When Your Greatest Strength Becomes Your Biggest Weakness

The qualities that drive success can sometimes hold you back—especially when confidence, perfectionism, or determination goes too far.

By Daniel Todd, Special to California Business Journal

Most success stories skip the part where the thing that saved you almost sank you. This one doesn’t.

We started in 2012, not in mobile gaming, but in rewarded shopping. When we moved into rewarding people to play games, we walked into an industry with a bad name, and for good reason. Back then, the whole point for a lot of companies was volume: reward tens of thousands of people to install the same app within days, all to game Apple’s own ranking algorithm. Get to the top of the App Store charts that way, and you’d often just stay there, riding the organic momentum long after the paid installs stopped. Some of those companies sold for $50 million on the back of that one trick. None of it had anything to do with real players. It was a system built to game the system Apple was trying to control in the first place. We showed up promising to do it differently, in a category most people assumed was already a race to the bottom. It was a hard row to hoe, and for a long time, nobody was waiting for us to prove it.

The mobile gaming rewards industry ran on a simple model back then: advertisers paid a fixed price per install, no matter who installed. It was the standard. For a while, it was enough just to survive inside it.

By 2015 and 2016, the foundations were starting to bud. But budding isn’t thriving. We were still scraping for traction, still unproven, and growth stayed painfully slow all the way through 2018. For years during that stretch, I went without pay. So did my CTO, and occasionally other employees who believed in what we were building enough to stay anyway. That’s not a detail I bring up for sympathy. It’s the honest cost of believing in something before the market has agreed with you.

At one point, we were $3 million in debt while barely doing $3 million a year in revenue, and we weren’t profitable. Read that again. Every dollar coming in the door was matched by a dollar we already owed. It would have been the easiest thing in the world to pack it up and go home.

In May 2018, that off-ramp actually appeared. Another company I sat on the board of sold for a lot of money, and my wife and I personally walked away with $100,000. Our first investor and my own wife both told me the same thing: take the money, shut this company down, go do something else. Instead, I put a third of that $100,000 back into the business, because I could still see the vision, even when the two people who loved me most couldn’t yet. Six years in, we were a company that believed in something the market hadn’t confirmed yet.

Between 2018 and 2020, we ran hundreds and hundreds of experiments, testing every way we could think of to reward and price players so it worked for clients and for the players themselves. Most of them told us nothing new. Then one pattern broke through the noise and refused to go away: older female players, a demographic the rest of the industry barely glanced at, were converting and spending 60 to 70 percent more than anyone else on the platform. Not a marginal edge. A different game entirely.

So we did what any good operator does when the data hands them something real. We built demographic-specific campaigns around it, priced them to reflect the value, and pointed client budgets straight at the players who actually delivered.

Then 2020 hit, and everything we had built quietly for eight years detonated at once.

It worked. It worked spectacularly. That one insight, combined with an inventory market that had suddenly gone cheap and plentiful, took us from $3 million a year to $60 million a year in four years flat. We landed on the Inc 5000 four years running. Clients were thrilled, growth compounded on itself, and for a moment it felt like we’d cracked the code for good.

Around that same stretch, the industry started noticing too. We picked up multiple years of top-five industry rankings in US mobile casual gaming, specifically for finding game developers and finding the highest-value players, the people who actually spend money on games. That distinction matters more than it sounds like it should. In mobile gaming, it’s a very small percentage of players who account for the lion’s share of all the money spent, and finding those players consistently was exactly the kind of edge that put us in the same categories companies like Google and Facebook competed in, companies whose janitorial staff alone probably outnumbered our entire headcount. We were punching well above our weight class, and for a company that had spent years being lumped in with the worst actors in rewarded advertising, that recognition meant something.

That edge became our identity. And identity is a dangerous thing to defend, because you stop noticing when the ground underneath it shifts, or when it shifts all at once.

The Treadmill of Defending What Works

The ground shifted almost immediately. Apple, around that same period of scaling and winning awards, rolled out App Tracking Transparency, a new privacy and security framework widely read as a shot at its biggest competitors like Facebook and Google as much as it was a genuine security measure. But the effect on us was collateral damage on a massive scale. It didn’t just target the bad actors gaming install rankings. It made it so nobody, including companies like ours who’d built our entire reputation on doing this the right way, could reward players for playing games at all. It threw the baby out with the bathwater, and it happened to land squarely on our largest market. In our early days, iOS made up 70 percent of our revenue. For a real stretch of time, I genuinely wasn’t sure we could build a successful business on Android alone.

Then something else, entirely unpredictable, landed on top of that. Coming right at the end of that four-year stretch on the Inc 5000, we were hit in January 2024 with unprecedented fraud, professional-grade, coordinated out of other countries, hitting us in the tens and tens of thousands of fake players at a time. It ultimately cost Influence Mobile tens of millions of dollars in lost revenue, and millions and millions more in savings as we scrambled to retrench and rebuild with new products to defend against it. It cost us enormous amounts of time and energy just to protect the integrity of what we’d built, sorting real players from bad actors in real time while still trying to protect our game developer clients and keep the business running underneath us.

On top of that, as budgets tightened and the broader economy got harder, clients pulled back first from anything that wasn’t clearly premium. That created a real problem on our end. New players coming into the platform, across every age range, started seeing a shrinking selection of games actually available to install. We were effectively paying to bring in players who either had nothing left to install, or if they did, needed a reward high enough, five dollars or more, to make it worth their time, and clients weren’t willing to pay for that outside the segments they already trusted. Reasonable in isolation, one client at a time. But stacked across the network, it meant the diversity of players actually engaging with these apps started shrinking, quietly, campaign by campaign.

And what did we do about all of it? We doubled down. More segments. More granularity. More campaigns built to squeeze every last drop out of the strength that had built the business. At the top of our client companies, that was exactly what people wanted: better performance, full stop. But we weren’t dealing with the top of the company day to day. We were dealing with account managers juggling hundreds of campaigns at once, and for them, what we thought of as improvement often just looked like more work. More segmentation meant more reporting, more splintered budgets, more configurations to keep straight. Even when a change genuinely lifted performance, it wasn’t always received that way on the ground. And here’s the catch-22 we didn’t see coming: the smaller and more granular a segment got, the easier it became for an overloaded account manager to just turn it off rather than manage it. We were engineering our own best ideas into the first thing that got cut.

By the time the dust settled, we weren’t just in a tighter market.

We were in a fundamentally different one.

The Deeper Mismatch We Almost Missed

Here’s the part that took us far too long to see. Not all rewarded advertising channels are built the same, even when the dashboards make them look identical. Some are brilliant at manufacturing a great week one: a hot burst of engagement that fades fast and never comes back. Others, the ones we’d built our entire model around, play the long game. Players who stay for months, sometimes years, and quietly generate more value than any first-week number could ever hint at.

While budgets were flush, nobody had to choose. Growth blended the flashy and the durable together, and every channel looked fine. But the moment marketing spend compressed, the short-term channels suddenly looked like the smart, defensible choice. Cheaper. Easier to justify in a spreadsheet. Meanwhile the channels quietly producing our best long-term players started to look, on the surface, like the underperformers.

That’s the real danger hiding inside a strength you’ve stopped questioning. It doesn’t just blind you to something better out there. It can flip your best asset and your biggest liability in the exact same quarterly report, and hand you the wrong answer with total confidence.

Breaking the Treadmill

We were caught in a genuine bind. The more we cut players into narrower segments, the better performance looked on paper. But clients didn’t want to run a growing pile of campaigns to get there. Every additional segment meant more administrative overhead on their end, more dashboards, more setup, more decisions, even when it modestly improved results. That friction didn’t stay quiet for long. Clients started trimming budgets and souring on the whole approach, no matter how good the underlying numbers were. We weren’t losing on the metric, we were winning it. What we were losing was the relationship, the trust and ease that actually grows an account over time.

The fix wasn’t a better campaign structure. It was tearing open the pricing model itself and rebuilding it from the studs. We pulled together more than five years of data: over 500,000 player spend histories, players who installed and went on to spend more than $100 million in in-app purchases with our clients, generating tens of millions of dollars or more in ad revenue along the way. That data revealed patterns we’d never had the resolution to see before, and it let us build proprietary models that are changing the way we grow today. Out of that came Amplify, a system built to see quality directly and price it accordingly, instead of relying on manual segmentation to approximate it. For the first time, we could use that historical depth to predict the future with real confidence, and align our value with our clients’ value over a far longer trajectory than we’d ever been able to manage before.

What We Didn’t Expect

Amplify did exactly what we built it to do. Clients got real long-term alignment for the first time, and so did we. But the bigger story was what came next. Once that data was finally working for us instead of against us, we started spotting more pricing mismatches hiding in plain sight, ones a more granular version of Amplify could actually resolve.

That discovery became Vintage. It’s not a tweak. It’s changing how we think about growing this entire business, not by digging in and defending the strength that got us here, but by building the next layer on top of what actually earns trust over time, for players, for game developers, and for us.

The Lesson

The thing that makes you successful early is almost never the thing that keeps you successful. It’s just the thing you’re least likely to question, because it already proved itself once, and proof is seductive. Fixed bid pricing gave way to demographic segmentation. Demographic segmentation gave way to Amplify. And Amplify, once it got strong enough to expose its own blind spots, gave way to Vintage.

Each strength did its job, and then quietly became the ceiling nobody noticed, until something built on better data showed us exactly what was sitting on the other side of it. The real skill was never protecting what works. It’s staying hungry enough to find out what could work better, especially, and this is the hard part, when what you already have is working just fine.

We took this business from $3 million to $60 million in four years by defending one strength as hard as we possibly could. That’s the version of us that had to prove a bad-reputation industry wrong from a standing start. I’m confident the version of us building now, with better data, sharper tools, and a system designed to keep finding its own blind spots, is going to take us further and faster than that ever did.

We’re not defending our strength anymore. We’re building on top of everything we learned from being willing to question one.

That’s the company worth watching next.

Exciting times ahead.