On the podcast: growing for four years on press and organic alone, affiliate deals as an underexplored revenue stream, and why deciding to pivot is the hardest part.

Top Takeaways:
🗞️ A PR retainer can beat paid UA for a mass-market app
A $3–5K monthly retainer produced months with half a million downloads and four years of growth with zero Meta or Google spend.

🤝 Affiliate deals are the revenue stream most subscription apps still ignore
Brands pay commission only on sales, so the pitch to Nike-sized partners is low-risk for them and the deals are reached directly, not invented.

📏 Pick the metric that is the user's outcome and A/B test every feature against it
A walking app that refuses to track time in app and measures steps instead shipped a feature that lifted steps 10% by locking social media behind a step goal.

🌍 A growth playbook that works in one country can fail completely in the next
The PR strategy that pulled 300,000 downloads from a single French TV segment produced nothing in the US, where nobody knew the founder or the app.

⭐ A celebrity works harder as a shareholder than as a spokesperson
An ambassador-plus-investor deal changed hiring, press replies, CAC and retention at once, though the impact can be difficult to precisely quantify.

⏱️ At scale, app review times are a growth constraint, not an inconvenience
The more parallel A/B tests you run, the more a 24-hour (or five-day) release cycle caps how fast you can learn.

About Yves Benchimol:
🚶 Founder of WeWard, a free mobile app backed by Venus Williams designed to make walking a more rewarding part of people's lives. WeWard’s mission is simple: to get more people walking the world over.

👋 LinkedIn

🚀WeWard

🖥️ WeWard Careers

💬WeWard on X

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• David Barnard - @drbarnard
• Jacob Eiting - @jeiting
• RevenueCat - @RevenueCat
• SubClub - @SubClubHQ

Episode Highlights:
[00:00] Meet Yves Benchimol of WeWard
[01:36] Why Yves left B2B retail analytics
[05:04] Shutting down a business to start over
[07:31] Building an app that rewards walking
[09:29] Why WeWard ditched blockchain
[12:24] Choosing user value over technical complexity
[15:55] Loyalty, gamification, and motivational layers
[17:41] Why WeWard measures steps, not screen time
[18:37] Building revenue beyond subscriptions
[21:46] How affiliate marketing fits WeWard
[23:54] Using PR as the first acquisition channel
[25:18] 300,000 downloads in under five minutes
[28:32] Four years without paid UA, and why US press fell flat
[31:12] Why US growth required local credibility
[33:11] Pitching Venus Williams at lunch
[37:47] What Venus Williams brings as ambassador and investor
[42:01] What's next for WeWard's global growth
[43:14] Staying ahead of copycat apps
[46:25] Locking social apps until users walk
[48:27] Motivational layers and staying focused on walking
[50:11] Localizing rewards across 29 countries
[52:35] Why growth strategies change by market
[54:10] Moving to the US to scale WeWard
[57:13] Why big growth requires bigger bets
[1:00:06] Biggest win: rebuilding the onboarding
[1:00:46] Biggest fail: returning to B2B
[1:01:46] Why mobile app iteration is still too slow