Waking Up

AppLovin's Lion Studios: house ad inventory built a $100M+ games unit

Shaan explains how AppLovin spun up Lion Studios by buying a small dev shop and publishing hyper-casual games pumped through ~5% of its own cheap house ad inventory. The throwaway inventory turned acquired games into a multi-hundred-million-dollar business unit.

“They bought this, this little dev shop and they call it Lion Studios and, uh, they just publish their own mobile games and they pump it through their own ad network with the cheap, uh, house ad slots. And, uh, that's become like a multi-hundred million dollar business unit within their ad network now.”

Steal thisIf you own distribution or spare ad inventory, acquire content/products that only lack reach and route your cheap inventory at them.

Sam Harris's Waking Up app: a guess of $10M/yr at ~100% profit

Discussing a mental-health app idea, Sam estimates Sam Harris's Waking Up meditation app at roughly $10M a year in revenue and nearly all profit, and says apps like this grow mostly through heavy paid performance marketing on the app store.

“And I think one guy who's kind of exploiting this opportunity in a good way is Sam Harris with Wake Up. And I don't know for a fact, but if I had to bet, I would say that's a $10 million a year company that is almost 100% profit.”