Hey everyone, Ivan here.

This was inspired by a podcast with the Flo founder (in Russian).

I agree with a lot of it, so first my thoughts, then bullet points with other key takeaways.

You've probably heard many times that this is the golden age of apps, right?

I have bad news for you. There's not much time left.

Why are solopreneurs doing so well right now?

With AI, you can vibe-code apps one after another. You can vibe-code SaaS products that used to cost corporations tens of thousands of dollars.

The cost of launching an MVP or even a fully finished product is a couple of days in Claude Code.

Marketing got easier too.

First, you can work with TikTok organic.

Second, the cost of producing creatives has dropped to nearly zero. This used to be the most painful cost in performance marketing.

The whole creative pipeline looked like this:

  • researching competitor creatives

  • ideation – coming up with your own concepts

  • production – building the creative

  • testing, collecting test metrics

  • scaling the creatives that performed best

  • producing similar creatives

In gaming, each creative can cost $500 to $2k, depending on complexity.

Two thousand dollars to create a single creative.

Then several thousand more in ad spend just to find out – does it work or not?

Out of 100 creatives, only 10-15 will actually perform. So a single winning creative can easily cost tens of thousands of dollars – just in production (counting all the failures). Only then can you scale it.

In large mobile gaming studios, the creative production department has anywhere from dozens to hundreds of people.

It's one of the most expensive and largest departments in any company.

And if you wanted to compete in gaming, you had to invest heavily in creatives.

Mobile apps are a bit easier.

Creatives here have always been cheaper to produce, so marketing operational costs aren't as high.

While an average gaming studio launched 30-50 new creatives per month, subscription apps managed to pump out a hundred or two simple creatives.

But now the scale has become even more terrifying.

Thanks to AI, big companies started testing tens of thousands of creatives monthly.

I'm not exaggerating.

Here's BetterMen as an example.

Since the start of the year, they've tested over 50k creatives.

That's just Meta Ads. In reality, several times more.

Without AI, this would be impossible. But you can't replicate this alone either.

What we solopreneurs are doing now, big companies will do 1000x more. Unfortunately, this gap will keep growing.

Not long ago, I would've said that automating the creative part with AI was nearly impossible – at least not in a way that actually works well.

Today – it's become routine.

A few more interesting thoughts from the podcast:

  • Development and marketing are becoming commodities. Everyone can do it now, so there's no competitive advantage left here.

  • You need to grow your product in depth. The more complex and useful the product, the more likely users will stick around. Soon, retention will matter more than how high you price your hard paywall.

  • Web funnels aren't about cutting commissions – they're primarily about marketing. They're not going anywhere anytime soon.

  • Users care most about design and UI.

  • Chat is an inconvenient interface for most people. Don't shove every app into this UI/UX.

So what's next?

Launching new products got easy.
Launching marketing got easy.

Gaming went through a vivid journey – from an ever-growing industry where new studios kept popping up and quickly reaching millions in revenue, to stagnation and insane competition.

Mobile apps will follow roughly the same path.

Soon it won't be enough to slap on a quiz onboarding, put up a hard paywall, launch TikTok, and enjoy the revenue rolling in.

Any ideas how you'll deal with this?

App Store is fighting your vibe-coded apps too

The App Store is flooded with identical vibe-coded apps.

Your own methods used against you.

Starting in April, Apple introduced automated moderation. And while on Google Play this speeds things up, Apple – as usual – does the exact opposite.

Prepare for absurd rejections and stock up on extra time.

See you next week,
Ivan