Blog 
In the gap they leave, a new private credit asset class has quietly formed. Some of the largest companies in America did not get that way just by selling their product. They got there by financing it. Caterpillar, John Deere and General Motors all built enormous businesses on the back...
Why AI-native apps need a new financial framework. And a new metric to run it. The Two-Dimensional World We Built Mobile On For most of the last decade, the financial architecture of a mobile app or gaming studio rested on two numbers: Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) and Lifetime Value (LTV)....
In Parts 1 and 2, I outlined a three-stage capital manifesto for funding gaming studios: $500K seed equity for product discovery, Grey Zone convertible debt ($1-3M) for content build-out, and pure debt or cohort financing for scaling user acquisition. The model only works if the foundations are solid. If...
In Part 1, I outlined a three-stage capital model for funding gaming studios: disciplined seed equity for product discovery, Grey Zone convertible debt for content build-out, and pure debt for scaling proven user acquisition. The Grey Zone is the innovation – a financing structure designed specifically for studios in that critical inflection point between “we’ve...
Great games cost money to build. They always have and always will (even with Gen AI!) You can moonlight on the side. Work for hire to fund your own IP. Bootstrap your way to a soft launch. But at some point, if you want to build something that reaches millions...
Many founders keep finance “good enough” for as long as possible. Spreadsheets, accountants, maybe a part-time CFO. But at some point, the business outgrows your skillset and decisions start to suffer. Recently, Mobile Finance Collective – the community of CFOs in mobile apps/gaming I founded in 2024, ran a LinkedIn poll asking:...
I believe that 2026 will be the year that non-dilutive financing moves from niche to mainstream in mobile UA, but this transition won’t be without some growing pains. The UA financing market is experiencing a wave of new entrants, and it’s important to distinguish between two different types of players....
In B.F. Skinner’s operant conditioning experiments, an animal presses a lever and gets a food pellet. The behavior is reinforced, so it presses again. When pellets stop coming, the behavior naturally pauses. No punishment or negative consequence – just the absence of any reward. The system is self-correcting through immediate...
The mobile gaming industry has a capital efficiency problem that most participants don’t realize they have. Studios that could scale profitably sit capital-constrained, unable to deploy into ROI positive user cohorts via paid UA channels. Meanwhile, those with access to capital often misallocate it, chasing growth metrics that obscure whether...
There’s a deceptively simple question I ask teams who want to scale their user acquisition: “Why aren’t you spending more on UA?” It sounds blunt—maybe even dumb. But over ten years working with CFOs, founders, and UA teams, this single question has consistently exposed the real bottleneck: either performance (you can’t profitably buy users)...