Sub Club Podcast: Lessons from Buying and Operating 40 Apps — Michael Ritter, Maple Media

0:00[Music] [Applause] hey you're listening to the sub club podcast a show dedicated to the best practices for building and growing subscription app businesses we'll share insider secrets from the top subscription apps on the app stores let's get into the show hello i'm your host david barnard and joining me today is michael ritter ceo and founder at maple media michael and his growing team acquire and operate category leading consumer apps popular maple media apps include pick stitch weather hi-def radar we heart it player fm weak cal and many more on the podcast we talked with michael about operating a portfolio of almost 40 apps the importance of delivering value

0:46to customers and why you should never use teal on your paywall hey michael thanks for being on the podcast i wanted to kick things off and just ask about maple media your company um just love to hear kind of your start in the app industry and then what eventually led you to to build maple media yeah thanks for having me on i i started maple media a few years ago i used to be in the mobile gaming business and i realized there was a whole second tab in the app store of apps that was totally being ignored and i thought it'd be a really great opportunity to go out and to explore

1:24more of the app side because early on most people were just focused on games uh and that's that's really i started in um evaluating potential opportunities in that category nice and so so in the in the gaming space were you what what company were you with and and what kind of stuff did you work on with that company yeah so i was very early at a company called jam city they make very popular puzzle games like cookie jam and panda pop and i was uh i really enjoyed my time working with them over there uh it was actually when i started there was very early in mobile games too were

1:57some of their first mobile games uh back when i started over there and i was doing a lot of m a for them uh acquiring apps and evaluating or games and i was evaluating game mechanics and and interesting games for us to or studios for us to acquire and um but i kind of had this theory you know as as my career progressed that apple had a ad campaign way back in the day when they first launched the app store that was you know there was an app for it but now there's like 10 apps for every it there's almost every product you can imagine on the app store

2:31there's a lot of great content creators and developers out there but taking an app like the next stage of its life where you're managing the user base growing the app improving um the features of the app or doing marketing for example is a different skill set and know-how and that's what i was really good at i'm not really a creator um but i was really good at the business side and so that's where what maple media really fits in is that we sort of marry the two as we go out and look for great products and great creators and we think we can elevate and grow the app from that stage

3:08and so we rather acquire a mobile app that has a good market fit and be able to sort of elevate it and grow it to the next level that's interesting i didn't realize you you had actually done m a at jam city so that's cool so so then you think okay there's this opportunity where did you go from there did you do like go the vc route and raise money did you was it uh bootstrapped or how did how did you actually kickstart maple media and remind me again what what year was this that you actually launched the business we ended up launching the business back in early

3:442017. um and you can't just like go out there and yeah you gotta prove out your concept so i so i uh i bought an app for two thousand dollars i had i i fixed it up i i i fixed it up a little bit and ended up i ended up facing some technical issues with it but i ended up selling it for for a pretty good amount of money i like 10x my money on it and realized that i could buy an app and prove it and and then sell it and so that was sort of like my first stuff you know first entry into it on my

4:12own and then from there i formulated you know a business plan of this idea of rolling up mobile apps and pitched it to pc i first pitched it to vcs i pitched it to angel investors i ended up raising about a million dollars from 10 angel investors 100 000 at a time but i knew i needed more money to start with and i was telling a friend you know as you hear these stories i was telling a friend like i'm going to be raising money for the rest of my life if i needed to yeah 100 000 at a time and have all these investors but the the vcs didn't the roll-up

4:47strategy wasn't really very popular for for vcs at the time um and it was suggested that i would approach a private you know private equity firms because that was more of their type of model right and as most people raise their money on a girls soccer field for like aoso soccer you know i we talked to this uh guy in private hey i have this idea i've been recommended that this should uh is more of a private equity play than a vc play and come on in and pitch me on it three days later i was pitching the pitching the team and um you know they're sort of

5:25the rest is kind of history yeah that's great and and so did you have any co-founders or or was it just you and and are you still like the the the main shareholder and is your company yeah so i'm the i'm the co-founder and ceo uh or sorry uh i'm the founder and ceo and we have a great co uh that we brought on shortly after starting and um we we only have uh one investor um which is this private equity firm and and we go out and we've you know we've built a business we've done over 37 acquisitions to date of mobile apps and um we continue to

6:05grow the business and we're continuing to be very active in the space yeah that's amazing so um back back to the the first part of that story i would love to hear this this two thousand dollar app you bought in 10 extra money uh do you remember like what what are the one of the specific things you did in that app that you turned your money around so quick it was this row it was i wish i remember the name of it it was like this road game uh and i just switched i changed out the monetization so i changed out some some of the advertising structure and um

6:38and made some tweaks to it uh that increased the revenue pretty substantially yeah yeah that's really cool you know i i had this like total fluke of an app in fact i talked to somebody on your team about acquiring it because i sold it back in i think it's 20 late 2017 so it's probably early for maple media but um total fluke of an app like i just when the iphone 4 was coming out with the front-facing camera for the very first time um it's like what what interesting things you know i'm always looking for like new and this is what you're kind of talking about like you're more on the

7:09business side i've always been like the indie app creator like looking for the new creative opportunity and so i was like you know what new possibilities does this unlock and you know i'm always thinking about new apis you know widgets and other new stuff that comes out from apple it's like what what unique way can i use these uh new features so i was like well i mean you could like make it a mirror and check your teeth and put on makeup and stuff and so i already had this photo app where we had like so much code already done for like sharing to twitter and saving the the photo files

7:39to the camera rolls like we already had so much code and so i hit up my my partner in that other app i was like hey you want to just like tweak this where it's just a mirror so we did that and like a few years later it was getting um like three to five thousand organic installs every single day but it was barely making any money i was like all right i gotta i gotta figure something and so yeah i mean i tweaked on uh increasing the price of the the in-app purchase to remove ads i i changed up the ad strategy i had more ad

8:10aggregation into it to increase the cpm and all that kind of stuff and oh it was it was incredible i mean i over the course of maybe two years like probably 10 20 x the revenue on that app just through like taking it seriously as a business instead of it being this hobby a lot of it has to do with the industry is moving so quickly and there's so many changes you can't keep the same strategy that you started with and even today at maple when we first started our you know our structures our monetization strategy what ad networks we work with uh are totally different now and our

8:46strategy and our approach to how we manage our yield for example from our in-app advertising or our in-app purchases or subscriptions and we we totally just jumped over in-app purchases like i forget that he worked so hard to get like one purchase for 99 cents i'm just gonna put subscriptions in and then hopefully i get some good renewals and i'm not fighting for every you know every inch yeah yeah you kind of came into the app store at a really good time i beat my head against the one-time purchase for for a decade of like trying all these convoluted strategies to have you know multiple you know freemium

9:22models where you have multiple in-app purchases and bundles and all this stuff it's like oh yeah but now but and it's but it's still ever-evolving we gotta stay you know really ahead of the curve of in terms of what what you know what the right strategies are the right partners the right ways to implement it there's a lot of different um you know changes going on and with the stores themselves revenue shares um so there's a lot to keep up on and to constantly be iterating um if you stay in one place too long you're gonna get passed really quickly yeah and one of the reasons i'm so excited to have you

9:56on the podcast is that because you've acquired and operated 37 different apps across multiple categories like you don't you don't focus on one specific category i was looking at your listing on app any earlier today and you still even have some games and productivity a scanner app a podcast app it's kind of all over the board and one of the things i find especially interesting about people who either consult with apps across multiple different categories or in your case like actually operate apps in all these different categories is that you just you see things that people who operate a single app in a single category just don't see you know

10:37there's there's kind of some confirmation bias and like this strategy worked so perfectly and you know everybody needs to use this strategy but once you've done that across a couple of apps you realize well it doesn't actually perform quite as well in this app and here's maybe why um so yeah i'm really curious kind of your thoughts on on and how you think about building out strategies that are going to work across your entire portfolio versus you know kind of taking the latest and greatest uh kind of hot tip that that that may not actually work across all your apps yeah i'd say that there's really

11:13it's an initial approach that we have so we have we care a lot about strategy and we care a lot about process so when we come up with particular strategies for our our app businesses you know you're right we have one of the top podcasting players out there player fm which this will be on and we have pick stitch which is a one of the top photo collage editing apps and we even operate a top 10 grossing weather app and weather high def radar and so those are three very different types of products but i look at it at more of a as a vehicle to distribute

11:46content podcasts in terms of weather you know it's weather um and pick stitch is more of a productivity tool um to help you edit your photos but the the wrapper is really what we really focus on the ui ux the look and feel the usability the well we care a lot about the usefulness of it like what value we're providing our users and so you know we look for great products that fulfill that value proposition and then what we're doing is we're really focusing on the edges on providing a good user experience as well as clean ui and making sure that what we're selling or offering in the app is um

12:28that the users are getting a lot of benefit from it but for example like when we're focusing on ui screens there's a lot of commonality that can go across multiple apps for example let's say a subscription screen we could optimize an a b test a screen in one app and get really confident in it and usually the color of the button the language a lot of that really translates across the portfolio because it's not very specific to a niche or a particular type of product however for example the offering like whether we offer an annual subscription or a monthly subscription whether we offer a free trial whether we

13:01don't offer a subscription whether we offer let's say an app purchase or it's a premium model that matters to the to the product and so we tailor we would tailor that piece to the product based on how it's how it's being used and what people are used to or why you would pay a monthly subscription for one thing versus yearly for another so that would be more nuanced yeah so um off the top of your head well i mean we we talked through these questions before but uh are there can you recall a specific strategy you tried in one app that was just like did amazingly well

13:38and then you're like okay this is you know this is the hot new stuff we're going to put this across our entire portfolio and then it just failed miserably in in another product the easiest one is a free trial because sometimes a free trial makes a lot of sense we have a calendar app called wecal and offering a seven day tr free trial is important because we want people to enter their calendar information and they got to get through a full week to really see the value of it in this particular app we have um different views of how you can view your california i think there's like nine or

14:08so of them and there's one particular one called the agenda that's like really specific and unique to the app we want to get people used to seeing using it because we know once they experience it and they start seeing the value of it they'll stay but they've got to be able to really experience it and go through a full week to really see the value of it but in our weather app for example there's a big storm coming and they're going to want to use the app for uh for that storm period and so a free trial might not convert very well because people you know people might just want

14:38to use it for one-off occasions and so you would you need a different strategy in that app versus the calendar app although we have the same screen yeah yeah that's great um so then on the on the paywall front uh with a b testing in multiple apps and then applying that across the portfolio um any any specific paywall tips any any things you've done that worked particularly well anything that worked particularly poorly as you went through your ibm we joke internally because teal we realized teal is not a good color um now that was one a b test we did uh that that was pretty funny um

15:18and uh that's what i've seen so like just changing the color you saw that significant of a difference that that that it was notable it was notable that teal was not a good color wow that was that was one takeaway that we had yeah any other uh paywall thoughts as you've worked and iterated on your paywalls over the years i just really think it's it's about it's about communicating the value proposition and then delivering on it and and right a lot of what we do whether it's paywalls or whether it's new features it's all about delivering value to the user and that they're getting um they're getting a lot of good utility

15:54out of it um and then that's what's gonna that's the best way to drive retention and yeah and to drive loyal users another piece i should tell you that you know i think goes very under the radar is customer support like yeah in subscriptions you're providing a service and a part of that is people have a lot of questions or need help with it and so providing really strong customer support is is really important and mobile developers aren't used to that because that's not you know most people you're doing in-app purchases or that's pretty new to the industry and that's something we actually spend a lot

16:30of time on and actually care a lot about yeah that's great it's it's a tough one too because so many times it feels like uh i mean especially you know as we were talking about earlier in the app store years it's like this person paid me 99 cents five years ago and like it's going to take me 20 minutes to answer this customer support but then exactly what you said it's like you gotta like have the long picture and then especially now monetizing via subscriptions is that it's it's not just that one-time purchase five years ago it's like you're building a relationship with these customers and then that

17:06matters for reviews for referrals for and just like being a good person and a good company like taking care of the folks who who are investing in your company and staying subscribed over time that's and that's how you build a brand and and you build a following and you can and then that's how you can build retention and your user acquisition will be more efficient because people will recognize it and know that they're you know that they're going to be good to the users i mean nordstrom's right nordstrom's is a great example everyone knows nordstrom's has great customer service and that's why a lot of people

17:36shop there and they have a great reputation for that and so in the why why would that be any different in the in the app store yeah yeah so this may get a little tiresome because your answers may be the same but i did want to go through like all the different kind of aspects of an app and i'll probably forget a few but kind of talk through you know we we just talked pay walls but uh i'm just curious through each of these different segments if there's any kind of insight you have like like the teal thing for the paywall um so having worked in so many apps and and

18:09worked through so many different onboarding flows are there any things you've learned in onboarding specifically of like how to communicate that value how to kind of sell and draw people in in the onboarding being so important to an app you know onboarding is such an interesting topic because there's really a few ways you can go there's the one way that you got to educate the user of what the features are and what the value proposition of the app is and how to use it but also people don't have an attention span and they usually just want to get into the app yep and one thing i learned early on in

18:42the gaming business at gem city which is at the time we had a really popular match three game and we we came out with another game that had a completely new uh game mechanic but people didn't really know the rules and it was really hard to try to teach them the rule because all they really wanted what we saw was all they wanted to do was skip the tutorial and play the game but they skipped the tutorial get in the game they didn't know how to play right and we couldn't get them to do the tutorial so we were like kind of stuck in the middle

19:10so that's why we really like you saw that on our you saw that we also operate games i love classic games the people know the rules too because then i don't have to give them a tutorial because they already know how to play minesweeper or sudoku and similar with apps to some degree i want to get users directly into the app and and using it and then later on i can teach them and so we'll have tips like some of our apps will have tips after the fact every time we update the app we'll do a what's new um and then just sort of teach people the app as they go through

19:43it but i really like simple apps that people know how already how to inherently use that's the best way i feel like to do on-boarding know the rules so then when you do onboarding what is the goal i mean do you do you still just do three pages of education and with a skip button or have you come up with another kind of job to be done for the onboarding that you've found to be more successful at engaging people my personal take on it is get a user into the game into the app as quickly as possible get them using it and then and then start teaching them

20:14how to do it sort of as they get through the app gotcha and then premium strategy so you already talked about weak cal where you you just need to get that free trial um what kind of freemium strategies have you experimented with your other apps and what have you seen you know be successful and and is a really interesting that's a really interesting topic because you want to give away enough to get the user understanding the app but you want to give away too much because there's no reason to to you know kind of that they just they could use it and there's not no reason to

20:49um subscribe or or monetize which is fine except for the fact that you can't support the app with more features right there's nothing wrong with giving away something for free and having great great users but then you can't really iterate on the app and provide you know better service or it makes it very hard to do customer support like you said if someone's paying 99 cents uh so like it's it's sort of a give take relationship there we want to give away enough to provide value in that experience but then provide sort of an additional layer of more features and advanced features for those that really want to really see the value

21:25in it and take advantage of it so there's a fine line that you've got to walk between yeah so so in across your different apps where there's like content or weather data or other things do you do you try and um well and you talked earlier about ads you do most of your apps have ads so that you are monetizing the free users where you're not quite needing to push the the subscription as hard or how do you balance the kind of ads and features and content not all of our apps have ads some of them do it depends the stre the right strategy for that product and some

22:00of them for example have cost to it yeah weather's a good example you know a lot of them have server costs or costs for content and so it's not there's just premium concept that it's free to the user but sometimes users don't realize there's a there's an ongoing supportive cost from the developer to support it that could be server related or uh content related customers you know there's a lot there's a lot of different um categories um but we try to match the right strategy uh whether it's ads or subscriptions with the right app and so sometimes we'll have ads sometimes we won't sometimes it'll be subscriptions

22:34sometimes when it purchases so it sort of depends on on the type of content and a lot of what users are used to purchasing in an app i'll give you a good example people aren't that used to subscribing to games like now they are with xbox live and you're seeing a lot more today but historically you bought a game for you know bought a nintendo game for like thirty forty dollars and you got to enjoy the game yeah or seventy dollars i just pre-ordered gran turismo seven on my son's playstation yesterday and i was like 70 bucks and then it was 90 for the deluxe edition

23:12but people are used to paying subscriptions for their cell phones you know for their carrier plans or for cable or you know the certain categories they're used to for they're used to paying for premium software right you have windows or maybe you have an adobe creative suite or you have excel and so we cal makes sense our calendar app because the people are used to paying a premium for let's say software yeah so we really sort of match what what people are you know what models make sense in in the world and it's no different than on mobile than it is in you know on desktops or other other

23:45mediums yeah are there any uh app categories where you think ads work especially well like with a productivity app like wecal do you specifically like do you have ads in that in the free version or do you feel like productivity apps actually lend themselves to not having this ad supported experience i don't see we don't have a lot of ads in our productivity apps because those are what we consider more software or premium sas more like premium software but games i mean a good you know most people are really familiar with having uh ads and games and there's a lot more advertisers spending money on games right

24:23advertising so you can get better cpm so it's like people are used to it and are a little bit more accepting from a user perspective there's better cpms because there's more buyers in the market so that seems that makes sense that that's a little better better to put it in an app let's say productivity that has lower cpms you make less money with it and users are a little bit more annoyed isn't you know doesn't doesn't really fit the model yeah i wonder if part of that low cpm is also just kind of user behavior it's like if you're in weak cow you're not like futzing around like you know

24:56hanging out playing a game where you you don't mind being distracted like checking out another game or whatever you're doing work when you're a wee cal it's like you're yeah you're working like you're managing your calendar so there's less kind of distractibility so the the uh the click-through rates probably go down the you know the engagement probably goes down in addition to just it not performing well from a cpm basis yeah exactly uh how about marketing we we haven't uh talked at all about marketing strategies um you know what are your thoughts on on effective strategies and then again like does it change app by app as far as you

25:34know kind of going after more organic and app store optimization and search ads and facebook i mean it's just marketing such a big can of worms and and you're working on it across a lot of apps in a lot of different categories so i'd love to hear your kind of high level thoughts and then maybe i'll follow up and get some some tactics out of you the way we approach marketing i look at marketing is really about developing a brand and having more of a 360 approach to you know all the different elements what goes into marketing direct user acquisition is obviously an easy one on

26:04mobile but you also have pr and you also have um more you know brand sort of partnerships and you can look at different distribution opportunities there's obviously working with the app stores to get a little bit more you know better placements so we look at it more of a holistic perspective in terms of how do we fit all these pieces together as well as direct user acquisition uh to grow the businesses and make people more aware of our products so then you know specifically on on organic strategies are there are there anything you've seen pay off in your apps um that you've uh doubled down on for a specific app or

26:44even kind of tried to implement across all your apps not necessarily from an organic perspective i think a lot of what we look at is that mainly maybe it's more in our m a strategy which is looking for apps that inherently already have a good footprint i think a star i think having good ratings is really important more so because users they go through the you know they're looking for a particular category they care a lot about what their cohorts say because that's probably one of the better ways to understand if it's worthwhile to download and use the app and so having good store ratings um

27:21is more important than just you know a lot of people think that that affects your rank but there's a lot more value to it than just that yeah is there a do you target i've heard some people say and once you get above like 4.5 stars it doesn't really matter um is there like a specific target that you try to hit or any strategies you use in the app to get more favorable reviews i like i've i've actually never heard that but that's a good you know i think 4-2 is sort of teetering four five is a good number if anything above that is great if you're

27:51at four eight you're you're in really good shape but yeah i think four or five is a good number i like that so what you're saying is like that you you specifically acquire apps that they already have some traction in or in organic search um and so is that something you you continue to foster as far as like you know keyword strategies and swapping out screenshots and that sort of thing we look for characteristics so we care a lot about the characteristics of an app of of and why what the value proposition of it is and if it's a app if it's an app that provides good value to the

28:28users then inherently almost everything else falls in place they're going to rate it and give you good reviews so you're already going to have they're going to have an affinity to it so you probably will have more reviews they're probably better um and so their organics are going to be pretty sustainable and consistent they'll probably have good retention because people like inherently like the app and continue to use it so it might sound boring but it kind of gets back to the core what is the core product and um is it providing value to the user um and and you know price two matters in that equation too as long as it's got to

29:07be a fair price for the user um and sort of almost a lot of the other pieces sort of start fitting in when it has those you know core characteristics yeah you know probably i actually didn't put price in my in my list of things to ask about but i i'm curious then and i kind of like that take of like a fair price i was just talking to somebody yesterday um my advice has often been you know that that people who are willing to pay are often much less price sensitive than you imagine and so there's a certain pull to go ahead and just price it

29:41higher um but then there's a pull on the flip side of like you kind of want people to feel like they're getting a good deal um is that kind of what you meant by by a fair price yeah i think that it's um it just needs to be matched appropriately with with the product and you know we try to put a lot of thought into it into the pricing not just yet not just like increasing it because you want you know yeah because you want to like that's just not the right approach like there should be some you got to have some good reasoning behind it

30:15and i guess that's what we try to anchor on do you do a lot of price testing uh we do we do some we do some we definitely uh do some testing but at the end of the day it's um it's also what is appropriate for the product yeah in in your price testing is there any um i'm kind of i'm surprised because so many people i talked to are like price testing processing processing like this is going to unlock so much value you're operating 37 apps in the app store and you're kind of like oh we've done a little price testing sure whatever i mean

30:48have you just not found it to actually unlock that much value or or do you kind of set your prices more philosophically than than trying to kind of like perfectly match your like demand curve balance when you have one app you have to grind on that one app to refine every single piece of it to increase you know to start really increasing its usage or revenue or retention but when you have a portfolio we're looking at incremental we're looking at things that we can do that we can roll across multiple apps to lift the entire portfolio and so we don't necessarily have to get that deep into into the weeds to build

31:29to grow the individual apps and to build the business so we're a little bit more focused on a holistic view of the portfolio and how we can generate more value to our users and not necessarily just sort of grinding on the pricing extract more value from users yeah yeah like i'll give you a good example like with our podcasting business we implemented uh we're implementing now uh a podcasting section into our we heart it uh social media app as well as we own a stock portfolio app and we're implementing a section in there to offer finance and other stock kind of driven uh podcast um content and

32:12we're gonna be you know we're gonna be branding and and telling our users and our other apps about our player fm podcasting app and we're gonna be offering more content and targeted content in those apps we actually sell advertising to podcast creators that can now reach more of a target audience and that's driving value to our users because now we're providing more targeted content to them that could be interesting they can access immediately in the app um we're co-branding our our products so more users can be more aware of our our podcasting business and it also extends our reach to be able to sell more advertising to podcast creators so they

32:48can reach a broader audience and even more niche audiences that they weren't able to reach before so that's something that's feels like a really good sort of win around the board and that would be something a little bit more that we would like focus on invest time in yeah that makes sense so are there any other you know having such a large portfolio of apps um are there any other kind of co-marketing solutions that you've seen actually work well like you know forever i i don't think i even have it anymore but i used to have like a little carousel in settings it showed all the other apps

33:22that i owned um and then you know there has been attempts by indie developers to kind of do like a co-op marketing thing where you know you kind of have you know 10 20 apps um from quality indie developers and trench them and apple kind of tamped down on that a little bit but i'm just curious if if you if you still do things like that and if you if you see any lift from any other kind of co-marketing so funny i'm not i'm not a really big component of uh cross motion i think it's it's um it doesn't drive as much value a usage as yeah as you would think

33:57or hope and so we do some some of it but i think it needs to be more native like this pot the podcasting example it needs to be a little bit more native and it's got to make a little bit more more sense and that can drive an impact also another one is also you know if you build up this relationship with your users like we're talking about earlier then you can start recommending your apps that's when cross motion starts helping is when you have loyal users who really like what you do and how you operate your apps then they're more likely to download some other apps um but you have

34:30to be very explicit and tell your users hey this is my app yeah you would like it versus you know if we have in-app advertising because it's very confusing of what's the difference between a cross-motion and potentially like a an ad yeah i know that makes a lot of sense and i was going to ask about remnant ads but it makes sense that remnant ads are going to perform terribly compared to saying hey you like weak cow we also make another app or but we explicitly call out from the developer of you know kind of like movies right he's always like the person who made this movie here's

35:01the next movie so when you do implement those kind of strategies are you are you doing like a pop-up in the app are you putting in settings or how are you calling attention are you doing email campaign when you've collected emails whatever sort of all all the above it but it could be a pop-up or it could be in the menu yeah right gotcha and i'd be remiss to not hammer a little harder and go a little deeper on marketing um you know and and so much has changed and i want to dive into att and all the tracking and ad industry stuff right now but

35:34um but i do want to hear like what what's working paid marketing wise you know are there specific strategies that um that you found across your portfolio that are successful like are you trying tick tock ads are you sticking with facebook or app store search ads any any kind of tidbits for us on what's working across your portfolio yeah we're we're sort of uh down the middle when it comes to our user acquisition strategy sticking to the tried and true um and and you know so the combination of our cross motion strategies our organic downloads our our branding efforts which are more partnership driven building up

36:12the concept of a brand uh we also have a pr strategy of around some of our key apps and then doing you know user acquisition mainly through the more the traditional channels um creates an aggregate lift that we're you know pretty happy with so are you are you spending on facebook specifically or where do you spend currently i think a lot of times people overspend and don't necessarily really dig in and understand the roi on the spend and so we're really focused on what that investment is and and making sure that we're optimizing the channels and spending wisely how do you how do you measure that i mean it's so tough now i mean

36:50it's getting tougher and tougher like do you have mmps integrated into your apps or or are you kind of doing more incrementality type like you spend a bunch of money and and you measure the results and and then pull back on spending and look at the impact it's a little it's a little combination of of all of that because you're right it is really hard to track it um but you can you can get a really feel for it like we really understand our apps the kpis i mean deep into the metrics and if you're really deep into the metrics of your app you can really feel

37:24it out right but you're dodging my question where where where are you putting your money the traditional guys you know google and apple yeah gotcha so with search ads specifically um you know i hear a lot of people say it's one of the better channels but it just tops out quickly is that has that been your experience like um you know with your weather app i assume you're doing app store search ads for you know specific weather keywords and stuff that's why we have to have more of a broader strategy and i think there's very few companies doing pr around their weather app for example and so that's

37:56why i'm not dodging your question we don't we do right i look at ua as supplemental to everything else we're doing not the other way around right yeah we're i'm trying to find other channels every weather app is buying search ads like right it doesn't at some to some degree yeah it's it's not you know how am i going to create a competitive advantage and to grow my business if i'm fishing in the exact same pond that all the other weather apps are fishing in yeah there you go see it was it was worth me pressing you on that because that's a fantastic answer is and this is

38:32something i've been talking a lot about over the past year you know with all the changes in marketing and tracking and everything else like that i think developers need to think more like you're thinking about this is that so many apps got too dependent on well if we put a dollar into facebook we get a dollar 20 out 60 days later so let's just you know borrow at a 25 interest rate because of math works and put as much money as we can into facebook ads and um and some of those apps are really struggling right now because they didn't kind of have this more broad

39:05approach to marketing and thinking about the paid as as leverage on top versus kind of the foundation of the entire strategy yeah exactly it's about building a good foundation and you know organic is part of it but that's also not everything but it's building a good foundation of a sustainable business and there's no business that's really reliant on essentially one channel right now of users yeah and i mean in some ways you're probably self-selected a bit as you said kind of buying apps that already have some established product market fit and probably have some established organic traffic through search and other places and so um you know somebody starting

39:47from scratch without product market or without search traction in the app stores and stuff like that you may have to kind of adjust the strategy accordingly to get to that point absolutely starting starting your strat an app from scratch is it would take a total of different uh strategy and approach than without what we do yeah definitely yeah so um we've kind of danced around a little bit but i do want to ask specifically like what what do you look for in an acquisition and then i i didn't put this in the talking points notes so i'm going to surprise you with it now uh until just this morning but um

40:23i i think i remember correctly that you told me one time that you love buying apps from indie developers uh so first of all am i hearing you correctly and then uh or do i remember correctly and then what do you look for in acquiring an app okay so to answer your first question is i and this is going to sound simple but and you've probably heard me talk a lot about this you know throughout the podcast but is the app useful and and is the game like and that really goes a long way uh and we really we care a lot about that and the chara

40:56and then then it gets into the characteristics but the characteristics start getting deeper into those categories of like well why is it useful and are people finding value from it maybe they're not but maybe there's value that we can add to it to provide value to the user but i'm trying to build a sustainable business for the next 10 15 years i don't know how long the app stores can be around for but like hopefully longer than that but i'm trying to build a long very long term sustainable business as well as a long-term sustainable relationship with my users which i think is a fairly a

41:23very unique approach to building an app business or to our m a strategy so really starts it really starts there and then and then i can get into the and then we get into the metrics no i don't i don't think i was the one we bought apps from really big companies okay and even you know sure some some i even say smaller than indie developers um but it really runs the gamut and yeah i like to think that we provide a good option to companies big and small uh there's a lot of really good reasons why somebody would want to sell whether it's an app or a whole portfolio

41:59we've done both and it can appeal to to a wide range of um folks of what you know why they'd sell an app yeah so when you when you acquire an app what's your playbook i mean yeah or what are you willing to share of your playbook it's probably the better question but but yeah i'd love to hear like what what's are there like a top three list of like you know almost every app you acquire these are the things that that unlock value yeah it's it's about the value proposition and making sure that the you're communicating it properly and also that the that you're providing a good service and

42:39sometimes that takes communication sometimes you need to fix certain certain components of it sometimes it's not presented properly in the app so sometimes you have to improve how it's presented but i'd say a lot of it has to do with those mechanics and then also we like to invest in our products and we try to to grow them um and that's you know that's sort of a different approach sometimes people think of m a roll-ups where they're just sort of riding them you know coasting right that's not you know that's not part of that's not what we look to do and and um so we're looking for

43:14opportunities and how we can um how it fits into our portfolio and and how we can appropriately manage it yeah so you have what more than 40 people on your team now yeah we're north i want to say we're north of 50 something something like that i got that from linkedin so yeah i wasn't sure how up to date it was so so yeah you have a lot of resources but um personnel and financially to invest in the apps you acquire so so that's a big part of the strategy we're a full studio so we can take on on a wider yeah we're in a position where we

43:51have a lot of experience in a lot of categories and so we can take on most products uh and effectively manage them we have very skilled team uh our engineering group is just fantastic and they love the challenge of bringing on not all engineers usually like taking somebody else's code and but they love the the challenge of taking somebody else's code fitting it within we have our own in-house platform called ivory which we i guess that's part of the playbook is that we implement our own we have our own technology platform that allows us to manage all these apps at scale and so we have internal infrastructure uh that it

44:27manages allows us to manage a lot of products sort of under under one put on one group and by leveraging that as well as our team we're able to uh take on a sort of a broad portfolio and and we do everything in-house yeah so so is that part of the strategy then you acquire an app and you do you have a specific kind of day one plan of like we're gonna interview a bunch of users or do you put a product manager on it and like have kind of a vision for for what's next and kind of pick up from the person you acquired what they thought

45:03the low-hanging fruit was what's your kind of product strategy around uh picking these apps up and then you know running with the ball usually this strategy is developed before it's acquired so during during the onboard the um i'd say maybe to the m a process we know exactly what we're gonna do with it um and we've interviewed you know in-depth uh the folks that work on it uh and already generally have a plan going into it from day one so once once the deal is is completed we hit the ground running and i guess the first thing is we implement our platform ivory yeah it just allows us to make

45:40everything very consistent uh consistent codebase consistent connections to analytics and and different uh you know advertising platforms and that allows us to really speak the same language and report in the same language so all our apps have the same infrastructure which goes which is sort of pretty imperative when you're managing a lot of different products yeah yeah i can imagine that gets tricky with 37 apps but i also i also point out at one of the playbooks is is also it's a great you know we look and acquire great products so at that point we assume that it's a great product and we already know it's a great product

46:15and don't don't mess with something that's really that's really good so we're looking to refine but the main proposition is already there and there's a lot of users that really enjoy it we have to continue to deliver on that yeah don't screw it up again exactly just test it that's great uh well i think that that's a great place we're heading up on the top of the hour um but as we close out um anything else you want to share and then um anything you want to pitch are you hiring currently uh we were talking before you are uh continually acquiring new apps yeah i i'd say we're sort of all above we're

46:51definitely hiring we have a great packages and i think we're a fun company to work at and we're acquiring you know we're still very inquisitive and interested in uh acquiring mobile apps for games and and i'd encourage anyone to reach out to us on our website at maplemedia.io where you can see jobs listings as well as get in touch with us awesome well it's super fun talking to you a lot of great insights in this conversation so thanks for being on the podcast thanks a lot to make sure you never miss an episode subscribe to the show in your favorite podcast player thanks so much for

47:25listening until next time [Music]