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Interviews with the experts behind the biggest apps in the App Store. Hosts David Barnard and Jacob Eiting dive deep to unlock insights, strategies, and stories that you can use to carve out your slice of the 'trillion-dollar App Store opportunity'.
David Barnard:
Welcome to the Sub Club Podcast, a show dedicated to the best practices for building and growing app businesses. We sit down with the entrepreneurs, investors, and builders behind the most successful apps in the world to learn from their successes and failures. Sub Club is brought to you by Revenuecat. Thousands of the world's best apps trust Revenue Cat to power in-app purchases, manage customers, and grow revenue across iOS, Android, and the web. You can learn more at revenuecat.com. Let's get into the show. Hello, I'm your host, David Bernard, and with me today, Revenue Cat CEO, Jacob Iding. Our guest today is Yves Benchimol, CEO and co-founder of WeWard, the walk to earn app with 30 million users that has paid out over 50 million to those users. On the podcast, we talk with Eve about 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.
Hey, Yves, thanks so much for joining me on the podcast today.
Yves Benchimol:
Thanks, David, and very excited about this conversation.
David Barnard:
I said joining me, but that's a bad habit. Jacob's back. Jacob.
Jacob Eiting:
Joining us, David, joining us.
David Barnard:
Busy summer.
Jacob Eiting:
I was on my RevenueCat. We have 14 weeks of mandatory PTO, so I've been off the whole summer. No, I'm just kidding. But it's good to be back. We just haven't been able to line it up, but yeah, it's good to be back.
David Barnard:
Yeah, great to have you. All right, I wanted to get started with the origin story of WeWard. You've had several pivots and I think it's always fun to talk about those kind of pivots because more people should think about pivoting and I think your story kind of shows why.
Yves Benchimol:
Yeah, I'm entrepreneur. It's been no more than 10 years that I'm entrepreneur. Originally, I'm engineer and most of my job is basically sitting behind the screen. And the first company I've created was a B2B SaaS company for large retailer, and we were doing analytics, pitfall analytics for large retailers. And after doing this for a few years with some of the biggest retailers in the world, like Ocean, Carfur in France, Calerie Lafayette, this kind of big stores, I realized two things. The first one is I'm not very happy doing this kind of job because actually I didn't feel like I'm putting my value into something meaningful for me and for others. And the second one is I really want to solve a real issue for the common people. And one of the issue I had was my lifestyle become more and more inactive because of course you are behind the screen coding or working behind the screen, you order food, you order a cab with one click on your mobile phone and say, "Okay, why not using my skills and technology to make people go outside and move again, I would say?" And so I decided to, it's not like a pivot, it's a totally different product because we went from B2B to B2C and it's a new company, but it was from something that I realized after doing few years of lifestyle as an entrepreneur behind the screen.
David Barnard:
Yeah, that's a crazy story. And I mean, makes a lot of sense too. I don't think I would find a lot of satisfaction in working on a tracking app for retail football. I
Jacob Eiting:
Though you were going to say B2B SaaS, David, come on. But I imagine the technology was similar, right? When you're selling footfall analytics, there's some amount of consumer side to that business. It's like a network effect thing where you have to have some draw to collect the data, or were you guys doing something completely different?
Yves Benchimol:
We used different type of data, so footfall analytics. We use also received analytics. We used tons of data from the retailers that they allow us to access. And based on that, we provide them a dashboard with some recommendation. We were using, it was AI, but not the AI as today. It was a way more complex to do. I would say now there is tons of model that makes this job easy. But at the end of the day, you have only few people that use your product, the marketing director of some company, and to make your recommendation being applied into a physical store is way more complex than the website, of course, because it requires some people to go and to work on the store to do that. So after a few years, we were almost profitable with a team of 10 people. So it was mostly a lifestyle business that didn't scale so much.
So the business was not very profitable yet. It was very complex, tons of competition. And with the GDPR happening, it was more and more complex. So all of that makes us think that it was not the right product at the right time. And this is why we decided to pivot to fully launch something very different and going into the B2C space.
David Barnard:
Now that we've gotten down this rabbit hole a little bit, I'm actually curious because this is something I think a lot of people can relate to. Did you fully shut down that business? Did you sell the assets? How did you wind that down? Because I think there's people who probably are in situations where they maybe realize they don't have product market fit or they're not enjoying it, but the idea of winding it down is almost as scary as starting something new.
Yves Benchimol:
Yeah, we though about selling the business, but most of the time it was meaning continuing to work for the company because it was very small team. But then with our investors, they decided to follow us on the new adventure. And so first the money that we get, because of course the company still got some money, we invested into the new, we want up and the investor continued to follow us. So it was like we say it simplify a lot the launch of the company I'm currently running. We will talk about it after. It simplify a lot because we had the investors, the employee, the foundation team, the people that love to work together. Even the office, we keep the same at the beginning. So it was very easy to move from one company to the other. It was just a shift in what we're going to do, but it was the same team, the same investor, the same money.
Jacob Eiting:
Yeah, it's almost more the mindset. It's like deciding you're done, you're giving up or you're stopping that thing and you're now a new thing. That's almost harder. The structures, and that's just one way to do a pivot and a roll forward. I've heard many, many different ways it's been done by many different people. Turns out it's like once you decide that's the hard part, then you can find the structure and whatever that makes the most sense typically from what I've seen. I haven't been through it, but I've seen it many
Yves Benchimol:
Times. No, no, totally right. The main difficult thing is to say, okay, no, we're going to go 100% on something new and we're going to stop what we are doing. And so calling your clients to say, Hey, we're going to shut down and
Jacob Eiting:
Then cut in.
Yves Benchimol:
It's out.
Jacob Eiting:
People you just spent years too convincing to use your thing, right? Yeah.
David Barnard:
I will say it's much easier to eventually just pull an app from the app store. I finally did pull Launch InterPro from the app store six months ago and I didn't hear a single person mention it. I've gotten complaints over the years as it's been sitting there untouched for a while, but nobody noticed when I finally did pull it from the store.
Jacob Eiting:
That's the difference between B2B and B2C. It's like 10 dinosaur size ducks or a hundred duck size dinosaurs or whatever. Yeah, they trade one thing for another. Yeah. So I guess it's like, how's B2C been?
David Barnard:
Yeah, let's jump into what was that early version of the WeWard app look like?
Yves Benchimol:
So B2C is not easy too. Actually, every company's out, but when we started. So I was thinking about multiple products at the B2C space, but as I said, I really want to impact the lifestyle of people in positive way. So I was thinking about disconnecting people from their phone, physical activity, sleep, all of that kind of behavior that I want to change. And we decided to go on into walking and increasing the number of steps of people because usually if you start walking, it means that you disconnect from your phone and your screen, that you have a physical activity that have, of course, physical and mental health benefits. But on top of that, it's quite easy to track the number of steps of people because every phone or every watch today has a pedometer. So of course it's way more easy to motivate people and to do a motivation tool on top of something that you can track and measure.
So we decided to launch a very simple app that was based on rewarding people for walking. And the first version of the app, we were thinking about doing this with cryptocurrency. So we were one of the first to do that with cryptocurrency. And so the goal was every time you do 1000 step, you earn one coin, which you can trade after if you want into a public market. And we were thinking about, okay, what can motivate people to walk? So of course money, cryptocurrency. The cryptocurrency is due to two things. First, I'm an engineer, a very tech guy. So I was of course passionate about all of the. It was in 2019. So at this time, of course, it was very innovative technology and very exciting. And then we also are thinking about using social and gamification to motivate people to work. But the first version was very simple with only the rewarding aspect, which was the first we developed.
But if you remember in that time, it was on the Ethereum blockchain. Every transaction cost a lot and the scalability is very hard. And once we launched that, it's also kind of a pivot after, I would say three to four months, we said, okay, there is an issue because basically we are trying to build something on top of Ethereum technology to make the blockchain more scalable, cheaper and say, okay, this is not our job to do that. Our job is to maturate people to work.
Jacob Eiting:
I guess the one advantage is you get to sidestep money sending rule. You don't have to deal with the global. Sending money across borders is regulated, you need licenses. With the blockchain, it's fake internet money, you could just do whatever you want, at least for now.
Yves Benchimol:
Exactly. But for very small transaction in 2019, the blockchain didn't work.
Jacob Eiting:
That's been solved now, right? Much faster transactions, much lower gas costs and stuff like that.
Yves Benchimol:
Yeah, yeah. No, I think there was different layer on top of the Ethereum blockchain that you can use or you can use other blockchain like Solana. But at this time it was very complex, so we will mainly start making the company kind of a research company on top of the Ethereum foundation to build us and say, okay, we're going to stop that because we asked to a user, is it important for you to have. Because the coin we were giving to people was a stable coin. We didn't want to have something that fluctuate because it can be good when it's going up, but the day is going down. We understand that in advance that it will potentially kill the company. So we say we want to be for the long run. So we did a stable coin. So at the end there was no interest to be on something that fluctuate.
And it was the benefit we were selling to users like, yeah, it's fully secure. We cannot take it out. And everybody said, no, but we don't care about that. If you put the points into a database like a loyalty points, it's fine for us. And so we shift and basically I would say it was hard to shift because of course when we were hiring people, we were talking about the blockchain, the technology, what we are building per se, this is so innovative. And when we change, basically all the engineers start to shine because like, oh, this is so easy to manipulate a classic database. This is so cool. We don't have the issue of scalability. We don't have any problem of transactions that has been lost on the blockchain signature and all of that. And basically it become way more simple and we were stuck to a certain amount of user.
It was very laggy and all of that. When you receive a coin, you have to wait for one minute to receive a coin into the mobile app. So it was basically only downside and not so much benefit. And the day we decided to shift was quite crazy, but it was hard to, I would say, give up on the beautiful technology and the innovation, but beautiful to see the user happier at the end.
Jacob Eiting:
Well, that's the only point of technology. If you're not making users happier, it's just. But there's an interesting lesson in there, which is starting a company or anything is hard enough. Don't make it harder on yourself. You know what I mean? It's great to do ambitious things. You should do ambitious things. And there are a few, I think, founders, and often I think you look at second time founders tend to do the more ambitious projects because they've done it once, maybe they were successful, and then they're like, "Okay, I'm going to try something harder." They've solved a lot of the problems, so they know what they're good at and what they're not. But I see this a lot in folks take on something too ambitious for their first thing, or even too ambitious, but just unnecessarily hard. I remember personally when coming up with Revenue Cat as deciding what to work on or what I was going to focus on, it had been an idea that had floated around for years with me and Miguel and stuff, but I had a long list of other things I though were more interesting, but they were all much harder.
They were hard tech problems or things I didn't really understand, things I didn't have expertise in. And for better or worse, I chose the idea where I was like, okay, this is the easiest one for me to implement.
David Barnard:
For you, because you had a ton of experience. That's
Jacob Eiting:
Maybe the key,
David Barnard:
It's easy
Jacob Eiting:
For you. But as you were saying, it's like, oh, making users happy is hard enough.That's the actual part of market fit is one of the hardest, most elusive things. And so don't create unnecessary difficulties for yourself. Also, engineers, that's funny because I think a lot of founders would go like, "Oh, we're not going to work on blockchain. All my engineers are going to get bored and quit." You'd be surprised. Do you know what I mean? Engineers might be relieved they don't have to deal with this shit.
Yves Benchimol:
But they think basically this is the day I stopped being an engineer and being a real entrepreneur that has one focus, it's user or its clients. And it's very different because when you are an engineer. I did math all my studio. I love to solve complex mathematic problem. And this is why I was continuing to do that. And the day I say no, but actually it's so cool to see your clients and people use the product you've built and being happy for that, that you start to being sticky about that and then you build only things with one obsession is to make people happy and make people used.
David Barnard:
I love telling this story on the podcast because there's so many people out there, both of your pivots, either one, working on something that's just not bringing them joy, but there's enough momentum and then they just can't bring themselves to let it go. And sometimes it is time to just let it go. And then just a few months into the new thing, you had this complex technology. Instead of digging your heels in, you went ahead and just pivoted away from it. And again, I think there's a great lesson in there of figure out what really matters. And even if it feels like a big hard pivot, you've sold yourself as this blockchain technology company. If it's not the right thing, just move on from it versus digging in your heels and trying to make it work. So I think more people should pivot, and I love that we get to kick this off with two different pivots that you made to build what's turned out to be a great company.
So let's get to that then. So you shifted to this idea of getting people more active, and was it called WeWard from the beginning or what did you launch first and then what did it become?
Yves Benchimol:
Yeah, it was called WeWard. Of course, the first version of the app, even after the blockchain was very simple. So it's a loyalty points that you earn every time you do 1000 steps, and these points can be converted into cash or gift card. And then we added multiple things, of course, in term of design, user experience, the social and the gamification, but the name was the same since the beginning.
David Barnard:
And you've already kind of hinted at it, but I did want to dig into your obsession with the customer and really being that kind of user-centric, mindful design over just B2B play of just maximizing revenue no matter what and working in that kind of industry. So yeah, tell me about that.
Yves Benchimol:
So of course you understand that the loyalty program is also inspired by the retailers because we understand that how powerful is loyalty program. So in Europe is not as powerful as in the US because in the US you have tons of loyalty points, especially with the credit card, but how powerful is it to make people use more product and especially at the credit card to use more of your credit card and for the airlines and for all the retailers to increase the retention. So we decided to apply exactly the same system with the loyalty points to make people move their legs. And so the inspiration and the understanding of how loyalty program works help us a lot to create this motivation. And we did exactly the same with gaming, how powerful a game is to make you spend hours killing zombie. So why not using the same mechanism to make you move your legs?
And the social is the same. How powerful is it to make you spend hours scrolling? Why not spend people hours to walk? We use exactly the same on social gamification and loyalty program to create what we call the motivational layers. Of course, I start reading some books around cognitive science to understand what makes the brain more sticky to do something, and it's inspired by all the nudge terry and all of that. And so we just apply that. We are not the only one, but you can apply that to many different field and we apply that to motivates people to do more steps.
David Barnard:
And how do you think about time spent in-app? Because I know that's not a focus, but then you do have ads and trying to balance this utility and the bringing people back and keeping them retained, but not necessarily spending two hours a day inside the app.
Yves Benchimol:
We don't track the time spent into the app because we don't want to be a target for the team because the goal and what we track the most is the number of steps of people, and we run AB testing always for every features to be sure that these features increase the number of steps of people. Because at the end, we believe that this is the main value we give to people because at the end, after six months, if someone didn't improve his lifestyle, he will stop using the app. So for us, the success of the number of steps of people is the success of the company. After we decided, okay, how can we make money?
Today, reward is, I think, one of the app which has the most diversified source of revenue. I think this is a strange, and of course sometimes a difficulty, but this is a strange because if we want to reward people, we need to make money to finance this reward first, but also to make the company alive. So we have with Revenue Cat, we have the premium subscription, which is a way for people to avoid ads and to have a better experience into the app. We have some in-app purchase too. We have ads and we have affiliate marketing survey. So we have all that source of revenue, but at the end, if you look at every source of revenue, it's not here to increase the time spent, it's here to increase either the experience of user into the app, the number of steps into the app to increase the amount of rewards they can earn thanks to the app.
So we are in the middle of a rewarding app, a wellness app, and we like to be both because at the end of the day, this is what people like. They earn because they work and they're proud of it, but they can maximize by doing other stuff, and this is how it works today. The number of time spent into the app for us, it doesn't make sense because if we ask people to go outside and walk, it means that we will potentially even decrease the time spent into their phone, and this is also something good.
David Barnard:
If you don't mind sharing, I'm curious how the revenue breaks down these days or maybe even how it evolved over time. Is a subscription 50% of your revenue, 25%? Are ads just a small five or 10%? I know a lot of subscription apps, their ad revenue is tiny, but then you have the one-time purchases and you have the affiliate. I was curious, ballpark, if you're willing to share how that breaks down.
Yves Benchimol:
Yeah, for us it's the opposite for a simple reason is because the premium subscription is pretty new. So we launched the premium subscription way after the other source of revenue. So this is why today this is not a major source of revenue, but it's growing quite fast. But thanks to also the technology of revenue got tons of different tasting and tons of different improvement in this one. But we have a huge number of users, so the ad is working quite well because you have a huge audience into the app. And for the rest, the affiliate marketing, we have beautiful brands that we work with. So for us, it's working well. We have Nike, Adidas, Expedia, Booking.com, all of Amazon, it's part of the clients of reward. So of course when we have this, it's very powerful. And we are lucky because brands, when they work with us, of course they work with a rewarding app, but they like also to be associated with an app that try to increase the lifestyle of people.
And this is also a messaging, and this is why sometimes we reject to work with some specific brands because we believe that their value and the way they change the way people act is totally opposite to what we are trying to do. So we're trying to work with brands where they're not opposite to having a good lifestyle. I
Jacob Eiting:
Was going to say the best CPMs probably come from gambling apps in 2026, so it may not always be the best for your brand long term.
Yves Benchimol:
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
David Barnard:
Tell me about how you establish some of those affiliate deals, because this is another area I think some apps are getting into like OnX, their Hunt and Maps apps. They've started to do brand partnerships. They actually just signed a big deal with Ford where Ford is giving owners of the Ford, I think just the Broncos maybe, but they're giving Ford vehicle owners a free year. But then inside the app, they're doing brand and affiliate deals with some of the outdoor apparel and equipment companies and stuff like that. So I think this is probably overall in the industry an underexplored source of revenue. So I'd love to hear a bit more about how that came about and how you formed the partnerships.
Yves Benchimol:
So affiliate marketing is a well-developed market, so I think we didn't reinvent the wheel. There was tons of brands that understand that the affiliate marketing is very powerful first because it's performance based for them. They just pay a commission of a sales and there is all the tracking technology that are already in place to be sure where the customer is coming from so they are not afraid to pay someone who doesn't know where it's coming from. I think it's becoming more and more important today in the market because it's changing a lot for many brands the way people discover these brands or the way people are exposed because with AI and the usage of AI, it's difficult even for the biggest brand to understand where the traffic will come from and how to be sure that they will be in front of the user and top of mind of the user when they have a need.
And so affiliate marketing is a way to be sure to spend the money efficiently because it's only commission-based. And so we jump on that and we start by reaching some affiliate platform and some brands indirect to say, "Hey, we would love to promote your brands and take commission on the safe we're going to generate it." And most of them are very aware about what means and the marketing say, "Okay, let's do it." They want to be sure about the way we're going to promote their brands and all of that. As I said, the beauty of WeWard is we're going to promote them in an environment which is wellness, fitness, and so they like this kind of branding.
Jacob Eiting:
This is maybe going back, because you can't sell affiliates or make any money from affiliates or ads until you have users, right? How did you acquire users in the early days? Just uploaded to the app store and pray or were you running ads? Because now I can see the apps obviously got virality, it's clear people are recommending it and stuff like that. I'm sure you're running acquisition and things, but how did you get your initial users to get some sort of flywheel going?
Yves Benchimol:
So we started in France in 2019, and so in the story of WeWard, we did many different action to, of course, acquire user because Jacob thinks better than anyone. But of course, the hardest thing is to get the user and after you have to keep them. But we did many different strategy. The first one was press, and it was very efficient. We did a lot of press in France, and we managed to be featured on some of the top TV show in France at Gator thousand and thousand of user.
Jacob Eiting:
Did you run that PR yourself, just cold emailing these folks, or did you hire a firm or something?
Yves Benchimol:
No, I had a firm that I work with.
Jacob Eiting:
That's great. I've had mixed experiences with PR firms, and people do it because I think it can work. I think it depends on your product. Your product, obviously, it hits a mass market, it's easily understood, right? It's an easy piece or segment to do on a show. Talk about getting paid for walking, that's easy, but that's great.
Yves Benchimol:
No, but it's magic when you say to someone in 2019 in France, there was an app that gives you money just for walking, the general say, oh, they just come and they test it and they say, wow, this is serious and it was crazy at this time. I remember we were on the show, it was maybe seven or eight months after the launch, so we were still very young, and it was one of the biggest show in France on prime time. I think it was in less than five minutes, we got 300,000 downloads. Wow. Can imagine what is it? Of course, the app crash instantly, it was terrible. But that day we understand that, okay, the marketing is very powerful in term of marketing.
Jacob Eiting:
Was that the first thing you tried, was like, "Hey, let's hire PR and let's try to get on shows," because a lot of times it's looking for that first traction channel that really is scalable. You can try all these different things. Was that the first one you tried or the first one you found that was like, "Oh, this actually works?"
Yves Benchimol:
So this is also being kind of a second time entrepreneur because I consider this is my second company because this PR thing, I used to work with them in the past and they are very efficient. And at the beginning when I started and I said, "Okay, I don't have money, but I can't do user acquisition, but press is like, I think it was in France, it was maybe between three and 5,000 per month. And I said,"Okay, give me for six months and I will pay you the rest, all the bill after six months. "And they were
Jacob Eiting:
Very - Or I'll be out of business and it won't matter.
Yves Benchimol:
Yeah. And they say," We trust you and we will do it for you because we are a very good relationship. "And after that, we worked for them at least for five years. And yeah, it was one of the agencies that we worked with them for a long time, and I was very lucky to have them because they trust on me and they give me for free when I didn't have any money. And it was very successful. So we had this, the app crash, but then we said, okay, even if the app crashed, we received tons of email, people really want to access the app, and we understand, okay, we have something. Now let's take a look at the retention to see how it goes. And the retention was very high compared to the average market, and so we put ads. And of course, as soon as you reach 100,000 user per day, I think making ads, you will start making money.
Jacob Eiting:
It's interesting too, to start in a local market, starting in France. So that helps, being a local French company, French story. I don't know the French appetite for these kind of things, but I think it always helps, especially in a smaller market, if you can be local to that market and tell a unique story. But it's just interesting what. There's not that many apps for which the PR thing was the story that worked intentionally. And there's cheaper ways to do it too. You don't have to hire a PR firm. David's been doing this for his apps and stuff since forever. It's like it's free to email people in the press. It may not work, but you could always reach out. But that seems like a pretty good ROI. So you said $5,000 for six months, like 30 grand to get you 300,000 users or probably more than that, right?
That maybe not scalable forever, but that's enough to get you that first bit of traction to then experimentation and get moving.
Yves Benchimol:
No, we worked for the first four years. Didn't spend any money in Meta, Google.
Jacob Eiting:
Oh, and direct user acquisition.
Yves Benchimol:
Never. Only organic and press, but press is quite free press because basically you spend 5,000 per month, but some months you have zero, but some months you have half a million downloads. So half a million download, you know how much it costs in UA, you can pay the agency for 10 years easily. So this is really profitable, but we did also that in other countries and it works in some country like Italy, Spain, but in the US, unfortunately, we didn't manage to have this success in press. I think it's a way more mature market. The product is way less innovative in the US. Journalists are not talking about a small startup like that. I think it's very different the way press works. And when I arrive in the US, because I moved to the US four years ago to continue the expansion of WeWard and make one of the biggest app in the world, when I arrive in the US, I said, okay, let's hire the best PR agency.
I have money and I took one of the most expensive PR agency, but unfortunately it's way more complex. I think it's not due to the PR agency or due to the product. It's just due to the fact that I'm nobody here in this country.
Jacob Eiting:
Right. It's a narrative. Journalists are always. They're not looking to report the news, they're looking for a good story, if that makes sense. That's maybe a bit. It doesn't make sense. But they want something to it other than Here's an app. There's got to be a narrative. It's got to fit into something else, which maybe you have or you don't maybe, and you can try it. But yeah, hit or miss, right? Hit or miss. I'm curious, Spain and Italy though, did you go on shows in Spain and Italy?
Yves Benchimol:
We did some in visual conference, but they didn't go physically in some shows. But of course I don't speak Spanish. Right. I was
Jacob Eiting:
Going to
Yves Benchimol:
Say. But at the end it's just like I was thinking, yeah, I will arrive in the US and I say, yeah, this is one of the biggest app in France and going to launch in the US. But then I say, so what? That's cool. But this is not enough to do a story about you guys. We like what you're doing, but we will see maybe did you raise money with someone impressive? Did you do something crazy? And no, we are a profitable startup that's coming and so it was not enough.
Jacob Eiting:
Boring. Exactly,
Yves Benchimol:
Exactly. So this is why after maybe we'll talk about it, but we managed to onboard the champion tennis player, Venice Williams. She's now shareholders of the company. And it was one of the benefit is when you reach a journalist with a celebrity, it's a different story.
David Barnard:
Yeah. Tell us about that.
Jacob Eiting:
Yeah. How much can you tell about the. Did you target her or did you just say, "Hey, I would love to get a celebrity endorsement and bring them on the cap table?" Because I've though about it before because there are some figures that I thought could be helpful, but I've never really tried. So I'd be curious how that came together.
Yves Benchimol:
So when we arrive in the US, I understand few things. The first one is being French is not a benefit, except if you are in the wine or the luxury brands, or the cheese maybe. But if you're a mobile app for US consumer, it's not a benefit. So we have to make the product, we have to have the validation from someone very personal.
Jacob Eiting:
An American icon, if you will.
Yves Benchimol:
Exactly. Or a VC or an icon. But people have to think that this is a US product and we don't care that you are from France. It's even better to be local.
Jacob Eiting:
We love Dan and yogurt here
Yves Benchimol:
For
Jacob Eiting:
What it's worth. It works if you get
Yves Benchimol:
It. Exactly. So this is the first things. And the second thing is the product has to be in the level of perfection and user experience that is level above what we are used to in Europe. And especially when you look at, if you compare the app from a bank in the US and the app from a bank in France, there is a level up which is crazy. And so we understand that we need to do that. And I was thinking for who can be the endorsement of the app? And I was thinking about a celebrity, which is well known mainly in the US, has great value. And of course, if it can be a sports celebrity is even better because we are in the wellness space. So it has to be someone that has a good value in term of lifestyle. And I start to look for people and I reached some agency VC to say, "Hey, I see that this guy is investor in your fund.
Can you introduce me?" Or some entrepreneurs that have some celebrity. And I think sometimes in life you have to get some luck, but I was in the lunch with my family and in a beautiful restaurant and the table next to me, Venice Williams, sitting in the table next to me with someone and she say hi to my table because it was definitely the table and say, "Hi guys, how are you?" And we say, "Wow, Venice Williams just say hi." And I say, "Okay, I need to go in to pitch her the company." And she was very receptive.
Jacob Eiting:
Oh my God, really? You just were like, "I got to go for it. I got to go
Yves Benchimol:
For it." Yeah. And for me, it was not easy because I'm not shy, but it's quite hard in front of your family to pitch, especially in English. Your company, you are in a lunch and you do that.
Jacob Eiting:
I don't know. I don't get pitched that often, but it has happened. But I kind of have this natural response that if somebody's pitching me cold, I didn't ask for it, I just go, okay. I'm not very receptive in that moment. Let's put it that way. I'm kind of annoyed, which is not necessarily a good reflection of me, but it is just the case.
Yves Benchimol:
Yeah, of course I was thinking during the lunch because of what I didn't do. As soon as I saw her, I did the dessert and I say, okay, the worst case scenario. And she said, sorry, I'm busy and that's it. And my family say, okay, that's bad. You're going to jail. Yeah, that's the worst case scenario. It's not
Jacob Eiting:
Going to end up on the news. Rude French app founder interrupts American icon at lunch, which actually would probably be good for you. You'd probably get some better. You finally broken the press. There is no bad press. So it's a win-win.
Yves Benchimol:
Exactly. There is no bad press. As soon as we talk about WeWard in the US press is good. But actually it was funny because she was sitting with a guy which is the founder of a big investment bank in tech in Europe. And so the pitch start to become, they start asking me, Venus and this guy question, which was question from very knowledgeable investor like, what is your G7 retention? She's asking me this kind of question.
Jacob Eiting:
Skip right over the get to know you part of the diligence.
Yves Benchimol:
What is the LTV of your product? And I was, okay, finally I was pitching something which is more brand. We would love to have you on board to make American more active. And she was very receptive to that to like, okay, no, let's talk about business. And so we talk about 10, 15 minutes and after we decided to continue the conversation, of course, remotely.
Jacob Eiting:
So you had already had this and you knew you were on the hunt for somebody. And then the universe sat Venus Williams next to you at a restaurant. So I think I would do the same thing. You know what I mean? I'm not super superstitious, but hey, if that happens, you got to go like, well, this is my moment. This was sent to me. I
Yves Benchimol:
Agree.
David Barnard:
Before a million, or not a million, but before anybody listening to Sub Club goes and attempts this themselves and gets totally shut down. Well, don't
Jacob Eiting:
Hunt them down.
David Barnard:
Right, right. No, exactly. Don't hunt them down. But how did you even break the ice? Because I imagine that's a huge part of it. If you walk up and you're like, "Will you invest in my startup?" They're going to be like, "Whoa." They're going to have that Jacob reaction. So I'm curious - My
Jacob Eiting:
Face is like.
David Barnard:
How did you even crack the conversation?
Yves Benchimol:
The first is Venice Williams is a very open person because as I said, she said hi to our table before us. So she was definitely in a good mood this day. I never saw Venice Williams in a bad mood, but this day she particularly -
Jacob Eiting:
Everybody has them.
Yves Benchimol:
But she was in a very good mood. I think she was very happy. And I was looking at our table the moment where the conversation was slow and when she had too much disturb. And I just say, "Hey, I'm a big fan of your career and the person you're representing, and I would love to tell you a bit of my story. I'm here with my family." And then the pitch was ready. So then I say what we are doing and why we believe we could do something crazy together. And then she start asking, "Okay, no, let's talk a bit about the business because the product seems very interesting and congrats." And then the conversation gone. And after we decided she sent me her contact and then just said, "Okay, send me the deck and we're going to discuss." And we decided not to only. Because at the beginning I was looking for kind of an ambassador endorsement and then she said, "Okay, I want shares, so I want to be also investor." And we did this dual deal of ambassador and an investor, which means that we can use her image, we produce content together.
And for the press, she even go on the show in TV in the Good Morning Maminica in the US to talk about the app. She answer journalists sometimes when journalists say, yeah. Because if you send an email to a journalist, we can organize a conversation with Venice Williams. The journalist will say, "Okay, why not? It's better than talking with eaves."
Jacob Eiting:
Yeah, that's so crazy. Have you done any normal growth stuff? Has it all been just weird? I assume you do the normal stuff too, like ads and things like that.
Yves Benchimol:
So now we do ads, but of course with ads and the conversion, and we are not the only one to do that, but if you produce a content with a celebrity, the conversion can be better and the can be lower if you do this with the face of a celebrity. And this is why at Super Bowl, you have all this celebrity doing ads because at the end this comes up better than someone that nobody knows.
David Barnard:
What was the impact? I mean, were you able to see a pretty strong bend in the curve when she signed on? There
Yves Benchimol:
Was multiple impacts and it's very difficult to quantify because there is of course a huge branding impact. For the HR, it's easier to hire talents when you have a celebrity because it give credibility to the company. The kakis going down, content that you produce with the celebrity will increase the retention and the LTV. And of course when Venus is talking about the app on her own social media, it's create organic acquisition. And there is of course the fact that journalists answer email because they can potentially have a conversation with her because just it give credibility to the app. So I think the benefit is everywhere. You will not be able to quantify day one. It's progressive and the more you use it and the better you use it and the better you will see that. But even the retention in the app is increasing because I said at the beginning when someone does know the product, they need to feel that it's an American product.
If they see the face of Venice Williams and the onboarding, they'll say it's the app of Venice Williams. It's not the app.
Jacob Eiting:
I went through your onboarding. I saw it. I was like, it was impactful. I mean meaningful, right? I knew the French connection, if you will, but it didn't, to your point, it didn't. You can kind of tell. You can kind of tell something feels vaguely not. I don't know what it is, but there's something about the copy and the styling and then sometimes you can tell. And it all depends on what your products are. You have a mass consumer product, so you need somebody who is. I don't know if they have a. There's somebody that does analytics on this, who has the most name recognition in America, but I imagine she's high on the list, top 100 most recognizable people. If I had to guess, I don't know, maybe less, but I would imagine up there. A household name as we would say, right?
Yves Benchimol:
Yeah, because she's of course the image of Venus and the image of Serena combined, it's huge and there are people that did a lot for America, but the beauty with tennis is it's not like soccer, football, it's worldwide. And you can talk about Venice Williams in France, in Europe, in Japan. Everybody knows her and everybody knows that how champion she was. All of that creates a tense around her. And so yeah, we are lucky because when I was looking for a celebrity in the US, the best of the best would be to have a celebrity that is also known outside of the
Jacob Eiting:
US. It's very rare to find somebody that's both. So the moral of the story is go to lunch more with your family. It's
David Barnard:
Got to be a very nice restaurant in New York City. Michelin starred restaurant.
Yves Benchimol:
Do expensive lunch.
David Barnard:
Yeah.
Jacob Eiting:
It's the American dream. It really is, right?
David Barnard:
Or you were saying earlier that being French in the US didn't buy you anything, but I can't help but think. I mean, as Americans do hear a French accent and think you're cool and cultured
Jacob Eiting:
And - Some sort of sophisticated. Sophisticated. I don't know if I walked in, "Hi, Serena. I'm from Ohio. I'd like to tell you about in-app purchases. Sorry, Venus." I think I would fail that. I think I would fail that. I just haven't had my shot yet. I just haven't had my shot yet. Fascinating. You said, but when did you start working with Venus Williams?
Yves Benchimol:
Two years ago.
Jacob Eiting:
Oh, okay. So this is fairly recent. So what next then? Because for the growth, there's always the next thing. You have to be looking for the next thing, right?
Yves Benchimol:
Now in the US, we start becoming a significant app, but the market is so deep. So we are at the beginning of what we can do in the US. Internationally, I think there is some country like France, Tali, Spain. The app is quite big, but the world is big and so we can continue to de-internalization. We mentioned Canada, Japan, Australia. There was tons of country where the app makes tons of sense. I would say the next big things for the next two years, of course, is to continue to develop the product and especially internalization of the product and continue to acquire user. So now we have a full UA engine that is working with creative spend and all of that. We continue to work on the brand and on the organic virality of the app in every country we launch. So press is still part of the strategy.
We have, of course, influence marketing. We have virality product-led growth into the product that we continue to develop. We have tons of development into the product, especially on the social aspect. We want to continue to develop the social aspect of the app.
Jacob Eiting:
You mentioned you're profitable. I don't know if that's. It can be tough to. If somebody raises, now you got to compete. The Venus Williams story is a good example of how you differentiate, but how do you interact with competitors in your space? How do you think about it? How do you react or not react to them?
Yves Benchimol:
When we launched the product, we were the first to give cash to people for walking. There were a product that was giving some of discount, some of things, but they think we were the only one to go as far as giving cash. Now we have tons of copycat of the app that launched since the beginning. And if you go on the app store, and I think we create this market, and I think it's good and bad at the same time, of course it's good because if you create a market, you can be proud to have these kind of people that try to copy and to continue to follow your path and of course make the market growing. But at the same time, you always want to be the only one. For us, we continue to be on top and innovative on features. We launch an amazing collection card games where you have to collect stuff.
Jacob Eiting:
It's like Pokemon GO, but a little more like mass market maybe. Not that Pokemon's not mass market, but maybe a little more applicable across cultures and age brackets.
Yves Benchimol:
Yeah, exactly. So we build our own IP with our characters and all of that, and so this is also very powerful. So this kind of innovation, we're going to continue to work on the gamification and the social. The powerful of the community is something very powerful. So in the app, the retention, now we never had such a high retention into our product, so I think we are going in the right way. But yeah, we need to continue to be in advance and this is why we hire people. We hire great product people to continue to be on top.
Jacob Eiting:
And I guess your power users in theory, they can use multiple apps because the tracking is underlying. So probably it's additive. I guess in theory you're competing over eyeballs, but like you were saying before, not all competition is bad. It may in some senses reduce some of your take, but I think what people underappreciate is it also makes you fitter as an organization. It forces you to be a little fitter, a little faster, serve customers better, which should make your business better. It's not a zero-sum thing, which is interesting, especially in this case where it's where your advantage is that you're not competing for real time at screen time because screen time is a fixed thing versus step counting can be shared and stuff like that. It's actually maybe your advantage.
Yves Benchimol:
Exactly. So people can use multiple apps. Of course, it's always better than they use only your apps because it means that you are 100% sure that we'll be more sticky to your app. But I think it's compared to some other products as it's a free product, it's not like a revenue cat. You will not use two different software for the same things. For us, they can use both and they can get the benefit of both, which is -
Jacob Eiting:
Even a lot of health and fitness consumer subscription apps, if you're doing weightlifting or something, you're probably only going to have one app, right? You're going to commit and pay into that one, which is a little bit of a different dynamic, but I think it helps you because it makes it a little less costly of a blood bath between apps, which is good.
David Barnard:
Speaking of screen time though, I did want you to dig into the recently launched walking mode where you lock TikTok and Instagram and other apps until they hit their walking goal. How recent was that? And tell me about the origin of this. It's a really fun, innovative feature.
Yves Benchimol:
It's very new. We launched a few months ago these features. So it's funny because as I said, at the beginning of the company, I wanted to work on disconnecting people from their phone. One day, one of our talents is the head of growth here in New York said, "Hey, we can launch this feature where basically we're going to help people to not use too much their phone by locking some apps. And as a rewards for walking, it'll unlock this app." So it's a new kind of rewards, which is time screen. So as a first go outside, meet people, enjoy the life, and then you can look on your screen. And so he vibe code these features and launch it. Of course, when he said this idea, I say, "This is amazing. This is exactly the type of feature I would love people to use." And yeah, we are currently expanding the usage of these features.
But the thing is we already measure that people that use these features walk 10% more, which is a feature that really have an impact on the number of steps of people because when they are addicted to social media, they are like, "Okay, I need to walk before I can use it." So they work more than usually. So I think it's benefit for their physical health, mental health. It makes them use less their social media. And mainly people lack social media and entertainment mainly because this is where they spend the most time. And so it's a great features and I think it has for the future a lot of expectation for this.
David Barnard:
And probably a nice kind of compliment to your existing ad motion and things like that because screen time apps are pretty hot right now and it's a great topic. And so I imagine it'll unlock some ad spend for you as well, going after that angle versus the rewards angle versus using Venus versus the health and fitness. Now it's like you get to attack it from so many different angles.
Yves Benchimol:
Yeah, yeah. It's always the same thing. It's like what is the motivational layers for people to change their behavior and everything that can motivate people. For some people it's the money. Some people it's giving to charity. Some people it's using social media. Some people it's beating their friends or their brothers. Some people it's just for collecting cards. Whatever is your motivation to make you move, we're going to try to make it in the app to find, okay, if you do this, we will get. It's the nudge terry. We give a small rewards to people and the rewards can be financial or digital or social media or whatever it is.
Jacob Eiting:
All these different motivating layers that people can opt into that you were just discussing, but all for one thing, which is getting off your butt and walking around. This is an open-ended product question. Would you ever consider motivate people to do other things like quit smoking or. I don't know. There's all kinds of things that you could let people opt into motivating themselves. It certainly would reduce the simplicity of the product.
Yves Benchimol:
Yeah, yeah. It can be done in one product or multiple products. So of course it's always a question we have. Actually, there is tons of behavior that you can improve in your life, but motivating people to walk is already a lot because if everybody in the planet reach the recommendation of the World Health Organization in terms of number of steps, we will solve so many issues. So it's already a lot of work. So for now we are focused on the walking, but yeah, of course, maybe if we have to think about what will be reward in five, 10 years, I would love to say, yeah, we impact the number of steps of this amount of people, millions of people, but we also impact the people to quit smoking and we impact people how they eat or I don't know.
Jacob Eiting:
You mentioned localization and I guess getting a local ambassador is one example of that. But for you, what is localizing? I guess language translation is probably obvious one, but you mentioned Canada too.What's a localization for Canada look like if you already have the US? Do you specialize brands and stuff like that? What's the process?
Yves Benchimol:
Yeah, the brands we are partnering with, the rewards, it's not the same. If it's not the same currency, you have to adapt the rewards and the partners and all of that. But as many international app, we took the decision to have the same app everywhere. So for us, there was the gift and the reward and the partners, but the mechanism of the rewards and the mechanism of the app, the social environment is the same everywhere.
Jacob Eiting:
Are you limited in countries that you don't support? So if you don't support a country, is it not downloadable in that country or do you just have it downloadable everywhere?
Yves Benchimol:
Yeah, we are in 29 country right
Jacob Eiting:
Now. Okay. But not every country in the app store you can't. No. Oh, I see. Interesting. It would just be a bad experience if it wasn't localized for that. It just wouldn't work, I guess.
Yves Benchimol:
Yeah. Potentially with PayPal and this kind of thing, you can say, okay, but we need to make money in order to be able to give back, so we need to have some partners. I would say it's not as easy as some app, but it's not so complex. We don't need a full local team.
Jacob Eiting:
Yeah, it's not like Uber or something. You got to send people and have a ground team and stuff, which is kind of great. I mean, I'm asking a lot of questions because it's interesting. Most of the folks we talk to are not monetizing like you are in this way, so they just have a different shape of problems. But I think for all the B2C app builders and stuff, I think it's really interesting to look at how folks we would solve problems slightly differently than you might think about it because I think we get stuck in these local optima of just looking at us and our peers and trying to copy what they're doing and stuff like this. It's helpful to look at something a little further afield and then try to apply first principles over. And I think there's a lot of what you've done that could be interesting.
I think the PR stuff's really interesting. I don't think enough people probably think about that. More traditional ways of truly marketing and just branding and things like that. Obviously helps that walking is universal. Your app has a huge TAM. Every human basically almost on the earth is a potential customer of yours, which isn't the case for many apps. They're more niched down, but still think there's a lot of great lessons.
Yves Benchimol:
Yeah, yeah. But I think the lesson also is we did also tons of things that was not efficient in term of marketing. As I said, when we start the press in the US, it was not efficient, so it was working in France. So you have to test and learn, and sometimes even the strategy can be very different from a market to the other. The thing is the more fast you will take the conclusion of is it the right or not the right strategy, the success will be there? I think in the US, for the first two years when I was there, the app was definitely not booming, and today we have billions of people that are not the app, but because at the beginning it was very hard, the product was not enough developed for the market, we didn't invest enough. All of that, it took time to understand, and also it took time to hire the right talents.
When you are not American, attracting good talent, it's very hard because of course, as the journalist will say who you are or nobody, it's like if you are a rockstar in marketing in the US, why you will work for a French mobile lab that. It's not like you have to trust the founder, you have to trust the story, but it's not very easy. So it took time and after meeting people, going to some event, and the one we are doing soon is a way to meet so many people. And so many people I met will be there and having advisor, being able to talk with the right people in the right space, all of that took time and this is how we did since the beginning, and this is one of the reason why I moved to the US. It's very difficult to understand what is the value to be in the US.
Jacob Eiting:
I was going to ask, I mean, obviously you knew the US was an important strategic market, but it still takes a lot of conviction to be like, "I'm going to leave behind my home country and home base and come to this country to get it set up."
David Barnard:
To meet Serena Williams, of course.
Jacob Eiting:
Yeah. Did you just come by yourself initially and just start feeling it out? And did you have a team in an office back in France that you left behind?
Yves Benchimol:
So today the company is like 80 people, 60 are in Paris. We are 10 now in the US, and we have 10 people remote. So I came with my wife. Now we have two kids, so we have a family here. But yeah, when I came, it's like, okay, there was some example of apps that managed to launch from France and being a great success in the US, and there was example where French people located in the US, you have both. Statistically, the one that become unicorn, one of the founder here in the US. So I did the math and I said, "Okay, statistically, if you want to have more chance, you have to move." I think the benefit is very difficult to measure, but attracting talents, if the founder is here, it'll be definitely game-changing. I don't know if Venice Williams would invest, I don't know, but it's 100% sure that it show us the ambition of the American market and that we are serious and we want to be.
We are ready to invest, we are ready to. And of course, in term of valuation, you can send that the people you talk with and the investor access to money. All of that is a lot of things that you can have by being here compared to Europe. Even if Europe is developing a lot and there is the taxing in Europe is very good, but compared to the US.
Jacob Eiting:
It's funny, European founder in Europe gets a discount. They're looked at as cheaper, right? Interestingly though, I think European founder in America gets a premium. Does that make sense? Because it's like you made the leap, you're committed, you love America. All these investors are like, "This person's part of the American dream." I don't know if that's true, but I don't know. Well, two things I don't know if that actually matters, who knows? But it certainly feels true. And I know many founding pairs that are like this. So you have co-founders that stayed in France to manage the office there, which is huge. There's no way you could just be like, "See you," and I'm gone.
Yves Benchimol:
No, but me, I come back a lot in France every two months. I spend one week with the team in France. Some people from France also sometimes come here. Of course, we are a company that have been created during COVID, so working remotely, we know how to do it, but I like the physical aspect.
Jacob Eiting:
Are you guys in Paris, I guess? Yeah. Yeah, Paris to New York is what, five hour. What the time difference? Five hours? It's not -
Yves Benchimol:
Six. Yeah. Six, so you have still half a day with them. But if you need to go in France, I think there was maybe 10 flights per day from New York.
Jacob Eiting:
So it's about the same time as it takes to go to San Francisco from New York probably. It's not that different, right?
Yves Benchimol:
New York is a very convenient city to travel all around the world.
Jacob Eiting:
I mean, that's why we have our big event there. It's why RAG is there. It's central. It's good for Europe. It's good for West Coast. It does feel like there is a bit of an abs nexus there. I think the broader story is interesting and just at some point you decided to get to that next stage to get out of a cool French startup to become an international, you had to commit and try something big, which has been sort of the narrative here. And sometimes I see founders just be like, "Oh, I just have to..." And not to knock revenue cat and everything we do, it's like, "Oh, I just got to optimize my paywall 5,000 times." You should also do that. Y should also optimize your paywall, you should test things. But often the big step functions are going to require something new, something different, something a little more bold, and they're not all going to work.
We're not talking about all the stories that failed because you just forget about them, I'm sure.
Yves Benchimol:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Of course, you always remember more what works and what didn't work, but it's part of the learning and I think for me being a second time entrepreneur, there was tons of. So for now, for me, it's the first time that I'm managing a company with such a scale because we are 80 people and so it's the biggest company I work with. So of course I'm learning a lot, but I think if tomorrow I'm building a third company, it will be fully different because it's very hard to. Every step is very hard. Repeat things, right?
Jacob Eiting:
Yeah. Well, I mean, that's true. David and I couch our advice on this podcast all the time is that there is no universal advice other than work hard and believe in yourself. This might be the only pieces of universal advice.
Yves Benchimol:
It's true. You will never know what will work. So this is clear. You will never know what will be the success, and so you have to admit that you don't know, and so to find the key to learn, to just explore and test and iterate. And if you do that, I think this is the universal things.
David Barnard:
Well, I think that's a great place to wrap up. We're way over time. Jacob's joked a few times we should do a three-hour podcast, but I do try and keep them around an hour. Well,
Jacob Eiting:
This one, this one, definitely.
David Barnard:
Not all of
Jacob Eiting:
Them, David. Some of them, we're good at a tight 45, but we could go for a long time on this
David Barnard:
One. We could go for a very long time. But those of you who want more from Eve, he is hosting a workshop at AppGrowth Annual, and one of the things I wanted to dig into more if we had more time, and maybe we'll just have you back on or have you do a live stream or something, but is that kind of motivational framework, and that's what you're going to do a workshop at AppGrowth Annual in New York in October, specifically diving deep into that. By the time you listen to this podcast, it's probably too late to get a ticket, but those of you going should definitely prioritize getting into Eve's workshop because it's going to be fantastic. But as we wrap up, I do want to ask you the three questions and now ask Every guest, and we will get into failures, but first I wanted to ask, what's been your biggest win of the last year?
Yves Benchimol:
I think this year, and Jacob, you mentioned this, was the onboarding. I think it was one of the biggest win we had when we redo the onboarding. We increased a lot the decision retention because we applied so many advice that I learned from top apps and from top entrepreneurs about how you make your user commit, how you create emotion.
Jacob Eiting:
The commit star. I had to push the commit star.
Yves Benchimol:
Exactly. The emotion with the celebrity, but also with the branding and all of that. We iterate a lot and it was a long project, but I think it's part of the project that allow us to unlock part of the user acquisition and increase the LTV and the retention. So it was one of the biggest win.
David Barnard:
Nice. And what about your biggest fail of the last year?
Yves Benchimol:
I think it's the B2B.
Jacob Eiting:
You try it again. You came back. You just can't give up.
Yves Benchimol:
I came back for many reason, but basically we received so much email from companies say, "Hey, we want to launch a competition internally for our employee to work more and kind of this." And we didn't crack how to make something successful on that. We launched a community features that makes people work together, give to a charities and all of that dedicated to enterprise. They can add some money on top for the charities and all of that. And I think I'm not good at B2B.
Jacob Eiting:
It's okay. I'm not good at enterprise sales, so I've just decided you just kind of give up on a few things.
David Barnard:
That a great story though. And just because it didn't work yet doesn't mean it won't work in the long run, but it's good to admit.
Jacob Eiting:
Strategic retreat, David.
David Barnard:
We call
Jacob Eiting:
It a strategic retreat.
David Barnard:
There you go. And then the last question is a fill in the blank. Growth would be easier if?
Yves Benchimol:
If I talk about my job and app developer job, if updating your app will be as fast as updating a website, I think.
Jacob Eiting:
Hey, there's change in the air at Apple. We got a new leader. Who knows?
Yves Benchimol:
Maybe. Maybe it will be one day. But today, yeah, iteration in the mobile app space is so much lung compared to a website. And I think this is a weird issue for being able to test and learn fast. And the more the app is growing, the more you have AB tests in parallel and the more you want to release and the more you want to iterate, and so it become a real problem. So there is technology that allow us for some specific things to avoid that, but still at the end you always try to. Yeah.
David Barnard:
For folks listening, even when you get down to 24-hour review times, until the boom of AI coded apps, Apple got pretty good at 24 hours. But even if you can get a review every 24 hours at your scale with as many engineers, with as many things as you want to do, it's still a limitation on having to have that constant release cycle and test cycle and things like that. Even if they get it back to 24 hours, which it's been bad again the past few weeks, it's still a blocker to the iteration.
Jacob Eiting:
It's also the revert time. So it's like 24 hours release is maybe okay, but then you can't take many risks because if something goes out that's broken, if your time to revert is 24 hours, that's brutal. If your time to revert is. When Facebook breaks something, which they still do, or Twitter or X or whatever, their time to revert is seconds or minutes. You can kind of take a little more risk in deployment and software. I mean, it's just always been this tax and hopefully someday.
Yves Benchimol:
The problem is the 24 hours you cannot. It can be 24 hours, but sometimes it can be five days.
Jacob Eiting:
That's a terrible thing to gamble with too, right?
Yves Benchimol:
Yeah. This summer we were stuck. I think it was more than five days. We didn't know why. At the end it was okay, but we didn't know why because maybe, I don't know, we were stuck.
Jacob Eiting:
It drives entrepreneurs uniquely crazy because we are such control freaks. You want to control everything and you just have no control. We have almost zero control, right?
Yves Benchimol:
Yeah. This one is unfortunately, but yeah, you have to have good contact at Apple and Michelle.
Jacob Eiting:
Or maybe the new Apple CEO can turn us around.
Yves Benchimol:
We'll see. Did you see the new
Jacob Eiting:
IPhone
Yves Benchimol:
Just released? Yeah.
Jacob Eiting:
I know. I know. You got to get on it. We're building foldable paywalls now, so we're ready to go. Nice,
Yves Benchimol:
Nice, nice, nice, nice.
David Barnard:
Awesome. Well, as we wrap up, anything else you wanted to share? It sounds like you're hiring and looking to hire more in the US. Any specific roles you want to shout out?
Yves Benchimol:
Yeah, I'm based in New York. I'm here to, of course, meet great people. If anyone wants to join, we're happy to discuss. We have tons of great project ahead and thank you so much. It's great, and I'm looking forward for the event. I was there last year. It was one of the best event on the mobile app space I did. So congrats for that, for organizing such an event. And yeah, it's going to be great.
David Barnard:
You're supposed to pitch. We were at jobs, not Revenue Cat in our conference, but thank you.
Jacob Eiting:
Take it, David. Just take it. Close the podcast. Thank you very much.
David Barnard:
Daniel, it was a lot of fun and I appreciate you hosting a workshop. So excited to see you there. There are going to be a lot of great folks in town for that and a lot of great folks already in town. Like we were talking about, New York is a really fun app scene. Well, I'll see you in a month. We'll all three see each other in about a month. So thank you so much for joining us.
Yves Benchimol:
Thanks, Jacob. Thank you.
David Barnard:
Thanks so much for listening. If you have a minute, please leave a review in your favorite podcast player. You can also stop by chat.subclub.com to join our private community.