App Growth Annual 2026: full agenda and speaker lineup

We’re less than a month away from App Growth Annual, RevenueCat’s event for the people building, growing, and shaping what’s next in apps. On October 21, thousands of app professionals will be gathering in New York and online worldwide for a day packed with candid lessons from some of the biggest names in the App Store.

We’ve been polishing the agenda for months, and it’s finally ready for your eyes: five keynotes and 36 workshops, split across exclusive virtual and in-person content. So whether you’re joining us in NYC or from the comfort of your home office, you’ll be leaving with fresh ideas and the momentum to ship them.

Keynotes

Here’s what’s heading up the main stage: five sessions from app leaders about what worked, what didn’t, and what they’d do differently — straight from the people building the apps.

All the keynotes will be available to watch on YouTube after the event. So even if October 21 is back-to-back meetings for you, there’s no need to miss anything. Register now to get sent the replays as soon as they drop.

Confidence engineering: why your app's activation flow is probably too short — Ravi Mehta, ex-CPO, Tinder

Every mobile growth team obsesses over friction — fewer screens, fewer fields, fewer taps between install and activation. It's conventional wisdom, and it's incomplete. One healthcare app replaced a three-step checkout with a twenty-five-step intake flow and conversion jumped 40%.

At Tinder, Ravi's team did the opposite — stripping onboarding to under two minutes to pull in millions who'd never have finished an eHarmony profile. In this session he'll share a framework for diagnosing your own flow: when to strip friction to the bone, when to add steps that earn trust, and how to spot the 'death zone' where teams split the difference and get the worst of both.

You'll leave with: a way to audit your own funnel, step-by-step, and a sharper question than "should this be shorter?"

Breaking the rules on purpose: the contrarian bets that built Babbel — Julie Hansen, CRO & US CEO, Babbel

Every subscription app has heard the same advice: never sell lifetime deals, don't bother with web checkout, go freemium to keep the funnel full, spend only on acquisition… Well, Babbel has ignored most of the advice — and is still here, 30 million subscriptions later.

As Babbel’s US CEO for nearly a decade, Julie had a hand in most of those bets. She’ll walk through why they made them against the advice of the day, which ones they’d make again, and what they cost Babbel.

You’ll leave with: the insight to discern which rules in your own playbook are real, and which are just habits the industry hasn’t questioned yet.

Built to burn: how to turn a high-churn product into good subscription economics — Greg Cohn, Co-founder & CEO, Burner

Burner is an app for disposable phone numbers, with a button that destroys the very thing you're paying for… yet it has been growing and profitable for almost a decade. In fact, half of Burner’s new subscription revenue on iOS is from users who previously churned.

Greg says they didn’t plan it that way. But along the ride, they learned not all churn is failure — some of it, in fact, is success. His session will tell the story of that success: from designing for profitable churn, to cohort math and monetization architecture.

You’ll leave with: analytical frameworks and mechanics you can steal — and a sneak preview of the new-to-the-market retention hack Burner’s testing next.

Speedrunning subscription monetization: what Tolan learned when the AI bill came due — Ajay Mehta, Co-founder, Tolan

For a decade, subscription apps ran on one assumption: the marginal cost of a subscriber is roughly zero. AI broke that. Now free users cost real money, and the heaviest users can cost more than they pay.

At Tolan, they learned this lesson in week one, when the OpenAI bill outgrew their userbase and a paywall became a survival mechanism. Since then, the team has run a decade’s worth of monetization plays in double-time. Ajay will recount each of these decisions; what they expected, what actually happened, and how they came to their ultimate monetization rule: would they be happy explaining it on a podcast?

You’ll leave with: a sense of what the end of zero marginal cost means for your own pricing, whether you're building an AI app today or adding AI to the one you have.

RevenueCat product update ahead of 2027 — Jacob Eiting, CEO & Co-founder, and Miguel Carranza, CTO & Co-founder, RevenueCat

We won’t spoil too much about our product keynote, but you can expect a retro on the last 12 months, roadmap reveals, and live product launches.

You’ll leave with: an insider's look at what's next for RevenueCat.

In-person workshops (block one)

One of App Growth Annual’s biggest opportunities is getting the right people in one room, asking the same questions you’ve been wondering about. Whatever your focus is right now, there’s a hands-on session to help, filled with genuinely useful conversations.

Apple Ads 2026, beyond the basics: what changed, what matters, and how to act on it — Thomas Petit, Growth Consultant

Apple Ads has changed more in the last two years than in the eight before it. This interactive session skips the 101 and tackles four core questions: Which numbers can you trust? Should you let Apple decide how you buy inventory? How do you test and iterate on creatives? And how much should you really buy?

Each question is unpacked with Thomas’s personal experience, how to use the functionality, and where the numbers can fool you. Expect questions, strong takes, and polite disagreement. Not recommended for ASA beginners.

You’ll leave with: a varied set of perspectives and focused examples to help inform complex ASA decisions.

Signal engineering: build your subscription app signal plan — Shumel Lais, Co-founder, Day30

Want to send better signals to Meta, Google, and TikTok, but your event tracking and measurement setup isn’t ready for it?

Shumel’s workshop will have attendees audit their own subscription funnel from install through renewal, scoring your existing events against speed, volume, intent, commercial value, and measurement reliability. Take part to identify which signals to test first and what you need to fix before you begin.

You’ll leave with: a signal readiness scorecard and prioritized action plan for your growth and data teams.

The executive roundtable: networking and problem-solving with fellow leaders at scaled apps — Ron Schneidermann, former CEO, AllTrails

No agenda, no slides — just candid discussion and problem-solving with a small group of fellow app executives. Ron kicks the session off with lessons from scaling AllTrails to millions of subscribers, then opens the floor to questions and discussions on team building, product decisions, and growth challenges.

You’ll leave with: fresh perspectives from peers who’ve been there too.

The viral iteration loop: adapt trending content into high-converting creative — Diego Kafie, CEO, Noise

Viral content already exists in your niche — the opportunity is turning it into creative that drives installs for your app. In this workshop attendees will search live for what's working on TikTok and Instagram in your category, break down why it's performing, and adapt it into iterations you can test as paid or organic creative.

You’ll leave with: a shortlist of proven content angles tailored to your app, and a repeatable process for finding and adapting them.

How AI is changing subscription app monetization — Phil Carter, Growth Advisor

LLM-powered features carry non-trivial costs, but most subscription apps are still approaching monetization as though their gross margins haven't changed. Spend this session reviewing the strategies that the best AI apps are using to adapt: restricting freemium, shortening trials, adding higher-priced AI tiers. Wrap up by benchmarking your own metrics against peer apps and apply proven pricing tools (Van Westendorp, Gabor-Granger, MaxDiff, Conjoint) to your own packaging.

You’ll leave with: a benchmarking tool, a pricing study template, and playbooks for adapting your monetization to the AI era.

How to launch and grow your app in Japan and Korea — Hyerin Choe, Customer Success Lead, AB180

Japan and Korea are two of the highest-spending mobile markets in the world, but most Western apps stall at entry because the playbook that works in the US doesn't translate. Join Hyerin Choe from Korean app growth agency, AB180, to identify where your current growth strategy breaks down and build a localized go-to-market plan.

You’ll leave with: a market-entry framework covering channels, positioning, and the cultural signals that data alone won't reveal.

Build a user research system that runs itself — Ekaterina Gamsriegler, Head of Marketing and Growth, MyGroove

Most apps run user research in bursts, then go dark for months. Ekaterina will walk through how to design an always-on feedback system for your app instead. From choosing the right research inputs (cancellation surveys, in-app prompts, price sensitivity polls), to writing the templates, mapping distribution channels, and building a cadence that feeds insights into your experimentation pipeline without becoming a full-time job.

You’ll leave with: a research system that’s ready to launch next week.

Beyond the first growth hire: building a remote growth and marketing team that scales from 0 to $50M — Olivier Lemarié, VP of Growth, Photoroom

Growth can't stay founder-led forever, but knowing when to specialize, who should own what, and which capability to build next is where scaling companies stall. Olivier’s workshop helps you map your current growth org against the capabilities needed to scale subscription revenue — paid, lifecycle, product growth, pricing, creative, data, international — and identify ownership gaps, missing roles, and your next hires.

You’ll leave with: a growth org map and prioritized hiring plan for your next stage.

Roast my ASO: your App Store listing, audited live — Steve P. Young, Founder, App Masters

Bring your App Store listing and get it torn apart live. Steve will audit real participants' metadata, screenshots, and keyword strategies against what's actually driving installs in their category — with pre-prepared case studies showing where AI-assisted ASO is outperforming manual approaches.

You’ll leave with: knowledge of exactly what’s costing you rankings and downloads — and what to fix first.

Find the moment your app earns the right to ask for money — Olha Yohansen, Group Product Manager, FareHarbor

Has your app earned the user’s trust by the time it asks for money? Olha’s workshop will get you mapping your own onboarding to pinpoint where users first feel “this app gets me” — and check whether that moment lands before or after you ask them to pay. If it's after, you're converting on template momentum, not trust.

You’ll leave with: a redesigned onboarding sequence that puts the aha! moment where it belongs.

In-person workshops (block two)

Our second round of workshops offer 10 hands-on sessions packed with in-the-trenches tactics to grow your app. We know it’s hard to choose, but whichever session you attend, you’re guaranteed to leave with new ideas and experiments to try right away.

Meta UA in 2026: what still works, what's changed, and how scale changes the game — Gessica Bicego, Independent Consultant

The right Meta campaign structure depends on your spend level, but most teams use the same setup whether they're spending $10K or $500K a month. Gessica’s workshop will group attendees by budget range where you’ll work through how campaign structure, optimisation approach, setup (CBO, Advantage+, W2A, signal engineering), and creative strategy should adapt for your scale.

You’ll leave with: understanding of which structure fits your current spend and what to change as you grow.

Google Ads for iOS: how to make it work — Ashley Black, Founder, Candid Consulting

Google has been overlooked as a serious iOS acquisition channel, but the platform has changed, and the opportunity is bigger than most teams realize. Join Ashley to evaluate your own app against Google's current campaign types, identify which formats match your funnel and audience, and stress-test whether the setup pain is worth the payoff for your specific scale and category.

You’ll leave with: a clear yes/no on Google Ads for your app, and a plan for what to test first.

How your ad creative shapes your LTV — Nataliia Drozd, Independent Consultant

The creative that lowers your CPA isn't always the creative that attracts subscribers who stay. Viral hooks and trending formats can flood your funnel with users whose expectations don't match your product — and you won't see the damage until retention data catches up. In Nataliia’s workshop, you’ll map the relationship between your creative narratives and the customer segments they attract, then test your assumptions in a simulation using real campaign data.

You’ll leave with: knowledge of which creative angles to scale, and which are quietly eroding your LTV…

Hybrid monetization: add new revenue without hurting your subscription — Cristian Rotari, Product Growth Consultant

Not every user will subscribe, but that doesn't mean they're worth zero. In this session you’ll map your user segments, identify which audiences are under-monetized, and evaluate which hybrid tactics fit your product: ads, IAPs, credits, affiliates, partnerships.

Finish by building a monetization ladder for your app and running a cannibalization check to confirm new revenue streams are truly incremental, not cannibalizing existing subscriptions.

You’ll leave with: one experiment that’s ready to test in the next 30 days.

Design habit mechanics that don't fade after week one — Yves Benchimol, CEO & Co-founder, WeWard

Gamification mechanics lose their impact the moment novelty wears off. Most teams respond by layering on more features, rather than questioning whether the mechanic should exist at all. Join Yves to apply a motivation-first framework to your own product and identify what's actually driving repeated use. You’ll then evaluate which mechanics are earning their place, and find where simplifying or removing features would improve retention more than adding new ones.

You’ll leave with: a clear map of which habit mechanics to keep, kill, or redesign.

Ship faster with AI without learning slower — Ethan Garr, Co-host, The Breakout Growth Podcast

AI has collapsed the time between idea and shipped feature, but most teams haven't upgraded their learning loops to match. You're deploying faster, but are you discovering what users value faster, or just building confidently in the wrong direction?

Ethan will walk through how to map your current growth initiatives across a Velocity vs. Learning Matrix, to identify where AI is genuinely accelerating progress, and where speed is masking the absence of real customer signals.

You’ll leave with: a prioritized view of where to let AI run and where human judgment is key to helping more users reach experiences they can’t live without.

Diagnose your biggest revenue bottleneck — Alice Muir Kocourková, App Growth Expert

You've spent the last quarter optimizing something, but was it the right thing? Most teams pour effort into onboarding when the real opportunity is renewal, or obsess over trial conversion when Month 3 churn is quietly draining more revenue.

Join Alice to score each stage of your subscription lifecycle against industry benchmarks, identify where the gap between your app and the norm is largest, and prioritize fixes using an Impact vs. Effort framework.

You’ll leave with: your bottleneck diagnosed, and a 90-day plan to close it completely.

Segmentation as a growth engine: how to scale across segments without breaking efficiency — Bohdan Lopatiy, Product Director, Flo

Most teams know they should segment, then hit the cost of it: split your users enough ways and every test is underpowered, every cohort too small to read, and the efficiency you were chasing disappears into a hundred experiments nobody can act on.

For this workshop, you'll slice your user base several ways, work out which splits actually change what you'd build differently, and find the segment you're currently treating as an average when it isn't.

You’ll leave with: a segmentation model sized to your actual traffic.

From investment to exit: tactics for raising capital and selling your business — Eric Crowley, Partner, GP Bullhound

Whether you're preparing for a fundraise or positioning for acquisition, the gap between ‘growing nicely’ and ‘investor-ready’ is usually a handful of specific metrics and positioning decisions. Eric’s workshop will offer a chance to benchmark your business against what buyers and investors are actually looking for right now, identify gaps in your financial story, and pressure-test your positioning with the room.

You’ll leave with: readiness to navigate your next round or exit conversation with confidence.

Roast my web funnel — Nathan Hudson, founder, Perceptycs

Your web funnel follows the playbook. But the playbook doesn't account for your category, your traffic, or the assumptions baked into every ‘best practice’ you copied.

Come along to Nathan’s web funnel roast and put your funnel on screen to get it torn apart from ad to checkout: what's cargo-culted, what's actually earning its place, and which experiments carry hidden risk.

You’ll leave with: prioritized test hypotheses and the context for why the obvious fix might not be yours.

In-person workshops (block three)

Wrapping up the day, our final block of workshops are definitely last but not least. Expect intimate conversations, practical takeaways, and new playbooks to take home.

Affiliate marketing: when it works and how to start — David Vargas, App Growth Consultant

Most apps treat affiliate marketing as an afterthought or assume it only works for e-commerce. But at scale, it can deliver high-intent users at a fraction of your Meta CPAs — if you pick the right partners and structure the right payouts.

David’s workshop will give you the chance to assess whether your app has the economics and category fit for affiliate marketing, map your ideal partner types, and design a commission structure that protects your margins.

You’ll leave with: a go/no-go decision and a 30-day launch plan.

Build an organic-to-paid acquisition engine — Shane Troy, Co-founder & Partner, Cousin Labs

Organic and paid teams rarely drive the same outcome, and the translation layer between them is where most growth teams leave the biggest gains on the table. In this session, you’ll map the exact loop that turns organic content into scalable paid creative: hypothesis design, creator selection and coaching, asset tagging, feedback loops, and the velocity payoff when winning formats feed directly into paid briefing.

You’ll leave with: a playbook to connect your organic and paid programs immediately.

Your creative pipeline is broken and more AI won't fix it — Elise Zareie, Head of Paid Social, Lingokids

AI handles analysis, iteration, and automation well, but when it's producing your actual ad creative, you often get volume without differentiation, or content that erodes trust with your audience. Join Elise’s session to audit your current pipeline and separate where AI earns its place, versus where it’s producing sameness. Finish by designing the right mix for your vertical: what stays AI, what needs human creators, and how to build that alternative without blowing your budget.

You’ll leave with: a creative production map tailored to your app and audience.

Ad monetization playbook for subscription apps — Felix Braberg, Ad Monetization Consultant

Your app is sitting on a monetization layer it's probably not using (or not using well). Ad revenue data reveals what each user segment is actually worth and whether they should be subscribing or staying on a free, ad-supported tier. This workshop covers how to read impression data as a willingness-to-pay signal, segment users accordingly, and set differentiated pricing.

You’ll leave with: a segmentation framework and a step-by-step tracking setup guide.

Make your app a habit: the lifecycle messaging that keeps people coming back — George Deglin, CEO, OneSignal

How do you make your app part of your customers' routine? Join this workshop to identify a behavior worth repeating, map where users drop off before they get there, and work out which of those moments can actually be fixed with messaging — and which are product problems a message won't solve. Wrap up by drafting a three-touchpoint journey with the audience, timing and rules behind it.

You’ll leave with: a brief you can hand to your team, from draft messages to behavioral rules and a measurement plan.

From 1 to 100 A/B tests per month: a practical framework for scaling experimentation — Olga Berezovsky, Data Scientist

Running more A/B tests doesn’t necessarily mean learning faster. As experimentation programs grow, tests often compete for the same traffic, run for months, and produce results that teams don’t trust. In this workshop, you’ll learn how to decide which ideas deserve a fully powered A/B test, which should be evaluated using faster methods, and which aren’t worth testing. You’ll then spend time scoring your current test portfolio by potential business value, identifying where rigor is slowing down learning, and redesigning your pipeline to complete more meaningful experiments.

You’ll leave with: a prioritized experimentation roadmap sized to your actual traffic and resources.

Your AI marketing team: what it can run, what it can't, and what to do about the rest — Jessica Gotti, Head of Performance Marketing, Bend Health & Fitness

One marketer with AI can now do the work of a small team. This session breaks marketing into single functions and asks one question for each: can AI run it alone, does it just help, or is it still a person's job? Each answer comes from practice — real projects where AI took over, helped, or failed.

You’ll leave with: a map of the AI marketing team and real examples to make it work.

$1M to $10M ARR: the founder-to-CEO mistakes that stall your next stage — Josh Peleg, Vice President M&A and Business Development, BlueThrone

The skills that got you to $1M ARR won't get you to $10M, but they’ll get you to this workshop and that’s pretty close. Join M&A guru Josh to audit your own setup and mindset across four dimensions — growth, product, monetization, and team – and identify which founder habits are now bottlenecks. Bring your real growing pains; the room will workshop them together.

You’ll leave with: knowledge of the three changes needed to unlock your next stage.

Fix your activation before it kills your retention — Daphne Tideman, Growth Consultant

Your activation metric is probably measuring activity, not predicting revenue — which means every onboarding test you've shipped this year optimised for the wrong thing. Daphne’s session will help diagnose whether your drop-off is a trust, context, or value problem, before you’ll define the one user action that actually predicts LTV, and pressure-test it with the room.

You’ll leave with: a validated activation hypothesis and one test to ship next week.

Hyper-personalization in app onboarding and monetization — Thomas Cotter, Principal, Elemental Growth

Many apps invest heavily in personalizing onboarding and monetization without seeing meaningful ROI. In this workshop, you’ll learn how to make personalization actually work: what information to collect, how to identify and prioritize opportunities, where and how to experiment, and what to measure. Thomas will walk through real examples, then put attendee apps on screen for live personalization teardowns and test ideas.

You’ll leave with: a shortlist of personalization tests to run, prioritized by likely impact.

Virtual workshops

You didn’t think we’d neglect those watching from home? Our online attendees have six insightful sessions to choose from, but even better — unlike the in-person workshops, these will be recorded and shared to watch back after the day. So no need to panic if you can’t decide which one to tune in to!

Make AI-generated ads that actually convert — Julien Daver, Head of User Acquisition at SplitMetrics Services

Generic AI creative tools promise to fix the production bottleneck of creative production every UA team is battling — but mostly, the output tanks your ROAS, or gets rejected by the network outright. For this session, Julien shares how his team actually integrates AI into their creative workflow, with real campaign data on what worked and what didn't.

You’ll leave with: a production framework built for mobile performance constraints, rather than a list of prompts.

From competitor ad to finished creative, in one hour — Sven Jürgens, App Growth Consultant & Advisor

Your competitors have already paid to find out what works in your category, and the results are sitting in a public database anyone can open. What are you waiting for?

Sven will share the whole process live: pulling a competitor's longest-running ads from the Meta Ad Library, lining up the first three seconds of each one until the pattern is obvious, then writing the brief and building the creative that answers it. Copying their ad might get you a worse version of theirs; but answering the pattern gets you yours.

You’ll leave with: a one-page checklist of the nine steps to run this process on your own category the next day.

6+1 AI workflows to scale Meta from your phone — Marcus Burke, Meta Ads & App Growth Advisor, Ctrl Shift

With AI, small and midsized teams can get much of the operating leverage that used to require a fully staffed marketing and growth team. In Marcus’s workshop, he’ll walk through the workflows used across real clients, all drawing on a shared memory that compounds as it learns your account, and how each one makes Meta easier to operate and scale.

You’ll leave with: real workflows Marcus runs across client accounts.

Copy that converts: the language-market fit teardown — Lisa Kennelly, Growth and Product Marketing Strategist, Klarna

AI-written onboarding and paywall copy reads fine but converts flat — because nobody fed it real customer language. In Lisa’s session you’ll learn how to mine App Store reviews, support tickets, and cancellation reasons for the actual phrases, anxieties, and objections your users use, then watch a section of conversion copy rewritten live using what that turns up.

You’ll leave with: a repeatable method for mining customer language going forward.

Building apps people want: the playbook behind 23 million organic downloads — Bria Sullivan, CTO, Honey B Games

Most app developers build features nobody talks about. In this session, Bria will share the system she uses to decide what to build, and the process of making sure the ideas are compelling enough that users will tell their friends. From researching the market to running surveys, customer interviews, and testing visual directions on real people, this is Bria’s full workflow.

You’ll leave with: a repeatable process for designing features around what your target users actually want.

Yulia Lennox, Genesis Tech

Details on the final workshop are coming soon, so stay tuned.

Other highlights

But App Growth Annual isn’t just about keynotes and workshops. Also on the agenda:

Who wants to be a millionARR?

The live interactive game show where app growth knowledge meets dramatic tie-breaker questions, phone-a-friend lifelines, and (of course) real buzzers. If you want to take part you’ll have to make it through the audience qualifier round, before beating fellow contestants in different categories to make it to the top of the leaderboard.

With questions covering app trivia, industry knowledge and growth benchmarks, we’d suggest you start polishing up your knowledge now… (The State of Subscription Apps is good revision material!)

Exclusive virtual content

Online attendees get access to all the main stage content, streamed live from New York, but they also get to enjoy a whole hub of virtual-only material. Including: a networking breakout room, virtual Expo Hall to speak to RevenueCat and partners, and 1:1 speed dating-style networking.

Best of all, you can enter The Meowtrix, an interactive challenge for your App Growth Annual experience. Gather the most points among attendees by checking off specific side quests to climb the leaderboard and claim your prize.

The legendary afterparty

Last year saw Jason Paige (of Pokémon theme fame) bring the energy with a performance of RevenueCat’s official theme song. We then had DJ Jazzy Jeff soundtrack the evening while folks networked, got airbrush tattoos, custom caricatures, and enjoyed plenty of delicious street food.

Will Jason Paige be back this year? Who knows. Will we play the RevenueCat theme song regardless? Probably. Will there be tasty food and free drinks? Of course!

And that’s our full lineup for App Growth Annual. A jam-packed schedule filled with insights, inspiration, and new connections — maybe you’ll even meet your future co-founder.

We’ll see you on October 21!