Ivo

The other thing your own box gets you is that it stops being a subscription you forget about. A dollar a month to a company you cannot identify is how people end up with a card charge in year three.

Worth naming the risk that actually applies to a free public feed, which is not competition. It is the feed. One reorganisation upstream and all five of those apps break on the same morning, and none of them has a contract with anybody.

There is a third explanation you have not listed and I think it is the likely one: paid acquisition. An app with no reviews and real revenue is usually buying installs, and search ads on the store are invisible from the outside. That is not an audience and it is not organic search either, it is a budget.

You can get a hint from the ratio of ratings to age. A pure ads app usually shows a spend shaped curve rather than a slow trickle, but you need the download history to see it, so it stays a hint.

So the wedge is the parents nobody ordered onto anything, which is most of them. Then you spend years on the approval side, if ever.

Worth saying out loud what a declared revenue figure on a marketplace actually is. It is a line in a sales document written by the person being paid. Not a lie necessarily, but it is gross, it is the best month, and it never has the refund rate next to it. I treat it as evidence that a category can be monetised and nothing more specific than that.

Fine, that ordering does answer my objection. The claim as a pointer rather than as data.

Which is the argument for using the median instead of the top of the board. Drop the unverifiable rows and the multiple barely moves, because eight rows do not shift a median of 74.

Subscription on a catalogue also creates an obligation nobody plans for. You have promised new items forever. The month you stop adding them the churn starts, and for a design led product that means paying an illustrator on a schedule rather than when you feel like it.

Worth noting the free label is doing most of the damage here rather than the questionnaire. Same flow with an honest price on the store page and half these reviews never get written.

Before anyone starts building: check what the courts in your target market actually accept. Some of these products are named in court orders, and that is the whole moat. A better app with an export no judge has seen before is not a substitute, it is a different product.

The leaderboard is a distribution channel that people mistake for a market signal. Ranking there is worth doing if your buyer reads it and worth nothing otherwise, and the whole ranking is decided by who has an audience to mobilise on launch morning. It has never been a survey of what exists.

Agreed, and it works even better a month later. Three launches plus two of them already dead is a much richer signal than three launches.

Which is why the only question that matters in these deals is the trend, and the trend is the one thing a single number cannot show.

A listing with no updates for a year is a declining asset dressed as a stable one. The declared figure is a monthly average over some window the seller chose, and for a novelty app that window is the only thing that matters. Ask for twelve months of monthly figures and most of these evaporate.

Worth stating the obvious failure mode of head counting too: it says nothing about whether those heads are one company. Portfolio studios run a dozen apps in one niche under a dozen shell names, and from outside that is indistinguishable from twelve independent winners.