Finding Your Place in an Unimaginably Large Space

Stephan Schmidt’s Amazing CTO Newsletter led me to this year’s RevenueCat Subscription App analysis, which makes this sobering claim:

Market dynamics — user acquisition costs, algorithm changes, platform fees, AI unit economics — now heavily reward the top performers, creating a mobile app economy that mirrors broader wealth inequality: the rich get richer, and indie developers struggle to stay afloat.

The internet is unimaginably large, and that scale is the opportunity: a wide variety of people and ideas, each just a click away. But from the beginning of the World Wide Web the problem has been finding what you’re really looking for.

In theory, the Web should be the greatest mechanism for connecting individual people with their individual interests. Google claimed to search 8,058,044,651 webpages in 2005. That was more than 20 years ago. The number of websites and the number of people have grown enormously since then. Surely the technology of connecting the right person with the exact right thing or community has improved since then, right?

Well, not exactly. It has all centralized due to network effects and artificially high switching costs. So now we live in the web that Tom Eastman observed in 2018:

I’m old enough to remember when the Internet wasn’t a group of five websites, each consisting of screenshots of text from the other four.

Small businesses have slowly become less and less viable in this environment. 69% of all subscription revenue goes to incumbents launched before 2020. This has created a top heavy market:

• The top 25% of subscription apps have increased their Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) by 80% year-over-year.
• The bottom 25% lost at least a third of their MRR over the same period.
• Most businesses in the middle are simply not sustainable without aggressive growth towards the top quartile.

RevenueCat notes that this is a trend, not a one year blip. They expect it to intensify in our current “vibe coding era” as almost 15,000 new subscription apps are now launched every month, compared to just 2,000 three years ago. So how do we sustain new businesses, cooperatives, and cultural initiatives in such a top heavy environment? Especially ones that are more focused on building relationships with members and customers rather than investors?

I believe you have to be a bit different. For example, in Yorba, our members own their data. Our employees are encouraged to have a life outside of work. Our founders want to run the company as a business, not rush to an exit. Our generated data is published rather than hoarded. We are a Public Benefit Corporation. We are a bit strange.

People respond to this uniqueness. In a typical month, 20-30% of the folks who visit yorba.co become a member. Around 10% of those become premium. That beats industry averages.

But it’s not enough. We’re suffering from the issue that RevenueCat lays out. We are a small business with solid conversion numbers and industry-standard churn. But not enough people know we exist. A traditional startup would use their money cannon to build bots that follow people around the internet, yelling at them to use their product. But Yorba is working towards a quieter internet. So that approach doesn’t really fit what we’re doing.

And the right people are finding us, just in small numbers. More organic reach means establishing more strategic partnerships with other organizations while finding the individuals who will share Yorba with their friends and family. It means opening more of our valuable data to privacy researchers. It means being available when someone wants to enhance their privacy or authenticate certain claims.

In other words, a business like ours needs to be part of a network. The internet is still unimaginably large and full of people. But most of them have been herded into a handful of heavily surveilled spaces where leaving feels impossible. Yorba helps people break out of those boxes, but to succeed it has to break out of them too.

Image: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, L. Furtak, S. Fujimoto, Cosmic House of Mirrors, September 29, 2026, James Webb Space Telescope image, 4000 × 3869 px, NASA. Public Domain.

Source: RevenueCat, State of Subscription Apps 2026, 2026, report.