A six-month investigation into how mid-stage app companies are reorganising their marketing functions in response to a quietly brutal change in the unit economics of paid acquisition. The work has not disappeared. It has, in many cases, moved somewhere the spreadsheet does not see.
A quarterly review of the structural shifts in mobile app discovery — featured placements, the new review-prompt rules, the slow-motion consolidation of certain categories. With charts and several useful tables.
A small but consistent pattern in the published data from twenty-three mid-stage app companies. We think it is real and we think it matters.
"The interesting marketing work, in 2026, is happening at the edges — in the small studios who have stopped pretending the playbook still works."— Editorial, Issue 24
The marketing funnel has, since the 1920s, been the dominant mental model for how customers move from awareness to purchase. It is, in the mobile app context, almost completely wrong. What we propose to use instead.
Why the document that nobody at a venture-funded app company wrote in 2020 is, in 2026, becoming a competitive advantage at the smaller end of the market.
A long conversation with the head of growth at a UK-based mobile app company who, over eighteen months, stripped out roughly half the automated lifecycle messaging her team had inherited. What stayed, what went, and why the numbers improved.
Nine years, perhaps thirty engagements, no agency, no team. A short conversation about a working life designed in deliberate opposition to the conventional brand-design career.