Building a small app studio

There's a version of the app studio model that's mostly a numbers game: ship as many apps as possible, spend a little on each, and double down on whatever survives. It works for some teams. It isn't how we want to work.

Fewer products, more attention

Every app we run competes for the same scarce resource — focus. A studio that launches twelve products a year can't give any of them a real second act. We'd rather build fewer things and stay with them long enough to make them genuinely good.

That shows up in practice as:

• Shipping updates months after launch, not just during the launch window
• Treating retention as a product problem before it's a marketing one
• Saying no to categories where we can't add something real

Build, scale, acquire

Not every good app needs to be built from scratch. Some already exist — with real users and real retention — and simply lack the resources to reach the next stage. Acquiring those and giving them proper attention is often a better use of a studio's time than starting from zero.

What's next

We'll use this space to write about what we're learning: what works in onboarding and monetisation, what we got wrong, and what we're building next.

If you're working on something in this space — or thinking about selling an app you've built — we'd like to hear from you.