About
We're a small studio with an unusual rule: we only make money if the apps we build for creators make money. Here's who we are, why we built this, and exactly how it works.
We kept noticing the same thing. A creator spends years earning an audience that genuinely trusts them, builds a real method that genuinely works, and then monetizes all of it through sponsorships that pay once and stop the day they stop posting. The audience is an asset. The income is a treadmill.
Meanwhile, the one thing that would turn that audience into a durable asset, a real software product people pay for every month, is the one thing almost no creator can build. It takes a design team, engineers, an App Store presence, payments, support, and years of marketing. So it doesn't get built, and the treadmill keeps running.
We think that's a gap worth closing, and we think the honest way to close it is to take the risk ourselves. We cover the entire cost of building and running the app. The creator brings the audience and their method. We split what the app earns. If it works, we both win for years. If it doesn't, we ate the cost and the creator owes nothing. That structure only makes sense for us if we're genuinely good at the building, which is the part we've spent our careers on.
We never charge the creator. We make money exactly one way: a 50% share of the net revenue of the apps we build, after payment processing and direct app costs. That's it. We don't bill for the build, we don't take a retainer, and we don't earn anything until the app does. It's the same incentive a creator has, which is the entire point. An agency gets paid whether or not your project succeeds. We don't.
It also means we can't afford to ship and walk away. An app that launches and then goes quiet earns us nothing, so we operate every app we build for as long as it runs: support, updates, and the marketing that keeps new subscribers coming in long after launch.
Sameer Saxena
Co-founder · engineering and product
Sameer has been building consumer apps his whole life. He studied Computer Science at Columbia University and spent two years building at some of the largest technology companies in the world before starting ten studios. He owns the product and the engineering: the part that has to actually work, every day, for thousands of people.
LinkedIn ↗Nikhil Kakarla
Co-founder · business and strategy
Nikhil has spent his career designing solutions to everyday problems. He studied at MIT and spent two years building digital products at McKinsey & Company before starting ten studios. He owns the business: the partnerships, the positioning, and making sure the deal a creator signs is one we'd be proud to put our names next to.
LinkedIn ↗Where we are right now
ten studios is a new studio. We don't have a wall of creator logos or our own headline case study yet, and we're not going to pretend otherwise. What we have is a model that already works for the creators who've done a version of it themselves, the engineering to build it properly, and a deal structure that puts the risk on us, not you.
If you're vetting us, you should. Read the two real, publicly-documented stories of creators who owned an app, look at the exact terms we put in writing, and notice that we ask for nothing up front. We'd rather earn a small number of partners who looked closely than a large number who didn't.
The company
ten studios is operated by Ten K Ventures, Inc., a Delaware C-corporation. Every partnership is a written net-revenue-share agreement reviewed by counsel before anyone signs. You can reach us directly at [email protected]; a real person reads it.