The birds arrived, and the servers surrendered. GetJar had prepared for an audience three times larger than its forecast for Angry Birds. The actual demand reached seven times the forecast. For Ilja Laurs, the founder of an independent app store, a game about flinging birds at pigs had become a rather expensive lesson in arithmetic.
He described the demand as “a little bit beyond our expectations”. The understatement is part of the charm. A company can spend years persuading people to come through its doors, then discover that its most urgent problem is the number of people trying to enter at once. GetJar had reached that awkward, enviable point. The queue was invisible. The consequences were perfectly real.
Laurs’s career is full of these changes in perspective. A place to test software becomes a shop. A shop becomes a distribution network. Free downloads become an advertising business. Later, the founder who worked through those exchanges takes a seat on the investment side of technology. Each move changes the question he has to answer.
A shop nobody had quite planned
GetJar began in Vilnius in 2004 as an online forum where developers could test beta versions of games. Its first purpose was fairly specific: help the people making software find out whether it worked. Then Laurs noticed that developers were distributing finished software there as well. The activity was already moving beyond the original brief.
He opened the site to ordinary users. Traffic began doubling every two weeks. In that decision lies the origin of the business: take something developers are doing for one another and make it accessible to the people who might actually want the result. A useful place to visit can be a more persuasive proposition than a carefully polished explanation of why one ought to visit.
By 2007, investors were paying attention. GetJar opened an office in London, its first outside Lithuania. The modest geography of a testing forum had become something larger. Laurs would later put his ambition plainly: “We want to disrupt the app economy.” That sentence had plenty of competition in the technology business. His company, at least, had people downloading things.
GetJar’s first change of direction followed what developers were already doing on the site.
The phones in other people’s pockets
Before GetJar, Laurs had worked across an assortment of internet businesses. They included LithuanianHotels.com, the mobile payments service MicroPay and the games studio Midas Mobile. Hotel reservations, payments and games make an unusual calling card. They also put a founder close to several versions of the same practical problem: connecting an offer with someone willing to use it.
He had originally studied banking in Lithuania. Software became his working territory, but the questions of exchange and payment would keep returning. Alongside the business interests, there was another, less financial preoccupation: 3D photography. His photo blog, GeoGlance.com, appeared in his public biography. A founder whose work concerned distribution also liked finding things worth looking at.
In mobile software, the audience was scattered across devices. GetJar’s opportunity depended on taking that variety seriously. A discussion about apps could quickly become a discussion about the iPhone. Millions of customers, meanwhile, were carrying something else. Supporting those customers meant dealing with the untidy particulars of different platforms and handsets.
By July 2010, GetJar reported three million downloads a day, users in more than 200 countries and support for roughly 2,000 handsets. Laurs said daily downloads had grown more than 300 percent from a year earlier. North America, Western Europe, Asia and South Africa all contributed to that growth. The attraction was international, and the phones were far from uniform.
Partnerships made that reach concrete. In August 2010, GetJar announced a white label app store for Virgin Mobile India, following an earlier partnership with Reliance Communications. Virgin’s customers could reach a catalogue of more than 70,000 free games and apps. The catalogue included familiar services such as Facebook Mobile, Opera Mini and Yahoo.
There was an illuminating qualification: the applications were free, but Virgin Mobile India charged for the data used to obtain them. Even the word “free” had a local arrangement behind it. GetJar supplied the software distribution; the mobile operator had its own relationship with the customer. Reaching a market involved joining those pieces together.
A billion is a beginning
In June 2010, GetJar crossed one billion cumulative app downloads. It also announced an $11 million Series B led by Accel Partners. The company said it had tripled its employees and quadrupled monthly downloads over the preceding year while maintaining profitability. There were about 75,000 applications in its catalogue.
Those figures describe a company with more to do than point at a rising counter. GetJar planned to strengthen both its consumer sites and its services for developers and publishers. It had to be useful to the people looking for software and to the businesses trying to reach them. Success on one side created obligations on the other.
By February 2011, Laurs was discussing another financing round at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. GetJar had raised $25 million from Tiger Global Management and Accel, bringing its announced funding total to $42 million. He was running an independent distributor in a market occupied by Apple, Google, Microsoft and Nokia. The neighbours were exceptionally well supplied with resources.
The obvious question was whether an independent store could keep attracting users. A second question followed closely: what could it offer developers that justified their attention? A large audience helped. So did the ability to work across platforms. Yet getting an app into a catalogue and getting somebody to choose it were separate pieces of work.
Free, with the bill sent elsewhere
GetJar Gold, publicly launched in September 2011, offered another answer. Users could download premium Android applications without paying for them. Developers were paid per install. GetJar generated revenue through sponsored listings purchased by other developers. Advertising helped finance the giveaway.
The first catalogue contained 50 titles, including Fruit Ninja THD, TuneIn Radio Pro and Splashtop Remote Desktop. These were premium applications without advertising inside them. The promotional machinery sat around the exchange. Someone seeking a free app could also encounter a sponsored recommendation; the advertiser paid for the chance to gain that customer.
Three weeks after launch, GetJar said people had downloaded more than $1 million worth of free applications through Gold. More developers joined the programme, bringing titles such as Top Gear, Doodle Fit and SwiftKey X. A free catalogue had to keep giving people a reason to return. A shelf left unchanged eventually becomes furniture.
The arrangement is worth pausing over because it explains something a download total cannot. Users wanted software. Developers wanted payment and an audience. Advertisers wanted new users. Gold tried to make those interests meet in one service. “Free” was the customer’s experience of the price, while the business depended on money moving elsewhere.
The problem after the download
By November 2012, Laurs was GetJar’s founder and executive chairman, with Chris Drury serving as CEO. The company was shifting its emphasis toward discovery, rewards and commerce. Its revised Gold programme let people earn virtual currency through downloads and spend it on content inside participating apps.
GetJar reported that Gold had reached 50 million users. Laurs said it accounted for 60 percent of company revenue. These were company-reported figures at that moment, rather than a measure of the business today. They help explain why the emphasis was changing: a newer service was becoming central to the company’s commercial life.
The store had already demonstrated that it could distribute software at scale. Now it was working on which apps to recommend, how to encourage people to try them and how developers might earn money afterward. Each question moved a little further from the simple act of putting a file online. A vast shop still has to help people find something they want.
A vast shop still has to help people find something they want.
The problem behind the download counter
From distributing apps to judging what comes next
Laurs’s later public work carried him into investing and into conversations with other founders. As founder and CEO of Nextury Ventures, he advised entrepreneurs to seek relevant ideas and think globally. At a Vilnius seminar, he singled out areas including digital government, financial technology, gaming and mobile as Lithuanian strengths.
There was continuity with the GetJar experience. A company beginning in Lithuania could serve people far beyond it, provided the product and distribution made sense for them. His advice gave that experience a public form. In 2023, he was also listed among the speakers at Growth Hacking’23, a Vilnius conference concerned with product thinking and business growth.
Today, Nextury identifies Laurs as chairman of its investment committee. The committee’s role is advisory; the management company, Synergy Finance, makes investment decisions. The distinction matters when describing what his position involves. His work now sits in an organisation assessing technology companies and markets, rather than running GetJar’s daily operations.
An October 2026 webinar listing paired him with Rena Saribekian-Kinderė to discuss technology investing. Its subjects included artificial intelligence, semiconductors and automation, alongside the task of separating durable potential from market excitement. The applications have changed since the days of Java games. The commercial questions remain recognisable.
What will people use? How will it reach them? Who will pay? Laurs has approached those questions through bookings, payments, games, app stores and investment discussions. His career offers a view of technology from the space between making something and making a business of it. Somewhere in that space, a free download acquires a cost, a testing forum acquires customers, and a flock of cartoon birds acquires the power to ruin a capacity forecast.