some insight there as well. But, um I wanted to throw this up as a decision-making matrix for you guys out there and take a screenshot if if it helps. And I’m not going to go through all the points, but essentially this is the signals you’re looking for when you’re deciding whether to buy or build. So, let’s start in the top left at when you have a strong signal to buy. Here, if you have unique domain

knowledge that you can apply to the app you’re looking at that the founder hasn’t applied or doesn’t have, that’s super valuable. And if there is clear and proven appreciation potential with this app, then that’s also a strong signal. I’ll give you an example. If you see an app running um a weekly subscription package and you’re pretty confident you can run a monthly one at a higher price point and it will convert, that’s like a unique insight. That’s a unique opportunity that the founder has not done. Um I’ll just double click on one more point there.

Having 1 year of app history with the app you’re looking at is super important. One year minimum. Just so you can see seasonality, you can see trends, and you can have enough data to base your decisions off of. Um so that’s super important. And finally, uh really, really important, the founder of the app needs to be aligned with you. They need to want to sell. There needs to be a founder motivation to sell there as well, otherwise you’re you’re probably going to enter into a negotiation that isn’t going to go anywhere because they don’t actually want to sell. That’s important. Now, when should you not buy? This is so, so important.

Is the founder the product? What do I mean by this? The founder of the app currently, is he doing is he dancing on TikTok for the app? Cuz if he is, you’re not going to do that. Like he is the guy dancing and driving views and downloads on TikTok, right? You’re not going to do that. Is there no data available? Is he not tracking his cohort data? Has he only been around for 2 months? Super, super risky. There’s no data to value it, to base your decision off of. Uh and I’ve written there in capitals, defensibility. Is the app defensible?

Does it have some sort of defensibility? So, with Steve’s recent purchase, it had that. It had keywords that are ranking high, probably over a a certain period of time, and that’s defensible. Um moving on to the build side because again, building is also super important and and pretty easy these days. Again, if you have a distribution mode already prepared, uh like maybe you have a Facebook group. In fact, I spoke to a founder this week who runs a Facebook group for um women looking to get married.

And she wanted to build an app to help them plan their budgets. And I was like, this is a great idea because she has distribution advantage. She has that Facebook group to push the app to to to her her users already, so that’s super strong. Um What else? We’ve got that network effect, that’s super important. Maybe you have network effects in your app studio already. Maybe you have already set up like 20 TikTok accounts for your previous app that you can just start running users in and around between. Um And then onto the negative side, like

when should you not build? It kind of goes back to the health and fitness point, which is when the category is flooded with well-funded competitors, you’re going to lose the user acquisition game against them if you play by their rules. And um again, if there’s like hardware involved or complex integrations or complex API calls or some sort of enterprise or B2B solution needed, this overcomplicates the app game. And I think the the beautiful thing about the app game in general, and I’d love your your take on this, Steve, but I think the beautiful

thing about the app game is that to build, to launch, to scale, it’s super easy. You need one person, two people, handful of dollars, like that’s it. And as soon as you add hardware, B2B, or complex integrations, that like pops off, right? You becomes much harder, right? Yeah, absolutely. Especially if you’re trying to bootstrap it, Josh. Like and I always ask my founders, like are you bootstrap or you VC-funded? Because it’s a different whole game, right? We worked with VC-funded and Josh, like bro, AS does not matter as much. We’re just trying to You know what I mean? We’re just trying

to spend and we’re just trying to grow as big as we potentially can. And so, yeah, man. I like it. Should we move on to the next slide? Let’s do it. All right. All right. So, this slide is going to save you a million dollars. Don’t buy an app if you see an issue in the app that you see on this slide. Let’s go through them because this is like big mistakes you want to avoid. So, revenue quality. What do I mean by this? Is the revenue from lifetime purchases? Because if it is,

I’ve got a a harsh truth for you. It’s not recurring. It’s a one-time, never coming back piece of revenue. So, if the founder is pushing lifetime and they’re they’re telling you it’s ARR, it’s technically lying cuz it’s not recurring. That’s dangerous. You’re looking for like really stable revenue, really high retentive revenue, monthly subscriptions, weekly subscriptions, annual subscriptions. It can be ad revenue if the organic traffic or the downloads are pretty stable as well. So, that’s one thing to look out for.

Second one is integration risk. We’ve kind of touched upon this, but if the app is built around a founder’s personal brand or some undocumented systems or some undocumented unique insight they have, that’s very hard for you to to run with after the acquisition. So, that’s something you want to just be aware of. Churn bomb. Aggregate data, aggregate churn can look stable while recent cohorts deteriorate. You want to make sure you’re looking at cohorts by the time of acquisition, not overall, because cohort health changes over time. And if

someone’s sitting there thinking, “What the hell is a cohort?” Let me quickly break that down. A cohort works like this. We are currently in April. And over the course of April, from the 1st to the end of April, I will buy or I will acquire a set number of users. Let’s say 100 users. And my cohort for April are those 100 users. And I want to know how much revenue do those 100 users produce

1 month after April, 2 months after April, 3 months after April, etc., etc. And you want to be measuring these cohorts individually month by month, cuz then you can get a real feel of the health of the business. Are the cohorts producing more money as time goes on, less money? Are they they less people, more people? So, it’s important to be measuring like that. And the final point is about market timing. You don’t want to buy when a category is is at its peak. A good example is like during the crypto boom, if you’d have bought a crypto app

at the peak, you would be sitting there with with nothing in your hands right now. So, you want to really, a little bit like stocks, you want to try and not buy stuff at the peak or towards the the peak either. Yeah. I like it. All All but how do you actually do this? How do I even buy apps? I mean, God, that seems so complicated. It’s It’s not that complicated, guys. Uh just follow these these quick steps. I mean, first of all, you want to source apps, you want to screen apps, and you want to be rejecting 90% of the stuff you see at this stage. Um and if

you’re looking at this thinking, “Well, how do I find apps?” First of all, there’s a couple of great websites. You’ve got uh my friend Charlie who runs Appic, which has listings of apps you can buy. You’ve got uh I think acquisition.com has some apps, and you’ve got a couple of other kind of online databases uh where you can find apps to buy. Um that’s the easiest kind of low-hanging fruit place to start, and often they have fairly um like low-value listings, like $5,000, $10,000, $100,000. So, really affordable stuff.

Um the second thing you want to do is chat to the founder, understand their motivations. And this is so, so important because an acquisition is really like about also about two personalities and two motivations coming together. You really want to make sure the founder is motivated, you guys get along, there’s a relationship there that you can build on because you’re going to be working together for a separate of time. And there needs to be some sort of strong relationship there, some strong level of trust as well. I really can’t emphasize that enough. Then you want to start getting data, all the things we’ve talked about already,

revenue cohorts, downloads, ASO stuff, etc. After this, you have a lot of pieces from which to build a offer or valuation. And if it’s a more expensive app, you want to be doing modeling, and you can use Claude to help you. Ask Claude to help build a three-scenario model. It doesn’t have to be investment banker level quality. If it’s If it’s not that much money, like you’re all good. Um if the price is lower and it’s like an

app worth less than $50,000, you might not even need a model, and it might be pretty predictable at that stage anyway. Then you move to an LOI, which stands for letter of intent. This is not a binding legal document. It just says, "Hey, I intend to acquire the app at X value. I need you to stay for Y period of time. Um and that’s when you start formal due diligence. You’ll probably want to bring in a third party for this. So, maybe an accountant friend or an FP&A friend who can just help run through the numbers and check that everything checks out. And then you’re good to close. You want to close, you want to do a transition

period, which is when the founder will hand off all the app knowledge, the documents, the data, the systems, the logins to you. And that normally takes between 1 and 3 months. And that’s the really honestly, Steve, I got that’s the most important point because I’ve seen so many deals fail in that transition period because the founder thinks it’s not really their app anymore, the buyer hasn’t really got the app yet, and that’s where things get really risky. So, my top tip is during the transition period, stay like

on top of everything more so than any other time. That’s when things tend to go wrong. Yeah, I like it. Hey, Josh, I want to run through through some numbers with you. I think this will be fun because I think you can then just tell me, “Hey, Steve, this is This is sort of how I thought about it.” And I want to show people who are might be a little bit scared on this because I do think that number one, the what you said about the source and screen, I’ve always found You guys tell me because you guys have done a lot more purchases. I’ve always found that it’s a

little bit easier to work with a broker because the times that I’ve been like, “Oh, I got to buy this app.” And I’ve reached out to the developer, bro, it’s been like crickets. But when you work with a broker, and Josh mentioned Charlie Ryan from App Epic, there’s Evelyn, and that’s who I bought it from. But there’s these brokers, and it’s a little bit easier cuz they’ve already done the hard work in kind of talking to the buyer be like, “Yo, that number that you have in your head about the sale price, that’s probably too high.” And they could kind of talk to the founder.

So, I found it a little bit easier than actually just directly buying from the actual builder. Absolutely. I mean, it makes your life easier in the in in the early days. Um I think if it’s your first time using a broker, it is pretty smart. And and you threw out a few names there, which are great people. So, I would I would go to them, get them to help you. Um once you get to the bigger stuff and you’re more familiar, like generally you want to avoid the broker because the broker will take a cut um on the price, which is either less money in your pocket or less money in in the seller’s

pocket. It can affect valuation. But, definitely for your first time, if you want someone to hold your hand and make sure you’re not making some some core mistakes, highly recommend. Okay. Now, let’s run through this some numbers because I’m going to tell you the exact numbers that I did. Now, I’m not saying this is the you know, I’m not giving you financial advice. I’m not giving you anything. But, I think this is where I think we can kind of wow the audience a bit in terms of Let’s say you buy you see an app that’s making 10,000 a month, right? That’s about 120 ARR.

And then you multiply that by three. That’s 650,000. It’s 365,000. So, literally I just took I got a loan right now and you know, we made a pretty decent purchase and we got it for 350. Now, here’s what I’m thinking, Josh, right? I the monthly payments, so I’m going to write this down, for this loan is roughly about I’m just going to say $5,000 to make my fee. Okay? And now, I have 10 years

to pay it off. Now, here’s the simple math that I’ve done in my head, Josh, and I’m going to look at you because I want to know if I’m be like if I am on the right track. I have 10 years to pay off this loan. I have I’m now paying off revenues for 3 years. So, in my eye, I’ve got 7 years, if I’ve done all the math right, and if I can’t appreciate this app, well, I’m going to pay off this loan in a I’m going to make my money back in roughly about 3 years.

That’s what I paid for, right? I gave them 3 years worth of revenues. So, I’m going to Now, I have 7 years that should be profit. Now, that’s what I thought about two. One, secondly, this is paying for itself. The app is making $10,000. My loan is only $5,000. Why wouldn’t I do this all the freaking time? Because now I can play it, you know, like I can grow this app or that I

can I’m profiting right now and buy this app. Yeah. So, a couple of things. You’re You’re working on the assumption that everything stays the same. You’re working on the assumption that next year the app will do 120, preferably more, and the year after it will do 120, preferably more. And you need to have hedged your risk and done some analysis that you that gives you the confidence to think that the app will do that much money next year and more. And to you know, to think about an app’s lifespan as 10 years,

I would say it’s quite optimistic. Uh obviously depends on the app and depends how long it’s been out, but thinking an app is going to hang around in its current category ranking highly for 10 years is definitely like on the optimistic side, right? Because you’re assuming nothing changes, the market doesn’t change, nothing goes wrong, etc. The other thing we you know, we haven’t accounted for here is you’re obviously an expert at appreciation and monetization. Like that’s your your bread and butter. So, ideally, 3 months after acquisition, the app is not doing 10,000 MRR, it’s doing

  1. And then it’s doing 20 because you’re going to run your AB test and you’re going to do your product led growth and you’re going to do pricing experiments. And that should really factor in to kind of how you’re thinking about this um in general. Um and then there’s always this idea of opportunity cost. You know, Steve has taken a loan to pay for this app. What else could Steve have used that money for? Like what if Steve used 360k to hire two more guys to work at Masters or bought three apps for 120 each,

right? There’s always that question of of what if and we always think about this in finance, which is like, “Okay, I could spend my money on this and I’ll get X return, but how does that compare if I put my money in the bank and I got 4% on my money? Are you getting, you know, more than 4% a year on on this money, right?” And that’s how it’s how the bank’s thinking about it. But, generally speaking, um kind of as a rule of thumb, you want to make sure you can cover your loan payments with the current revenue cuz that’s quite a base like safe safe baseline. And then any appreciation any

appreciation Steve does on top of the 10,000 MRR either helps you pay back the loan quicker or ends up being additional profit in your pockets. Yeah. Okay, I like it. Cool. Let’s bring it back into this. And then we’ll get into the red flags. Red flags. Okay, let’s avoid these like the plague, guys. First one is metric inflation pre-sale. You want to look for things that seem out of order in the last 3 months before they try and

sell it. Are there sudden revenue spikes? Is there a push for lifetime packages? Has he pushed UA super hard in the 3 months before listing to try and pump revenue? Fundamentally, there’s nothing wrong with any of these things, but they need to be part of the conversation. You need to be aware of it. I’ll give you a really interesting example, guys. Let’s say you’ve got an app doing 10,000 a month, similar to Steve’s app, right? And the guy was spending 5k a month on paid user acquisition. And let’s say his cost was just that.

So, he’s doing 10,000 in revenue, he’s spending five on marketing, his profit is then five, right? 10 minus five, five. His profit is five. You’re buying an app that you think his profit is five. What if 3 months before sale, he cuts his marketing? He’s now spending zero. And he’s still making 10,000 a month. Suddenly his profit jumps to 10. It looks pretty good. Wow, much bigger EBITDA margins, way more profitable. Sounds good on paper.

But the revenue still coming in is from previously bought users. And in the future, when you own the app, you’re not going to have those users because the guy cut UA spend. So, what I’m trying to say here is that like some of these numbers in the short term might seem pretty good, but when when you kind of put it all into the bigger picture, it can actually be quite damaging. So, you’re really the number one thing you’re looking for is stability. Stability above everything else. Um Next thing is uh hidden churn. You always want to be checking cohort data. We kind of talked about that uh a bit before. Founder dependencies we also

already touched upon. You want to make sure like does this app hinge upon this one person? And then really importantly, this goes back to the question I threw at you earlier about the the keyword, Steve. Is there a single point of potential failure in the app? Does the app hinge upon one ASO keyword, one influencer on TikTok, or one advertising account on account on Meta or or Facebook or Google or whatever? Those three things symbolize risk, and you want to be minimizing risk. That’s that’s something you should be looking out for, too.

Absolutely. I think that helped me decide the multiple. Understanding that there is risk. Like I gave you guys simple math, and this is I would probably say this was more profit than revenue. Like I know I put MRR just to keep the math simple, but yeah, like you you know that that’s sort of weighs into it. Some of the red flags is I think that’s what tied into it cuz there was some risk involved. Like there’s always risk involved in anything, right, Josh? And so, for me, that was my negotiating point when I was working on

the deal. I was like, “Look, there’s some things I don’t like. There’s obviously things I absolutely love, and here’s how I’m sort of thinking about the deal that way.” Right. I just want to jump I I see I see I see I see Pizza threw us a question in the comments. He said, “Where to find the most amazing mobile app talent on the side of media buying or web-to-app funnels?” So, let’s split it into two. Media buying is your user acquisition, right? It’s your your meta spend, your Google spend, whatever it might be.

You can find a bunch of consultants that kind of floating around on LinkedIn. Just uh look up like UA consultant, growth manager, growth consultant. You’ll find a bunch of guys talking about it. They’re all pretty good, so you should start there. You can try and hire your own, but honestly, the talent is kind of like a combination of good and bad, so I’d start with like a proven consultant that has a track record that you can check. And then on the web-to-app funnels, if you’re trying to build them, um I know Adaptly offers this through their Funnel Flux subsidiary. You can also use RevenueCat. There’s also a bunch of other solutions. I think Paddle has a

solution as well. So, use that to build it. And if you’re looking for a UA manager to push traffic to the web-to-app funnels, it’s my same answer as before. Just find the guys on LinkedIn who are consultants. Uh just look up growth consultant, UA consultant, that kind of thing. You’ll find some solutions. Thanks for the question. Yeah. All right, let’s go here. Deal structures. Okay, this is a super important because a deal is made up of so many different components. Uh it’s not just price and valuation, even though we’ve talked

about that a lot. Price and valuation is kind of the end point of all the pieces that make that up. And let’s talk about some of the different pieces. Um the first piece is a full cash exit. This is the simplest one. This is 100% of the money paid at closing. Let’s go back to the vaping app for this example. So, the vaping app, I’m going to spend it 360K today, all cash on the table for the vaping app, right? It’s super simple, clean. It’s bad for you most of the time as the buyer because all of your risk is on day

one. On day one, you are down 360K. Not good for you, great for the seller. Um that’s the first point. Second point is uh using an earnout structure or deferred payment. Now, these are two mechanisms with which to delay the payment to a later date, and they work a little bit differently. So, an earnout structure is a later payment tied to a KPI. So, for example, on the vaping app, I pay him 50% on day one,

and I say, “The second 50% is going to be paid as long as we hit a certain KPI. So, as long as we maintain 100,000 downloads a month, which is what you’re currently doing, then we will pay the second half.” And this is really good for basically aligning motivations. You basically align the founder to keep making sure those downloads come in. And you’re saying, “Hey, if we hit that, all good. Here’s the rest of the money.” And there can also be additional upside there. You can say, “If you pump it up to 150K downloads per month, we’re going to double the payment.” So, it can be

very flexible. On the other side of that, you have a deferred payment, which is guaranteed money at the end of a time period. So, I’ll say, “I’m going to pay you 50% today, and then I’m going to guarantee you the second 50% after 12 months, irrelevant of KPIs, irrelevant of performance. It doesn’t matter. The money is guaranteed.” This is a uh structure we often use at Bluethrone, because it’s we feel like it’s very fair. We’re not tying the app performance to the payout. We are just saying, "Hey, we’re going to have You’re

going to have to wait for the money in 12 months. It’s going to enable us to give you a higher valuation, because our risk is lower. And whether the app lives or dies, doesn’t matter. The money is coming to your account." So, we do that quite a lot. Third point is equity plus cash. So, cash is on day one, and equity is saying, “All right. Your app is is 100%. I’m going to give you 70% of the value in cash, and the other 30% I’m going to give you as equity or shares either in the app or in the kind of acquiring vehicle, so in AppMasters or in Bluethrone.”

And finally, you have revenue share. So, this is where you you give less money up front or less money in deferred payment or something else. And instead, the revenue the app generates trickles back into the founder’s pocket as as some of the payment. Um and this is good for app founders that want to stay in the game and stay with the app business for a long period of time. It’s good for app founders that believe in your ability and the the ability of the app in general to make more money cuz they’ll end up making a lot more money. Um

and this this can be quite a low-risk way of of buying an app for for first-time buyers as well. I like it. For me personally, what what the way we did our deal was cash, bit of cash, and then we did an earn-out based off of like different milestones, revenue milestones, not profit, and then the deferred payment or seller’s note. And so it was a combination of all three. That’s how we structured the deal. That’s smart cuz that’s kind of balancing your risk across a number of different components, while it’s probably, you know, enabling yourself to

pay quite a good valuation for the app you’ve acquired. So it’s pretty fair for the seller as well. Yeah, I thought it was a win-win situation. Well, that’s why I like the broker cuz then I knew that the seller was motivated to sell as well because that’s what you said in the beginning. Like sometimes you reach out to somebody and they’re just not ready or they have this astronomical number in their head. Yeah, so Amazing. So Yeah, so so we’ve been at Bluethorn, we’ve been buying apps for almost 5 years. Amazing. And we’ve been growing pretty fast. So

we started buying apps for like less than a million dollars and these days we’re looking at stuff from a million all the way up to 50, and we kind of really really have have grown recently. One of the first apps we bought um is a really great case study because we looked at it and we said, “Okay, this app currently has 200K monthly active users, which is really strong, and they were organic.” We know that with our ability and product-led growth and our ability to drive virality, increase the K factor, we can massively increase the monthly

active users. So, we were able to do this by redesigning the subscription and doing aggressive testing on the AB side of things, lifting our conversion rate from free to paying massively. Um and we managed to boost the number of downloads massively to hit our 5 million MAU through redoing the ASO, which I know is a service I think you offer, Steve. It’s a super important service for any app out there with a current app. We also took the app to additional markets as well. The other thing I want to I want to

touch upon here is Excuse me. The other thing I want to touch upon here is um how do you keep users actually in the app, right? It’s all good having downloads, but how are you keeping them hanging around? And if you’re able to keep them, you’ll you’ll slowly grow your MAU as well. So, we actually add we actually added like gamification and streaks all to our core product, and we were able to jump our day seven retention from 18% all the way to 34% and today it’s actually much higher. Just by using techniques to keep the the the users in the app.

Daily login rewards, um subscription uh retention mechanics, uh gamification, all these kind of things super super powerful. Um I think the final thing I want to point out here is that the founder that we acquired it from really saw the value in what we were doing and said actually I want to hang around with you guys for like two and a half years. So, he actually kind of rode the wave with us and really benefited from the upside of this app once we were scaling and appreciating it. Um and these days we still have the app. It’s still performing incredibly well.

Um we keep we keep growing it particularly on the monetization side. Um and I think it really kind of highlights the strength of our business, which is we’re not really about buying weak products that kind of die slowly or whatever. We’re really about buying products that can be category leaders, that are really strong from a product sense, that we can hold on to and grow and sustain for years upon years upon years. We’ve had this app for four plus years now. Um and it’s still performing exceptionally well. So, that’s the kind of strategy we we are

deploying on right now. Really looking for those quality products. Um and yeah, that’s uh that’s one of our case studies. I know. I mean I know, you know, Don and Alan very well and they it was one of the first apps that they kind of mentioned to me in all the presentations we’ve done. You guys have done a lot of AB testing and you guys were ahead of the game. I remember talking to them in 2023 at MAU and they’re like doing all this monetization stuff. BlueThrone was and I was like, “What?” And Josh like 2 years 3 years 2 or 3 years later they’re like, "Hey, we

have this. We do that." I won’t say what exactly it was. I’ll tell you offline. But I was like, "Oh my god, my buddy from BlueThrone’s been doing this for 3 plus years already all on their own and now there’s a platform to help you do it. But I really love it. And what I one thing I wanted to say too is like for me, I love talking about product. I love just working in the product. And one of the things that you talked about gamification and streaks and helping retention, that helps when you have users and I think too many times builders are trying to think about

these techniques, in my opinion, way too early. Like you don’t have 200,000 MAU to play around with. You have like maybe 100 and you’re trying to figure out game again. While I think that’s a valuable, like the impact isn’t going to be there unless you have these active users. And so buying it and then doing all the things that you guys know best, like look at the growth. It’s it’s it’s a lot easier. >> as you know how to like grow it. It’s I I feel like buying is for me, I was just like, "Look, I’ve

tried building it. It’s taking way too long and I’m impatient. Let’s go." Like I’m just going to buy >> Yeah, I I think I think I think the big takeaway for the guys kind of earlier on in their app journey, maybe just starting to build or starting to scale, is don’t worry about retention in the beginning. Your your first port of call is to find distribution that works and to get users through the door. Once you have a solid way of getting users through the door, then you’ll think about keep how how do you keep them there. But, you know, you can’t tackle all these problems at once. Your time is

limited. Your focus is limited. And you need to be thinking, okay, distribution first. Once they’re in the door, how do I keep them? Once I keep them, how do I monetize them? Once I monetize them, how do I make sure they keep monetizing again and again and again? And tackle it in that order. Um Steve, I see a couple of questions. Should we should we go to >> to I want to hit this and then we’ll get jump into the questions. So, Yeah, so so we’re still deploying. Uh we just raised additional funds to basically buy more, bigger apps, smaller apps, the whole

shebang. Uh we’re nearing about 80 people at Blue Throne and all of us are essentially product experts, growth experts, CTO, CFO, everything. So, we are really there for when an app founder has been kind of grinding away on an app for a couple of years and either they want to sell it, they want to get their exit, they want to retire their mom, they want to buy a car, buy a house, and their sister to college. We’re also there for when the founder says, "Hey, I’ve been doing this on my own for a while. And what happens if I do this with a team like Blue Throne that has unlimited

money, that has unlimited experience and skill set, and can really blow this thing up?" Um those are the two core use cases we really specialize in. Um and we’ve done that again and again and again. And um yeah, if you guys have an app you are thinking about selling and you’re looking for really the right partner to take it to the next level, you can find me on Twitter. I’m pretty active. And you can find me on my email there as well. Again, another thing I’ll say, guys, I really enjoy helping guys get to that level where the exit makes sense. So, if you have questions about how to grow, how to scale, what I should be looking at, how I should be building, uh ping me

an email with a quick question. I’m always happy to help. Um and uh yeah, my my inbox is always open. Yeah, I love it. And Josh is going to be there at MAU Vegas and in London as well. And we’re doing a workshop after Business of Apps App Promotion Summit in London. And so, if you guys are out there, just email me and I will hook you up with all the info on the workshop and Josh is going to be there. So, if you want to talk to him in person and get the insights, the real insights, you need to talk to him in person. I’ll be there. Also, also one other thing, I’m

actually it’s kind of last minute, but I’m throwing a app founders house party in London next week with some friends in the space. We’ve got founders doing millions in ARR. We’ve got founders just starting. We’re going to be talking I think that the beauty of this event is that it’s super casual. We’re going to have drinks, and music, and sushi. And if you are in London and you’ve kind of been building and you’re on this journey on your own and you want to be in a room with people who are on the same journey as you but at different stages, maybe behind you, maybe in front of you,

and kind of just talk shop a little bit in a very casual setting, then come along, send me an send me an email, and I’ll get you on the invite list. That’s happening next Saturday in London. That’s awesome, man. All right, there it is. josh.p@bluethrone.io. I know Josh The other Josh is in London with well, and we’re going to see him in a couple of weeks there. All right, we got Marco. What’s up, Marco? The with regards to annual EBITDA, which means earnings before blah blah blah taxes >> Interest, taxes, and amortization. Thank you.

Which multiple range should one look for since MRR is a difficult metric since the cut for the stores as well as sales tax still apply? At what multiple should we look at? Yeah, it’s a great question. First of all, um the biggest benefit from the MBA I did was learning what EBITDA is. Apart from that, it wasn’t super helpful. But, um okay, first of all, um MRR, you know, is is still a good metric because you can still it’s very easy to account for the store taxes. Like, that should be in either the App Store Connect or kind of the founders P&L. So, it’s still a good metric to have, but

EBITDA multiple ranges really vary. Let me give you a very kind of straight answer, which is EBITDA multiple should really be between three and eight, which is quite a range, but it depends on a few key aspects, right? Let’s go through them together. So, how profitable is the business? Is it a 20% EBITDA margin, or is it an 80% EBITDA margin? That’s going to affect the price big time. How sticky is the revenue? If the revenue is all subscription revenue, great resubscriber rates, it’s very

sticky, and you know it’s going to come back, you can pay a higher multiple. If the revenue is one-time payments, if it’s ad revenue, if it’s lifetime revenue, it’s less sticky, and the multiple will be lower. And finally, you know, core product retention. Are users sticking around in the app? Is retention metrics good? That’s going to pump up the valuation. If users are just If users are just kind of checking it out and then churning, the the valuation’s going to come down after that as well. Um but it really depends. Think about valuation on like this sliding scale.

And you’re looking for strong products that take you towards the higher end, and weak products towards the lower end. Um Marco, quick question for you, mate. Are you asking this question from the perspective of an app seller, or are you thinking about buying something? Um drop a drop a comment, let us know, and we can talk in more detail. Um Steve, back to you. All right. Well, thank you, Yasmine. All right, Chrome Media says, “I heard buyers prefer that the seller is set up under a C corp. Does this matter?”

Um it’s helpful, but I think really good buyers will find ways to make a deal happen, whether it’s a C corp or not. It also comes down to whether you’re talking about an asset deal or a share deal, and let’s talk about the differences there. So, an asset deal is Chrome Media is the company, and under Chrome Media, they have the app, which is an asset. And Steve comes along and says, “Hey, Chrome Media, I just want to buy the asset. I’m leaving the company alone.” That’s one type of deal. It tends to be not as good for the founder, because you

pay a lot higher taxes on this deal. The other deal is a share deal, so you have Chrome Media as a company with the app, and Steve comes along and says, “Hey, I’m going to buy Chrome Media, which includes everything inside of it, including the app.” And this works really well if you’re a one-app company, and this works really well for the seller because you pay far, far less taxes as well when you actually make that exit. Um and from a risk perspective, it’s much less risky on the app side to buy the company than buying

the asset because if you buy the asset, you have to move the asset from one developer account to another, which can really mess around with your keyword rankings and ASO and stuff. Um so, it’s generally much safer to to buy the company. Mhm. Interesting. I like it. Great answer. All right, we’re going to another question that came in. All right, Matthew says, “Do you look for apps with users from T1 tier one countries, USA, Europe, or is it only revenue over attention metrics?” That’s a great question. Um yes, you do look for apps with users from tier one

countries. That’s tier one in Europe plus the US, maybe Canada or Australia as well. Um and the reason behind this is higher propensity to pay for things if they use it from that that audience. Um they have a they’re more elastic on price, right? They can pay higher prices for your products. Um whereas users from tier three countries might just never convert, right? So, they’re just kind of sitting there in your app. Um but often like you’ll see the result of where the users come from

in the revenue and retention metrics, particularly in RPD, which is revenue per download. If your users are from tier three countries, you’re going to have a low revenue per download, and if they’re from tier one, they should be higher. So, great question, and the answer generally speaking is yes. All right, love it. All right, Josh, I’m going to get into the app audit side of the show, and we like to start off every app audit with some dad jokes. All right, I didn’t even ask before we hit record and went live. Do you have a

dad joke ready to go? >> I listen, I did. I asked my dad for some dad jokes uh just before this call. Okay, perfect. I thought I had the drum. I don’t even have it. What’s this? Nope. There used to be We’re just going to have to do a >> I like that one. That’s That’s pretty >> going to go with the dong. Okay. I don’t have my studio. I am I am traveling. All right, my friend, do you want to go first or you want me to go first? I’ll I’ll I’ll I’ll shoot first. Um so, Steve Yes, sir.

know, I was trying to build a habit tracking app, but I just kept forgetting to log my progress. Oh, shoot. It It didn’t It replayed. It doesn’t replay. This Come on. This is big shoe. All right, I like that one, Josh. All right, Josh, well, since we’re talking about investing and buying, what do clowns like to invest in, Josh? What do clowns like to invest in? Big shoes? I don’t know. Oh, close. Laughing stock.

All right. Okay. That’s actually quite good. There you go. So, forget Steve. Yes, sir. >> Steve, sticking sticking on the app theme, all right? I got to tell you I did Yeah, yeah, I did I built a meditation app, but all the notifications kept stressing me out. I like it. All right, Josh came with two. So, put J if you thought Josh’s joke was better and put S if you thought my joke was better, and then we’ll hook you up with some promo from us. All right, Josh, we’ve got this app from I’m going to

butcher his name Bol Buoy Buoy. Okay, I’m going to say Buoy for now. All right, here’s his app. Let me pull it up here. Move a few things. It’s It’s not good not having multiple screens that I can kind of go through. I like my multiple monitors. Then we’ll You know, apparently the more monitors you have, the more productive you are. That’s just the science. >> I think that’s definitely true. All right, we got reading gate from boy. He

I’m going to assume it’s a he needs help on user experience ASO app speed and performance. All right, anything on the ASO front Josh that you kind of want to highlight here? Yeah, a few things. First of all the screenshots look pretty good. I don’t like the change in color. It feels like you’re changing the identity of the app halfway through your screenshots like that blue color is super nice. I would keep that consistent across the screenshots. The other thing that stood out to me

Steve and probably stood out to you as well is is the user reviews. The user reviews 3.1 stars. That’s going to affect your ASO a lot as well. Don’t you think Steve? Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Well, look at this. 1.8 here too. Maybe it’s just Android. What is going on? Or maybe it’s you’re targeting the wrong countries. Yeah, no I agree with that. I would try to prove that improve that as much as I can. Look at this. Yeah, it looks like it’s a lot of from

the Asian countries. I mean he has an Asian name so he’s probably from I’m going to assume Vietnam. Right now. Yeah, that’s the first thing I would try to improve. What would you say like is it just a product of to try to improve reviews or is it something like hey maybe I need to ask for a review at a timely basis. Yeah, I haven’t seen the onboarding but it would be about really prompting the user for a a review at that aha moment. So at the wow moment. To do this again

don’t reinvent the wheel just find apps that have a really good aha moment in the onboarding. And that that’s exactly when you want to prompt for a review cuz you’re more likely to get a good review. Yeah, I like that idea. And I think the what I would do is a custom store listing from an ASO perspective. They’re really great on Google. You can literally target different keywords, have a whole different listing, whole different title, short description, screenshots, everything targeting a

particular keyword. Worked really well for a client of ours and we got it to go to I think 6 7,000 MRR on just Android when we first launched on Android and then we took it to Google Play because the ASO on both platforms are so different that, you know, became a little bit easier on Android actually on Google Play to get our ASO rocking and rolling versus iOS. So, that’s what I would suggest for you from an ASO standpoint too, Billy. Let me Anything else you want to add on, Josh, before you get we hit the app?

Uh, no. Let’s do it. >> Let’s I got to like stop sharing, share, stop sharing, share. And then we’ll Yeah, one one thing I’ll say while you’re pulling it up is I see Marco commented that it’s from the the buyer’s perspective. He said he makes decent money as a freelancer, but he’s also building his own app. So, potentially he might want to sell some in the distant future. Um, so Marco, I recently went on Starter Story, which is like a big entrepreneurship channel and I broke down the seven rules on how to

build your app today with a seven-figure exit in mind. That’s on Starter Story Build, the YouTube channel. Uh, it’s like a 12-minute video. Basically breaks down the seven things you’ve got to think about today in order to hit a proper exit in the future. That’s on Starter Story Build. You should go check it out. Yeah, this is Marco’s first question when he was talking about what what we were trying to figure out if he was trying to buy or sell. All right, let me add this to the stage. H, I know what I’m doing and I H thought I was pulling up the wrong comment.

Thanks, H, for looking out for me, but All right, let’s get into the app. Don’t know why. Okay. Uh, it’s Okay. Well, This be tough. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I mean >> onboarding. Was there no onboarding? Yeah, that’s what I said. That’s literally what I was about to say. I’m like, "Where are the benefits? This is

literally like I’m like, what? First Like you should know where I’m at from a local This is what I hate, Josh. Like no offense to the British, but I’m like I like a Z in my optimize. I like a Z in my monetize. I like a Z. You know, I don’t like an S. It’s a lot stronger. But you should know where I’m at and if you’re already asking me you’re defaulting in a different language. Very good. But it looks like it might you might be targeting countries that are not here or other countries.

Yeah, this is pretty bad. I can see why. I’ve always found Josh like showing an onboarding showing a paywall way more beneficial than making through login right away. We actually saw and this was a fitness app. We actually saw a 52% increase in sales when we did the onboarding. He did the onboarding then asked for like sign up then show the paywall and

it was a forced sign up. It was a like like here. All we did was flip the two and show the paywall before the registration we saw a 52% increase in sales. That simple. But anything that you want to get into? Well, I just I the app’s just missing an onboarding, right? It’s missing a What is this app for? What is the problems trying to solve? What benefits am I going to receive uh by using the app? Um and I also noticed that when you pulled up the app it asked me to allow notifications straight away. Um that’s a

big no-no. You want to kind of warm up the user before you ask for some sort of permissions. Yeah, I agree. No more votes. Where’s all the votes for the jokes? Come on. I know many people are here. Come on. I only have three votes. Give me a break. Come on, guys. Give me more votes. All right, we’re going to go to the next app, H. I’m going to give you a bit more time. Hopefully, you will get more votes from the joke perspective. I’m going to get on to the next app, and then we’ll We’re going along. Josh, how are you on time? I want to respect your time.

Cuz I can take it the rest of the way. Okay. All right, bro. Let’s get into the next app. We’ve got Sophie’s app, and this is Oh, it’s a POS. Not the POS that you’re thinking about. We’ve got this app from Sophie. I’m going to pull it up Move screen. Stop screen. Share screen. Commentating everything I have to do. Okay. She’s got a p- point of serv- point of sale app. The

She wants help, as Sophie says, just ASO perspective. I mean, the default language The default country was in India, so maybe she’s targeting India. Uh that’s what I would just assume. I’m going to I’m going to pull up US right now and see if that changes anything. Okay. So, maybe it is in the US as well. That’s what What about where you’re at? UK? Nope. Okay. I’m going to stick with the US then for now. All right, Josh, anything from the ASO perspective? That’s all she wants help on.

Honestly, your screenshots look great. Um one small comment is on your third screenshot. The background color of your app is purple, and the background color of the screen of the kind of visual is also purple, so your app does not pop. Um whereas on your first screen, the app is dark and the screen is purple, it does pop out. So, you definitely want to make sure the app is popping from the background color. That’s a very small point, so don’t beat yourself up about it, but that’s that’s that’s one thing. Otherwise, the the color

generally good, maybe a little bit too much purple. Um PayPOS Tap and Get Paid Mobile Point of Sale Worldwide. It’s I I I don’t know exactly what the app does, but I would definitely add in some keywords in the kind of sub-description as to what the app is actually doing. So, let’s say the app is like a budget tracker, then it should be Pay POS tap and get paid and then underneath that budget tracker, financial planning, cost tracker, whatever whatever’s ranking highly in that category is kind of missing there.

Yeah. I like it. I think the Well, you know, here’s the category that I know a little bit about. So, it’s like Stripe or Square, right? Like we can take payments and if I’m a a small business owner, I think this is interesting. I think here with the POS, it’s kind of like Stripe, Paddle. You have a really high LTV, but probably a high acquisition cost. And for a category like this, Josh, to your earlier point where there’s huge competitors with a lot of funds like

Stripe, like Paddle, like Square, this is a category I’m going to avoid. So, I feel like from an ASO perspective, this is more brand oriented. It’s like dating. There’s way more traffic volume for Tinder, Hinge, Bumble than there is for dating. And then having done a couple of POS apps, there’s way more traffic for Square, Stripe, all the major POS systems out there than there is for POS. So, you really have to going to have to build a brand and figure out

ways beyond just ASO to to market this app cuz ASO is literally just Yeah. POS and that’s it. Yeah. All right. Oh, Josh put the video to the link of the the story. Starter story. Cool. All right. That is it. I don’t won’t go into the app because it’s not something that would be applicable for us anyways, Josh. All right. H Uh I know the votes, there weren’t many,

but I know the outcome either. But you go ahead and let the audience know and let Josh know. Let’s go. H, where are you? You’re not going to come on screen. Come on, man. Oh, I’m here, Steve. Okay. I’m sad because you lost. I know. I know. Bobby, you didn’t catch Bobby. Bobby, what a traitor. Okay, go ahead, spin that wheel. Spin the wheel. What’s the reward here, Steve? What do they get?

Nothing. I didn’t win. Forget it. I’m kidding. No, we’re going to give a Is this Adam again? He won. So, we’ll Adam I don’t know, H, what do you want to give away? Let’s go an annual discount on community. Okay. All right, annual discount Adam on the community or if you want, you know, app signals. We’ll figure something out. But, Josh, you want to add anything on here because you won, man. He voted for you. He’s not laughing actually. Naturally very funny. I’m pretty good at dad jokes even though I’m not a dad

which which feels strange. Um, but um this was super cool. Thank you for having me. Um it’s very fun to see people’s apps pop up and kind of roast them and I think like just to kind of summarize everything like buying can feel scary, but with the kind of right advice and the right kind of people around you it’s definitely doable and a very very interesting thing to to explore. Um and finally, if you’ve got an app and it’s at scale and you’re looking for the right partner to acquire it, um give you a big payout, take it to the next level, then

hit me up. Yeah. This is our website. Yep. This Did you guys remove me from Oh, yeah, you did. Oh, no, I’m still here. No. Yes, let’s go. An older picture, but I’m still there, too. >> You were so beautiful back then. What’s happened? I know. Look at that skin. It’s incredible. >> H, my friend. H. And who knew the app business aged you so so so much? Yeah. I turned into a gangster now. I’m more rugged.

More rugged, yeah. Go to chain. You’re actually competing with me on the chain game. I like it. >> Yes, sir. So, it is bluethrone.io or josh.p@bluethrone.io as well. Marco, you just put in the comments. This is exactly what you do. You put S or J. All right, you’re new here. Well, we’ll give you a slide. All right, Josh, thank you so much for coming on. Next week we got a buddy of mine, a past podcast guest, who made a dating app called Down. He has a book out. He’s going to talk about how to use

user psychology to grow your app. He’s the co-owner of Down, a top 10 dating app with millions in revenues, and he’s going to kind of share his process for using user psychology. We’ll be back at 9:00 a.m. Pacific, but Josh, thank you so much for coming on doing this. My pleasure, man. Thank you so much for having me. All right, London, I’ll see you in a couple of weeks. If you guys are out in London or you want to be in London, hit me up and I’ll give you a link to our workshop as well. All right, until next time, have a really good one. I’ll see you. Bye.