Mobile developers earned more than $260 billion on Apple’s App Store between 2008 and the end of 2021. But Apple hasn’t provided an easy way for companies to monetize their apps — and neither has Google. which owns the Google Play Store rival.
Enter New York City-based Adapty, which hopes to help developers get more revenue from their apps. So far, it’s doing this mostly by enabling A/B testing for paywalls, but it has a broader roadmap, co-founder and CEO Vitaly Davydov told TechCrunch.
It’s never a good time to leave money on the table, but with Apple moving to collect a 30% discount on mobile app business and overall mobile app spending likely to continue to decline, it means developers may be hungrier than ever. For additional income.
Paywall A/B testing helps optimize revenue, letting developers know which conversion screen produces the best results. It is one of Adapti’s main offerings, but not the only one. The startup sees itself as development-focused, rather than infrastructure-focused.
Adapty is used by 2,500 apps, starting with 50 in 2020 when it raises pre-seed funding. The team has also grown to about 40 full-time employees, but more are on the way as others come on board, Davydov said. Startups are downsizing or laying off employees.
Closing a seed round that will bring its funding to $2.5 million this year, Adapty is focusing on two goals that require more headroom: geographic expansion and the incorporation of machine learning. It is used to derive features including a lifetime value (LTV) prediction tool.
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Adapty’s round was participated by Surface Ventures from irrvrntVC, two funds where the startup was connected by 500 startups. Adapty was one of the companies presenting on February 27, 2021 at the Fast Track Showcase — and one of TechCrunch’s favorites at the time.
Ever since Davydov graduated from the program, Adapti has been “on the road.” to attend Here’s the word: The startup’s landing page claims “8 million monthly tracked events.”
This monitoring is done on behalf of Adapty clients and is fed back to them in the form of analytics and dashboards, which can be used by developers and user acquisition managers.
Image Credits: adaptation
Adapty serves customers large and small, from individual developers who can learn from the community and its content to large customers attracted by its free tier and development-oriented features.
Adapty’s decision to add an LTV forecasting tool was inspired by customer demand and the first-hand experience of Davydov and his co-founders Kirill Potekkin and Dima Podoprosvetov. The team now thinks they are better at predicting LTV than app owners.
“That’s something you can’t replicate internally, because we’re looking at a lot of data and it’s different — from all the categories in the app store.[s]” said Davydov. “And by design, we have more knowledge about the app market than if you only have one app, but only your data. Because of that, we believe we can build more accurate models.”
Adapt is not alone in the mobile subscription management category, arguably the leader is RevenueCat. But the roadmap connects two trends that seem to be on the rise – the use of aggregated data and applied machine learning. We will continue to monitor these, as well as the ongoing impact of Apple’s privacy policy changes.
