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

Follow us on X:

• 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

On the podcast: scaling to $10M ARR with a team of ten, having every employee do two user interviews a week, and why their hard paywall "win" backfired.

Top Takeaways:

🧪 Trial-start rate is the wrong scoreboard
A hard paywall and a no-exit discount both lifted trial starts, then refunds spiked by more than the gain; judge paywall tests on net revenue after refunds, on a matured cohort.

🗣️ Every employee does two user interviews a week, engineers included
Automated invites to a mixed sample of users book whoever has calendar space, so the whole team hears customers directly instead of through a PM.

💳 Charge from day one to find out who you're building for
A plain $10-a-month paywall with a one-week trial at launch filtered for willingness to pay and freed the team to work on onboarding and the core product instead of pricing tests.

🧩 Mixing other apps' playbooks is the worst strategy of all
Duolingo's freemium base only works because it teaches the basics of everything to hobby learners; a product for high-intent professionals should ignore that base entirely.

📅 Lead with annual to know your channel ROI the week the trial ends
Annual cash lands after the seven-day trial, so payback per channel is visible immediately and can be reinvested; monthly leaves you guessing between one month and 24.

🧑‍💻 $10M ARR with 10 people runs on owners, one meeting a week, and everyone shipping
Hire founder-type doers, hold a single Monday sync, and let AI coding tools turn the whole team, including a non-technical CEO, into builders.

About Anada Lakra:
Anada Lakra is the Co-Founder and CEO of BoldVoice, an AI accent and speech coach for the billion people who speak English as a second language. The app provides real-time feedback powered by our proprietary speech models and lessons from Hollywood accent coaches.

👋 LinkedIn

🗣️BoldVoice

Follow us on X:

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

Episode Highlights:
[00:00] Building a subscription app by focusing on product value over paywall hacks
[01:12] Anada's personal experience with communication barriers
[08:53] The early founding story of BoldVoice
[13:30] Why BoldVoice charged from day 1
[16:36] Why over-optimizing paywalls distracts teams from improvement
[18:40] Why mature net revenue after refunds is an important metric
[22:04] How hard paywall experiments backfired once refunds were factored in
[24:17] BoldVoice's reverse-trial freemium model & why it ignored the Duolingo playbook
[33:32] How BoldVoice found its real ICP: professionals over students
[36:42] Keeping customer obsession alive with user interviews
[43:29] How Accent Oracle drove a major viral growth moment
[48:33] BoldVoice's approach to paid growth and annual plans
[50:45] How BoldVoice reached $10M ARR with 10 people
[55:02] The expansion from accent training to spoken-English fluency
[1:00:37] The stigma around accents and how BoldVoice hopes to change that

On the podcast: scaling Meta ads from zero to $100,000 a month, why they waited a year after launch before buying ads, and how a pricing page experiment shifted users toward annual subscriptions.

Top Takeaways:

📉 A big audience buys you a launch spike, not a growth engine
Even 7 million subscribers produce a bump at launch and a steady trickle after; durable growth still came from paid ads, SEO, and a product that converts cold traffic.

🧱 Fix trial-to-paid before you spend a dollar on ads
A full year of product work before the first ad lifted the conversion floor for every channel, because paid traffic always converts colder than organic.

🧲 Cold traffic converts better on a quiz than in the App Store
A long, personalized web quiz educates users, overcomes objections, and raises perceived value — and it beat direct-to-store traffic in a head-to-head test, which is why 90% of traffic goes there.

💰 Show annual first and shrink the perceived risk, not the price
Presenting annual upfront with a day-by-day trial timeline and a promised day-12 reminder shifted plan choice from 60/40 to 75–80% annual, with no price change.

👯 A two-person plan is retention insurance disguised as a discount
15% off for adding a workout partner gets 15% of trial starts to take it, raising order value and keeping both users subscribed longer.

🔬 70% of experiments fail on the first try — winners come from documenting why
Locking in the problem before brainstorming solutions, and writing every test down, turns failures into iterations instead of dead ends.

About Ethan Ethier:
🏋️Head of Growth and Operations at Built With Science, a science-based fitness app founded with YouTuber Jeremy Ethier. Personalized workout plans, nutrition guidance, and AI-powered coaching designed to help users train with research-backed methods.

👋 LinkedIn

🚀 Built with Science

🖥️ Built with Science Careers

Follow us on X:

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