Paddle

Just over a year ago Abdul Mukati 🛟 was a solo founder struggling to monetize his idea, Master Inbox. He joined Paddle's Launchpad program and the $10,000 prize he won gave him the runway to turn things around. Today, Abdul and the 14-person team he built supports 2 million+ mailboxes and are scaling rapidly. But that's only half the story. Abdul is also the winner of the recent Paddle x Lovable hackathon hosted at B2Coast. In just two hours, Abdul built and monetized a fully fledged SaaS tool, LeadPeek. Our CMO Ben Aronsten sat down with Abdul to talk about his Hackathon victory, onboarding his first customer, the Master Inbox journey and how Paddle has supported Abdul along the way. Full conversation in the comments 👇

You learn a lot from how builders describe the problem in their own words. Taking a payment is only one part of selling software globally. Then come VAT and sales tax, registrations, filings, and keeping up as the rules change. For a small team, that can become a lot of time and risk tied up in work that has very little to do with the product they set out to build. We’ll happily take the Paddle mention 💛 but more than that, we like seeing the problem described so plainly by the people dealing with it every day.

Let’s be clear: AI makes apps easier to build, but it didn’t make app businesses easier to monetize. As more products reach market faster, the hard part shifts to distribution, monetization, retention & unit economics. And monetization is product strategy. Pricing, paywalls, trials, checkout, and cancellation all shape both the user experience and whether the business can sustain itself. The web opportunity is part of that. Not just because of lower fees, but because it gives app teams more control to test, learn and improve across the full revenue journey. Lucas Lovell wrote more about what good App2Web looks like, where teams go wrong, and why net proceeds matter more than checkout conversion alone. Link in comments 👇

Moving to the web gave Paired more control over growth. It also gave the team two problems they hadn’t had to manage before: failed payments in their biggest market, and growing tax compliance complexity across the world. For a lean finance team, that quickly became expensive in both revenue and time. After moving to Paddle, Paired improved payment acceptance in the US and handed off the tax registrations, filings, and ongoing compliance work that had been taking around 30 hours every month. Hear the full story from Paired’s Head of Finance, Magdalena T. 👉 https://lnkd.in/eGDsaakg

App Store submissions are up 84% in the last 6 months. AI coding tools are making it faster and cheaper than ever to build and ship software. It’s exciting, but it also means more pressure on acquisition costs, conversion rates, and customer attention. The companies that stay ahead don’t just outspend on acquisition -- they convert and retain more efficiently once customers arrive. When channels get crowded, the unit economics of your revenue engine matter more than ever. Getting someone to sign up is one thing. Getting them to pay, stay, and expand is where the real advantage is built. If you're competing in a market where the supply of software is about to explode, Daniel Layfield and Andrew Davies deep dive on how to win in the SaaSpocalypse in our latest webinar ⬇️

Cal AI pushed the limits of App2Web. The industry learned from what happened next. External payments are allowed, but the rules can still be hard to interpret in practice. Cal AI tested the system far enough that Apple responded with specific violations, making the boundaries clearer for everyone else. There’s still plenty of room to be bold — just without losing sight of trust, conversion, and compliance. Our latest blog breaks down what the Cal AI episode clarified, the boundaries app teams need to understand, and how to approach App2Web with more confidence. Read it here 👇