Whole generations of mobile marketers have cut their teeth on growth in the grand old times of (nearly) free money from venture capitalists, resulting in huge budgets that could be deployed and deterministically measured. Those times are over, so how do you grow when growth is hard? You become a cockroach app.

Cockroach apps survive the nuclear apocalypse when nothing else does because they focus on the fundamentals, says Tynker chief growth officer Lomit Patel.

“If you look at the past 5, 6, 7 years, there was such an over-index emphasis on growth at all costs, right?” Patel, who is the former VP for growth at IMVU and led direct marketing at Roku, says. “It was really cheap to get money at that time, especially in startups. So it was really about just buying your way to growing as quickly as possible.”

So what do you do?

Well, for starters, listen to (or watch) this episode of Growth Masterminds, brought to you by Singular.