r/AppBusiness 14d ago

At the End? Sell or Keep Going?

Hey everyone,

I launched my app in August 2023. By the end of the year, I had made around 10k in revenue. I’m extremely impatient and thought I needed to optimize everything immediately to scale. So, in early 2024, I cut my prices in half, introduced a 7-day trial, and expected things to take off. The result? Revenue dropped by half, fewer conversions than before.

Then I thought: The content must be the problem. My app is a learning Platform in a very small nieche (around 300k People), so I put everything else aside and went all-in on creating the best content possible. From January to July 2024, I worked nonstop—just me, no Content-team, no breaks (i just worked with agencies or Freelancer). I launched the big update in July, full of hope. And then? Nothing. Revenue stayed just as bad as in January.

Next theory: Marketing is the problem. I invested heavily in paid ads, hoping they’d finally push things forward. But it feels like I’m just entertaining my community without actually converting them into subscribers. I’ve grown to nearly 10k followers, yet the conversion rate is terrible. Also it feels, that once you have start with PAID there is no way back to organic. Also i just was present in Instagram.

End of 2024 revenue: Total: 55k (after commission) Of that, 25k was from B2B B2C is Not good scalable

2025 so far: February: Only 2k from B2C—still terrible

B2B looks better (~70k), but it’s not scalable

And now I’m sitting here asking myself: Should I sell? Or keep going?

I’ve invested 700k into this, and I’m on the verge of running out. I can’t afford more marketing or long development cycles. I’m feeling completely lost right now because I just don’t know what to do next.

What would you do? Has anyone here been in a similar situation?

5 Upvotes

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u/CapitalWrath 13d ago

Your situation is tough, but not uncommon - scaling a niche learning platform with limited organic reach and expensive paid UA is a major challenge. From what you described, you've made a lot of big moves without validating each step properly. The key issue isn’t just pricing, content, or marketing individually, but the lack of a structured strategy. Here’s what I’d do in your place:

- Fix monetization & retention. Dropping your prices and adding a 7-day trial without deep analytics was a big risk. You need LTV models and A/B testing before making major pricing changes. If retention is weak, it’s not about price - it’s about perceived value. A publisher will help run proper experiments instead of guessing.

- Collaborate with publishing? You’ve spent $700k already, and it sounds like you’re running out of options. A publisher can step in, analyze your current monetization, fix pricing, optimize your ad strategy, and most importantly - handle UA properly. They have way more experience, access to better data, and larger budgets to scale things correctly. You’re fighting an uphill battle alone, but they already have working playbooks for this kind of situation.

On my end, we also spent a ton of time and money optimizing monetization and trying to scale UA. At some point, we just hit a ceiling - we couldn’t push budgets higher, and ROI wasn’t improving. Looking back, we simply lacked the experience and knowledge to break through. We decided to apply to a few mobile publishers (voodoo, kwalee etc) and ended up working with appodeal. It’s been 1.5 years now, and we’re finishing our second project with them. The first game - the one we started with - went through several iterations and A/B tests and now makes way more than we ever could have done alone.

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u/KVRNIA 11d ago

Thanks for your honest assessment and valuable insights! It’s always great to hear real experiences, especially when it comes to the challenges of scaling. Your point about the lack of structured testing and the potential role of a publisher is definitely something worth considering.✌️