Yoav Sharon
Head of Growth and Product at Simply
Where to hear and read about Yoav Sharon1 episode or test
Yoav Sharon is Head of Growth and Product at Simply, the maker of Simply Piano, Guitar, Sing and Draw. The most useful thing to learn from him is to test every growth lever against real usage and retention, and to check best practices locally before trusting them.
best practices can take you up to a certain point but you really need to understand the intricacies
How Simply Finally Cracked Facebook Ads with Web Funnels – Yoav Sharon, Simply
Yoav Sharon: the story and the lessons
1How Sharon grows Simply's portfolio of learning apps
Simply turns hard hobbies into small coached steps. The portfolio covers Simply Piano (most mature), Guitar, Sing and the recent Draw. It reaches millions of learners in 11 languages and 180 countries.
Simply Piano holds about 80% of the piano learning app market.
Sharon launches each new app with its own pod and playbook. Small multidisciplinary pods find the pain that stops people learning a hobby, then build the offer and value proposition. They reuse early growth and customer discovery playbooks from earlier apps, with the same principles but not the same steps.
Simply Draw grew about sixfold in revenue last year. Not every launch succeeds.
Sharon says multi-app portfolios usually fail, so each app stands alone. Pushing users from a main app to others often does not work. He points to Duolingo pulling back from several learning apps and Mind Snacks running about 10 language apps with hard promotion and engineering.
Cross-promotion happens only when it serves users, such as marking songs that exist in both Simply Piano and Simply Sing.
Family plans with up to five profiles gave the strongest retention. Simply saw users from households with several creative interests, so it added a family plan and then multi-profile accounts across apps. Multi-app, multi-profile accounts have by far the strongest retention in any cohort.
Someone in the household is always engaging, so these accounts churn less.
Sharon measures cannibalization by switching campaigns off in separate geos. Simply turned off app campaigns in one Google geo and web campaigns in another. The team then watched organic traffic and the interplay between apps and between iOS and Android.
He says "it's never about perfect attribution". The aim is enough truth in CAC modeling to place the next dollar.
Sharon treats Apple and Google as partners, not enemies. Simply shares plans, roadmaps and challenges with its account managers and meets them biweekly on Simply Piano. That brought beta access and design partnerships.
Simply sent developers to WWDC with real sound recognition problems and got help from Apple engineers. Sharon dislikes the fees but accepts them as part of a close relationship.
Sharon builds for new devices early, without expecting revenue. Each new device such as Vision Pro or Android XR gets a fast pod working closely with the platform so a product ships at launch. Sharon led the first Simply build on Vision Pro.
He says it is not about an ROI right now with the direct revenues, but about being present in that future. A learner who finished a first course got a standing ovation from a Carnegie Hall crowd.
2How Sharon cracked Facebook with web funnels
Sharon uses a web flow to move scrollers into a download mindset. People on social networks are in a lean-back mindset, and being sent straight to an app store is friction. A web flow of a few minutes opens with a simple question and explains the value first.
It helped Simply succeed on Facebook for the first time. About 20% of revenue in the past year came from web flows. No conversion or revenue figures are given for the gain itself.
Sharon builds one flow from ad to onboarding to paywall. A parent-targeted ad leads to an onboarding that speaks to a parent's pains and needs, through to the paywall. Deterministic attribution on the web makes this personalization possible.
Simply's tests of the full path raised conversion significantly.
Sharon sees web flows as a way to reach new audiences, not save fees. Fee savings and attribution help but are not the main driver. The bigger value is incremental audiences who would not download straight from an ad.
The flow explains value rather than copying the store page, so expectations are right when the paywall appears. He says web payments are a money decision, not a protest against Apple.
Sharon tests routing instead of fixing it. Creative, placement and destination are tested together, and web to app is one route among several. The right mix varies with each app's maturity and creative.
Older Facebook audiences need more warming up. He cites Leon Cass of Speak, who tied Facebook success to age: millennials are app native and older users need more time.
Sharon holds the paywall timing to testing, not a fixed rule. Simply Guitar's first paywall does not mention the family plan. Some apps start with a soft paywall and others wait until users feel the value.
The choice depends on the app's maturity, the expectations the ad set and the current campaigns. The web is also where the whole bundle can be sold as one Simply offer.
3Sharon's approach to pricing and plans
Sharon built Simply's own Big Mac style purchasing power index. Instead of converting currency, Simply combined purchasing power with other factors about how people value learning an instrument or drawing. It rolled one modeled strategy out to all geos as a single test.
ARPU rose dramatically in most geos. A few geos did not respond and were adapted, and prices are updated as the app matures and new audiences arrive.
Sharon moves to monthly plans only when retention is strong. Every usage gain shows up as a renewal at the next month, while annual plans bring cash up front but hide usage for a year. Simply moved after heavy pricing tests and only where monthly usage was strong.
Mature apps see better LTV on monthly. Younger apps still split plans and keep testing. He says the move "works only when you have good enough retention renewals on your monthly plans."
Sharon treats up-front annual cash as financing, not proof. Simply uses early cash to improve the product, not for financial engineering. Users who want the discount get annual and those who want flexibility get monthly.
An annual plan can also scare off beginners, since even 15 minutes a day is a commitment and a yearly price adds a financial one.
Sharon tests annual discounts between 60% and 75%. Simply varies the discount, sometimes 60% and sometimes 70 to 75%. It keeps the monthly price high enough to protect LTV while attracting users who prefer annual.
There is no single right discount, and it depends on the plan and on user psychology such as anchoring.
Sharon skips weekly plans because skills build slowly. A $5 weekly price feels like a coffee, so friction drops. But learners cannot tell after a week whether they play or sing better, and a weekly renewal keeps asking if they are sure they want to pay.
Simply tested weekly in some apps but does not offer it now. Sharon notes weekly plans are mostly used by low-retention apps chasing short-term LTV.
4Where Sharon's best practices failed: Japan and the soft paywall
Sharon says localization is about trust, so it must go deep. It covers the country's songs, app translation, store, pricing and creatives. If only the first-time experience is localized, users lose trust deeper in the product.
Consistency in tone, UI and currency matters more than breadth. The team goes all in only after confidence is built, and he says localization is not the riskiest part of growth.
Simply picked Japan with a model, then paywall conversion fell. The model estimated incremental ARPO per geo and confidence of reaching it. For Simply Piano the team added anime songs, a changed UI, localized store creatives and Japanese currency.
Every metric grew as expected except paywall conversion, which decreased.
A local country manager showed Sharon what the model could not. The Japanese country manager said users expect a detailed story of the company, founders and values, plus social quotes and lots of color. Simply built a very long one-pager paywall, and conversion skyrocketed.
This is the opposite of the clean paywall best practice. Everything else had been done properly, so the gap was invisible from outside.
A soft paywall win on ARPO hid poor-fit users. Simply Piano put a soft paywall at the end of onboarding and the team celebrated for months. Later the subscribers turned out to be touch-only users with no keyboard, signed up for a year with little value to gain.
Deeper segmentation showed kids did find value, replaying songs until they got a keyboard. The soft paywall now stays only on accounts with kids profiles.
Sharon turns delightful product moments into ads. Simply Draw used AI to bring a child's finished drawing to life. Kids ran to show their parents, who saw positive screen time, and adding it to the first-time experience raised the paying pool.
Parents also share the results organically on Instagram. Sharon says "Many of our creatives are being inspired by real usage."
How Simply Finally Cracked Facebook Ads with Web Funnels – Yoav Sharon, Simply
Simply's growth lead explains how web funnels opened up Facebook and older audiences, how a custom purchasing power pricing index and deep localization lifted ARPU, and why monthly plans can beat annual on LTV. Web flows drive about 20% of revenue, and a Japan paywall lesson shows why best practices need local checks.
Simply turns hard hobbies into small coached steps. The portfolio covers Simply Piano (most mature), Guitar, Sing and the recent Draw. It reaches millions of learners in 11 languages and 180 countries.
Simply Piano holds about 80% of the piano learning app market.
Sharon launches each new app with its own pod and playbook. Small multidisciplinary pods find the pain that stops people learning a hobby, then build the offer and value proposition. They reuse early growth and customer discovery playbooks from earlier apps, with the same principles but not the same steps.
Simply Draw grew about sixfold in revenue last year. Not every launch succeeds.
Sharon says multi-app portfolios usually fail, so each app stands alone. Pushing users from a main app to others often does not work. He points to Duolingo pulling back from several learning apps and Mind Snacks running about 10 language apps with hard promotion and engineering.
Cross-promotion happens only when it serves users, such as marking songs that exist in both Simply Piano and Simply Sing.
Family plans with up to five profiles gave the strongest retention. Simply saw users from households with several creative interests, so it added a family plan and then multi-profile accounts across apps. Multi-app, multi-profile accounts have by far the strongest retention in any cohort.
Someone in the household is always engaging, so these accounts churn less.
Sharon measures cannibalization by switching campaigns off in separate geos. Simply turned off app campaigns in one Google geo and web campaigns in another. The team then watched organic traffic and the interplay between apps and between iOS and Android.
He says "it's never about perfect attribution". The aim is enough truth in CAC modeling to place the next dollar.
Sharon treats Apple and Google as partners, not enemies. Simply shares plans, roadmaps and challenges with its account managers and meets them biweekly on Simply Piano. That brought beta access and design partnerships.
Simply sent developers to WWDC with real sound recognition problems and got help from Apple engineers. Sharon dislikes the fees but accepts them as part of a close relationship.
Sharon builds for new devices early, without expecting revenue. Each new device such as Vision Pro or Android XR gets a fast pod working closely with the platform so a product ships at launch. Sharon led the first Simply build on Vision Pro.
He says it is not about an ROI right now with the direct revenues, but about being present in that future. A learner who finished a first course got a standing ovation from a Carnegie Hall crowd.
Sharon uses a web flow to move scrollers into a download mindset. People on social networks are in a lean-back mindset, and being sent straight to an app store is friction. A web flow of a few minutes opens with a simple question and explains the value first.
It helped Simply succeed on Facebook for the first time. About 20% of revenue in the past year came from web flows. No conversion or revenue figures are given for the gain itself.
Sharon builds one flow from ad to onboarding to paywall. A parent-targeted ad leads to an onboarding that speaks to a parent's pains and needs, through to the paywall. Deterministic attribution on the web makes this personalization possible.
Simply's tests of the full path raised conversion significantly.
Sharon sees web flows as a way to reach new audiences, not save fees. Fee savings and attribution help but are not the main driver. The bigger value is incremental audiences who would not download straight from an ad.
The flow explains value rather than copying the store page, so expectations are right when the paywall appears. He says web payments are a money decision, not a protest against Apple.
Sharon tests routing instead of fixing it. Creative, placement and destination are tested together, and web to app is one route among several. The right mix varies with each app's maturity and creative.
Older Facebook audiences need more warming up. He cites Leon Cass of Speak, who tied Facebook success to age: millennials are app native and older users need more time.
Sharon holds the paywall timing to testing, not a fixed rule. Simply Guitar's first paywall does not mention the family plan. Some apps start with a soft paywall and others wait until users feel the value.
The choice depends on the app's maturity, the expectations the ad set and the current campaigns. The web is also where the whole bundle can be sold as one Simply offer.
Sharon built Simply's own Big Mac style purchasing power index. Instead of converting currency, Simply combined purchasing power with other factors about how people value learning an instrument or drawing. It rolled one modeled strategy out to all geos as a single test.
ARPU rose dramatically in most geos. A few geos did not respond and were adapted, and prices are updated as the app matures and new audiences arrive.
Sharon moves to monthly plans only when retention is strong. Every usage gain shows up as a renewal at the next month, while annual plans bring cash up front but hide usage for a year. Simply moved after heavy pricing tests and only where monthly usage was strong.
Mature apps see better LTV on monthly. Younger apps still split plans and keep testing. He says the move "works only when you have good enough retention renewals on your monthly plans."
Sharon treats up-front annual cash as financing, not proof. Simply uses early cash to improve the product, not for financial engineering. Users who want the discount get annual and those who want flexibility get monthly.
An annual plan can also scare off beginners, since even 15 minutes a day is a commitment and a yearly price adds a financial one.
Sharon tests annual discounts between 60% and 75%. Simply varies the discount, sometimes 60% and sometimes 70 to 75%. It keeps the monthly price high enough to protect LTV while attracting users who prefer annual.
There is no single right discount, and it depends on the plan and on user psychology such as anchoring.
Sharon skips weekly plans because skills build slowly. A $5 weekly price feels like a coffee, so friction drops. But learners cannot tell after a week whether they play or sing better, and a weekly renewal keeps asking if they are sure they want to pay.
Simply tested weekly in some apps but does not offer it now. Sharon notes weekly plans are mostly used by low-retention apps chasing short-term LTV.
Sharon says localization is about trust, so it must go deep. It covers the country's songs, app translation, store, pricing and creatives. If only the first-time experience is localized, users lose trust deeper in the product.
Consistency in tone, UI and currency matters more than breadth. The team goes all in only after confidence is built, and he says localization is not the riskiest part of growth.
Simply picked Japan with a model, then paywall conversion fell. The model estimated incremental ARPO per geo and confidence of reaching it. For Simply Piano the team added anime songs, a changed UI, localized store creatives and Japanese currency.
Every metric grew as expected except paywall conversion, which decreased.
A local country manager showed Sharon what the model could not. The Japanese country manager said users expect a detailed story of the company, founders and values, plus social quotes and lots of color. Simply built a very long one-pager paywall, and conversion skyrocketed.
This is the opposite of the clean paywall best practice. Everything else had been done properly, so the gap was invisible from outside.
A soft paywall win on ARPO hid poor-fit users. Simply Piano put a soft paywall at the end of onboarding and the team celebrated for months. Later the subscribers turned out to be touch-only users with no keyboard, signed up for a year with little value to gain.
Deeper segmentation showed kids did find value, replaying songs until they got a keyboard. The soft paywall now stays only on accounts with kids profiles.
Sharon turns delightful product moments into ads. Simply Draw used AI to bring a child's finished drawing to life. Kids ran to show their parents, who saw positive screen time, and adding it to the first-time experience raised the paying pool.
Parents also share the results organically on Instagram. Sharon says "Many of our creatives are being inspired by real usage."