I’m 27. My Business Mints Millionaires, Is Probably On Your Phone

This as-told-to story is based on a conversation with 27-year-old Evelin Herrera, founder and CEO of EHVM Apps Capital, an M&A firm working exclusively with mobile app businesses. Founded in 2025, EHVM Apps Capital closes up to 25 mobile app M&A deals a month. Currently, the firm manages about $500 million in active deal value. The piece has been edited for length and clarity.

I worked in apps for five years, doing both marketing and business development, so I got to know different players in the industry by attending conferences and talking with companies nonstop. Also, I never had a home base; I had an Excel sheet of all the companies that I wanted to meet on Earth, about 30,000. I wanted to travel and meet as many as possible. Eventually, that led to meeting very high net worth individuals. One of them asked me if I could get him some companies to buy in the mobile app industry because he didn’t know anyone. That’s how my business started.

M&A: The chance to become a millionaire faster

With M&A, from day one, it was a different connection with founders — because it’s giving them the chance to become millionaires or multi-millionaires. It’s different from raising VC, where maybe you can achieve success 10 years from now. In M&A, you can close the chapter and materialize your success tomorrow or six months from now. M&A for consumer tech wasn’t as well-known. Everyone saw consumer tech more like You can only achieve a big exit if you’re Spotify. But actually, if you’re a small music app, you can also secure a really good exit. 

The business is fully bootstrapped. I had some savings from my previous full-time job, and that was it. We have two full-time employees in addition to freelancers and consultants. 

Through talking about this on social media, I built two funnels. One was for buyers from LinkedIn, so more corporate. And then from X, it was more founder-to-founder. Like, “Hey, I’m building this company. Today I saw this. Today I spoke with this founder. We are doing a founder’s dinner.” So it was community building on X.

Our focus on mobile app companies only is an advantage. We don’t do commerce, SaaS. We don’t try to do it all and accept any client. Just apps. Also, it’s not simple enough to be an app; you must have good metrics and not be a copy of another app.

Managing half a billion dollars in active deal value

EHVM Apps Capital is managing half a billion dollars in active deal value. I’ve unlocked that milestone by focusing on the firm’s service and results — because people talk. Particularly in smaller industries, everyone knows each other. So for us, every time we close one deal, we get five to 10 referrals. Roughly 60% to 70% of our deals are through referrals, and then the rest through inbound. 

Another valuable strategy is meeting people in person. Right now, we’re touring 22 cities in four to five weeks, and I’ll be meeting 50 CEOs many other industry players haven’t met before. An additional secret is, if I’m at a table of five, I want to have at least one or two people who already work with me, either on the buy or sell side, who can advocate for my services. 

Making a case to major players as a young founder

One of the biggest challenges is when we talk with investors in different Fortune 500 companies and public companies and try to convince them that this industry is worth their time and investment. You might get a music app that wants to be sold to Spotify. But Spotify might see it as, “Oh, this is a very small business. Nothing new for me.” 

Also, I’m 27 years old, and my team members are 25, 26, so sometimes people see us and make judgments on age and gender or how we talk, because I don’t speak as formally as a typical corporate leader. 

Educating founders on the mobile app industry

Another challenge is educating founders. Now with social media, so many people post YouTube videos claiming they became millionaires overnight. Maybe, but you also paid 50% of that in taxes. There are so many details people leave out. Also, the App Store takes 30% of your revenue. So right away you have a 30% tax. If you’re just starting, they have some small business programs that take 15%, but as soon as you get big, they charge 30%. 

AI is making the market more competitive too. For an app that has one use case, like you take a picture of your food and get the nutrients, that’s so easy to develop. To create a business 15 years ago, you needed to provide much more value than today. Now, you have influencers selling an ebook that they created with AI for $150. And then you have apps that have one functionality charging $29 per month on subscription.

M&A is a finance business that hinges on relationships

EHVM Apps Capital relies more on automations than AI. For instance, when we get an NDA signed it notifies the team, or when we sign a new agreement it prepares a potential list of buyers, and so on. But AI itself for us, I only see that it decreases value. If I create an AI summary and send it to my team, they don’t read it. They give it to their AI to give them a summary. And then it’s just communication through AIs. I need my team to use their brains. 

M&A is a finance business, but it’s also a relationship business. If I send you an AI document that I didn’t clean up first myself, I’m putting the work on you to go through AI slop. I don’t like to run our process based on AI. I run it based on knowing who’s on the buy side and what they want to see. We also customize material depending on the reader, and so on. 

Why every Fortune 500 company should have a mobile app

Looking ahead, I want every single Fortune 500 company, public company to have their own mobile app business because it makes so much sense. If you’re any business that doesn’t have an app, you’re not interacting with your users daily. An app is the only way of interacting daily because everyone uses their phone for hours every single day. It doesn’t matter if you’re retail, experiences, pretty much anything — it’s the only opportunity that you have to have daily touch points. And that’s so crazy valuable. It’s the only way to become part of people’s lifestyle. 

The industry is only getting bigger, and entrepreneurs interested in breaking into it should talk to people who have been doing this for five years. Then decide if you want to be a seven-figure, eight-figure or nine-figure business, because it’s a totally different path, and there are only a few apps that hit the $1 billion range. Deciding that upfront can help you come up with your vision as a founder. Maybe you want to build a portfolio company and have 10 apps in health and fitness, or maybe you bet on one to become a $200 million company. That’s very important. The execution is completely different depending on your goal: the team, the vision, the audience. 

This as-told-to story is based on a conversation with 27-year-old Evelin Herrera, founder and CEO of EHVM Apps Capital, an M&A firm working exclusively with mobile app businesses. Founded in 2025, EHVM Apps Capital closes up to 25 mobile app M&A deals a month. Currently, the firm manages about $500 million in active deal value. The piece has been edited for length and clarity.

I worked in apps for five years, doing both marketing and business development, so I got to know different players in the industry by attending conferences and talking with companies nonstop. Also, I never had a home base; I had an Excel sheet of all the companies that I wanted to meet on Earth, about 30,000. I wanted to travel and meet as many as possible. Eventually, that led to meeting very high net worth individuals. One of them asked me if I could get him some companies to buy in the mobile app industry because he didn’t know anyone. That’s how my business started.

M&A: The chance to become a millionaire faster

With M&A, from day one, it was a different connection with founders — because it’s giving them the chance to become millionaires or multi-millionaires. It’s different from raising VC, where maybe you can achieve success 10 years from now. In M&A, you can close the chapter and materialize your success tomorrow or six months from now. M&A for consumer tech wasn’t as well-known. Everyone saw consumer tech more like You can only achieve a big exit if you’re Spotify. But actually, if you’re a small music app, you can also secure a really good exit.