Inside $500M/Year Bending Spoons: TikTok Trends, Viral videos, UA & Paywall Science

Yeah. Yeah. Because I mean you know like I think most of the apps like on on iOS in the US most of the apps with a conversion rate of about 3% from installed to paying subscriber uh on average also a lot of fluctuous variations but average let's say to generalize 3% uh at least 3% up to like 5% for some of the better apps. And so if you can move from 5% to 6% conversion rate, keeping the price point high, and add like a weekly compounding, like you're off to the races.
Whoa, doubling the conversion is unheard of.
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Welcome back to Yeah. Hello. Welcome back to another excellent Two and a Half Gamers podcast episode where you can stay two and a half steps ahead of the gaming industry. Today, after a very wellreceived first episode on Genesis in our app in our a new segment where we cover a couple of app companies, we're doing part two and today we'll be covering probably the largest app company in the world, Bending Space.
Allegedly. Allegedly. We don't know about rounds because they have 10

millions accounts. So, it's hard to say, but yeah.
But one of the biggest definitely.
Absolutely. Yeah. And uh to help us get the facts right on this really unique company, we are joined by a special guest.
Do you want to introduce yourself, Darius? Yeah.
Thank you, Felix. Uh it's great to be here. My name is Darius. Uh I've been in the app industry for about a decade now. And um I'm super excited to jump in. And we all in the app space, we look at bending spoons. is like one of the ultimate steps. If you want to manage hundreds of employees, that is a good way to go and yeah, I'm excited to dive in.
Yeah.
Nice.
And you've been working in a lot of apps as well, right, that are kind of competing with bending spoons, correct?
Yeah, I think well in the app space there's a few categories that just print money. So, we all go into the same categories. We end up all working in the same apps essentially. But yeah, I started with an AI language learning company about 10 years ago, way before AI was anything similar to what

Yeah. And actually as a funny antidote, it took us three years to build that product and it still wasn't like technically completely finished and proficient
and few months ago we got together with my co-founders and we built the whole thing in one weekend using Chad PC.
Wow.
So that is the advance of technology that that happened in the last. So you were going for like LLM style of a map or or a different approach.
We were trying a lot of different approaches but LLM wasn't in the state that it is now.
Okay. Okay. Yeah. Just curious like why this transition happened as you said.
Also that would be a good question for my CTO.
Technology technology yak of technology happened in like 10 years ago and now. So I guess
there's there more intelligent people on my team to answer those questions. Yeah. So that was the first company and then um I was the first employee at Reflectly which was the first like AI journaling company. One of the really like we built the journaling category scaled to about

20 million users. We acquired 12 companies in the first three years that I was there. During hyper growth phase we're getting 10,000 installs per day with four people in the company which was insane. I've never seen that before. And then yeah, I I exited that part and then um became a hippie, went to travel the world, got bored, came back to Europe and now opened a new app studio and now I'm doing what Bending Spoons is doing.
Very good. Okay, perfect.
Yeah. So, exactly like that. So, what we're going to cover today, we're going to have a look at Bending Spoons portfolio kind of how they do business and also break down how they do UA Bending Spoons first.
But before we do that, my name is Matthew Lancher. I'm Felix Provers and we
are your hosts.
You up. You it up. it up. Okay. Anyway, yes. We are Yeah, I know. I know. I know. But we are your host. So, thank you very much.
And funnily enough, Ari is from Slovakia.

Felix now is outnumbered again. And now it's it's even more. But okay, bending spoons. Jokes aside, let's let's dive into bending spoons. It's interesting. Sorry.
Yeah, sure. So, a little background on Bending Spoons. So, Bending Spoons was founded in 2013 by six co-founders after a failed app startup. So,
you know where it was in Copenhagen?
Copenhagen. Copenhagen. Nice.
Yeah. Everyone loves Copenhagen. That's from Slovakia. It's like Yeah, it's like your guys' mecca.
I've lived in Copenhagen myself. I loved it.
Oh,
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So, uh, Bending Spoon's founding story is a little unique because they had no money. So, the six co-founders made an agreement that they all would look for jobs, and whoever got the highest paying job would pay for rent and food for all the others while they worked on the business. So, the one who got the highest paying job was CEO Luca Ferrari.

Great name by the way. He uh
even with accent. Amazing.
Exactly. Yeah. He joined Mckenzie where he worked for 16 months while the other founders developed simple apps for the app stores. They had some moderate success but no breakthrough success.
And this is by the way like what a shitty deal. It's the smartest guy that has to do the boring while everybody else is having fun at not paying rent and just working.
It's a great deal, huh?
Yeah, of course. So after no breakthrough success, this is when they decided to buy their first app, a keyboard app, which they bought for $15,000. And they then rewrote the software, changed the design, and were able to drastically improve the revenue metrics. They then took the profits from this app and made the next purchase, which was larger, and they managed to turn it around for a bigger profit. So this laid the grounds for the bending spoons business model which focuses on buying

assets overhauling them and they describe it themselves as a mix between being a technology company and a privy private equity firm. The only difference
very close to Genesis right sounds like them.
No no the key difference between Genesis and here is that they take a very long-term view and they never sell their assets. So Genesis sells their assets all their assets. I don't know if they have actually, but yeah, I don't know. Derek, do you know? Yeah. Do you know if Genesis sells as well or Yeah.
No, I don't think so. It's just I think that they don't just buy them, but they invest. They
Genesis was like voodoo voodoo style.
Yes. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
So it's not exactly the same, but very similar.
Was Genesis building their own products from scratch as well?
Genesis was um they were
Yeah. This is the game industry model that that we use during the hyper casual era where you are pretty much financing the teams mainly and they build you prototypes and then you kind of run with them as much kind of shorts on go as possible. It's kind of
but they built
before they've done that few apps on

their but they they built something on their end as well.
Yeah. So, this was wildly profitable for Bending Spoons, uh, and has been. And in 2024, the revenue is rumored to have surpassed $500 million. And it's also rumored that Bending Spoons is planning to go public soon. So, I guess it's the first company kind of in this business model that is actually willing to go public, my friend here. So bending bending bootstrap but in September 2022 he raised 340 million from investors and this round attracted names like Ryan Reynolds or exfemale CEO or a former Google CEO Eric Schmidt as well. So and some Italian bankers.
So you see Italian bankers. Yeah
sounds sexy,
you know. And then they actually in early 2024 raised additional 155

uh at valuation 2.5 billion. So not bad.
What was the date of that last valuation? Sorry.
Early 2024.
Okay.
And apparently they said that like all of that money was used to do the acquisitions cuz they bought a lot of stuff in the last few years. So this wasn't like they're not burning, they're making cash. this was just to make the big acquisition which I'm sure you're gonna talk about what they bought because they're going outside of the app space as well and if
if they do want to go for an IPO and they talked about like the US listing
then I wonder if it makes sense to also diversify outside of the app store because then there's a question about like long-term feasibility with AI and with OpenAI announcing their own hardware next year. Who knows where what the app store will look like in five years if there will be one.
Yeah. Yeah. Very good point. Just just want to add one tidbit here. This model was actually already tried in the gaming industry. Maybe you have heard of things like Embracer or Stillfront which are our very famous names here which ended

up horribly. I'm sorry.
Yeah. But
because what were they doing? They were pretty much just raising the value of their stock and buying the companies for the stock and
at some point pretty much went all crumbling down as a Ponzi scheme. So that that's like even though they own like the right to Lord of the Rings and stuff like that now. But yeah, it it went very very bad.
But more we talk about apps, it's actually I'm seeing way more differences between games and the business model versus apps and their business model and how it actually works and how it actually is more consumerdriven rather than just like gamers. It's it's slightly different.
It's utilities like it's not you know lots of these things are utilities. This is not like a game that you need to compete with some other Chinese company which copies you one to one and then what?
Sure. But then in this like all of all of these different categories they have millions of clones obviously and it's like some of them are making millions and you have never heard of these apps before and you look at it like no UA

like what the happening and then you open Tik Tok, YouTube, Real, Instagram, it's all over the place. So it's it's slightly different business model but still like all these subscription based offerings. Yeah, it's an interesting thing. So I'm very glad that we are actually talking about
and a lot of the like not just utilities but a lot of the apps have like a really long you know LTV people will just use something like you'll use the same alarm app for 10 years right or whatever that might be or like fitness app or my my favorite category is all these trackers like any tracking app something that people use for years and years and years. Yeah. And especially in January.
So January is a good one for us. I know companies that'll do 40% of their annual revenue comes in January alone. If you're having like fitness and some of these
and my resolution apps
like we saw Yeah. our own apps will like will triple in January but not doing anything.
Yeah. Through the seasonality.

Super interesting. And I remember you told me one time before Darius about the how bending spoon hires. It's also very different from pretty much any company that I've actually heard of.
Yeah. Yeah. So, they have I mean they have a very rigorous process and there also a lot of interesting changes they made and I think the first they're very confident in their own team. So when they did some of these big acquisitions note that we transfer and bunch of the other ones the one of the first things they do is fire everybody. That's big way to lower cost because these are based in San Francisco and Amsterdam other places. So you fire everybody and then bring it inhouse and it's still you still pay really well but it's cheaper in Italy and Milan than most of the other places.
I that's what I that's what I read. Transfer bought the the the companies like laid off 75% of people. Bye-bye.
Yeah. Yeah.
It's amazing.
I mean for them obviously.
Yeah. They're giving out I think pretty

like comfortable packages like 16 weeks of salary, one year of health insurance, all this stuff that like you have a pretty cushy transition. But of course it's not ideal.
Yeah. But if you compare San Francisco US-based salaries and then Italy mobile exactly. Yeah. Exactly. It's no way like that's why you see so many at least gaming companies coming out of Turkey or Vietnam or well not really US that much because it's really expensive. That's really
I mean we have like Ukraine, Bellarus.
Yeah, Turkey is huge obviously.
Exactly.
It makes a lot of sense.
Yeah. So in their hiring process, I mean it's um I was reading somewhere they expect to do about like five to 10 hours of work before you speak to a human during the process. So they have like tests, they call it tests, they call it tasks, but it's tests and a lot of like heavy lifting you have to do just to qualify to go to interview round and actually talk to somebody. unpaid
in person. Unpaid. Yeah. Uh and and a lot of it, so I haven't seen the actual test, but it seems like a lot of it is

kind of problem solving unrelated to your specialties and your experience. And so it's all about, you know, trying to figure out how you can resolve problems and on the spot on the fly. I don't know how they um hedge against Chad GPT and all of this stuff with like take-home tasks and homework, but that's that's that's their process at the be like just top of the funnel. They don't do any like open applications. you have to have a specific role to apply for, but it's such a big company. They have so much inbound that this works really well well for them.
Nice. I mean, so it's like you you want to work for them.
Yeah. I mean, it is like it's obviously one of the more exciting ones. Somebody described it as um Goldman Sachs of of Milan. They they they pay really well and they expect really high performance. Okay. And I do say in all the communication like, yeah, this is not going to be easy. You're going to be pushed and like really going to challenge yourself. This is not to around. But if you're ready for that and they do pay like you know like north of 100k a year salary in Milan you're a king for that kind of
Oh yeah yeah yeah

or queen.
Do we know the headcount estimate or at least some some kind of number here?
I think 450 employees if I remember correctly. I also remember one of our mutual friends there has told us that also if you're a graduate hireer so if you're out of university how you if you get through the application process you're actually not assigned or you're not applying for any specific job but you basically start and then you choose what role you want to do after being in the company for a while which is very
it's like the internship program yeah so they have like 3 months 6 month internships that's for graduate it seems like their strategy in general is not I mean they have of course expert in industry but I majority of the workforce is like fresh graduates coming up. They can get them for cheaply. And also like the the the scaling of the salaries like if you have some experience is about you make about double of what they offer when you're coming in as a graduate which like makes sense.
But this is like like isn't this is like the KPMG model like the big four model but you know you work to the bone in the

beginning and then you get better and you know if you survive of course.
Yeah. Yeah. I think if you're hungry and ambitious, this is like a great way to go. I think it would be a lot of fun and you'll learn a lot. I'm sure starting point is a great school, I guess.
Yeah, they don't have too many like layers of management, it's like it's structured around specific products and so you get to kind of a fairly small team work on one product, dive deep, you know, cross function, all of that. I think it's a great way to start.
And I'm assuming you must have tried to poach a couple of these people, right, in your career.
Yes. But it's, you know, it's really tough to compete with their salaries if you're like a regular startup, not two and a half billion evaluation company. I think that like, yeah, one thing to offer them is like, look, you can be like one of the founders or early you get equity and be like a bigger part of something drive, but they seem to have a pretty low churn. There's not a lot of people exiting or kind of laying around. They claim,
I saw the stat, they claimed uh less than 1%

unwanted churn. Mm- The unwanted part makes me wonder like, okay, do you just fire a bunch of people and
Yeah, exactly. What's the wanted part? Like, come on.
Wanted churn.
Yeah. You want to leave? Yes.
Yeah.
All right. So, I think
you haven't succeeded in hiring anybody from there. But, but yeah, there's a great pool of talent.
Yeah. I guess that's also like much much more harder to get like capital running compared to like Bali or some somewhere there in the US if these people they get the knowhow and then they want to go independent. I guess it's not that easy from Europe than from US if they would be exiting some Facebook or whatever.
Yeah. Because in Europe you have slightly different laws. It's like
you don't found in Europe. That's the
Yeah.
So Jacob, I think we've been dancing around the topic, but do you want to share screen and show off their beautiful portfolio so we can see actually Yeah. Yeah. When when you are starting to do so, I just want to go through like the the high-profile acquisitions they've made. So Evernote we already talked about. There's filming which is a popular professional mobile video camera app whatever that means.

Mosaic group mosaic group bought assets from mosaic group from IA 400
weather app
climb. Yes. Robot killer spam which is a spam call blocker and then I translate and then meetup hop instreamyard. Okay. I used actually streamyard which is a streaming service when I was on the Google webinar. There's isue v transfer bride co and comeote which is outdoor navigation for hikers and cyclists and which was very the the the last app was acquired in March 2025.
Okay.
Nice. So they're they're saying they're claiming they do about 5,000 companies in a top funnel of the acquisition and obviously like they talk to a lot of people. Yeah.
And then like less than 1% makes it to like the actual like conversation stage. And this is something that also

this like five years ago maybe if you had an app that makes like some not huge but if you just had an app that makes consistent money there was very little people reaching out. Like Ed reflectly, we did a bunch of acquisitions early on, fairly easy, and we could like triple the revenue in a few months just by doing some optimization on the payroll on the onboarding and nothing really changing the code, just some few things here and there without even driving UA literally just on the onboarding and that was easy. And now those same people, the same founders, they get messages like every day from bending spoons like people and private equity and all these like the the market has shifted significantly. demand for apps is huge now.
Yeah, for sure. We also see that in in our sector whereas a lot of people are actually switching from gaming to apps because that expertise translates to some
I wouldn't say changing or switching to apps. It's just
I've seen some friends literally just go apps.

Really?
Yeah. Why?
Yeah. Because you know the monetization is kind of the same.
Yeah. But like people think it's it's way easier but I I don't think that really applies. they get to get paid. Well,
I mean then say they they get paid well. I mean it's it's slightly
we had with Netflix and Netflix was poaching gaming people with 1 million a year salaries and like where did they get that?
Ah okay.
I don't know Dar did you think gaming like translates to app development because it's quite different right or what is your experience? I it's interesting because I think like I think we look at gaming of like oh gaming is a few steps ahead of us and then we look at some of the obviously like gamification but a lot of the monetization models and and like pay walls and onboarding a lot of stuff using vents and from I was listening to you guys last episode you're talking about how apps are a few steps ahead uh in some of the
from the marketing point of view that is absolutely true absolutely true because people are definitely from the gaming at

least I'm borrowing the trends because it's it's usually the flow. It's e-commerce, apps, games. Everything starts in like e-commerce and apps. UGC came to gaming like three years late.
It's like usually it's like porn e-commerce after years.
Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Okay.
It's where everything starts.
Yes, that's very true. Okay, fair enough.
Yeah. But but regarding monetization and like let's say design or progression is the other way around where it's like games, apps and then that that's the thing. For instance, that's my case where like most of my non-gaming clients are apps that are like, can you help us with progression? Can you help us with recurring spending, gamification systems, all these other things, which is completely natural to gaming people, whereas I I show them some like gacha for instance, like random drop chance, loot boxes, and it's like, oh, this is amazing. We never thought of that. So,
yeah, but it's not really applicable to every app out there.
It's not. It's not. But you know some of those get to be Dualingo
obviously but it's it's it's

rather rare than uh you know like every it's suitable for everything.
Yeah of course of course
but we do see that like I think a lot of people where the it's not suitable in the product people will do it in the onboarding and in a payw wall. So we'll see sometimes like pay wall pops up if you close the payw wall then you get like a little spinning wheel. Oh, you got 40% off the annual plan. You won this box. And like that seems to happen as well.
Yeah. Okay. Nice.
Okay. So, back to portfolio. Regarding uh downloads, do I get that right that there are multiple accounts, not just the bending spl account for the apps? Because that that would be my guess or because sensor tower not that would always be tracking the like scale of these giant conglomerates because I I see only like 200 apps on this one. So, I'm guessing there's definitely more.
Yeah, they probably have more accounts, but we don't know what the accounts are.
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So, just wanted to put this as a disclaimer that this is not all that we see. My friends at Codeway, they have many accounts

that they publish under. That's not their main one.
Yeah. You have also the Tower. There's a bending spoons kind of tab and it says 27 278 apps
but then there is a company hierarchy and then you can actually check it's bending spoons easy tiger app fonts evernote the meetup LLC and all of these that I guess that they bought
but those are the companies here in the list.
Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm pretty sure like they have some other accounts as well.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, so a lot of people main ones
and a lot of people in the app space like if you start to do a little bit of gray hat stuff a couple accounts, one gets locked down, you can never put all your eggs in one basket.
I've heard horror stories of people doing like
seven figures and Apple shuts you down for one day to another
and you have no there's nothing you can do. You can't reply. You can't explain yourself. Like you're done.
Yeah, you're fine. This is this is very different to gaming because gaming is always usually just one account and the other accounts are just like hidden soft

launches
because in games nobody does the gray slash blackhead stuff
because they don't dare to.
Well, wait no I take that back. None nobody in Europe or US or
that part. Yes. from the other side
it's very very much happening just people don't know about it
let's let's yeah let's let's stay there
main account portfolio rameni the AI photo enhancer is pretty much the bulk of the downloads now for last month it was pretty much 10 million out of 13 or 14 million
it's the most valid app from the portfolio
yeah exactly and then revenue wise which is only IP revenue not uh ad revenue on top of it because
no climb which is app we're going to look at later actually has ad revenue uh
that's what I'm saying that that this is not counted in because this is only IP

revenue not ad revenue because we don't see ad revenue in sensor tower is doing something like 26 27 mil uh could be more or less 20 30% definitely yeah there was some like there was some event in July you know this event Look, Remen introduced make me look younger filter. This helped Remeny reach 10 million downloads.
Okay, there you go. So that's that there.
Jesus Christ. I am I'm just
Yeah.
20 million in in a month basically.
Yeah.
Which is unheard of. And then
and you know where this app is coming from actually?
Guess.
You tell me. Beijing.
Beijing. Oh, really? China.
Yeah. I mean, we don't even need to talk about like everything is coming from China. Period. Thank you very much for listening.
See you next category genre. Like we can look also there because that's also pretty interesting. But finish the portfolio.

Yeah. Yeah.
So revenue is increasing from year to year. So it's still scaling up. As I said, this is not the whole picture. Regarding the apps themselves, you can see them here. This is their IP revenue. of the four apps we'll be talking mainly today which uh again all of these are 150 million plus all of them like splice is 250 million lifetime revenue remin 230 climb again everything without ad revenue regarding downloads yeah reminis like plus half billion and then all the other ones are 100 million plus minus yeah so this is the revenue which again reminy is the big one and Slice doing 120k a day. Climbk Evernote 70k a day IP only and download.
Looking at the downloads, do you think they're using a UA funding partner?
Maybe I'm not sure. But if they don't uh

I mean there's a PVX partners, guys. So if you if you if you want to scale your app business or uh or your business in general, you should call PVX partners because they can help you grow your app as well because it's a most effective credit line for marketing. So go to pvxpartners.com and tell them uh two and a half gamers sent you. So pvxpartners.com the most effective credit line for marketing.
Yeah. So for Darius to know, we run ambush ads. So you don't know what whatever he says if it's an ador.
Exactly.
I noticed.
Yeah. So So back to the back to
I might sneak in a couple myself by the way.
For sure. Go ahead.
Of course. No problem.
Yeah. So the revenue wise uh sorry downloads wise revenue is pretty much taken all of the traffic here whereas it's like 300k a day and then all the other ones are I guess on back burner. If we go to active users as Felix likes

to always do because I guess that's the most important chart
when you're talking about revenue but not this. Yeah.
The whole growth. So they they claim that they went from 90k revenue per week to almost 600 which you've talked about. They say they run Apple search ads or like in the research like their Apple search ads targeting hundreds of keywords competitor names obviously and they're trying to capture like the viral moment. So anytime there is a viral thing happening they're loading all the keywords around that which helps like hell. I mean it's it's in it's crazy but works quite well. By viral moment, you mean what? Like ChPT going Giblly style
for example, something like that.
Or like I don't know, Will Smith slapping Chris Rock during the Oscars. I don't know. Like things like that.
Yes. Things like that. Yeah. It's I mean it's so so clever.
We definitely don't do this in We don't do this in gaming at all.
Yeah. Yeah. We don't do
It's so good.

Do you think they just have like a bunch of Gen Z and Tik Tok like looking at what's happening every day?
100%. For sure. I mean honestly like with apps and the growth in the apps business if you don't have anyone like looking at Tik Tok 247
you're you're done. You are done.
I mean I've started like kind of doing a little bit of experiments here and there and like diving into this exact kind of industry and Tik Tok is like the best growth engine for apps. Oh my god.
Yeah. Even even in games we had periods where people were literally slapping the videos from Tik Tok into their onboarding funnel like save the dog video when it happened like some literally like cut it into levels and put it into their onboarding funnel change all the icons store screenshot everything to save the dog and just skyrocketed like 8 million a month.
Jeez.
Yeah. Even here, even here I have this like the growth fueled by mix of the userdriven viral effects and the

marketing. So they have this before after kind of uh feature and uh many many guys posted this on Tik Tok especially. So it was just viral. There was a moment mid 2023 and like trend on Tik Tok using Rein's baby filter on adult photos. So you you you remember all these like people trying oh my god this is how would you would look or this is your adult photo and this is how kind of you look like as an as a baby insane rank number one immediately in upto thank you very much can you imagine like how much money they've earned only on this it's like
I look at the I look at the organic um search terms on the app store like couple times a week And every day I find something like some app or such term goes from nothing to like huge spikes in search volume and sometimes it lasts like a couple of weeks or a couple of months and the ones that can monetize on

that very early on like do really well
all the way.
Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.
Regarding the app's positions so I guess and ramen are the ones uh worth mentioning what's their position. So Ramini is on the third spot in the photo editing category after Picassard and Mu which I guess are Chinese. That that would be my guess. Donald Charts is actually on the second second spot there. And then uh regarding Splice is the second most grown sing video editor after Cap Cut by but by
I mean first by a long shot because it's Tik Tok man. Like come on. You can't
Yeah. Yeah, you can. You just can't. Of course. Of course.
No, it's like no.
So, that that's what we want there. Yeah. Felix, do you want me to go through the actual insights of the apps or like what what would you like?
Yeah, we can just uh show off the the

four apps that we wanted to talk about. And I guess maybe Darius, since you actually have a lot more experience, you can tell us what's going on with all these different ways of monetizing users and what's like the tricks here that we're not seeing with our uneducated eye. By the way, this is the this is the common den the nomin modifier for all of the apps basically where you have this kind of onboarding funnel which is usually like select your preferences or something something and ends with this window pretty much and this window is like I think one of the magic tricks that been around here where you have yearly weekly subscription not sure yet enable free access once you click enable free access it goes into payment so yeah there we Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
But there's this very small X button either on left or right side. And this is the same for all all the apps basically. And only if you click this, you get to the free version of the app themselves. So that's
some of the apps they don't even have the free option. You you have the free trial and then you need to kind of

unsubscribe afterwards. I really really like these things because for instance splice
this was uh like it looks like this like you know add is the video editing thing and I was like because this is emulator so I don't have time to add media into it. So I went on YouTube but like how does it look and like it's great and everything and went through the like actual experience. It looks like Adobe Streamline version.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Watch the first comment in the video. It's the best one. I love how importing a video to your photos is either be a payw wall.
I mean, what would you expect? Seriously, what would you expect? It's either that or you just need to watch an ad.
Yeah, of course. Of course. So,
but it blows me away like the amount of people that expect to be free.
Yeah.
On the app store. Like, we get dude like 90% of my negative comments on all of my apps is like, "Oh, this is not free." I was like, "Well, do you think the app made itself?"
Tell me something about it in games with that freeto play.

Yeah. So that's there. Regarding Reiny, looks pretty good. Like if I understand correctly, it's pretty much like photo enhancer with some AI functionality that's been added during the AI hype. So lots of these things are if we go into the
Oh, it's not me. If you go into the actual app, there's a it actually crashed my emulator because there were so many options that are loading. Uh because there's lots of functionality that's there that are uh AIdriven. So something is enhancement for static images. Something is just like the normal stuff that you would expect to see in Photoshop. And then you have a lot of these, you know, funky things which are we go to the menu. Yeah, there we are. Uh
gonna crash again. Uh hopefully not. Yeah. So stuff like portraits, but then you have bring memories to life, which is basically image to video functionality from stuff like link or
wait stop. Wait, hold on that payment

wall. I want to see what's happening.
I'm going to go back there if you want. No worries.
Of course. I mean I mean real life memories.
Don't even need to click.
It's almost 10 millions apps are doing the same thing.
Yeah. So here's the payment wall. Again, I think all of those have the same setup whereas you're very very limited in functionality that you can do and then for subscription you can
they have their own template for this.
Yeah. Yeah.
That's that's how they're so successful because if you take the app and then you apply the same thing if I understand this then you suddenly make way more money. That's that's
so this
this pay wall I mean these pay walls look quite different on the phone than you do on the emulator but the general idea is the same and this theme of this template has like recently become popular and people have been talking about it for recently like the last year become the best optinish model and actually in my studio we're converting

all of our apps to the same exact model where you have
the weekly that's pretty expensive it tends to be around like $7 to $10 a week and then you have the annual UAL with a 3-day trial we can optionally enable that's uh about like whatever 40 yeah $40 $50 a year $60 and you try to push people onto the weekly actually because you get the recurring revenue from the weekly that tends to be a really good monetization model. We've been running tests a bunch of our apps
like in the short run in the first month they look very similar in terms of the ROI and what's the LTB but in the long run the weekly just really compounds and does amazing work and actually it's become so popular that now you know we use like revenue cat and adapt and super wall to
all the apps kind of uh tools
yeah that people know
yeah all of us we use three tools basically for payw wall revenue ced app and superall and This table has become so popular that now it's a default template on Super Bowl for example.
Nice. Okay.
So, we're actually doing
I need to check.

It's a it's a oneclick to move all our apps to the same thing.
Okay.
So, exercises in behavioral psychology pretty much.
Yeah. Yeah. Cuz I mean, you know, like I think most of the apps like on on iOS in the US uh most of the apps with a conversion rate of about 3% from install to paying subscriber on average. also a lot of fluctuous variations, but average let's say to generalize
3% uh at least 3% up to like 5% for some of the better apps.
And so if you can move from 5% to 6% conversion rate, keeping the price point high and add like a weekly compounding like you're off to the races.
Well, doubling the conversion is unheard of.
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CTV ads on Hulu, Roku, Tuby, you name it, in minutes. It's that simple. Totally selfs serve. And yes, it actually drive real business results. So, over 5,000 brands are already using it. So, maybe it's your turn. Check out vibe.com. That's v ibe.co vibe.co and uh enjoy. Thank you very much. Now let's get back to the episode. Also in terms of the like the LTV and the the time frame is it what like three six months that you kind of see it the lifetime of the user or is it
not the ROS like the actual like like the lifetime not value but like how long the users are staying with within the app because obviously without the the annual like if you if you do weekly or monthly it was like six months nine months or
yeah I mean this fluctuates quite widely

for the annual it tends to be pretty standard. We see on the annual the renewal rate will be around like 30%. At least 20% of people will forget and they'll just renew 30% up to 40% if you're doing quite well. That's on the annual
and then the monthly and weekly like yeah it kind of swings wildly like on the monthly you could have like around 6%ish on the weekly really like I can't confidently say one.
No, of course. Yeah, that's fine. Yeah. Yeah. I mean Yakob you don't really need to even look at the the retention. It's just It's different different kinds of I know it's different model but exactly curious to me
a lot of people
this is going to look like
we don't even measure retention it's not a metric we look at for for a lot of us for some it matters but a lot it's just like it's the renewal rate under subscription that really drives everything
okay what's the what's like the other northstar metrics you are going for like KPIs
the biggest one is just the the renewal

Right. And then it's obviously like the price points at which you can convert. So like the average revenue per user and average revenue per subscriber
and then conversion rates like conversion from installed to start trial and start trial to paying subscriber.
Oh okay. So basically a much faster bucket than the games industry.
What is the the gaming APIs they look at?
Uh retention for sure. like it's it's much much harder to kind of tack on retention because uh you know you're looking at top games having like 20% day 30 retention and then you know users need to stay you need to have very good live ops meaning like recurring content that keeps them spending because our LTVs can reach thousands of dollars pretty much we don't care about some you know subscription is just some kind of afterthought somewhere there you have gacha systems usually loot boxes that can drive like for instance my favorite game which I'm playing did uh yesterday 1.5 million a day spike on the new gacha just because of that out of just like few few thousands of users. So that's

there
I think that's one major difference is that in the apps industry we don't have whales. So like if we have the you know you have the higher end you have like a $40 subscription.
My question will be not if you have whales but like do you even have the depth of the economy for the whale to kind of manif manifest itself.
We don't have the options for it. Like really we don't have the pricing and the monetization. We have one annual
you know you take something like I don't know Clash of Clans the economy is something like what 100k plus and you still at not at like top level still and you spend already,000
that's insane.
Yeah that that's more important. We have games the biggest ones like you know the white out survival or kingshot the ones ads you're seeing everywhere pretty much. We have infinite economies where it's based on destruction of property. So what you have bought is being destroyed by other players. So there's infinite spending going on pretty much. Let's get let's get back to bed.
Yeah. Yeah.
A day.

Yeah. Yeah. Four and a half.
Yeah.
I mean in our best case scenario for us
when we look what we would consider whale is somebody who gets a weekly subscription and then keeps it for a year. Like that's that's a whale for us.
Sure. Sure. Sure. But you know like it's the other side of different coin because again we have the problem with UA and distribution. The apps are that that's their forte here. So that's
yeah we can we can borrow a lot of things from from this side of the the business but people are just yeah people are just don't not used to see this it's not a lot of work but it's different type of work and these days um managers are lazy so they won't do it they just spend all the money the company has but when you're a small company you don't have the money then you need to be very creative and then how creative you can get is all the different kind of organic ways of doing stuff Not so easy. But if if you know what you're doing,
you could honestly just go on TikTok, open 10 accounts, post 10 times a day to each account and like you're going to make it. It just requires work.

Mate, you want to take the screen with you or
I can Yeah, I can feel something else.
Actually, I actually wanted to ask one last question.
Are you you are here? Sorry.
Yeah. I wanted to ask one question actually. Us and ratings for these apps, right? Uh what's the story there? Like cuz I overheard a conversation that you were having at one of our breakfasts how you essentially don't even take the good bad reviews or like there's a lot of tricks you guys do there.
Well, we can report bad reviews that don't align with some of the guidelines. So, it said the review has to talk about the app specifically or some stuff within the app. I'm trying to report all the ones that just like I have a bunch of bad comments that just say this is not free. So my claim is like this is not about the app. This is just
so shoot down one star reviews this way.
Yeah. Like so that's one way. But something that's that's happening like the kind of standard in in reviews was like okay when you have the wow moment

in the app like when you deliver value you show the review prompt. And they were like you know what let's move it. Let's show it right after the payw wall after the onboarding before they even see the product because they just subscribed. Like they just want to get in there so they'll click on whatever. And so that worked and then like the reviews went up like next and the ratio of negative to positive stayed the same. So we're like okay our volume and then we're like wait a second let's even put it before the pay wall. So not just subscribers but everybody sees the review prompt and Apple doesn't mind apparently and we're like now we have review prompts in the onboarding.
Have you have you also tried review filtering of like two buttons like five star and four stars? It's like four star goes to feedback, five star go to store and stuff like that.
No that's Apple doesn't like that cuz that's like manipulation. like to do that all the time here industry.
You know, you incentivize the the fivestar rating and you're it's fine. It's like you need to take it down before you are considered for featuring by Google or Apple, but then you can bring you can bring it back.
Yeah. I mean, one thing is like we'll we'll we'll do like a we'll prompt them

with a screen that kind of shows them like, oh, we're a small indie dev team. Here's a picture of two people that are
so we beg for review
and like we beg for a review and then we use like emotional manipulation to get the good reviews that sometimes work. There is another strategy of like some and I don't know how this actually well works. Something I've been trying. So there's the website appadvice.com and they have apps gone free portion of the website. So every day they feature a couple of apps and then you make a deal with them. So you make the app free for a day and they'll feature you. And we did it one of our fitness apps. We got 10,000 installs in a day. So, you don't get the revenue because it's free, but we obviously like we forced the revenue prompt down their throat. And so, we got a couple hundred fivestar reviews. I'm still waiting to see, and this was a few weeks ago, so I'm still waiting to see how like the Apple red flag algorithm, if they'll flag some of it, I'll remove it. But so far, it seems like we got a ton of five star reviews, and they're staying there. And they're all in the US. So, this is one way to like

spike up.
You you sacrifice one day of revenue for a couple of hundred five star reviews. That's worth it.
That's worth it. Yeah, for sure.
Interesting,
Felix. So, anything else you want to for me to share?
That's pretty much it. Let's uh let's get on to UA and see how these guys are getting their users.
Sure. I mean,
it got me really curious.
Yeah,
in gaming, all the all the latest UAV is AI stuff basically. I
mean, we're going to talk so it's exactly the same. I mean, look. So if you app but I mean like
yeah but still also again as I said like this is not everything that we see it's like this is the the paid UA stuff right nothing else than Tik Tok and Facebook and a little bit of Google but it's like majority of the apps how it works is you make all the money on iOS on Android does it doesn't really matter percent revenue us

iOS thank you very much What I what UA options you have Facebook, Tik Tok and if you are savvy enough integral, Applavin and all the ad networks but in app space people don't really know unless they have some gaming experience before they don't really know like Applavin is actually suitable for apps. But I know some of the companies already kind of going in that direction. But again, we can we can check all the different creatives and like what what exactly they're running. But then like this is not exactly like the whole story. And I'm going to show you afterwards like what the actual whole story is [Music] exactly what we talked about. Like it's that that's it. I mean you don't really need anything. You don't really need anything else. Use AI for all this. Try it. Correct. Thank you very much. It

says basically everything, right? What is the all app about? I wanted to say game, but this is app. And you Jesus Christ. Sorry. Do I still have the the sound on or no?
No, no, it's off.
Okay. Okay. Good. You before after, right? So that's the like that's the beauty part of the the whole whole app. At the end of the day, this is like this is all quite simple. Like it's just about like volume of testing on the creatives and and whoever can get there first like wins. The the the the copycat element is also huge. So like what a lot of companies a lot of us will do like we'll watch like every day we'll check the Facebook ads library and these tools for whatever was ran yesterday and then we'll see the best performing. We'll just recreate it and run it and and do the same thing essentially. Yeah, that's that's what we discussed.
These strategies are also not like there's no way to defend.
Oh, yeah. Oh, 100%. That's what we discussed
uh with uh with the Chinese developers.

You know, here's the brief. Just look at whatever all the competitors and other guys were running yesterday. Just do it today. That's that that's exactly normal business.
Yeah. Normal way of business. Exactly.
It just works really well. Like I remember at like at Reflectly we would like we would I would turn on 200 creatives in the morning by noon I would see that about you know 90% are underperforming so I'd kill those
and then after lunch break I'd have five to 10 creatives that are doing really well put all of the budget behind it go all in and then you would find like one that'll last for months that are performing well.
Yeah. So again, it's volume. It's just pure volume. Nothing else. And you you see like it's 11 seconds all the different kind of images. Exactly what the app does, right? So nothing really that different.
It's so tab instead.
Oh, so yeah, sure. Let's I asked if there is the

the actual
and this was very something like coming from top girl game.
Oh yeah, exactly. Look. Yeah. Hello. Oh Jesus Christ. Okay, let's see. Let's see. What do we have here again? Oh, there's that the old photo. Bring back your old photo back to live. Share. Thank you very much.
That's so loud. Going to have to mute that.
What? I couldn't hear you.
Oh, really? I mean, I I just turn off the the whole Anyway. Okay. So, I would shut down this and then start actually sharing something else, which is the Tik Tok fun because this is where the whole kind of magic happens. Not on Facebook or on like paid UA. Obviously, it's the combination of both, but you usually start here. And like Dario said, you create hundreds of accounts and you start spamming them with videos and then

suddenly you create like a very big snowball effect with or kind of let's call it organic traffic, but it's not organic. I mean, it's let's call it misattributed stuff. And look, all of these videos, they would get thousands of of views and hundreds of thousands of views. This this guy had like two million likes. So I'm pretty sure like it's very big amount of views and imagine this you create 10 different accounts and you start doing all of this it's just insane and in the US suddenly you have so many so many organic installs well installs coming from this then which translates to the revenue right away because of all the all the payw wall kind of tricks that we saw. I mean it's perfect. And then like this is this is just the baseline where you start. You have Instagram reels and you have also shorts. I mean this is way more powerful because you get way more um views obviously but still if you combine compound all of these together perfect

baseline and then on top of this you start running UA. I mean where is the limit? Where is the limit?
Yeah. Yeah. The real special thing about Tik Tok like the the organic discoverability is is incredible because the algorithm is fundamentally different from
Instagram. On Instagram you can only get exposure to people who follow you most of the time.
On Tik Tok you can have zero followers. It's about the content and if you post it like I've seen accounts with zero followers first video b million views and like
you're done.
Exactly. Yeah. And you're fine.
What percentage is Apple search ads usually of like marketing spend must be really big in the app space, right? So, I mean, I can't tell you like a percentage for the industry. Apple search ads is is the easiest to start with because you don't have to have creatives. You just put in the keyword and and you're good to go. The thing is it's very is very very competitive because it's so easy to start with.
And so, obviously like the cost per install will go like $30 for a fitness app,
which makes no sense.
Yeah, exactly.

You're competing with Better Me and all these guys. So if you go like I've seen some stuff like we'll we'll do like hyper niche apps based on a keyword that goes viral. So some of like our strategy is I look at these trending keywords couple times a week and every once in a while I'll find a trend that's not a specific app but some generic trend that went viral on Tik Tok and then we'll quickly like we'll build an MVP in a week. We'll put it up there and then on top of it I'll put search ads to make sure everybody who goes to look for it then like gets the app. You rank number one in like three days and then if the trend stays you're you're good to go and you're golden.
Yeah. Exactly.
Like you might have seen like Yeah. Better me you know like few weeks ago there was a trend with um like action figure stuff on Chad GPT which you can do it like for free. Just one guy saw the trend built an app and he did like I mean he built the app in a couple of days and he did like 80k in profit that month just from you know doing it quickly enough just a single day.

Yeah, easy. And then you have also also the same thing here. Honestly, it's it's not exactly the same, but you have all these 300k views. Obviously, this is not exactly the remedy app, but still still funny enough. So, all of the shorts, thousands of views, some of these, of course, not as big, but this is all you need. And if you have hundred of these, as we discussed, I think with some in one of our other episodes, you have hundred of these like smaller and like midsize kind of shorts, like suddenly you have thousands of installs and you haven't even run any types of UA and you can automate this even now. It's insane. The thing is like the the the paid UA for apps has been like becoming more competitive and more difficult and more expensive every month for like the last 10 years.
Like the reason why calm became a billion dollar company is because they

discovered sleep stories which is their number one feature like it was better than meditations and at the same time Instagram story ads just became a format. We didn't have story ads available on Instagram. And when this feature placement fit happened, it like exploded and suddenly they had like billion dollar in revenue. That's the timing. You couldn't do the same thing now because it's just way more competitive. And especially in the last six months, as you guys know, with all the AI stuff. We used to have to like pay the creators and and do all the logistics with the influencers, the micro influencers, and all the content.
And now I can just generate like a thousand videos an hour. And
it's so flooded. has become very very difficult to compete in some of the bigger categories.
Yeah, we we can tell you something about the UA competition in game.
I mean, yeah, sure. But still, but yeah, it wasn't like this before in apps like now. Yeah, and also it's like the biggest big part in the the whole app UA is just actually working with the creators and the influencers. And then

you can use obviously like all of these like videos from let's say Instagram marketplace. You can use them in your UA campaigns. So you don't really need to create like your own videos. But you see like you work with 10 different creators and then you see like one or two are really getting a lots of views which is kind of like pre-qualifying the the video as like the creative win. You you put it into campaigns. Boom. You have creative winner immediately.
Have you seen this working in games? No. Nobody's using nobody's doing that. So, okay, let me just close this. So, I mean also like AI guy,
you know, it's I know a thing or two about this. So, it's good. It's good. No, but it's it's very interesting because uh again, if you ask anyone in in uh in the gaming space, are you working with uh like Instagram marketplace? There is a Instagram marketplace thing. Yeah. Okay, good to know.
Yeah. And if you post like a ton of

videos on Tik, you can post a 100 videos a day, you can see which one takes off, and then you don't you don't waste your advertising budget. You take the two, three that work really well, you scale, you go all in and you pre-qualify your
creatives. Exactly. Creative testing. You just do it. You just do it on Tik Tok and uh you can literally do it like on a daily basis like tens of videos if you have them. And then you see, oh, this one got like 2 million views. Thank you very much. Let's put in the UA. That's it. That's all you need. which is I mean it's easier said than done.
Yeah.
You first need a video with two million views.
Yeah.
But you don't need like high production quality. Like from my experience over and over and over again when I see something that I think is going to work really well, it never works. It's always like the shitty stuff with the weird lighting and weird noises and
ads work so well. They always overperform everything that I expected. And the same like when Tik Tok first came and I I was doing a course on Tik Tok and I was like to publish the course I need to grow my own account to show. And so I grew my account and um I posted 10 videos a day for three months grew to

like 30,000 followers and then about three or four videos had a million views and it's like the stupidest silliest things that you would not expect.
Of course random stuff. I mean not so random though, but still like anything that looks really native and people can relate. That's that's all you need.
Yeah. It's got to look like it's a it's a video from your friend, not a polished advertising. Something I've seen that it seems like a lot of the Asian markets, the more polished stuff perform better, but in general like the Western world is just the more unhinged you are, the better.
Yeah, suits me really well. Suits really well. No, it's good. So, anything else should we cover? Because I think this was pretty pretty good.
Pretty good episode. Bending Spoon's very inspiring app company. Yeah, I think the next one we're going to do in the series is probably going to be Codeway and we might or might not have a special guest joining us for that one as well. But yeah, more to come on that in the future. So, this has been another amazing episode of the Two and a Half Gamers podcast with special guest Darius joining us to let us give some insights

into the app industry. Don't forget to join our Slack group if you want to ask any questions. And I'm sure Darius anywhere people can get in touch with you if they have any questions about apps.
Yeah, the best way will be on YouTube. I make a video every week telling people what we discuss, but I share my experience. So I'll run a bunch of tests every week, new apps. We publish about one new app a week, pay wall test, optimization test, and then I share everything on YouTube like step by step. So just go to Darius Mora on YouTube or if you're serious about the app business, you want to dive in, I do have a paid community on school.comappsuccess if you guys are serious and want to join a community of active builders where I show like really all the behind the scenes, all the secrets.
Nice. We'll put the links in the show notes as well so everybody can can join. Maybe I will join as well.
Yeah,
I'm interested in space. Let's clear that that ad.
We also do a live coder every week where

actually I look at the trending keywords. I share my screen and I tell the guys, "Okay, these three five are top trending this week. Go build apps for it because there's an opportunity this week
and we do this every week."
That's nice. Very cool.
All right.
Yeah. Thanks.
Thank you for having me.
Thank you for having the time.
Perfect. Thank you guys for listening. See you next time. Uh please comment under the episode. Uh, and as as Felix said, we actually got pretty good feedback for the the previous uh Genesis episode, and people are looking forward to hear about bending spoons. So, thank you very much. See you next time.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Ciao. [Music]