Opportunity → Genetic-Risk Screening Platform
Framework → 3-Minute Founder Leverage Test
Tool → Palus
Trend → App Revenues Exceed Game Revenue
Quote → Distribution Has Always Been The Hard Part
🔗 Houck’s Picks
My favorite finds of the week.
Fundraising
Growth
ICYMI
Opportunity: Genetic-Risk Screening Platform
Healthcare is moving from reactive treatment to proactive care.
Companies like Superpower and Generation Lab are leading this shift.
But they mainly focus on snapshots of your current-state health, rather than your inherited, lifelong risk profile.
As Ideabrowser flagged, there’s an opportunity for a new startup to position itself as the genetic foundational layer for preventative medicine.
What I like about this is that it requires less frequent self-testing (and potentially higher margins), but can still realistically charge a subscription and offer recurring / updated interpretations as new genomic studies and/or drugs and treatments come out.
You could even use some of your funding to run your own studies frequently, which would open up your TAM to include research breakthroughs and proprietary data as well as the now-standard consumer angle in this space.
🧠 Framework: 3-Minute Founder Leverage Test
How can you be so busy while progress feels slow?
If that resonates, you probably have a problem building leverage.
Go through these four steps in three minutes right now:
Are you repeatedly solving the same problems or doing the same tasks yourself?
How many one-off exceptions did you approve in the last month?
Can everyone on your team clearly state their top 3 goals, and are those the same you would assign to them now?
If you stepped away for two weeks, what would legitimately fail?
If the answers to these questions leave you feeling overwhelmed, you need to improve your systems and processes.
Remember that you’re not building a job for yourself, you’re building a company. Treat it like one.
Leverage can feel scary because it pulls you up to a higher altitude, but you have to get there sometimes in order to see the big picture and think clearly.
🛠 Tool: Palus
If you’ve raised venture, you have cash that you probably aren’t going to touch for a while.
Palus helps you earn more from this cash without doing anything.
Traditional treasury options put your cash in high-yield savings accounts and/or treasury bills. Palus puts it in mortgage-backed securities (bonds made by pooling thousands of home loans).
These are government-backed securities, like t-bills, but typically result in a higher yield (4.5-5% instead of 3.5-4%). With millions in the bank, the difference is meaningful.
📈 Trend: App Revenue Exceed Game Revenue
Four years ago, mobile games produced nearly double the revenue that in-app purchases from non-gaming apps brought in.
But, as a16z reported, last year it flipped and non-games made more than games for the first time ever.
You can attribute the faster growth in non-game revenue to AI apps, as AI features likely let apps increase their ARPU, but the real story is clearly that mobile game revenues have completely flatlined since the COVID pandemic.
Interestingly, the answer to why does not appear to be as simple as saying that the pandemic saw an acceleration of game revenue that has since reverted to the norm. If you look at the pre-COVID trendline, we’re now well below it.
But people aren’t spending less money on mobile overall, they’re just spending it differently.
My own speculation here is that the reasons are somewhat complex:
The inflated cost of everything → Human nature doesn’t change, so what looks like shifting priorities is more likely just a reaction to a new environment. Everything is more expensive now (both online and offline) than it was pre-pandemic, so people may be prioritizing spending their hard-earned money more on tools that make their life better rather than having the discretionary income to use on games.
App Store policies → In 2021 Apple made privacy changes that heavily impacted games and made it much harder and more expensive to target high-value players. This crushed ROAS across the whole sector on iOS, especially for games that are initially free to play. Additionally, many games are now pushing purchases outside of Apple’s ecosystem. This could mean revenues are actually up, but just in-app revenues are flat.
Market maturity → This is an expected outcome, at the end of the day. Gaming is a small fraction of people’s overall expenses, and this is just the mobile/app ecosystem catching up to historical preferences. The overall smartphone user base is no longer exploding, so we’re just seeing normalization here.
💬 Quote: Distribution Has Always Been The Hard Part
Go back 10 years.
Or at least pre-LLM.
Even at tech companies, most people used to think the hard part of making something people want was the “making” part.
The building. The coding. The designing. The product itself.
The people who didn’t think that way tended to be the ones who were doing the building.
Most engineering teams would tell you that they can make whatever you want, but that the hard part will be getting it out there to the right people to actually use it.
To non-technical folks, that sounded crazy. Coding was this hard, math-heavy skill that took training to get good at.
It seemed like the hard part. Way harder than sales or marketing, which anyone could do… right?
Now a lot more people can create software, thanks to LLMs, and they’re discovering what the engineers knew:
You can make anything, the hard part is getting people to use it.
Yes coding has gotten easier so you can say the goal posts have shifted, so to speak, but even then and definitely now: distribution has always been the hard part.