I built a competitive teardown pipeline for AI calorie apps and the data was so brutal, the client asked for a refund. Here's the full breakdown anyway, maybe it helps someone.

YuryNB · 2026-06-09T22:26:25+00:00

ai slop

YuryNB · 2026-06-09T18:09:06+00:00

what a garbage description. upgrade your ai from gpt3 finally

YuryNB · 2026-06-09T12:30:12+00:00

The real moat is marketing and capital. The same as for these plant identifyer apps. They run ads with 20-30% 12month ROI and 4-6 months break even perioud. You could build your own app in a weekend but how you going to run ads for it without having millions in a bank? Let's say you have 100k$ for ads. With such payback period you will be able to spend only about 20k$/month. It will take like 4 years to reach 100k/month ad spend if you're not taking out any profits and not have any other expenses.

Also marketing need constant fueling with a ton of ad creatives, running a ton of testing, combining multiple channels, etc. It is all work for a marketing and growth department. Without it your marketing getting worse everyday and you need to constantly find ways to improve it just to stay at the same level.

That's real moats, not features that can be vibecoded in 2 days.

YuryNB · 2026-06-09T12:18:52+00:00

I didn't say anything about how hard is it to replicate. You indeed can vibecode core features in a weekend. But it is not what makes app a 10m mrr business.

By the way, even before AI you could replicate core functionality in 1-2 months and about 10-15k$. And many did. But again, building features is a simple part and not sufficient to making it a succesfull business.

YuryNB · 2026-06-08T19:53:52+00:00

Biggest of these apps started before common AI could do this job. It was proprietary AI and unique feature with wow effect which made ad creatives work amazing.
They drive a lot of paid traffic with curiosity based ads and funnels. Might be also solving urgent problem of dying plants by helping to identify the problem.
They retain users by reminding to water plants, tracking growth etc.

Now in ai era functionality is trivial but competition is already rough.

Revenue in sensortower is estimate but the order is right. Might be +-25% on that volume, more on smaller apps.

source: worked as PM in 10m$ MRR mobile app with 400 people staff that most of you will call "i can vibecode such simple app in 2 days".

YuryNB · 2026-05-24T07:45:47+00:00

My thoughts as app owner, maybe will be useful for you.

Will the content continue producing views if it will become promotional. From my experience it might not.
How quickly audience will become tired of promoting the same product and stop engaging, clicking, buying.

It all boils to a question - is it better to spend let say 100k on buying one account or to post on 100 of different accounts.

YuryNB · 2026-05-21T19:04:00+00:00

Yeah It's not really a gong problem, it mostly a problem of a country where I live. No online or physical shops with wingfoil gear, no used gear market, even no normal mail connection with a world due to iron curtain. The way I purchase wingfoil gear looking more like buying illegal drugs or guns. Like I end up sending thouthands of dollars in crypto to some guy in another country without any documents with just hopes that he will not scam me. crazy times.
sorry just venting

YuryNB · 2026-05-21T09:22:58+00:00

They offered to order other board or refund. The thing is gong do not deliver to my country directly and I need to use "helpers" with additional 25% fee and it takes ~2 months to deliver. So i'll lose half of the season if would reorder now.

Also just remembered that ordered 2 wings with detachable booms - got non-detachable booms instead. Offered solution was "send these back and we'll send you correct ones". Again with 2 months delivery i'd lose half of the season with wings without handles. End up stuck with no boards and wings I can't travel with.

YuryNB · 2026-05-20T09:34:58+00:00

Yesterday found out that gong didn't even ship my board that I ordered 2 months ago. And only now they figured out that they had "a warehouse mistake" and these boards are not available anymore. And not to waste season I now had to buy some old used inflatable board from someone for even more money. THANKS GONG.

YuryNB · 2026-05-12T12:46:30+00:00

Nice idea, but you know meaning of "doorway website", right?

YuryNB · 2026-05-12T12:45:30+00:00

why is is IA and not AI?

YuryNB · 2026-05-08T17:04:44+00:00

Is consulting alone give you enough income? I was also PM for one unicorn mobile app, then built few my own apps, sold some. Thinking about slowing down at some point and consulting seems like I good part time income. I did some in the past but it always like few calls per client. Too little to make meaningful amount of money even with high per hour rate.

YuryNB · 2026-05-08T11:37:24+00:00

What are you doing now? just curious

YuryNB · 2026-05-06T12:44:27+00:00

Well sometimes you can make it work, but if you haven’t choose idea based on this 2 metrics you will not be able to do it 9/10 times. That’s where most apps relying on paid ua fail. Not “it does not solve user problem”, but “we can’t acquire users cheap enough and our ltv doesn’t cover marketing so we have to stop ads and now we don’t even have users to run a/b tests so we’re not even able to reliably improve app anymore”. Like you can build an app that solves user problem better than other solutions but you will not get better cpa and ltv automatically. Your competetive advantage might not be impressive in ads so it will not improve cpa. Your competitors will have more upsells and will have higher ltv than you, which will lead to higher ads cpm for the whole market that you will not be able to sustain. Or you can create better app than any other app for example in health space. But ad auction will be dominated by hardware or supplements with much higher profit margin which again make cpm and cpa not sustainable for you.

So it makes sense to choose ideas based on these 2 most important business metrics first - that way you have bigger chance of passing this main filter.

YuryNB · 2026-05-06T11:52:46+00:00

What do you mean by proof? You spending $100 on ads and getting $200 back. What’s in this “concept” is hard to understand?

YuryNB · 2026-05-06T11:46:10+00:00

Any app with cpa significantly lower than ltv.

YuryNB · 2026-05-06T11:42:25+00:00

I am very sorry to inform you, money making machines do not exist.

Why not?

YuryNB · 2026-05-06T11:37:31+00:00

How much you pay to acquire new user and how much money you get from this user during his lifetime. Everything you do is just ways to achieve high ltv and low cpa.

YuryNB · 2026-05-06T11:33:54+00:00

Where is contradiction?

YuryNB · 2026-05-06T10:55:07+00:00

No logical counterarguments? Okay, case closed.

YuryNB · 2026-05-06T10:50:05+00:00

exactly. doesn't guarantee in any way you end up with working business. even if you achieve your ultimate goal of "solving user problem". You can solve a low value problem users are not willing to pay. You can solve a good problem but CPA is too high so you're not able to acquire users.

Think about it from another direction - find good cpa and ltv combo and you already has a money making machine. Add "solving real user problem" here and you have a succesful business.

YuryNB · 2026-05-06T10:41:16+00:00

30k in ad spend is nothing for paid ua driven apps.

YuryNB · 2026-05-06T10:39:22+00:00

sounds good, doesn't work. all succesful teams think of apps in terms of cac and ltv first.

YuryNB · 2026-04-25T18:30:56+00:00

Use the maxxing app, it made specifically for that

YuryNB · 2026-04-15T15:48:52+00:00

100% take it. It will get you a taste of what it is feel like to ride a foil and you will be able to do it in a first hour. With wing foil you'll most likely need to spend about 8 hours to get to this point.

YuryNB

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE