Blog 
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...
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)...
In every mobile gaming and app businesses, user acquisition and monetization are the engine room of growth. But they’re also where financial discipline tends to blur. In many companies, revenues, ad spend, salaries, and server costs often flow through the same account, leaving founders and their finance teams guessing about...
Welcome the Capital Stack! A decade after founding Pollen VC and having lent hundreds of millions of dollars into the sector, I’ve seen the same question surface again and again across mobile gaming and app studios: “If our UA machine is working — where can we find the capital to...
Debt and revenue based finance options for early/growth stage businesses has become much more mainstream over the last few years, as founders seek alternative sources of capital to fund their growth. Rather than relying purely on equity financing which is dilutive to their ownership positions, they are increasingly seeking more...
In the fiercely competitive mobile gaming landscape, marketers are constantly seeking strategies to better understand their metrics and enhance their chances of success. A critical, yet often overlooked, aspect of this is the concept of duration. In an environment where ROI positive user acquisition is hard to achieve, understanding not...