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 iOS in the US,

most of the apps with a conversion rate of about 3% from install to paying subscriber on average.

Also, a lot of fluctuation variations, but average, let's say to generalize, 3%,

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 after the races.

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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 well received first episode on Genesis in our app in our 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 million accounts so it's hard to say but yeah 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 there

thank you felix uh it's great to be here my name is darius i've been in the app industry for about a decade now

And I'm super excited to jump in.

And we all in the app space, we look at bending spoons.

And it's 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?

They're 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 AI was anything similar to what we say.

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 a few months ago, we got together with my co-founders and we built the whole thing in one weekend using ChatGPT.

So that is the advance of technology that happened in the last year.

So you were going for like an LLM style of an app or

a different approach?

We were trying a lot of different approaches, but LLM wasn't in the state that it is now.

Yeah, just curious like why this transition happened, as you said.

Also, that would be a good question from our CTO.

Technology?

Technology?

Yeah, I could technology happened in the United States.

I know

like 10 years ago and now, so I guess.

There are more intelligent people on my team to answer those questions.

Yeah, so that was the first company, and then I was the first employee at Reflectly, which was the first 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 exited that part and then

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.

A little bit about Bending Spoons first.

But before we do that, my name is Matteo Anchari.

I'm Felix Proverk.

And we are your hosts.

Are you fucked up?

You fucked it up.

Fucked it up.

Okay.

Anyway.

You can always be.

Yeah, I know, I know, I know.

But we are your hosts.

So thank you very much.

And funnily enough, Arius is from Slovakia.

Felix now is outnumbered again.

And now it's even more.

Well, okay, bending spoons.

Jokes aside, 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?

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.

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So Benning Spring'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 was CEO Luca Ferrari.

Great name, by the way.

Amazing.

Exactly.

Yeah, he joined McKinsey, 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 basically like, what a shitty deal.

It's the smartest guy that has to do the boring shit while everybody else is having fun and not paying rent and shorten.

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

private equity firm.

The only difference is very close to Genesis, right?

That 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.

Darius,

yeah, do you know if Genesis sells assets as well?

No, I don't think so.

It's just, I think they don't just buy them, but they invest.

Genesis was like a voodoo, voodoo star.

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.

They were.

Yeah, this is the game industry model 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 short-term goal as possible.

It's kind of they built before they've done that, like they built a few apps on there, but they built something on their end as well.

Yeah.

So this was wildly profitable for Bending Spoons 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 Bendings was Bending was bootstrap.

But in September 2022, he raised 340 million from investors.

And this round attracted names like Ryan Reynolds or ex-Vimeo CEO or a former Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, as well.

So, and some Italian bankers.

So,

you know.

And then they actually in early 2024 raised additional hundred fifty five

uh at valuation two point five billion.

So, yeah, not bad.

Sorry.

Uh early twenty twenty four.

Okay.

And apparently they said that like all of that money was used to do the acquisitions'cause 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.

So outside of the app space as well.

And if if they do want to go for an IPO and they talked about about like the us listing then i 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 open ai 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 very good point just just want to add one tidbit here but this model was actually already tried in the gaming industry maybe you have heard of things like embracer or still front which are our very famous names here, which ended up horribly.

I'm sorry.

Yeah, but look, what they were doing, they were pretty much just raising the value of their stock and buying the companies for the stock.

And

at some point it pretty much went all crumbling down as a Ponzi scheme.

So that's still the idea.

Even though they own the right to Lord of the Rings and stuff like that now.

But yeah, 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 model versus apps and their business model and how it actually works and how it actually is more consumer driven rather than just like gamers it's it's slightly different

utilities like it's not yes you know lots of these things are utilities it's 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 fuck is happening?

And then you open TikTok, YouTube, Real, Instagram, it's all over the place.

So 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 it.

A lot of the, like, not just utilities, but a lot of the apps have like a really long, you know, LTV.

People just use something.

Like,

you'll use the same alarm app for fucking 10 years, right?

Or whatever that might be, or like like fitness app.

Or 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

like we saw our own apps will like will triple in January, but not doing anything.

Yeah, there's a seasonality.

Super interesting.

And I remember you told me one time before, Darius, about 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's 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,

Vernote and WeTransfer and a bunch of the other ones, one of the first things they they do is fire everybody.

That's a big way to lower costs because these are based in San Francisco and Amsterdam, other places.

So you fire everybody and then bring it in-house.

And it's still, you still pay really well, but it's cheaper in Italy and Milan than most of the other places.

That's what I read.

Transfer, bought

the companies, laid off 75% of people.

Bye-bye.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's amazing.

I mean, they are giving out.

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.

They're like, you know, pretty cushy transition, but of course, it's not ideal.

Yeah, but if you compare San Francisco or US-based salaries and then Italy,

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 the US that much, because it's really expensive.

That's really good.

I mean, we have like Ukraine, Belarus.

Yeah, Turkey is huge, obviously.

It makes a lot of sense.

Yeah, so in their hiring process, I mean, it's

this, I was reading somewhere that they expect to do about like five to ten 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 an interview round and actually talk to somebody

in person, unpaid, yeah.

And a lot of it, so I haven't seen the actual test, but it seems like 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

on the spot on the fly.

I don't know how they

hedge against ChatGPT and all of this stuff with like take-home tasks and homework, but

that's their process.

At the beginning, 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 for them.

Nice.

I mean, so it's like 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 Goldman Sachs of Milan.

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 gonna challenge yourself.

This is not to fuck 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 thing.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Or queen.

Do we know the headcount estimate?

Or at least 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 hire, so if you're out of university,

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

internship program.

Yeah.

So they have like three months, six month internships that's for graduate.

It seems like their strategy in general is not, I mean, they have, of course, experts in industry, but I think majority of the workforce is like fresh graduates coming up.

They can get them for cheaply.

And also like the scaling of the salaries, like if you have some experience, you make about double of what they offer when you're coming in as a graduate, which like makes sense.

But this is like, isn't this 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.

Yeah, for sure.

So the starting point is a great school, I guess.

Yeah, they don't have too many layers of management.

It seems like it's structured around specific products.

And so you get a kind of a fairly small team, work on one product, dive deep, you know, cross-functional 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 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.

And there's not a lot of people exiting or kind of laying around.

They claim, I saw the stat, they claimed less than 1%

unwanted churn.

The unwanted part makes me wonder like, okay, do you just fire a bunch of people?

And

what's the wanted part?

Like, come on.

Wanted churn.

Yeah,

all right.

So I think we haven't succeeded in hiring anybody from there, but I but yeah, there's a great pool of talent.

Yeah.

I guess there's also like much, much more harder to get like capital running compared to like Belle or some somewhere there in the US if these people they get the know-how and then they want to go 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.

You don't found in Europe.

That's the yeah.

So Jakob, 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

when you are starting to do so, I just want to go through like 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

IAC for

Climb, yes.

Robot Killer, Spam, which is a spam call blocker, and then iTranslate.

And then

Meetup hopping slash StreamYard.

Okay, I used actually StreamYard, which is a streaming service when I was on the Google webinar.

There's issue, VTransfer, VTransfer, BrightCo and Commode, which is outdoor navigation for hikers and cyclists.

And which was very the

last app was acquired in March 2025.

Okay.

So they're saying they're claiming to 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 conversation stage.

And this is something that also, this

like

five years ago, maybe, if you had an app that makes like some amount, nothing huge, but if you just had an app that makes consistent money, there was very little people reaching out.

Like at Reflectly, we did a bunch of acquisitions early on and fairly easy, and we could like triple the revenue in a few months just by doing some optimization on the payroll and 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 market has shifted significantly.

Demand for apps is huge now.

Yeah, for sure.

We also see that in our sector, whereas a lot of people are actually switching from gaming to apps because that expertise translates to.

I wouldn't say

changing or switching to apps is huge.

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 it's like people think it's it's way easier but i don't think that really applies like they get to get paid well i mean

then say they get paid well i mean it's it's slash like from automation

netflix and netflix was poaching gaming people with one million a year salaries and like where did they get that okay i don't know there's did you think gaming like translates to app development because it's quite different right?

Or what's your experience?

It's interesting because

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 like payrolls and onboarding, a lot of stuff.

And from, I was listening to you guys last episode, you're talking about how apps are a few steps ahead in some of the.

From the marketing point of view, Darius.

Absolutely true.

Absolutely true.

Because people are definitely from the gaming industry, at least I'm borrowing the trends because it's usually the flaw.

It's e-commerce, apps, games.

Everything that starts in like e-commerce and apps.

UGC came to fucking gaming like three years late.

Usually it's like porn e-commerce apps.

Yeah,

yes.

Okay.

That's where everything starts.

Yes, that's very true.

Okay, fair enough.

Yeah, but regarding monetization and like, let's say, design or progression is the other way around where it's like games, apps, and that's the thing.

For instance, 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 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 Duolingo.

Obviously, but

it's rather rare than

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 with the it's not suitable in the product, people will do it in the onboarding and in a paywall.

So I'll see sometimes like paywall pops up.

If you close the paywall, 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 downloads, downloads, do I get it right that there are multiple accounts, not just the Banding Spooz account, for the apps?

Because that would be my guess.

Because sensor towers not that could always be tracking the scale of these giant conglomerates.

Because I see only like 200 apps on this one.

So I'm guessing there's definitely more.

Yeah, they'll probably have more accounts, but we don't know what the accounts are.

Yeah, exactly.

So just wanted to put this as a disclaimer that this is not all MEC.

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, yeah.

So I'm pretty sure like they have some other accounts as well.

Anyway, so

a lot of people in the app space.

If you start to do a little bit of gray hat stuff, you have a couple accounts.

One gets locked down.

You 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

there's nothing you can do.

You can't reply.

You can't explain yourself.

You're done.

Yeah, you're fine.

This is very different to gaming because gaming is always usually just one account and the other accounts are just like hidden soft lunches.

Because in games, nobody does the gray/slash black hat stuff.

Because they don't dare to.

Well, whoa, wait, wait, wait.

No, no, I take that back.

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 see.

Let's stay there.

portfolio

ramini the ai photo enhancer is pretty much the bulk of the downloads now for last month it was pretty much ten million out of thirteen or fourteen 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

clime which is that we're going to look at later actually has ad revenue and 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, could be more or less 20, 30%, definitely.

Yeah, there was some, like, there was some event in July.

You know what this event?

Look,

Remini introduced Make Me Look Younger filter.

This helped Remini reach 10 million downloads.

Okay,

there you go.

So that's the fucking

Jesus Christ.

I am I'm just

20 million in in a month, basically.

Yeah.

Which is unheard of.

And then you know where this app is coming from, actually.

Guess

you tell me.

Beijing.

Beijing, oh really?

Yes, yes.

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

the category genre, like we can look also there because that's also pretty interesting.

But I want to finish the portfolio.

Yeah, yeah, sure.

So, IP 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.

The four apps we'll be talking mainly today,

which

again, all of these are 100

million plus, all of them, like Splice is 250 million, lifetime revenue, remini 230, climb again, everything without add revenue regarding downloads.

The Remini is like plus half a billion, and then all the other ones are 100 million plus minus.

Yep, so this is the revenue, which again, the reminiscence is the big one, and then splice between 120k a day, climb,

Evernote, 70K a day, IP only, and downloads

looking at the downloads.

Do you think they're using a UA funding partner?

Maybe, I'm not

sure.

But if they don't,

I mean, there is a PVX partners guy.

So

if you want to scale your app business or your business in general, you should call PVX Partners because they can help you grow your app as well.

Because it's

most effective credit line for marketing.

So go to pvxpartners.com and tell them 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 whatever he says if it's an ad.

Exactly.

I noticed, yeah.

So, so back to the back burner.

I might sneak in a couple myself, by the way.

Yeah, for sure.

Go ahead.

Of course, no problem.

Yeah, so the revenue-wise, sorry, downloads-wise, Remini 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 Backburner.

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 so not this yeah the whole growth so they it 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 they're apple search ads targeting hundreds of keywords competitor names obviously and they're trying to capture like the viral moment so anytime there is is a viral thing happening they're loading all the keywords around that which helps like hell i mean it's it's insane it's crazy but works quite well by viral moment do you mean what like chat gpt going ghibly style for example

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 we don't do this in gaming at all yeah yeah

it's so good.

Do you think they just have like a bunch of Gen Z and TikTok looking at what's happening?

100%.

I mean, honestly, with apps and the growth in the apps business, if you don't have anyone looking at TikTok 24-7,

you're done.

You are done.

I mean, I've started

doing a little bit of experiments here and there and diving into this exact kind of industry.

And TikTok is like the best growth engine for apps.

Oh, my God.

Even in games, we had periods where people were literally slapping the videos from TikTok into their onboarding funnel, like save the dog video when it happened.

Like some guys literally cut it into levels and put it into their onboarding funnel, change all the icons, store, screenshot, everything to save the dog, and just skyrocket it like 8 million a month.

Jeez.

Even here, even here.

I have this like the growth fueled by a mix of the user-driven viral effects and the marketing.

So they have this before-after kind of feature.

And

many, many guys posted this on TikTok, especially.

So it was just viral.

There was a moment mid-2023 and like trend on TikTok using Remini's baby filter on adult photos.

So you remember all of these like people trying, oh my God, this is how you would look or this is your adult photo and this is how kind of you look like as a baby.

Insane.

rank number one immediately in app store

thank you very much see can you imagine like how much money they've earned only on this

it's like i look at the i i look at the organic um search terms on the app store like a 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,

yeah, yeah, exactly.

So, regarding the apps positions, so I guess Splice and Remini are the ones worth mentioning.

What's their position?

So, Remini is on the third spot in the photo editing category after Picas Art and Me2, which I guess are Chinese.

That would be my guess.

From download charts is actually on the second second spot there.

And then

regarding splice is the second most grossing video editor after Capcat.

By but by

first by a long shot because

it's TikTok man.

Like come on.

You can't.

Of course, of course.

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 to 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 the denominator the 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's been run 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 go.

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 that.

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 like these things because, for instance,

this was like, it looks like this.

Like, you know,

it's the video editing thing.

And I was like,

because this is an 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 actual experience.

It looks like Adobe Streamline version.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And then watch the first comment in the video.

It's the best one.

I love how importing a video to your photos is either behind fucking paywall.

I mean,

what would you expect?

Seriously, what would you expect?

It's either that or you just need to watch an ad.

Of course, of course.

So, yeah, but it blows me away, like the amount of people that expect shit to be free 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 fucking app made itself?

Tell me something about it.

It games with that free to play.

Yeah, so that's there.

Regarding Remini, it looks pretty good.

Like, if I understand correctly, it's pretty much like a 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

actual,

it's not me, if we go into the actual app, there's a, it actually crashed my emulator because there were so many options that are loading because there's lots of functionality that's there that are AI driven.

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 funky things which are...

Well, let me go to the menu.

Yeah, there we are.

Could I crash again?

Yeah, 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, wait, wait, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, 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 million 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 pay.

Yeah, actually, they have their own template for this.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

This is how they're so successful.

Because if you take the app and then you apply it,

you try to understand this like a template, then you suddenly make way more money.

So this

payroll, I mean, these payrolls look quite different on the phone than they do on the emulator, but the general idea is the same.

And this theme of this template has recently become popular, and people have been talking about it recently.

Like the last year, this has become the best opt-in-ish model.

And actually, in my studio, we're converting all of our apps to the same exact model.

We have the weekly that's pretty expensive.

It tends to be around like seven to ten dollars a week.

And then you have the annual with a three-day trial we can optionally enable.

That's about like whatever, 40, yeah, 40, 50 dollars a year, 60 dollars.

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 with the LTV.

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 RevenueCat and Adaptee and Superwall to all the apps kind of tools.

Yeah.

Yeah, all of us, we use three tools basically for paywall.

RevenueCat, Adaptee, and Superwall.

And this paywall has become so popular that now it's a default template on Superwall, for example.

Nice.

Okay.

So we're actually doing it.

I need to check

it's a one-click to move all our apps to the same thing.

Okay.

So exercises in behavioral psychology, pretty much.

Yeah, yeah.

Because I mean, you know, like, I think most of the apps, like on iOS in the US,

most of the apps with a conversion rate of about 3% from install to paying subscriber.

on average also a lot of fluctuation variations but average let's say to generalize three percent uh at least three percent up to like five percent 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 after the races, whoa, doubling the conversion is unheard of.

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Also,

in terms of the LTV and the time frame, is it three, six months that you kind of see

the lifetime of the user?

Or is it

not the Rust, like the actual

lifetime, not value, but like how long the users are staying within the app?

Because obviously without the annual, like if you do weekly or monthly, it was like six months, nine months.

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% people will forget and they'll just renew

30% up to 40% if you're doing quite well.

That's on the annual.

And on 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, it's fine.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, yeah, we don't really need to even look at the retention.

just

different, different kinds of

different model, but

it's just curious to me.

A lot of people this is going to look like shit.

Yeah.

We don't even measure retention.

It's not a metric we look at 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, okay.

What's like the other North Star metrics you are going for like APIs?

The biggest one is just the renewal renewal rate, 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 install to start trial and start trial to paying subscriber.

Okay, so basically a much faster bucket than the games industry.

What is the gaming APIs they look at?

Oh, the retention, for sure.

Like it's it's much, much harder to kind of tack on retention because, you know, you're looking at top games having like 20% data t 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 subscriptions 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

yesterday 1.5 million a day spike on a 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 it's like if we have the you know you have the higher end you have the control 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 manifest manifest itself we don't have the options for it like really we don't have the pricing and the monetization because we have one subscription manual you know you take something like like, I don't know, Clash of Clans, the economy is something like what 100k plus, and you're still at not at like top level still.

And you spend already $100K thousand dollars.

That's insane.

Yeah, that's more important.

We have games, the biggest ones, like the White Out Survival or Kink Shot, 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 back to Petrics.

Yeah.

In a day.

yeah yeah four and a half yeah i mean in our best case scenario for us

when we'll look what we would consider a whale is somebody who gets a weekly subscription and then keeps it for a year like that's yeah that's a whale for us

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 fourth area so yeah i think we can we can borrow a lot of things from from this side of the business but people are just yeah people are just not not used to see this

it's not a lot of work but it's different type of work and these days ua 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 are doing

you could also just go down tick tock open 10 accounts post 10 times a day to each account and like you're gonna make it it just requires work

Mate, you want to take the screen with you, or I can, yeah, I can.

Felix,

actually, I actually wanted to ask one last question.

Are you here?

Sorry,

yeah, I wanted to ask one question actually.

Uh,

reviews and ratings for these apps, right?

Uh, what's the story there?

Like, because 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

shoot down one-star reviews this way.

Yeah, like.

So that's one way.

But something that's happening, like the kind of standard 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 paywall, after the onboarding, before they even see the product, because they just subscribe.

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 like, okay, our volume rate.

And then we're like, wait a second, let's even put it before the paywall.

So not just subscribers, but everybody fucking sees the review prompt.

And Apple doesn't mind, apparently.

And we're like, now we have review prompts in the onboarding.

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 goes to store, and stuff like that.

No, that's Apple doesn't like that because that's like manipulation.

I like to do that all the time here.

You know, you incentivize the five-star rating, and 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 it back.

Yeah, I mean, one thing is like, 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

like we beg for review and then we use like emotional manipulation to get the good reviews.

That sometimes works.

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 abs 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, and we got 10,000 installs in a day.

So you don't get the revenue because it's free, but we obviously like forced a revenue prompt down their throat.

And so we got a couple hundred five-star 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 shit ton of five-star reviews and they're staying there.

And they're all in the US.

So this is one way to the spike up.

You sacrifice one day of revenue for a couple of hundred five-star views.

That's worth it.

That's worth it.

Yeah, for sure.

Interesting.

Felix.

So anything else you want me to share?

Let's get on to UA and see how these guys are getting their users.

Sure, I mean.

It got me really curious.

Yeah.

I mean, in gaming, all the latest UA array is AI stuff, basically.

I mean, we're going to talk about Remini, so it's very, it's exactly the same.

I mean, look, so if you go to the AI 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 paid UA stuff, right?

Nothing else than TikTok and Facebook, and a little bit of Google, but it's like the majority of the apps,

how it works is you make all the money on iOS.

On Android,

it doesn't really matter.

Revenue, US.

iOS, thank you very much.

What are

what UA options do you have?

Facebook, TikTok, and if you are savvy enough,

Integral, Applevin, 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 Applevin is actually suitable for apps.

But I know some of the companies already kind of going in that direction.

But again,

we can check all the different creatives and like whether it, what exactly they are running, but then like this is not exactly like the whole story.

And then I'm going to show you afterwards, like what the actual whole story is.

Exactly what we talked about.

That's it.

I mean, you don't really need anything else.

You don't really need anything else.

Use AI for all this.

That's right, Corey.

Thank you very much.

it says basically everything right

what is the all app about i want to say game but this is app you know it

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 exactly like volume of testing on the creatives and whoever can get there first, like, wins.

The copycat element is also huge.

So, like, what a lot of people,

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 do the same thing essentially.

Yeah, that's what we

discussed.

These strategies are also not like there's no way to defend.

Oh, yeah, 100%.

That's what we discussed 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 exactly what I'm doing.

Normal Veil business.

Yeah, normal video business, exactly.

It just works really well.

Like, I remember at Reflectly,

I would turn on 200 creatives in the morning.

By noon, I would see that about 90% are underperforming.

So I'd kill those.

And then after lunch break, I'd have five to ten creatives that are doing really well, put all of the budget behind it, go all in, and then you would find like one that lasts for months that are performing well.

Yeah, so again, it's volume, it's just pure volume, nothing else.

And you see, like, it's 11 seconds, all the different kinds of

images, exactly what the app does, right?

So nothing really that different.

It's so simple.

Yes.

Oh, so, yeah, sure.

Let's say I asked if there is the

actual

and this is very comic.

Something like coming from top 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.

Bring back your old photo back to life.

Sure.

Thank you very much.

That's so loud.

I'm gonna mute that.

What?

I couldn't hear you.

Well, really?

I mean, I I

just turned off the whole.

Anyway, okay, so I would shut down this and then start actually sharing something else, which is the TikTok 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

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 views and hundreds of thousands of views.

This guy had like two million likes, so I'm pretty sure it's a 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 paywall kind of tricks that we saw.

I mean, it's perfect.

And then, like, 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 views, obviously.

But still, if you 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, the really special thing about TikTok, like the organic discoverability is incredible because the algorithm is fundamentally different from

Instagram.

On Instagram, you can only get exposed to people who follow you most of the time.

On TikTok, 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 of ban, million views.

And like

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 the easiest to start with because you don't have to have creatives, you just put in the keyword and you're good to go.

The thing is, it's very, it's very, very competitive because it's so easy to start with.

And so, obviously, the cost per install will go like $30 for a fitness app, which makes no sense to us.

Yeah, exactly.

You're competing with BetterMe 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 a 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 TikTok.

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 and like gets the the app.

You rank number one in like three days, and then if the trend stays, you're good to go and you're golden.

Yeah, exactly.

But you might have seen, like, yeah, better me.

You know, like a few weeks ago, there was a trend with like action figure stuff

on Chat 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 single day.

Yeah, easy.

And then you have also

the same thing here.

Honestly, 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 hundreds of these, as we discussed, I think with someone in one of our other episodes, you have hundreds of these, like smaller and like mid-size 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.

The thing is, like, the

paid UA for apps has been becoming more competitive and more difficult and more expensive every month for the last 10 years.

The reason why Calm became a billionaire 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 a 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 you can just generate like a thousand videos an hour and

it's so flooded it's become very very difficult to compete in some of the bigger categories

yeah we we could tell you something about the ua competition again 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 lot of views, which is kind of like pre-qualifying the video as like the creative win.

You put it into campaigns, boom, you have creative winner immediately.

Have you seen this working in games?

No, nobody's using it, nobody's doing that.

So, okay.

Let's just call this.

I mean,

you know,

I know a thing or two about this, so it's good.

It's good.

No, but it's very interesting because, again,

if you ask anyone in the gaming space, are you working with like Instagram Marketplace?

There is an Instagram marketplace thing.

Yeah.

Okay.

Good to know.

Yeah, and if you post like a ton of videos on TikTok, you post 100 videos a day, you can see which one takes off.

And then you know, you don't waste your advertising budget.

You take the two or three that work really well.

You scale, you go all in, and you pre-qualify your creative.

Exactly.

Creative testing.

You just do it.

You just do it on TikTok.

And 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 it in the UA.

That's it.

That's all you need.

Which is, I mean, it's easier said than done.

You first put 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 i don't ask

so well they always overperform everything that i expected and the same like when tick tock first came and i i was doing a course on tick tock and i was like to publish the course I need to grow my own account to show.

And so I grew my account and 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 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, it's just the more unhinged you are, the better.

Yeah.

suits me really well.

That's you 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, paywall tests, optimization tests, and then I share everything on YouTube, like step 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, school.com/slash app success.

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 join.

Maybe I will join as well.

I mean, interesting.

Let's call it that.

We also do a live call there every week where actually I look at the training 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, Ariel.

Thank you for having me.

Thank you very much.

Perfect.

Thank you guys for listening.

See you next time.

Please comment under the episode.

And as Felix said, we actually got pretty good feedback for the previous 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.