Mobile developers won more than $260 billion in Apple’s App Store between its launch in 2008 and the end of 2021. Yet Apple doesn’t provide an easy way for companies to maximize profits from their apps — and neither does Google, which owns rival Google Play Store.
Enter New York based Adaptive, which hopes to help developers earn more from their apps. So far, it has mostly done this by powering A/B testing for paywalls, but it has a broader roadmap, its co-founder and CEO Vitaly Davydov told TechCrunch.
It’s never a good time to leave money on the table, but even less so when Apple moves to collect 30% reduction on even more mobile app commerce and as much as the overall mobile app spend decreasingwhich means developers are probably hungrier than ever for additional revenue.
Paywall A/B testing helps optimize revenue by allowing developers to understand which conversion screen will drive the best results. That’s one of Adapty’s core propositions, but not the only one: The startup sees itself as growth-focused, not infrastructure-focused.
Adapty is used by about 2,500 apps, compared to 50 when it went up pre seed funding in 2020. Its team has also grown to about 40 full-time employees, but more hires are coming, according to Davydov, at a time when other startups are cutting staff or hiring freezes.
After closing a seed round this year that brought funding to date to $2.5 million, Adapty is focusing on two goals that require more staff: geographic expansion and the incorporation of machine learning. The latter will be used to create features including a lifetime value (LTV) prediction tool.
Growth2
The Adapty round was led by Surface Enterprises featuring irrvrntVC, two funds that the startup contacted through 500 Startups. Adapty was one of the companies presenting at the accelerator’s 27th Demo Day in February 2021 — and one of TechCrunch’s Favorites at this time.
Adapty is “on track” to completing the program, Davydov said. Tracking is the word: the startup’s landing page claims “8 million monthly tracked events.”
This tracking is done on behalf of Adapty’s customers and fed back to them in the form of analytics and dashboards that can be used by both developers and user acquisition managers.
Image Credits: Adaptive
Adapty serves customers large and small, from solo developers on its free tier who may be able to learn from its community and content to larger customers attracted by its growth-focused features.
Adapty’s decision to add an LTV prediction tool was inspired both by customer demand and the first-hand experience of Davydov and his co-founders, Kiril Potekhin and Dima Podoprosvetov. The team believes it is now in a better position to predict LTV than the app owners themselves.
“It’s something you’re unlikely to be able to replicate internally because we see a lot of data and it’s diverse — from all categories in the app store[s]”, said Davydov. “And by design, we have more knowledge of the app market, whereas if you only have one app, it only shows your data. We believe we can build much more accurate models because of this.”
Adapty is not alone in the mobile subscription management category, of which it can be the leader RevenueCat. But his roadmap connects two trends that seem to be on the rise – using federated data and applied machine learning. We’ll continue to track these, as well as the ongoing impact of changes to Apple’s privacy policy.