The article discusses key insights from Samet Durgun, known as the Growth Therapist, presented at Business of Apps Berlin 2025. Durgun's perspective views app growth as a system that either supports or undermines sustainable outcomes, highlighting recurring conditions that differentiate successful apps from those that underperform.
He outlined several structural issues that often precede significant declines in performance.
Structural Issues Leading to App Growth Failure
Cash Flow Management
App businesses, especially subscription-based models, face a structural delay, often extending up to six weeks, between generating revenue and receiving payouts from app stores. This lag can increase risk when scaling if not explicitly modeled.
Decisions related to growth made without a reliable customer lifetime value (LTV) baseline can deplete future operational funds. Durgun emphasized that cash flow discipline requires visibility, specific financial planning, and contingency strategies for bridging funding gaps, rather than relying on optimism.
Retention as a Compounding Metric
Retention is not exclusively a post-install metric; its foundation is established from the very first app interaction. Factors such as onboarding experience, clarity of paywalls, perceived value, and the overall initial user experience all contribute to long-term user engagement.
The approach should focus on maintaining healthy retention ranges, informed by credible industry medians and top-quartile data, rather than pursuing absolute benchmarks. Retention should serve as a continuous diagnostic indicator.
Instrumentation as a Strategic Decision
Setting up event tracking should be treated as a strategic choice, as it determines what a growth system can effectively learn. Many applications optimize for convenient signals over truly meaningful ones, potentially obscuring issues such as immediate cancellations after a trial initiation.
More predictive signals often appear later in the user journey and necessitate deliberate definition and consistent transmission across analytics, attribution, and media platforms. Deficiencies in instrumentation can lead to challenges in explaining performance variations across channels, reconciling data between app stores and mobile measurement partners (MMPs), or effectively adjusting campaigns.
Attribution as an Organizing System
Attribution problems typically emerge from small inconsistencies, including delayed signals or missing parameters, resulting in discrepancies in revenue reporting across various systems. These gaps can persist even in large-scale operations.
The challenge frequently lies not within the available tools, but in the orchestration of data flow between product, MMPs, and acquisition platforms, making effective optimization difficult without a clear data map.
Creative Scale and AI
The increased availability of AI-generated creative assets has shifted the discussion from scarcity to abundance. However, the actual cost lies not in producing a high volume of assets, but in creating a genuinely effective one.
Creative production entails significant opportunity costs through activities like prompting, iteration, testing, and interpretation. The more relevant metric is "cost per winner," rather than "cost per asset," to avoid optimizing for sheer output while potentially diminishing emotional resonance and overall effectiveness.
Spend Without Learning
While statistically significant data requires investment, feeding algorithms without clear hypotheses can become wasteful. Spending that is not designed to generate learning is indistinguishable from spending that simply fails.
A warning sign is an increase in complexity (more campaigns, creatives, channels) without a corresponding increase in insight into what truly performs. This results in growth that is louder but less informed.
Product-Market Fit as an Ongoing Test
Product-market fit is often incorrectly perceived as a permanent achievement. Markets evolve, user expectations rise, and tolerance levels diminish, necessitating active maintenance of product-market fit.
Applications developed from genuine personal experience often adapt more quickly, as their creators directly understand the problem being addressed. Durgun highlighted that if creators would not use their own app, it becomes challenging to assess its continued value.
Conclusion
The primary recommendation for growth strategy emphasizes focus rather than the pursuit of new tactics or channels. Prioritizing what is already effective, the strongest product features, and meaningful signals aligns with a strategy of understanding and addressing underlying systemic issues.
"Prioritizing what is already effective, the strongest product features, and meaningful signals aligns with a strategy of understanding and addressing underlying systemic issues."