💸 How to finance your app’s growth without accessing venture capital — with Mark Loranger, co-founder & COO at Braavo Capital 📈

Our guest today is Mark Loranger, co-founder of Braavo Capital. Today, we dive into the different financing options for every company, and how VC funding isnt the only financing option for app developers. We’ll look at how app developers should think about financial decisions in the wake of the upcoming changes to the app economy starting with iOS 14.

KEY HIGHLIGHTS

🙅‍♂️ There’s no one-size-fits-all solution with regards to capital and fundraising for building businesses.

👀 At what point should apps start exploring their options with regards to funding?

🤷 What are all the different funding options out there for app developers?

🤔 What optionality is – and why it should matter to entrepreneurs.

💰 What is revenue based financing?

👥 What is user acquisition funding?

🔍 What sort of app is VC funding right for?

⚔️ What are the tradeoffs and challenges of obtaining non-VC funding?

📑 Why it’s important to think about the fundamentals of your business all the time.

💪 Why a lifestyle business can be very sustainable and healthy.

👨‍💼 How it’s smart to seek out other funding that’s not VC funding

🤓 How VC funding can backfire and lead to minimal payout to founders and early employees

🤩 How you should use capital to build enterprise value vs. for marketing.

👨‍💻 How should a developer look at funding if they arent sure if they will have strong retention?

🔥 The risks of venture debt.

❗Why receivables financing isnt just for companies that want to pay their bills faster.

🗑️ In the light of the upcoming IDFA deprecation, why it’s important to avoid making very long term commitments.

✅ Why planning for IDFA deprecation is in some ways similar to planning for handling the pandemic.

💡 Why the current changes are similar to when companies started to transition to subscription based models in 2015.

💯 What we are advising our clients at RocketShip HQ.

KEY QUOTES

The one question every founder should ask

I think that fundraising is always contextual on what you’re trying to accomplish as a business. For some entrepreneurs, they want to build billion dollar companies, so the earlier you can raise larger sums of money, the better off you are because you can attack a market opportunity faster. However, that comes with a major trade off. I think that’s really the question that most entrepreneurs should ask themselves very early on in the process: what am I trying to build?

There should always be a Plan B

For entrepreneurs and app founders, one of your core responsibilities to your organization is to create optionality. Optionality means having different options for whatever the next phase of the business is, depending on the circumstances that you’re in. Optionality in the case of funding is, what types of funding options are available to me, and how do I value those funding opportunities?

The dependability of B2B LTV

Particularly with consumer products, like apps, it’s really hard to build a tremendous amount of enterprise value in the form of users because users generally churn out from consumer subscriptions. VCs love B2B SaaS because you hold on to users for years and years, and they actually get more valuable over time. It’s difficult in consumer subscriptions to maintain those same sorts of increasing value on a per user basis.

VCs and virality

Obviously there’s a few examples in the market of companies that have just come onto the scene and grown very rapidly — TikTok is one that sticks out in my mind. There’s always a chance for that sort of viral growth to get VCs excited, but otherwise, there should be something really unique and some sort of long term competitive advantage you can create through technology or through some unique vision that you have for the business.

Venture capital brings its own limitations

I think the non VC path allows entrepreneurs to continue to have the optionality that I talked about before because taking a different type of funding, some non VC funding, doesn’t limit your ability to take VC funding in the future. However, if you take VC funding early on, then you are forced down a path of trying to create a venture scale, which means billion dollar potential enterprise value, which is very hard to accomplish and most companies fail at creating venture scale.

Steady and moderate success is still success

Can you imagine that your business is making 600-800k a month, and you’re working on side projects because you’ve just built a profitable, fundamentally sound business with a good product and good marketing. That’s not so bad. In a worst case scenario, and you want to sell that business, that business has real value. You don’t have to sell it for 100 million dollars to be really successful because you haven’t sold any of your business along the way.

Bandaid vs. cure

Even if you do take venture capital, or even if you expect to take venture capital, taking a different form of funding that’s non dilutive can extend the amount of time that you have between funding rounds or until you need to raise money — it’s runway extension.

How to use wins to fuel scale

If you have really quick, early growth on a particular UA channel, in my mind, the best approach. would be to leverage your receivables because those are growing really quickly, spin it right back into that platform, and see how much it can scale.

Venture capital is not an unalloyed blessing

The biggest challenge with that type of circumstance is if you raise venture debt, it’ll be a big number. They’ll throw out 5 million to you or 3 million to you, that’s if you have enough equity in the books to support it. You may not be able to spend all that, and then you’re committed to a larger chunk of money that you have to pay for that you couldn’t spend because you weren’t able to scale into that opportunity. That’s risky as well.

Lower risk during uncertain times

My recommendation in this case is similar to what I said earlier for a company that’s just starting to hit some scale with a new ad platform or a new UA channel, but doesn’t have any certainty that it’s going to be successful in two months. It’s the same situation here, which is, I would be careful to rely on making really long term commitments to whatever plan that you had previously and to whatever assumptions that you took into your modeling previously.

FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW

Shamanth: I’m very excited to welcome Mark Loranger to the Mobile User Acquisition Show. Mark, welcome to the show.

Mark: Shamanth, thanks for having me. I’m excited to be here.

Shamanth: I’m thrilled to have you because financing is something that’s so critical to very many app developers. This is something you’ve supported very many app developers with, especially the smaller ones for whom the app business can be a ticket to growing to what could be a fully scaled business. Financing can open up a lot of doors for small, independent developers. Certainly you have a window into how that world operates, so I’m excited to dive into all of that with you today.

Mark: Speaking broadly to address that, the reality is every business needs capital to grow. You can’t build a business without capital. If you have a skill and expertise in a particular area, you can use what’s called sweat equity to build something — whether you’re an engineer building an app or whether you’re a landscaper working on your own time, that has an added value. There’s value that is either capital or time. I would argue that, in most people’s lives, both have some sort of way to measure. You need money to grow a business, and you need different types of money at different times. We see the entire spectrum because we do work with very early stage companies as well as very mature businesses. There’s a huge spectrum, and certainly with capital and fundraising and money to build businesses — there’s no one size fits all solution. I think that’s an important context to share.

Shamanth: Certainly, and we will talk about that entire spectrum during this conversation. Let’s say there’s an app developer, they have an app out there. The app is trying and scaling. At what point in time, should they stop thinking about funding and start to explore their options?

Mark: That’s a good question. If the app is already on the market and already starting to grow, scaling generally means acquiring users and, in ideal circumstances, monetizing. But that’s not always the case. You could acquire users and not monetize. That’s a different strategy.

What is reasonable about my goals, my aspirations? What are the trade-offs I’m willing to make about quality of life, the likelihood of outcomes for my business, what is most important for me? I think those questions actually precede any sort of funding decision.

If you are trying to build a massive company, then you may as well just go try to raise as much equity as possible. You may not be successful because that massive company may not be possible. You have to be realistic about the market and your ability to execute against market opportunity. Without giving this philosophical perspective, what I would say is as soon as you have some metrics and you’re starting to see some scale, I think it’s worthwhile to evaluate what options are out there.

For companies that have a little bit of traction, there is the equity path, but that comes with a lot of trade offs, and you may not be successful.

There’s also, in our case, revenue based financing. As soon as you start to generate some revenue, that traction, you can seek revenue based financing to grow your business. There’s a few different types of revenue based financing out there. Braavo offers a couple different products: factoring or working capital financing, receivables, lines of credit — those are all things based upon money that you’ve earned, but you haven’t necessarily been paid, whether it’s by the app stores or the ad networks.

There’s also user acquisition funding, if you have good metrics. If you have good metrics for LTV to CAC, you have strong retention, you’re improving your downstream events to create more value in the long tail of your users’ journey, in that case, you can actually qualify for user acquisition funding as well, which is based upon the likelihood of revenue being created in the future by your user acquisition activities.

Other than that, for relatively early companies, occasionally you can get lines of credit at your bank, usually those come with a lot of strings attached — personal guarantees, things like that. In Europe, more so than in the US, there may be government programs that you can get. In some countries, there’s a strong program for gaming funding because they’re trying to build a gaming ecosystem. So, in your local jurisdiction, particularly in Europe, I think the government funding path is also an opportunity. Again, there’s a lot of process that goes along with that.

What I mentioned earlier is that an entrepreneur’s most important value is time, so if you’re looking to save time going down the path, it’s going to take you two or three or four months to find out if you’re actually going to get that funding — that can be disadvantageous. That’s why platforms like Braavo and others out there have emerged to provide funding for early stage app companies very quickly, so you can execute on an opportunity.

Shamanth: Yeah, and that also helps me see what the very different options are for a developer that might be looking to really fuel the next stage of that growth. For the vast majority of entrepreneurs, or for the laypeople at least, when they say funding, they assume it’s VC funding. That’s the right first reaction that a lot of people have. So what sort of apps is VC funding right for? Who should be pursuing it?

Mark: The VCs are better suited to answer what sort of apps are right for them. I think what we can see from the market is that generally it’s very challenging if you’ve got a consumer focused app with even subscription monetization to raise large rounds of VC funding because it’s an extremely competitive market. There’s really dominant players at the top of every category and to sort of attack their position is going to be very expensive.

You have to find other ways to monetize — maybe you go off app, so you have a multi platform business model. It’s a real challenge right now to raise meaningful venture capital in the app world. Unless there’s something that you’ve built that is extremely unique, that is also very scalable, I’d like to argue that there should be some sort of core technology component that gives you an unfair competitive advantage.

That’s usually where the VCs get excited. There’s some unfair competitive advantage. The other thing is you somehow cracked the code on virality, and you’re exploding. In that case, people will throw money at you even prior to monetization.

I don’t know if I’m giving a direct answer, but I’m not a VC. Their answers may vary. Gaming is really a different world. There’s just not a lot of traditional VC funding going in gaming. There are some specialty funds with gaming people behind them — people that come from the gaming industry that have done specialty gaming VC funds — but those would be the only ones that would probably be suited to answer what’s fundable in the gaming world.

Shamanth: It sounds like VC makes sense if you feel like you need a large amount of capital to really go big. A lot of the alternative means of financing allow you to scale. They don’t necessarily need you to go become a billion dollar company. You can grow month in and month out and see steady scale and growth. With some of the options you mentioned — factoring, revenue based financing, or user acquisition funding — what are some of the trade offs or challenges that an app should be mindful of if they seek out a non VC mode of funding?

Mark:

Therefore, the outcomes for founders are relatively binary. It’s either a massive outcome or almost nothing because the VCs are looking for the 1 in 10 from their portfolio for really massive returns. As soon as you go down that path, your options change in terms of what you can accomplish in business. Let’s talk about the other option, which is revenue based funding or any type of non dilutive funding — funding that is not requiring a lot of equity and a lot of your company in exchange for that capital.

Generally these types of fundings are a little bit more conducive to sustainable business models. With revenue based financing options, we mentioned a few different types, the goal of the platform or the company that is providing that funding is to make sure that they get repaid. Ideally, the company is able to grow. For anyone who’s providing this type of funding, you want these companies to take your money to grow and then take more. That’s the ideal circumstance, but it’s a kind of shared success model.

The more a company grows and is taking revenue based financing, the more capital they can take and be successful, but also the platform providing that funding can also be successful. The trade offs are, in some cases, you don’t know how much money you’ll be able to get over some period of time because it’s based upon execution. If you can’t effectively spend that money to grow your business, then you’re not going to qualify for more funding, you’re not going to get that next chunk of money from that revenue based financing platform because you haven’t been able to execute against your vision.

The alternative is you took a huge chunk of money from VCs, you didn’t execute against your vision, and then your business is gone. So, the trade off in context is not so bad. I think that other trade offs might just be that you can’t grow as fast as you might like to. There is a lot of allure to raising millions of dollars in a single pop because then you have ideally 18 months to do whatever the heck you can to get to that next level of scale.

Again, if you don’t get to that next level of scale, whatever you promised your investors — “I’m going to get to 10 x where I am today” — if you don’t get there, your investors are disappointed. They’re unlikely to continue funding your business. Then you have to rethink your entire business model and say, “How do I change my business model entirely?”

Or maybe your investors have a lot of control and they force you to spend as much money as you can to hope for that last hurrah of success. The miracle of all of the sudden, your retention doubles on day 30, and you have a business that works right. Trade-offs are a limiting factor on the amount of money you know you have for a long period of time. You have to, in some cases, ask for more capital sooner than you would from raising a big round of funding. You’re also maintaining that optionality.

I believe it forces entrepreneurs and founders to think about the fundamentals of their business all the time. When you don’t think about the fundamentals of your business all the time, if you just focus exclusively with a bias on growth, you can lose sight of what works about your business model. Maybe it doesn’t have a venture scale.

It may be a great profitable business and you’d be very happy and successful and work four days a week. One of our earliest clients, their business grew really exceptionally. They bootstrapped, they got to a point where they’re ready to take on non dilutive funding, and they’ve grown to 700 or 800k a month in revenue. They have a very comfortable work life balance, and they don’t have investors telling them what to do. They can work on side projects.

Can you imagine that your business is making 600- 800k a month, and you’re working on side projects because you’ve just built a profitable, fundamentally sound business with a good product and good marketing. That’s not so bad. In a worst case scenario, and you want to sell that business, that business has real value. You don’t have to sell it for 100 million dollars to be really successful because you haven’t sold any of your business along the way.

Shamanth: Yeah, and it comes down to what you said earlier about how a developer or a business owner really needs to figure out what they want out of the business. If they do want to build a billion dollar business, work seven days a week, that there is a path for that. What you’re also saying here is that isn’t the only path, which I think is important to underscore because in certain circles, lifestyle business can be a bit of a dirty word, and what you’re saying is undisclosed that it doesn’t have to be.

Mark: If you build a lifestyle business yourself, you don’t raise outside capital. Maybe you get to, let’s say, a $3 million annualized business — so 250k a month in revenue, which is very doable in the app world. As long as you have good fundamentals of your business economics, you could sell that for $15 million, maybe $20 million if it got good growth. You’re immediately a very wealthy person, and then you name whatever it is that you do next.

You can’t sell a business for $15 million and take any money away if you’ve raised 5 or 10 from VCs because they’ll get all the money back. Again, it’s not to trash on the VC business model, we have raised venture capital ourselves, but we are a B2B company. We retain our customers for a long period of time where we’ve created a tremendous amount of enterprise value and the infrastructure we built. It’s also taken us several years to get to where we are, a lot of hard work, a lot of trade offs, and work life balance and all those things. When I look at a lot of our customers who are just building profitable business models, I say, next time around, maybe I’ll think about that pathway as a different approach.

Shamanth: Yeah, I’m certainly familiar with VC funded businesses that sold for 10s of millions of dollars and yet didn’t return a lot of money to founders or early employees. They went for it. You’re right, it certainly doesn’t have to be the only path that an entrepreneur can take.

Mark: In any case, this is something important to just reiterate,

even if you do take venture capital, or even if you expect to take venture capital, taking a different form of funding that’s non dilutive can extend the amount of time that you have between funding rounds or until you need to raise money — it’s runway extension.

If you’ve raised a small seed round, let’s say a couple million dollars, which is a decent seed round, that money should be allocated to building enterprise value. I talked a little bit earlier about enterprise value, you’re building technology, you’re hiring great people, you’re creating competitive advantages. That’s where your money from equity should go because you’re creating long term value. If you have sources of non-dilutive capital to go alongside that equity, you can use that to invest in marketing for example.

Marketing should repay itself if you’ve got decent marketing channels in a meaningful amount of time that you can have good economics and even the capital that you’re borrowing. You’re essentially subsidizing your marketing budget with non-diluted funding, while you allocate all of your equity to the stuff that creates that long term value. You stretch out your runway, you just build more on less. Again, these things can be complimentary, but they’re not mutually exclusive. In any case, but certainly once you go down the VC path, the outcomes that are potential change a lot.

Shamanth: Yeah, and what I’m also hearing you say is that with non-dilutive funding, you can use that for operating expenses or variable expenses, which are important and necessary, but aren’t necessarily building the longer term value which can be making the business really valuable.

Mark: Correct, and that’s an important thing to keep in mind.

Shamanth: Let’s say there’s an app that hit a spurt of growth — maybe they’re crushing it on TikTok, maybe they just went super viral — they’re like, “Okay, we see we make a bunch of revenue, let’s go get non-dilutive funding based on this revenue.” Then two months down the line, our retention, it’s terrible. That’s a very real possibility and certainly I’m familiar with that. I imagine you are too that apps could fall in that sort of category. For an app developer who has a spurt of growth and is wondering, “Oh, my god, is this sustainable? Should I raise funding? Because maybe I’ll raise funding and things will crash?” How should they recommend thinking about financing, If they are in that position?

Mark: Well, honestly, in that circumstance, the lowest risk type of funding would be factoring. Essentially, you’re getting access to your earnings that haven’t been paid sooner. If you’re growing really fast, getting access to those earnings sooner you can reinvest. If you’re reinvesting every week in that really rapid sort of revenue growth, then your marketing budget can increase every single week.

You can create nonlinear returns, you can create compounding growth for as long as that sort of massive curve sustains. If that curve drops off, you haven’t lost much because you’ve only leveraged your unpaid receivables, you haven’t taken a lot more money that’s going to have to get repaid over time. Even if your revenue goes down and more of your revenue is going to go to servicing, that longer term financing, or if you raise VC at that point in time, and then things go south, then you have to totally change your plans. In all likelihood, it’s going to be very hard to recover from something like that.

and then inevitably, you’re going to hit a plateau. Ideally, you don’t drop off completely because your retention falls off a curve, but maybe it’s just you can’t scale any further on that on that platform.

Maybe it’s 100k, maybe it’s 200K. At that point, you haven’t necessarily committed to anyone else, whether it’s a long term sort of venture debt partner, whether it’s a VC, you haven’t committed to anything long term to them. You haven’t leveraged money that you haven’t yet earned, meaning that you’re going to then have to pay something back that when revenue is declining, that’s really painful.

I would argue that in that circumstance, any sort of factoring solution or receivables based financing is the right approach if you’re concerned about how viable something might be for three or four months. If you have a really strong conviction that your retention is only improving and your metrics are just getting better, in that case, I think that there’s a reason to argue that you should focus on a longer term funding solution because you’re going to need more money in your war chest to really pour into that fire.

In that case, there’s other options — long term revenue based financing or UA funding or even VC, but again, in the case of VC you really don’t want to just raise venture to spend on marketing. You should find other sources in that case.

Shamanth: Yeah, so what you’re advocating is for somebody that isn’t very certain about what even the medium term looks like, they can still be incremental around their financing decisions. Many of these alternate non VC funding models let them do exactly that.

Mark: Right, they allow the company, the entrepreneur to retain the control of decision making and to minimize their exposure to long term risk because you’re shortening the window under which you’re sort of creating that leverage or that ability to spend. There’s a misconception about factoring or any sort of receivables financing, which is that it’s for companies that just need to pay their bills faster. The reality is, the majority of our customers over five years that have utilized the factoring solution are mid stage or mature businesses that are just creating more leverage for themselves to incrementally grow or to even to create compounding growth. They’re repaying themselves so fast that investing every week a little bit additional on your marketing budget will really create a compounding growth. There’s a curve there just from accelerating your earnings or just from leveraging your receivables.

Shamanth: To switch gears a bit, Mark, a lot of the funding decisions thus far in the last decade or so have been around user acquisition as a driver of a lot of app growth. For the vast majority of app driven businesses, that’s the single biggest expense line item. That has been the case in the last decade or so just because as a primary means of distribution unless they go to viral. All of that is set to change with the introduction of iOS 14 and the deprecation of IDFA. Generally what we are hearing and seeing is that advertising ROAS numbers are going to crash and CPMs are expected to crater.

Some would argue that some of the smaller developers that benefited the most from direct response advertising are going to not find the direct response user acquisition nearly as effective. How should an app developer think about debt financing decisions in this climate where they would have invested a million a month a year ago, but now just don’t know what’s going to happen. How should they think about this?

Mark: I wish I had a great answer for you. It’s a question we’re asking ourselves. I think the entire industry is on its heels a little bit right now, trying to understand how we should think about the post iOS 14 world and post attribution. Certainly, the MMPs are trying to figure it out. Anyone that relies on mobile app growth and mobile apps’ ability to acquire users through paid acquisition are in a world of uncertainty right now.

We’ve worked with so many companies over the years, I can kind of put myself in their shoes and think about how they’re planning. I can also think about how we’re planning, but I think in some ways there’s similarities. It’s really hard to price uncertainty. For an entrepreneur, pricing uncertainty means what is the cost of making commitments for the long term when I don’t know what that long term is going to look like? Making commitments might mean hiring your next growth marketer or investing a tremendous amount in a new product or creative for an ad platform that you’re not really certain you’re going to be able to use in the future.

From our perspective, it’s how our customers are going to be able to continue to build their businesses with, we’re taking a step back five plus years where it was sort of a wild west of “I’m spending money, I’m making money. Okay, that seems good.” Really, that’s not a fundamentally sound way of building a business.

I think that those assumptions need to be challenged at a really fundamental level. It’s not necessarily a bad thing to go back and challenge a lot of assumptions you have about your business. Certainly, if you don’t know what new assumptions to put in place, it makes things really difficult. I would say that in the context of funding decisions, I would caution companies against committing to raising lots of equity with a goal and a plan in place that you believe will be driven primarily by user acquisition because it’s unclear what that’s going to look like.

This is not to say I’m totally pessimistic. I think that certainly there will be companies who will figure out ways to be successful in the new environment, but it’s going to take a little bit of time. I think on your previous podcast, the guys are saying in 12 to 18 months, we’ll figure things out, we will know more, the new paradigms will emerge, not the short term fixes that people are thinking about right now, but the long term solutions.

This reminds me a lot in a less globally impactful way of the pandemic when it hit most seriously in February, March. We were thrown into this situation of uncertainty. The question was, how do we plan for the long term? Most people were saying you need to focus on the fundamentals. You need to try to find ways to just continue to create economic value in your business without necessarily committing to things that you won’t be able to fulfill in a longer period of time until you have a better sense of how you’re going to execute.

I think it’s optimizing for short term commitments, while you learn how your business will work post iOS 14. That’s the best answer I can give. It’s about being a little bit more conservative probably. And certainly, that’s going to hurt my business if customers are super conservative because they’re not going to want money. In the context of long term value creation, you just have to be a little bit conservative sometimes in committing to things that may or may not be able to materialize once we figure out how to survive and hopefully thrive post iOS 14, but it’s going to be a period of time where things go badly if you are monetizing through ads.

That’s another area of challenges. There’s discussion about if you’re monetizing through ads, how do you actually figure out how to monetize through IAPs in a very short period of time in the context of what’s happening? Do you make those drastic changes now? Do you at least envision them? Certainly, if you’re going to do that your revenue is going to drop off because you’re going to have to adopt a new business model. It reminds me a little bit of when companies were in health and fitness in 2015. Subscriptions were just starting to crack the surface of the market, so companies transitioned from some blend of IAPs and ads to subscription business model. Their revenue dropped off dramatically for a long period of time before they were able to nail down the subscription model. Those things might happen in the not too distant future.

Shamanth: It’s going to be a period of transition. It’s certainly going to be a challenging period for very many businesses. I think your advice to play it by ear, optimize for short term wins and commitment is spot on because you don’t want to be making a long term commitment in the face of a very uncertain long term future, so I think that is very good advice, Mark.

Mark: I’m curious, Shamanth, if you don’t mind if you don’t mind me asking, I’m gonna put you in the hot seat. What are you advising your clients? What’s the advice you’re giving them? Or are you helping them plan differently? What’s been your process with your client?

Shamanth: At a high level, it’s very similar to the advice you did offer, which is A watch as to how that ecosystem evolves, but also make room in the technology roadmaps for significant retooling because the MMPs as they are now will not function. They are coming up with alternate solutions. My advice has been to be prepared to retool all of your infrastructure be it for MMPs be it for SKAdNetwork. As you said, just prepare for a period of upheaval, which may or may not materialize, but my advice has been to prepare for the worst.

Mark: Yeah, it’s tough. You want to stay optimistic because certainly you, like us, believe in this ecosystem and invested a big chunk of our lives in helping create more and more successful businesses within this ecosystem to support those successful businesses. So, giving advice to be conservative is sort of counter to the optimism that I think we both have, but for a short period of time being conservative is not the worst thing.

It reminds me again of previous situations where if you relied purely on venture capital, for example, and you have committed to your investors that you are going to 3X your revenue between now and the end of the year, it’s going to be very difficult to execute against that. A more balanced blend of capital previously is going to put a lot of companies in a bit of a better position. Something like revenue based financing where your repayment is based upon your revenue — sort of a rev share model. You’ve managed your risk effectively because if your revenue goes down, your payments will go down. For us, we’re expecting that with some of our customers, it’s going to take us longer to get repaid because we’re getting repaid by some percentage of future earnings. I think that in that case, that model, it’s a shared risk model, and it’s not as punitive to the company as if they were paying a fixed monthly payment to a different financing provider. Their revenue is cut in half, which means that way more of their total operating budget is going to paying back different platforms.

Shamanth: Definitely, Mark. I know we have come up on time. This is a good place for us to wrap, Mark. Before we do that, could you tell folks how they can find out more about you and everything you do?

Mark: Yeah, so Braavo Capital Inc. is the name of my company. We can be found online at getbraavo.com. You can also find us on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook with the same handle — all the typical places where you’d find businesses like ours. Feel free to reach out to me personally on LinkedIn if you have any additional questions or my email. You can find my email on the website as well. We are open and still very, very optimistic and committed to empowering this ecosystem and the companies in it, even in times of uncertainty. That’s sort of the platform that we have.

Shamanth: Absolutely. We will link to all of that in the show notes and they’ll have a full transcript of this episode. For now, Mark, thank you so much for being on the Mobile User Acquisition Show. Really appreciate you taking the time.

Mark: Thank you, Shamanth.

A REQUEST BEFORE YOU GO

I have a very important favor to ask, which as those of you who know me know I don’t do often. If you get any pleasure or inspiration from this episode, could you PLEASE leave a review on your favorite podcasting platform – be it iTunes, Overcast, Spotify or wherever you get your podcast fix. This podcast is very much a labor of love – and each episode takes many many hours to put together. When you write a review, it will not only be a great deal of encouragement to us, but it will also support getting the word out about the Mobile User Acquisition Show.

Constructive criticism and suggestions for improvement are welcome, whether on podcasting platforms – or by email to shamanth at rocketshiphq.com. We read all reviews & I want to make this podcast better.

Thank you – and I look forward to seeing you with the next episode!