Sub Club by RevenueCat

On the podcast: growing for four years on press and organic alone, affiliate deals as an underexplored revenue stream, and why deciding to pivot is the hardest part.
Top Takeaways:
🗞️ A PR retainer can beat paid UA for a mass-market app
A $3–5K monthly retainer produced months with half a million downloads and four years of growth with zero Meta or Google spend.
🤝 Affiliate deals are the revenue stream most subscription apps still ignore
Brands pay commission only on sales, so the pitch to Nike-sized partners is low-risk for them and the deals are reached directly, not invented.
📏 Pick the metric that is the user's outcome and A/B test every feature against it
A walking app that refuses to track time in app and measures steps instead shipped a feature that lifted steps 10% by locking social media behind a step goal.
🌍 A growth playbook that works in one country can fail completely in the next
The PR strategy that pulled 300,000 downloads from a single French TV segment produced nothing in the US, where nobody knew the founder or the app.
⭐ A celebrity works harder as a shareholder than as a spokesperson 
An ambassador-plus-investor deal changed hiring, press replies, CAC and retention at once, though the impact can be difficult to precisely quantify.
⏱️ At scale, app review times are a growth constraint, not an inconvenience
The more parallel A/B tests you run, the more a 24-hour (or five-day) release cycle caps how fast you can learn.

About Yves Benchimol:
🚶 Founder of WeWard, a free mobile app backed by Venus Williams designed to make walking a more rewarding part of people's lives. WeWard’s mission is simple: to get more people walking the world over.
👋 LinkedIn

🚀WeWard 
🖥️ WeWard Careers

💬WeWard on X

Follow us on X: 
David Barnard - @drbarnard
Jacob Eiting - @jeiting
RevenueCat - @RevenueCat
SubClub - @SubClubHQ
Episode Highlights:
[00:00] Meet Yves Benchimol of WeWard
[01:36] Why Yves left B2B retail analytics
[05:04] Shutting down a business to start over
[07:31] Building an app that rewards walking
[09:29] Why WeWard ditched blockchain
[12:24] Choosing user value over technical complexity
[15:55] Loyalty, gamification, and motivational layers
[17:41] Why WeWard measures steps, not screen time
[18:37] Building revenue beyond subscriptions
[21:46] How affiliate marketing fits WeWard
[23:54] Using PR as the first acquisition channel
[25:18] 300,000 downloads in under five minutes
[28:32] Four years without paid UA, and why US press fell flat
[31:12] Why US growth required local credibility
[33:11] Pitching Venus Williams at lunch
[37:47] What Venus Williams brings as ambassador and investor
[42:01] What's next for WeWard's global growth
[43:14] Staying ahead of copycat apps
[46:25] Locking social apps until users walk
[48:27] Motivational layers and staying focused on walking
[50:11] Localizing rewards across 29 countries
[52:35] Why growth strategies change by market
[54:10] Moving to the US to scale WeWard
[57:13] Why big growth requires bigger bets
[1:00:06] Biggest win: rebuilding the onboarding
[1:00:46] Biggest fail: returning to B2B
[1:01:46] Why mobile app iteration is still too slow

On the podcast: scaling to $10M ARR with a team of ten, having every employee do two user interviews a week, and why their hard paywall "win" backfired.

Top Takeaways:
🧪 Trial-start rate is the wrong scoreboard 
A hard paywall and a no-exit discount both lifted trial starts, then refunds spiked by more than the gain; judge paywall tests on net revenue after refunds, on a matured cohort.
🗣️ Every employee does two user interviews a week, engineers included 
Automated invites to a mixed sample of users book whoever has calendar space, so the whole team hears customers directly instead of through a PM.
💳 Charge from day one to find out who you're building for 
A plain $10-a-month paywall with a one-week trial at launch filtered for willingness to pay and freed the team to work on onboarding and the core product instead of pricing tests.
🧩 Mixing other apps' playbooks is the worst strategy of all 
Duolingo's freemium base only works because it teaches the basics of everything to hobby learners; a product for high-intent professionals should ignore that base entirely.
📅 Lead with annual to know your channel ROI the week the trial ends 
Annual cash lands after the seven-day trial, so payback per channel is visible immediately and can be reinvested; monthly leaves you guessing between one month and 24.
🧑‍💻 $10M ARR with 10 people runs on owners, one meeting a week, and everyone shipping
Hire founder-type doers, hold a single Monday sync, and let AI coding tools turn the whole team, including a non-technical CEO, into builders.

About Anada Lakra:
Anada Lakra is the Co-Founder and CEO of BoldVoice, an AI accent and speech coach for the billion people who speak English as a second language. The app provides real-time feedback powered by our proprietary speech models and lessons from Hollywood accent coaches.
👋 LinkedIn
🗣️BoldVoice 

Follow us on X: 
David Barnard - @drbarnard
Jacob Eiting - @jeiting
RevenueCat - @RevenueCat
SubClub - @SubClubHQ

Episode Highlights:
[00:00] Building a subscription app by focusing on product value over paywall hacks 
[01:12] Anada's personal experience with communication barriers 
[08:53] The early founding story of BoldVoice 
[13:30] Why BoldVoice charged from day 1 
[16:36] Why over-optimizing paywalls distracts teams from improvement 
[18:40] Why mature net revenue after refunds is an important metric 
[22:04] How hard paywall experiments backfired once refunds were factored in 
[24:17] BoldVoice's reverse-trial freemium model & why it ignored the Duolingo playbook 
[33:32] How BoldVoice found its real ICP: professionals over students 
[36:42] Keeping customer obsession alive with user interviews 
[43:29] How Accent Oracle drove a major viral growth moment 
[48:33] BoldVoice's approach to paid growth and annual plans 
[50:45] How BoldVoice reached $10M ARR with 10 people 
[55:02] The expansion from accent training to spoken-English fluency 
[1:00:37] The stigma around accents and how BoldVoice hopes to change that

On the podcast: scaling Meta ads from zero to $100,000 a month, why they waited a year after launch before buying ads, and how a pricing page experiment shifted users toward annual subscriptions.

Top Takeaways:

📉 A big audience buys you a launch spike, not a growth engine
Even 7 million subscribers produce a bump at launch and a steady trickle after; durable growth still came from paid ads, SEO, and a product that converts cold traffic.
🧱 Fix trial-to-paid before you spend a dollar on ads 
A full year of product work before the first ad lifted the conversion floor for every channel, because paid traffic always converts colder than organic.
🧲 Cold traffic converts better on a quiz than in the App Store 
A long, personalized web quiz educates users, overcomes objections, and raises perceived value — and it beat direct-to-store traffic in a head-to-head test, which is why 90% of traffic goes there.
💰 Show annual first and shrink the perceived risk, not the price 
Presenting annual upfront with a day-by-day trial timeline and a promised day-12 reminder shifted plan choice from 60/40 to 75–80% annual, with no price change.
👯 A two-person plan is retention insurance disguised as a discount 
15% off for adding a workout partner gets 15% of trial starts to take it, raising order value and keeping both users subscribed longer.
🔬 70% of experiments fail on the first try — winners come from documenting why 
Locking in the problem before brainstorming solutions, and writing every test down, turns failures into iterations instead of dead ends.

About Ethan Ethier:
🏋️Head of Growth and Operations at Built With Science, a science-based fitness app founded with YouTuber Jeremy Ethier. Personalized workout plans, nutrition guidance, and AI-powered coaching designed to help users train with research-backed methods.
👋 LinkedIn
🚀 Built with Science 
🖥️ Built with Science Careers

Follow us on X: 
David Barnard - @drbarnard
Jacob Eiting - @jeiting
RevenueCat - @RevenueCat
SubClub - @SubClubHQ

On the podcast: hitting $10M ARR without ever testing a paywall, paying their own customers to help make video ads, and why you might want to turn away some potential customers.

Top Takeaways:
💸 You can reach $10M ARR with the growth playbook still in the box 
$1M to $10M in subscription ARR in two years, with no lifecycle email, no paywall test, and no SEO, TikTok, or AdWords. The precondition was over a year of giving the product away first.

🚪 Screening buyers out protects every metric that matters 
A web quiz that tells some visitors the product isn't for them caps conversion on purpose, because the wrong subscriber wrecks retention, reviews, and product signal.
🎬 Your own customers can be a creative engine 
Members submit an audition tape, get a weekly brief, and receive a flat fee in real money (not credits, not discounts) for any video that’s used as an ad.
🏷️ Where you put the hardware margin is a bet on where the value lives 
Sell the band at cost, roughly $80, and the $20 subscription carries the value; charge a premium for the device only if it reads as an object people want.

🆓 Hardware kills the free trial, so the free tier has to do the de-risking 
You can't give away a physical device, so the free tier becomes the proof of quality that a trial would normally provide.
🔬 Published research is a moat nobody can clone over a weekend
Opt-in anonymized data sharing, ethics sign-off, and peer-reviewed papers move no revenue number this quarter, but are exactly what a skeptical buyer finds when they research your product.

About Luke Martin-Fuller:
🫀Co-founder of Visible, a wearable activity tracker built for illness, not fitness. Real-time heart rate data and personalized insights help users pace activity within their energy envelope.
👋 LinkedIn
🛥️Visible

🖥️Visible Careers

💬Visible on X

Follow us on X: 
David Barnard - @drbarnard
Jacob Eiting - @jeiting
RevenueCat - @RevenueCat
SubClub - @SubClubHQ

Episode Highlights:
[00:00] From $1M to $10M ARR in Two Years
[01:57] How Long COVID Led to Visible's Founding
[04:18] 5,000 Waitlist Signups for a Product That Didn't Exist
[05:54] Building the Founding 100 With a Free App
[07:33] Raising Just Enough Money to Get Started
[08:27] Why Visible Won't Call Itself a Cure
[11:06] Turning Research Into a Credibility Engine
[16:49] The Stigma Around an Invisible Illness
[19:40] Why Lived Experience Matters for Investors and Employees
[21:57] Why an Existing Wearable Wasn't Good Enough
[24:46] Designing for Brain Fog and Limited Energy
[26:53] Partnering With Polar Instead of Building Hardware
[29:12] The Hidden Complexity of Hardware-Enabled Subscriptions
[30:59] Oura, Whoop, and the Three Hardware Pricing Models
[37:13] From $1M to $10M ARR Without Testing a Paywall
[42:09] Meta, UGC, and the One Paid Channel Behind Growth
[44:37] Paying Customers to Create and Test Video Ads
[47:56] Running an Influencer Program With a Team of Two
[51:21] Why Visible's Funnel Qualifies Customers Before They Buy
[55:24] Why Hardware Forces Visible to Sell Through the Web
[58:49] A 10-Day Journey From Landing Page to Purchase
[1:00:44] Using the Free App to De-Risk a Hardware Purchase
[1:02:08] A Quiet Series A at $7M in Revenue
[1:07:11] Biggest Win: Rebuilding the Web Funnel In-House
[1:08:00] Biggest Fail: An AI Feature Users Hated
[1:09:41] Why Growth Depends on Insurance, and Who Visible Is Hiring Next

On the podcast: crowdfunding millions of dollars to accelerate growth, the two-year subscription that transformed his CAC payback, and why removing signup friction backfired.

Top Takeaways:

💰 Raising money means selling your business
Equity crowdfunding turned 10,000 engaged users into 2,500 investors, and the smartest founders still raise half of what they think they need.
📈 A 2-year subscription can transform CAC payback
Offering 2 years at a ~30% discount ($183 vs. $129/year) pulls revenue forward, funding marketing spend the moment it happens.
🚧 Removing signup friction can backfire spectacularly
Killing account creation looked like a huge win in early tests, but multi-device sync complaints and support grief erased the gains at 100% rollout.
🤝 Not every mouth is worth the same in word of mouth 
Instructors and industry insiders who refuse affiliate kickbacks carry more trust than any paid channel, precisely because they aren't sales reps.
🧪 Most startups don't have the sample size to A/B test properly
With a billion users, testing is easy; without them it's dangerously easy to read whatever you want into the numbers while a metric further down the funnel quietly breaks.

About Jelte Liebrand:
🚀Founder of Savvy Navvy, a marine navigation app that is Google Maps for boats. Charts, tides, weather, and everything you need for sailing and motorboat navigation
👋 LinkedIn
🛥️ Savvy Navvy

🖥️ Savvy Navvy Careers

💬 Savvy Navvy on X

Follow us on X: 
David Barnard - @drbarnard
Jacob Eiting - @jeiting
RevenueCat - @RevenueCat
SubClub - @SubClubHQ

Episode Highlights:
[00:00] Six Days to an Oversubscribed Crowdfunding Raise 
[00:36] Introducing Jelte Liebrand of Savvy Navvy 
[01:46] A Bad Day at Google and a Yacht Race Sign-Up 
[03:09] Plotting Courses by Hand on a Racing Yacht 
[05:12] Realizing This Wasn't Just an Ocean Racer's Problem 
[06:10] Buying a Clipboard to Research the Boating Market 
[08:16] What AI Teaches Us About Shifting Expectations 
[13:15] Even Dropping a Pin Is Starting to Feel Dated 
[14:31] Sitting Down With VCs and Walking Away 
[16:46] What Equity Crowdfunding Actually Means 
[20:56] Why VC Only Fits a Narrow Set of Businesses
[24:44] Raise Half of What You Think You Need 
[27:31] Inside Savvy Navvy's First and Later Funding Rounds 
[29:25] No Preferred Shares and the Same Terms for Everyone 
[32:35] Why He Tells Founders Not to Raise At All 
[35:42] Setting a Revenue Multiple Instead of a VC Multiple 
[39:34] From Just an App to a B2B Platform 
[42:27] The Arc Boats Partnership That Opened Doors 
[46:50] Spotting Hardware Opportunities Like Tessie and Tesla 
[48:30] How the Manufacturer Flywheel Actually Works 
[52:57] Instructors, Chandleries, and Trust Without Kickbacks 
[57:44] Two-Year Subscriptions and the CAC Payback Win 
[01:00:13] Biggest fail of the year: The Anonymous Accounts Experiment That Backfired