+ the team.
Although in this case the team becomes an insignificant proportion of the price, for many smaller apps it can be the bulk of the price.
A small, awesome team can often be bought in the 7 figures per head range.
might be a dumb question here...
when a company acquires a certain app. is that company basically buying the userbase + brand and such?
because with the amount of resources fb/google have. wouldn't it be possible for them to just create a better version of certain apps? (or even copy)
i.e - CandyCrush copying CandySwipe.
Your mentality is what stops most people starting businesses.
Facebook copied Snapchat a fair while ago. Basically built the same app:
Facebook Poke Vs. Snapchat: What’s The Difference? | TechCrunch
It failed miserably.
Google copied Facebook to some extent with its entrance into social. Google+ traction is coming a heck of a lot slower than Facebook achieved it, despite having hundreds of millions of accounts to try and force onto the network.
Smaller companies that are focused on solving one specific problem tend to solve it much better than big companies that are trying to do hundreds of things and where things move a lot slower. Building a product with "more features" or having more capital isn't enough to build an app that gets traction.
A lot of it is building an app at a time where the market is just ready to receive it, and blam, hockey stick growth. No imitator can then overtake it, unless they severely screw up (at least until the company matures, at which point it risks being taken out by new innovation... hence Facebook's frothy acquisition attempts of anyone it feels is a threat to its model).
If you want to build a great app, web or mobile, think about something that a big product/service does, but could do better. Take that one specific thing, and focus on doing it as well as you possibly can. It sounds much simpler than it is in practice, but that's a decent recipe for success these days.
