Melissa Cash
Co-founder and CEO of Pok Pok
Where to hear and read about Melissa Cash1 episode or test
Melissa Cash is co-founder and CEO of Pok Pok, a subscription kids app with no levels, rewards, streaks or pop-ups that grew subscribers 9x in one year. The lesson most worth taking is to earn the trust of the parent who pays, even when refusing growth hooks slows you down.
We would grow faster with those things, but I don't think we would have great retention because we wouldn't have the trust.
The Anti-Addictive Playbook Behind Pok Pok's 9X Subscriber Growth | Melissa Cash
Melissa Cash: the story and the lessons
1Melissa Cash's path to Pok Pok
Melissa Cash kept getting pulled back to children's products. Her first real job was three years at an educational toy store in high school. After university she moved to Germany, met a Disney product designer at a bus stop, and later landed a product design job at Disney's Munich office with no experience and no German.
She then moved back to Canada and went into startups, where she met her co-founders. She says every time she steps away from kids she is pulled back in.
Pok Pok started because parents found no good app for a toddler. The founders, Esther and Math, are husband and wife and worked in video games. Their two-year-old had meltdowns after TV, and the games he could reach were dumbed-down adult games with sticky mechanics, or memorize-and-regurgitate learning.
Math had freelanced as an artist for Snowman, the studio behind Alto's Adventure, and Melissa's brother Ryan, a Snowman co-founder, connected them. The app digitizes open floor toys like hula hoops, Lego and art supplies, for ages 2 to 8, with no rules, no language and no ads.
Pok Pok won top design honors and grew subscribers 9x in a year. It is the first app to win both an Apple Design Award and an App Store Award, and Time named it one of the 100 most influential companies of 2025.
The 9x figure is never broken down by cause, so it is unclear how much came from design, awards or ads.
2Why Melissa Cash keeps hooks out of Pok Pok
Cash refuses pop-ups, streaks and rewards, even when they would help. The team wanted a pop-up to promote the free play kit, but a child can't read or dismiss it, so they found another way. Parents trust that kids will only ever see toys, with no accidental purchases and no locked content.
Investors keep asking whether hooks will start after funding, and the answer is no. In her words: "we would love to put a popup in, but from a value standpoint, we're like, we could never put a pop-up in."
She wrote the company's values down so refusals are quick. Pok Pok only put its core values in writing in the last year. Before that they were passed on by word of mouth.
With the values written, saying no to a growth tactic no longer needs a long debate.
Cash bets that trust beats hooks on retention, and accepts slower growth. She expects growth to be slower with the hooks off, but believes retention would suffer without parent trust. Trust built over years is worth more to her than any single growth decision.
This is a belief, and the episode shows no retention data to back it. She says one bad decision could break that trust and it would break her heart.
Open-ended toys bring kids back without rewards. Nothing in the app is locked. Intrinsic motivation works like an unfinished puzzle on the dining table, and the more a child explores, the more the app gives back.
A child in the dinosaur toy leaves for dinner and wants to return to see whether Johnny the Ankylosaurus got eaten.
One toy is built to grow with a child from age 2 to 7. A two-year-old is amazed that touching makes something happen, while a seven-year-old tells robust stories or builds elaborate things. Like Lego, the same toy stays useful as kids age.
Her own son has played Pok Pok for over two years, and she checks her choices against how he uses it.
A subscription works because parents pay for what their child loves. Cash says parents are fine paying even if their kid only uses the app twice a month. Earn the trust, and the dollars follow.
The design started from kids, then won parents with beautiful sound and visuals, since annoying media is painful on a plane or at the doctor's.
3How Pok Pok shows value to a parent who never opens it
Cash assumes parents will never interact with Pok Pok again. Push notifications land on the child's iPad, parents never open the grown-up area, and many interviewed users don't know Pok Pok has an Instagram account. So onboarding and the paywall show, not tell, why the app is trustworthy.
She admits the company did what it set out to do "almost too well." Her quote: "We have to assume that they're never going to interact with us ever again."
She treats the moment after payment as a sacred window. Right after the paywall, the parent is engaged and the child isn't there yet. Pok Pok uses it to prompt a free play kit request and email signup, and it covers both purchases and started trials.
How the parent presents the app shapes whether the child takes to it. Like healthy food next to cake, you don't announce it, you let the child find it. Onboarding is being made more playful so the parent can almost play too.
Pok Pok mails a free physical play kit to jog parents' memory. The kit arrives roughly in the first month of subscription and is designed so items around the house remind parents that Pok Pok exists.
It is expensive, but it helps retention. It is also the thing the team wanted a pop-up to promote.
Lifecycle messages must add real value, not show every drawing. Parents don't care that a kid drew a mermaid. Pok Pok is testing emails that put a drawing from six months ago next to today's, and shares parenting podcast episodes.
The core message is that the kid is learning, and it should take only 30 seconds of the parent's month. The company is also rebuilding the grown-up area to add family value, and does not yet use the channel fully, to avoid being annoying.
4How Melissa Cash grows Pok Pok with micro-creators and brand
Cash picks micro-creators for content, not follower count. Big influencers stopped working about a year before the interview, and creators began asking Pok Pok for work because they were earning less. Many of its creators have around 2,000 followers, and Pok Pok works with 30 to 50 regulars.
A partnerships manager hunts on TikTok first, then checks Instagram, across niches like Montessori homeschool moms, crunchy moms and day-in-the-life accounts. One teammate with an eye for talent screens candidates. Her line: "on Tik Tok it's not about followers, it's about content."
She starts with a batch of 20 creators on a 30-day trial. Pay per video with bonuses tied to engagement, so downside stays limited, and expect roughly four or five hits from 20.
The program has scaled quarter over quarter for almost a year. It stays manual work: emails, spreadsheets and attribution math that AI only partly eases.
Cash gives creators freedom instead of scripts. Creators are asked to use the app with their kids and say what they think the focus should be, with light suggestions only.
Pok Pok once handed over a list of seven values to mention, and it came across as disingenuous.
She waits a few weeks before cutting a creator. One creator was due to be cut on day 28 of 30, posted a huge video on the last day, and is now a top performer.
A unique product takes time to position for each audience. Another company runs 500 creators at once with a $1,000 bonus for a million views in a week, which works only because it has the staff to manage them.
Top creator videos get reused as paid Meta ads. Content that pops off in the creator program is then run as ads. Pok Pok is still heavily reliant on Meta, especially Instagram, to reach millennial moms.
Cash calls Meta the golden handcuffs.
One familiar word, Montessori, made a hard product easy to sell. Early messaging about open-ended, creative-led play got no response. After a customer review compared the app to Montessori, the team adopted the word, which she says describes about 80% of what Pok Pok does.
Only about half of users know what it means. The team is now testing a move away from it because it attracts mostly Montessori, homeschooling and tech-aware families. The product isn't changing.
She now watches who fast Meta growth brings in, and invests in brand. Meta can grow quickly but bring in the wrong people. Pok Pok started a brand department about six months before the interview, and a Calm collab is one result.
Her biggest regret is not putting early venture money into untracked brand work. The limit was focus and a small team more than cash.
5Melissa Cash on pricing, Android and award spikes
Cash launched too cheap and learned that price is never final. The launch price was $29.99 a year, set out of fear that price would stop people trying something odd. Doubling it doubled revenue, and the team later lowered it somewhat after seeing longer-term retention.
The sweet spot is still unknown and may differ by market. Lowering a price is easier than raising one, so underpricing early is the costlier mistake.
She held off on Android for over two years. A port costs money, time and mental capacity, and Android users do not behave like iOS users. The launch gave a boost that was not company-changing, and iOS drives the business.
She tells new app builders not to do Android yet.
Android later became Pok Pok's test lab and a retention helper. Every feature ships on Android first because it is lower risk, cheaper and faster, and Google Play offers testing features the App Store lacks.
Many Apple families keep the subscription for a cheap kids' tablet like a $150 Kindle Fire. That retention effect comes from user conversations, not metrics she can prove.
An Apple Design Award hit before Pok Pok had retention tools. Pok Pok won two weeks after launch with no save flow, easy cancelling and one worldwide price, and lost many of the new users.
Many award-era users stayed anyway because they matched the core customer. Her lesson: have the fundamentals ready so that "when those things happen, your product is ready for it."
The Anti-Addictive Playbook Behind Pok Pok's 9X Subscriber Growth | Melissa Cash
Pok Pok built a subscription kids app with no levels, rewards, streaks or pop-ups, and grew subscribers 9x in one year by earning parent trust. The episode covers micro-creator programs, Montessori positioning, delayed Android launch, price testing, and how to show value to a parent who never uses the product.
Melissa Cash kept getting pulled back to children's products. Her first real job was three years at an educational toy store in high school. After university she moved to Germany, met a Disney product designer at a bus stop, and later landed a product design job at Disney's Munich office with no experience and no German.
She then moved back to Canada and went into startups, where she met her co-founders. She says every time she steps away from kids she is pulled back in.
Pok Pok started because parents found no good app for a toddler. The founders, Esther and Math, are husband and wife and worked in video games. Their two-year-old had meltdowns after TV, and the games he could reach were dumbed-down adult games with sticky mechanics, or memorize-and-regurgitate learning.
Math had freelanced as an artist for Snowman, the studio behind Alto's Adventure, and Melissa's brother Ryan, a Snowman co-founder, connected them. The app digitizes open floor toys like hula hoops, Lego and art supplies, for ages 2 to 8, with no rules, no language and no ads.
Pok Pok won top design honors and grew subscribers 9x in a year. It is the first app to win both an Apple Design Award and an App Store Award, and Time named it one of the 100 most influential companies of 2025.
The 9x figure is never broken down by cause, so it is unclear how much came from design, awards or ads.
Cash refuses pop-ups, streaks and rewards, even when they would help. The team wanted a pop-up to promote the free play kit, but a child can't read or dismiss it, so they found another way. Parents trust that kids will only ever see toys, with no accidental purchases and no locked content.
Investors keep asking whether hooks will start after funding, and the answer is no. In her words: "we would love to put a popup in, but from a value standpoint, we're like, we could never put a pop-up in."
She wrote the company's values down so refusals are quick. Pok Pok only put its core values in writing in the last year. Before that they were passed on by word of mouth.
With the values written, saying no to a growth tactic no longer needs a long debate.
Cash bets that trust beats hooks on retention, and accepts slower growth. She expects growth to be slower with the hooks off, but believes retention would suffer without parent trust. Trust built over years is worth more to her than any single growth decision.
This is a belief, and the episode shows no retention data to back it. She says one bad decision could break that trust and it would break her heart.
Open-ended toys bring kids back without rewards. Nothing in the app is locked. Intrinsic motivation works like an unfinished puzzle on the dining table, and the more a child explores, the more the app gives back.
A child in the dinosaur toy leaves for dinner and wants to return to see whether Johnny the Ankylosaurus got eaten.
One toy is built to grow with a child from age 2 to 7. A two-year-old is amazed that touching makes something happen, while a seven-year-old tells robust stories or builds elaborate things. Like Lego, the same toy stays useful as kids age.
Her own son has played Pok Pok for over two years, and she checks her choices against how he uses it.
A subscription works because parents pay for what their child loves. Cash says parents are fine paying even if their kid only uses the app twice a month. Earn the trust, and the dollars follow.
The design started from kids, then won parents with beautiful sound and visuals, since annoying media is painful on a plane or at the doctor's.
Cash assumes parents will never interact with Pok Pok again. Push notifications land on the child's iPad, parents never open the grown-up area, and many interviewed users don't know Pok Pok has an Instagram account. So onboarding and the paywall show, not tell, why the app is trustworthy.
She admits the company did what it set out to do "almost too well." Her quote: "We have to assume that they're never going to interact with us ever again."
She treats the moment after payment as a sacred window. Right after the paywall, the parent is engaged and the child isn't there yet. Pok Pok uses it to prompt a free play kit request and email signup, and it covers both purchases and started trials.
How the parent presents the app shapes whether the child takes to it. Like healthy food next to cake, you don't announce it, you let the child find it. Onboarding is being made more playful so the parent can almost play too.
Pok Pok mails a free physical play kit to jog parents' memory. The kit arrives roughly in the first month of subscription and is designed so items around the house remind parents that Pok Pok exists.
It is expensive, but it helps retention. It is also the thing the team wanted a pop-up to promote.
Lifecycle messages must add real value, not show every drawing. Parents don't care that a kid drew a mermaid. Pok Pok is testing emails that put a drawing from six months ago next to today's, and shares parenting podcast episodes.
The core message is that the kid is learning, and it should take only 30 seconds of the parent's month. The company is also rebuilding the grown-up area to add family value, and does not yet use the channel fully, to avoid being annoying.
Cash picks micro-creators for content, not follower count. Big influencers stopped working about a year before the interview, and creators began asking Pok Pok for work because they were earning less. Many of its creators have around 2,000 followers, and Pok Pok works with 30 to 50 regulars.
A partnerships manager hunts on TikTok first, then checks Instagram, across niches like Montessori homeschool moms, crunchy moms and day-in-the-life accounts. One teammate with an eye for talent screens candidates. Her line: "on Tik Tok it's not about followers, it's about content."
She starts with a batch of 20 creators on a 30-day trial. Pay per video with bonuses tied to engagement, so downside stays limited, and expect roughly four or five hits from 20.
The program has scaled quarter over quarter for almost a year. It stays manual work: emails, spreadsheets and attribution math that AI only partly eases.
Cash gives creators freedom instead of scripts. Creators are asked to use the app with their kids and say what they think the focus should be, with light suggestions only.
Pok Pok once handed over a list of seven values to mention, and it came across as disingenuous.
She waits a few weeks before cutting a creator. One creator was due to be cut on day 28 of 30, posted a huge video on the last day, and is now a top performer.
A unique product takes time to position for each audience. Another company runs 500 creators at once with a $1,000 bonus for a million views in a week, which works only because it has the staff to manage them.
Top creator videos get reused as paid Meta ads. Content that pops off in the creator program is then run as ads. Pok Pok is still heavily reliant on Meta, especially Instagram, to reach millennial moms.
Cash calls Meta the golden handcuffs.
One familiar word, Montessori, made a hard product easy to sell. Early messaging about open-ended, creative-led play got no response. After a customer review compared the app to Montessori, the team adopted the word, which she says describes about 80% of what Pok Pok does.
Only about half of users know what it means. The team is now testing a move away from it because it attracts mostly Montessori, homeschooling and tech-aware families. The product isn't changing.
She now watches who fast Meta growth brings in, and invests in brand. Meta can grow quickly but bring in the wrong people. Pok Pok started a brand department about six months before the interview, and a Calm collab is one result.
Her biggest regret is not putting early venture money into untracked brand work. The limit was focus and a small team more than cash.
Cash launched too cheap and learned that price is never final. The launch price was $29.99 a year, set out of fear that price would stop people trying something odd. Doubling it doubled revenue, and the team later lowered it somewhat after seeing longer-term retention.
The sweet spot is still unknown and may differ by market. Lowering a price is easier than raising one, so underpricing early is the costlier mistake.
She held off on Android for over two years. A port costs money, time and mental capacity, and Android users do not behave like iOS users. The launch gave a boost that was not company-changing, and iOS drives the business.
She tells new app builders not to do Android yet.
Android later became Pok Pok's test lab and a retention helper. Every feature ships on Android first because it is lower risk, cheaper and faster, and Google Play offers testing features the App Store lacks.
Many Apple families keep the subscription for a cheap kids' tablet like a $150 Kindle Fire. That retention effect comes from user conversations, not metrics she can prove.
An Apple Design Award hit before Pok Pok had retention tools. Pok Pok won two weeks after launch with no save flow, easy cancelling and one worldwide price, and lost many of the new users.
Many award-era users stayed anyway because they matched the core customer. Her lesson: have the fundamentals ready so that "when those things happen, your product is ready for it."