WeWard

A cheap PR retainer replaced paid acquisition for four years. WeWard paid a PR agency about $3,000 to $5,000 a month and spent nothing on Meta, Google or other paid user acquisition for its first four years. It reached 30 million users and has paid out over 50 million to them.

Results were lumpy: "some months you have zero, but some months you have like a half a million downloads." Benchimol says buying half a million downloads would cost enough to pay the agency for 10 years. A simple, surprising idea (an app that pays you to walk) fits a short TV segment.

Sub Club▶ 0:01

Scale your servers before a big TV segment airs. A prime-time French TV segment, seven or eight months after launch, brought about 300,000 downloads in under five minutes, and the app crashed instantly.

People emailed asking for access, which confirmed the demand. The lesson is to load test and scale infrastructure before a big press moment.

Sub Club▶ 25:18

Check retention after a press spike before monetizing with ads. After the TV spike, WeWard checked retention first and found it very high compared to the market average, so it added ads.

Benchimol says ad revenue starts to cover costs at around 100,000 users per day.

Sub Club▶ 27:05

WeWard A/B tests every feature against steps, not time in app. The company deliberately does not track time spent in the app so it never becomes a team target. Every feature is A/B tested against steps walked; a mode that locks social apps until a step goal is met lifted steps by 10%.

The reasoning: users whose lifestyle does not improve leave after about six months. "The success of the number of steps of people is the success of the company." No test method or sample size is given for the 10% figure.

Sub Club▶ 17:45

Stack motivational layers so each user finds their own reason to walk. WeWard borrows from retailer loyalty programs, games and social feeds, which it calls motivational layers. Some users walk for money, others for charity, friends, card collecting or unlocking social media time.

Benchimol read cognitive science books and applied nudge theory: small rewards all aimed at one behavior. "Whatever is your motivation to make you move, we're going to try to make it in the app."

Sub Club▶ 48:27

App review delays cap how fast a large app can test. With many A/B tests running in parallel, review times of 24 hours, and once more than five days, slow releases and make reverting a risky change costly.

WeWard's answer is technology that avoids a release for specific changes, plus good contacts at Apple.

Sub Club▶ 1:02:02

The French press playbook failed in the US. PR worked in France, Italy and Spain, but one of the most expensive US agencies produced no results.

US journalists wanted a narrative, such as a famous backer or a big raise, not a profitable foreign startup. "It's just due to the fact that I'm nobody here in this country." The takeaway is to test each market separately and decide quickly whether a strategy works.

Sub Club▶ 28:30

Make the celebrity an investor as well as an ambassador. Venus Williams got shares in WeWard. Her deal covers use of her image, joint content, TV appearances such as Good Morning America, and replying to journalists.

Journalists answer emails more readily when a conversation with her is possible. Benchimol says the deal helped hiring, press, CAC, retention and organic reach, but gives no figures and calls it hard to quantify.

Sub Club▶ 37:22

A rebuilt onboarding built on commitment and emotion lifted retention. WeWard redid its onboarding using advice from top apps on making users commit and creating emotion, including Williams' face and new branding. Benchimol calls it the biggest win of the last year, with a large increase in retention and LTV that unlocked more user acquisition.

Seeing a well-known American in onboarding makes users read it as a US product: "people have to think that this is a U.S. product and we don't care that you are from France." It took many iterations.

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Moving the founder to New York mattered, but the product needed investment too. Benchimol moved to New York to attract talent, investors and credibility. The first two years in the US were slow because the product was not adapted enough and investment was too low.

US users expect more polish than Europeans. WeWard has 80 people, 60 in Paris and 10 in the US, and millions of Americans now download the app.

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Ads and affiliate deals carry the business; subscription is newest and smallest. WeWard earns from ads, affiliate deals, surveys, in-app purchases and a premium subscription that removes ads. Asked if subscription was 50% or 25% of revenue, Benchimol said it is the opposite, without giving a split.

Each source must improve the experience, add steps or raise the rewards users can earn, never push time in app. Ads work because the audience is huge; the subscription launched long after the others and is growing fast.

Sub Club▶ 18:25

Affiliate deals are an easy sell because brands pay only on sales. WeWard approached affiliate platforms and brands directly and now works with Nike, Adidas, Expedia, Booking.com and Amazon, which pay a commission on sales.

Tracking technology already exists, and brands like appearing in a fitness and wellness setting. AI is making traffic sources less predictable, so commission-only spend looks safer to brands.

Sub Club▶ 22:11

Turn down partners whose values clash with a healthy lifestyle. WeWard rejects brands whose effect on how people act runs opposite to its mission, even though some high-CPM categories would pay well.

Jacob Eiting noted the best CPMs come from gambling apps, which can hurt a brand long term, and Benchimol agreed.

Sub Club▶ 20:37

Deciding to pivot was hard; carrying it out was easy. Benchimol shut down a B2B footfall analytics company serving Auchan, Carrefour and Galeries Lafayette and started WeWard with the same team, investors, leftover money and office.

The old company was almost profitable with 10 people but did not scale and felt meaningless to him. The hardest step was calling clients to say it was closing. Walking was chosen because every phone has a pedometer and it cuts screen time.

Sub Club▶ 6:26

WeWard dropped the blockchain because users did not care about it. The 2019 launch paid one coin per 1,000 steps on Ethereum, but it was slow, costly and hard to scale, with coins taking about a minute to arrive. After three to four months it moved to loyalty points in a normal database.

Users were happier and engineers were relieved, even though hiring had leaned on the blockchain story. "This is not our job to do that. Our job is to motivate people to walk."

Sub Club▶ 9:29