Hi Reader - Years ago, I was working on a word game, and we were killing it in the US. So we ran an experiment in the UK. After all, they speak English too, right? I think it was George Bernard Shaw who said: England and America are two countries divided by a common language. (Whoever it was that said it, I was about to prove it.) Anywayyy for our word game, the UK did even better than the US. CPI was strong. Cost per first puzzle played was strong. D1 ROAS was extremely strong, and D7 held...

Hi Reader - Before I scaled an app from $30K a month in ad spend to $1.5M(profitably), first I cut it to zero. I've told the zero part before. What I didn't tell you is what happened in the two months after. Because turning the spend off turned out to be the easy half. Zero spend fixes exactly one thing: it stops you paying to pour users into a leaky bucket. It does not fix the bucket. And in a five-person company, zero spend isn't a strategy. It's a countdown. Or a ticking time bomb. Pick...

Hi Reader - Most companies run a hackathon once a year. You know the yearly kind. Forty-eight hours, matching hoodies, a demo that gets a standing ovation, and a LinkedIn post about "our culture of innovation." The non-engineers come for the beer. And by March, nobody remembers where the repo lives. That made sense when the tools changed once a year. AI changes them every few weeks. A yearly hackathon is out of date before the pizza gets cold. A couple of weeks ago, in my typewriter email, I...