WeWard launched in France in 2019 as a free app that pays you to walk: 1,000 steps earns points you can convert into cash or gift cards. It grew for four years without buying a single ad. "Didn't spend any money in Meta, Google," says founder Yves Benchimol. When Jacob Eiting checks whether that covers direct user acquisition too, the answer is "Never. Only organic and press."
The press wasn't free, exactly. Yves had worked with a French PR agency at his first company and hired them again at, by his recollection, "maybe between three and 5,000 per month" — on deferred payment, because WeWard had no money yet. About seven or eight months after launch the app landed a segment on one of France's biggest prime-time shows. "I think it was in less than five minutes, we got 300,000 downloads," he says. "Of course, the app crash instantly, it was terrible."
The crash didn't matter. The inbox filled with people asking to get in, and when the team checked retention it was, in his words, "very high compared to the average market." So they added ads, on the logic that at roughly 100,000 daily users an ad-supported free app starts to pay. The retainer, meanwhile, kept producing. "Some months you have zero, but some months you have half a million downloads," Yves says. "So half a million download, you know how much it costs in UA. You can pay the agency for 10 years easily."
The same playbook produced nothing in the US
Press worked in Italy and Spain as well. Then Yves moved to New York, with money this time, and "took one of the most expensive PR agency." The French success didn't repeat. His diagnosis is unsparing: "It's just due to the fact that I'm nobody here in this country." American journalists wanted a story, and "one of the biggest app in France" wasn't one. "Did you raise money with someone impressive? Did you do something crazy?" he recalls being asked. "And no, we are a profitable startup that's coming. And so it was not enough."
Being French didn't help either. "Being French is not a benefit, except if you are in the wine or the luxury brands, or the cheese maybe." US users needed to see the product as American, and the product itself had to reach the level of polish he saw in US banking apps compared to French ones.
So he went looking for a US icon, ideally an athlete with wellness values, and started asking VCs and agencies for introductions. The search was deliberate; the meeting wasn't. At lunch with his family in a New York restaurant, Venus Williams sat down at the next table and said hello. He waited for a lull, walked over, and pitched. Williams was sitting with the founder of a European tech investment bank, and the questions turned to day-seven retention and LTV within minutes. The deal that followed went further than the ambassador arrangement Yves had in mind. "Okay, I want shares, so I want to be also investor," she told him.
Two years on, he is careful about what that bought. "There was multiple impacts and it's very difficult to quantify." But the mechanisms are clear enough to list: hiring got easier because the company had credibility, CAC comes down when creative carries a known face, co-produced content lifts retention and LTV, her social posts drive organic installs, and journalists who ignored a French founder reply when a conversation with Venus Williams is on offer. "You will not be able to quantify day one," he says. "It's progressive."
Nike, Adidas and Amazon pay WeWard a commission
WeWard may be one of the most diversified apps in the business, and the subscription came last. Ads work because the audience is huge. In-app purchases exist. The premium tier, built on RevenueCat, launched well after everything else and is "not a major source of revenue" yet, though it is growing fast. And then there is affiliate. "We have Nike, Adidas, Expedia, Booking.com, all of Amazon, it's part of the clients of WeWard," Yves says.
He is quick to say he didn't invent anything. Affiliate is a mature market with the tracking already built, and brands like it because it is performance-based. "They just pay a commission of a sales." WeWard went to affiliate platforms and to brands directly, offered to promote them for a share of the sales generated, and sold the environment: a wellness and fitness context brands want to be seen in. The team also says no. "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." Jacob's aside that the best CPMs in 2026 probably come from gambling apps went unchallenged.
WeWard refuses to measure time in app
Every revenue stream sits under one rule. "We don't track the time spent into the app because we don't want to be a target for the team," Yves says. The number WeWard watches is steps, on the theory that a user whose lifestyle hasn't changed in six months leaves anyway. Every feature ships through an A/B test that has to move that number. "So for us, the success of the number of steps of people is the success of the company."
The newest test of that rule is a walking mode that locks TikTok, Instagram and other apps until the user hits a step goal, making screen time itself the reward. The head of growth in New York vibe-coded it and shipped it a few months ago. "We already measure that people that use these features walk 10% more," Yves says. For a company whose ads depend on people opening the app, building a feature that sends them outside is a strange thing to celebrate. It's also the point.
In the full episode, Yves also explains why WeWard dropped its original Ethereum-based rewards after three or four months when users said loyalty points were fine, why he considers deciding to stop the hardest part of any pivot, and why an 80-person company in 29 countries still counts B2B as its biggest failure of the year.