“There are ways to do it because of the beauty of apps, which is you can measure retention and you can measure churn and you can measure repeated customers and you can measure conversion of free to paying users. So you can pretty accurately predict how the app's going to do as long as you have maybe six to nine months of data.”

6-9 months of cohort data is enough to defend a valuation

Buyers discount apps younger than 12 months because they lack a full resubscription cycle, but six to nine months of clean cohort data is enough to model future retention and put a defensible value on the business. Track churn, repeat-purchase rate, and free-to-paid conversion from day one so the data exists when an offer arrives.