Portfolio review compiled 7 October 2026, updated 8 October 2026 with the team's decisions and time split.
Bottom line. On the numbers available, none of the four initiatives is on a path to two salaries, and the current plan spends most of its visible build time on the two with the weakest revenue case (the Balanseby app and card game). Homie needs roughly 4,100 paying households to fund two modest Norwegian salaries; Notion documents about 860 signed-up households, a 0.3-0.4% paid rate and no revenue figure at all. Each Homie signup costs about NOK 35 and, even at the freemium benchmark of 2% conversion, returns about NOK 6 in first-year net revenue, so paid acquisition is a learning cost, not a growth engine. The only line whose arithmetic reaches salary level with a small number of deals is B2B income built on Balansebarn's authority (sponsored family programmes, corporate talks), and it has zero recorded sponsor conversations. Recommended: keep Homie as the core but limit it to activation and conversion fixes with a hard read after 20 October; run a dated sponsor and B2B validation sprint now, while the age-limit bill is in the news; freeze Balanseby features; and gate the card game behind pre-orders. Decisions taken on 8 October are recorded in the decisions table below. The time split was also set that day. One item remains open and blocks a real read on progress: writing down Homie's MRR and paying households.
Evidence labels used throughout: (I) internal fact from Notion (read 7 Oct 2026), (B) external benchmark, (A) researcher or report assumption. Conversions use NOK 11.5 per EUR (A).
| Initiative | Role in the portfolio | Verdict | Daisy | Øyvind |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Homie | Only product with a price; core | Fix activation and conversion; do not scale ads | 65% | 30% |
| Balansebarn, revenue lines (sponsors, corporate talks, NGO delivery partner) | Fastest plausible krone; untested | 90-day validation sprint with kill date | 25% | 30% |
| Balansebarn, content, social, press | Trust and audience asset | Capped; one press hook (age-limit bill) | 0% | 20% |
| Balanseby app | Demonstrator for partners; no revenue case; pricing tbd | Feature freeze, maintenance mode | 5% | 10% |
| Card game | Small side income at best | Christmas 2026 pilot (decided 8 Oct): small pre-sold batch, fixed hour cap | 5% | 10% |
Three consequences to watch (A):
Sequence and triggers (thresholds are proposals for the team to confirm (A)):
| When | Gate | Go | Stop or demote |
|---|---|---|---|
| This week | Small Homie paid test, Review Balansebarn proof points for partnership/sponsorship routes in, create list of Balansebarn contacts to reach out to for partnership & speaking ops. | All written in Notion | Nothing else starts until done |
| By 15 Oct 2026 | Card game pilot set-up: final card list, printer quote and delivery date, price, safety-marking check, success threshold agreed | All five in hand, delivery promised by early December | No Christmas pilot; move to the 2027 pre-order test |
| Mid-Nov to about 10 Dec 2026 | Card game Christmas pilot: pre-orders open, batch of 100-200 | 100 sold at full price to people outside the team's own network | Under 40 sold: park the product for a year |
| 20 Oct to mid-Nov 2026 | First Homie read: D30 on September cohorts, paid conversion once the free tier is enforced | D30 at or above 10% and rising; paid conversion at or above 2% | Hold ads at NOK 250/day or cut; do not scale |
| 31 Jan 2027 | Sponsor and B2B sprint | 15 conversations, 2 costed proposals sent, 1 paid pilot or signed intent | Drop the sponsor line; cut Balansebarn to its content ceiling |
| 31 Mar 2027 | Homie second read | Paid conversion trending to 5% or more (internal target) | Test a reverse trial or tighter free tier; treat Homie as maintained, not growing |
| Jan to May 2027 | Card game larger run, only if the pilot passed | About 440 paid pre-orders (break-even on the assumed cost base) | No print run; revisit in a year |
| Ongoing | Balanseby | A funded NGO or school pilot | Stay frozen; retire deliberately if unused after six months |
The target. Two modest Norwegian salaries (SSB lower quartile, NOK 45,470 per month, SSB (B)) with an 18% employer on-cost (A) come to 45,470 x 12 x 1.18 = NOK 643,855 each, so about NOK 1.29m, or EUR 112,000, a year before ads, tools or a third person. Dutch salary costs were not researched.
| Initiative | Unit economics | What two salaries would require | Where it stands | Realistic 12-month view |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Homie | EUR 39.99/yr (A: annual price as used by the researchers; Notion documents USD 4.99/month) less 25% VAT and 15% store fee = 39.99 / 1.25 x 0.85 = EUR 27.19 net | 112,000 / 27.19 = 4,120 paying households; at 2% conversion that is 206,000 registered households | See household figures below; paid 0.3-0.4% (I) | About 400 signups/month x 12 = 4,800; at 0.4% = 19 payers (EUR 520); at 2% = 96 (EUR 2,610); at 5% = 240 (EUR 6,525). Ad spend is about NOK 90,000 (EUR 7,800) a year |
| Balansebarn (B2B lines) | Internal estimate: 10 sponsors at EUR 10,000 = EUR 100,000 (I, unvalidated); school talk NOK 6,000 (B); corporate talk NOK 25,000-40,000 (I, desk research marked "to verify") | 11 sponsors, or about 215 school talks, or about 40 corporate talks | No sponsor conversations, proposals or replies recorded (I) | Unknown; one or two pilots would be a good result |
| Balanseby app | 2% of downloads pay x USD 22.82 per payer per year (B) | Not reachable (potential donation opportunity) | Free, no monetisation decision, no download data (I) | 10,000 downloads x 2% x 22.82 = USD 4,564 before store fees (A) |
| Card game | NOK 249 shelf price (A) / 1.25 = 199.2 net; less NOK 28 landed (A, from a sourced print price) and 7.5 fees = NOK 163.7 per deck if the buyer pays postage; 103.7 if Loop pays | 1,290,000 / 163.7 = about 7,900 decks a year | A bullet list titled "Gift Set" dated 6 Oct; no quote, price, owner or date (I) | 1,000 decks = NOK 199,200 revenue, about NOK 164,000 contribution before about NOK 72,000 fixed costs (A) |
Homie. The household figures conflict and both should stay visible. The North Star model starts from "about 150" active households in mid-2026 (‣); the admin panel shows 859 signed-up households at 30 September, and a call on 28 September says "865 members" (‣, Meeting September 28, 2026 9:34 AM (GMT+2)). No current active count exists, and with D30 retention at 6.6% all-time (37 of 561; 11.5% excluding one untargeted campaign, against a 15% target) the active base is a small fraction of the signed-up one. No MRR, subscriber count or churn figure was found, so "main revenue generator" is unverified. Paid conversion is depressed by design until the free tier is enforced on 20 October, so 0.3-0.4% is a floor, not a verdict.
The acquisition maths is the firmer problem. At NOK 35 per signup (Meeting October 1, 2026 10:32 AM (GMT+2)) and EUR 27.19 (NOK 313) net per payer, first-year break-even needs 35 / 313 = 11% of signups paying, or roughly 7-8% if a renewal multiple of 1.4-1.7x holds (A). The freemium median is 2.1%; 10.7% is the median for hard paywalls (RevenueCat 2026). Only 4.6% of new subscription apps reach USD 10,000 MRR within two years, and two salaries needs more than that (PPC Land on RevenueCat). The team's own guardrail says not to scale paid until D7 clears 20-30%; D7 is 21.8% as reported and about 17% once the day-7 push artefact is removed. Decision 8 Oct: the guardrail holds, do not scale. The cheapest levers are internal: households that enabled notifications retained at 30.4% versus 1.3%, the notifications step was removed from setup on 25 August, and the account form loses 46% of people who reach it (‣). These are correlations, but they cost little to test.
Balansebarn. It is designed as "a trust engine, not a P&L", and direct reader income will stay negligible: the 20-year incumbent Barnevakten collects about NOK 248,000 a year in gifts from 65,250 monthly users and runs on 54% public grants (Barnevakten annual report 2025). Grants are largely closed to an AS: Stiftelsen Dam and Gjensidigestiftelsen exclude limited companies (Dam, Gjensidigestiftelsen); the one fast route verified is Innovation Norway's start-up grant of up to NOK 150,000, which pays only for external purchases (Innovasjon Norge). School talks are price-capped by Barnevakten at NOK 6,000, subsidised to 3,400 (price list). That leaves sponsors and corporate work as the only lines with salary-level arithmetic, and they are entirely unvalidated. As a funnel, the evidence so far is two clicks on the Homie house ad from 107 viewers, on a site with 630 visitors in seven weeks (‣). Even a 5,000-subscriber list converting at 1-2% yields 50-100 Homie households, about EUR 1,400-2,700 a year (A).
Balanseby app. Every commercially successful comparable found had venture capital or a corporate parent; the closest values match, Pok Pok, raised over USD 10m and was still unprofitable after three years (Hampton). Its value to Loop is as a demonstrator for NGO pitches, which is how it was used with Mental Helse Ungdom (Submit a project idea to Mental Helse Ungdom's prosjektstøtte form). Keeping it free, account-free and data-free is also the cheapest configuration to maintain.
Card game. Manufacturing is cheap (a 100-card deck costs about USD 2.02 at 1,000 units, QinPrinting) and stock risk is small. Audience is the constraint: at the 1-5% list-to-buyer benchmark (BackerKit), 1,000 decks needs 20,000-100,000 engaged subscribers. Balansebarn has about 580 Instagram followers and an uncounted newsletter list. The nearest comparable failed its first launch with no audience and succeeded with 7,000 subscribers (Shopify).