There are two ways to enter a market. One is to answer it: there is a clear demand, people already looking, and you arrive to serve them better than the others. The other is to build: the demand exists, but latent, unorganized, unmet, and you bet that it can be awakened. BLA is on the second.
Brazil has few Brazilian apps thought out for the domestic market with real editorial care. Most of the supply is imported and translated, or national and cheap. In the middle, where the Brazilian product with finish, a voice of its own and respect for whoever uses it would be, the space is almost empty.
An almost empty space can be read in two ways. The pessimistic way: there is nobody there because it does not make money. The way of BLA: there is nobody there because nobody treated it as a category that deserves to be built. Emptiness is not proof of absence of demand. Sometimes it is proof of absence of supply.
The bet of BLA is that there is a latent demand. People who would use a well-made Brazilian app if it existed, who prefer a product with a voice of its own to one more generic translation, who recognize finish when they see it. Those people are not actively searching, because they do not know the option can exist. To build the market is, above all, to show the option.
Building is slower than answering. Answering a ready market gives a fast return, because the demand is already there waiting. Building a market requires patience: each app is also an argument, a demonstration that that category can exist and can be good. The result comes later, and it comes bigger.
That is why the app line matters more than any isolated app. One app alone serves some people. A whole line, coherent, growing, does something else: it makes visible a category that before had no name. It shows that a Brazilian editorial product is not an exception, it is a real and repeatable possibility.
There is a risk taken on in this choice, and BLA knows it. Whoever answers an existing market has the safety of what has already been validated. Whoever builds a market bets before the validation. The bet is well-founded, it is not blind faith, but it is a bet. BLA prefers the risk of building to the comfort of merely occupying.
In the end, it is a difference of ambition. To answer a market is to take a slice of what already exists. To build a market is to grow what exists for everyone, including for whoever comes later. BLA chose the second, because the emptiness it saw was too big to be treated as a simple gap.