“So many of them have been pumped full of revenue at the time of sale. After you buy them they start to die. But also because they're quite shallow products, their longevity is very limited and we learned the lesson the hard way.”

The spray-and-pray app portfolio: pumped revenue dies on close

Blue Throne's first version bought nearly 100 small utility apps (flashlights, QR scanners) treating them as pure financial assets and ignoring product metrics. The sellers had juiced the numbers right before sale, and the apps decayed fast post-acquisition. Shallow products with no real retention have no longevity, no matter how clean the P&L looks.