Notes
Notes from building Dayzle
What we learn making a daily brain-games app, with the numbers. Marketing, measurement, and the occasional mistake.
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October 20, 2026
Why game apps squeeze their best players
Once you pay for players, the money has to come from a handful of them. What 100 installs of our puzzle app are actually worth, and why most game apps end up squeezing their best players.
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October 13, 2026
If you build it, they won't come
A product manager's look at user acquisition. We measured every step from seeing our ad to playing for a month, against industry numbers, and found we lose players at the top of the funnel, not the bottom.
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October 1, 2026
Google blocked invalid interactions but still billed me for bot installs
Google is very good at catching click fraud and bad at catching install fraud. Why that gap exists, and why small advertisers get farmed hardest.
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September 18, 2026
Burning my money on ad bots so you don't have to
I'm rerunning the Google Ads campaign a bot farm ate on Android, identical in every way, on iPhone, to find out whether iPhone users are worth more because they're harder to fake.
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September 16, 2026
I sent Google proof of a bot farm. They called it "normal user behavior."
Google suspended our ads over a handful of accidental clicks its own bug caused, then reviewed a bot farm that took my ad money and found nothing wrong.
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September 15, 2026
How Google Ads made me an AI doomer
While waiting on Google about a bot farm, I kept thinking about WarGames. An algorithm chasing the wrong goal, and why no AI lab can stop playing on its own.
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September 11, 2026
I spent $220 on Google app ads. 60% of the installs were robots.
Google reported 21 installs in a day. The admin panel said 1. What the other 20 were, how a bot farm gets paid, and what we changed.