From a tool that did not exist to an exit

Dani and Miriam, who I had worked with before, had founded PICKASO: the first agency in Spain dedicated exclusively to app marketing. They needed tools to track the apps they managed, produce reports and pull insights on the competition; tools existed, and none covered the whole job. That is where TheTool comes from: building the one that was missing. They called me for that (I was at the end of my digital marketing stage, with my head more on what happens to the user than on how to attract them) and Rubén joined as CTO.

I worked in two directions. One, professionalising the agency: TheTool was bootstrapped and PICKASO funded it, so the agency's growth was, literally, the product's budget: I repositioned its brand and its service portfolio, and along the way mapped the companies that would become our competitors. Two, finding the gap, with a four-input discovery: agency clients, indie developers, PICKASO's consultants and the agency's own way of working, which was the value we wanted to put inside the product. The MVP was presented where the market was: Applause, the first professional app conference in Spain, organised by PICKASO. TheTool was announced and the free tier opened, doing two jobs instead of one: our first acquisition channel and the best discovery input we ever had.

It gained traction, and with it came the first frontend, a new backend, customer success and the first customers. We worked in Kanban and at a very high pace, because occupying our gap was not enough: we also had to offer what the other tools already had. It worked for almost a year, and then the usual showed up: plenty of speed and little method.

We reorganised: a branching and deployment architecture that would scale, two-week sprints and a goal system with one simple rule: one disruptive feature per quarter (ASO score, international analysis, competitor timeline, related-app tracking), with the rest of the sprint to optimise on user feedback. That dynamic is what brought the nomination for best ASO software at the App Promotion Summit in Berlin, alongside competitors with serious funding and far bigger teams than ours.

Analysing the entire App Store and Google Play daily is not simple, and putting that data into the product solidly is less so. It showed: sprints shipped fine, but the scraping bugs appeared during launch week, after the nightly crons ran.

So we changed the sprint: monthly, three weeks of development and one of external testing with PICKASO's ASO consultants and with a customer or two. Less delivery cadence, and stable value. And we turned the cost around with TheTool Monthly, a monthly communication with every new feature explained step by step: on the 1st there was something new and you knew how to use it. Stability stopped being an internal constraint and became something the customer noticed.

With delivery stable we could go back to product, with a focus we passed on to the whole team: give the customer the maximum information about their competitors. Out of that came decoding the real install numbers behind the “1 M – 5 M” band that Google Play publishes as a black box, and with it a whole line of market analysis on verified data: sector and trend reports, some of which made it onto national television news.

Growing bootstrapped has advantages and a bill. Ours was design: we had started from a template that served us well, and five years later the platform was a Frankenstein. I pushed for hiring the first product designer, who rebuilt the brand and the platform and gave it the usability users had been missing.

Even so, by year five we were flat: the market had matured, competitors had more financial muscle and we had already received acquisition offers. Our path was a different one: stop being bootstrapped and look for partners who would bring investment, but also market knowledge and the capacity to expand. The round was going well; and then the pandemic arrived. It stalled, nobody knew whether the world would still be the one we knew, and the decision was to protect PICKASO and close the sale of TheTool. That is how the acquisition by AppRadar came about.

I could have stayed at the agency; I had already worked there during my marketing and growth years. But product had got under my skin by then, and the next challenge had to be a product one.