#216: Balancing profit, people and planet in mobile apps with Yves Benchimol, CEO & Co-Founder at WeWard

Business of Apps Podcast

This episode will a bit usual. Previously, we covered a broad spectrum of app marketing topics that are on all people’s minds - user acquisition, app retention, app monetization, app subscriptions and so forth. Today, we’re going to touch on something that unfortunately isn’t appreciated as much as it should be.

If you ever watched the 2020’s movie The Social Dilemma, that explores the dangerous human impact of social networking, you would remember that addiction was in the heart of the issue that the movie explored.

Well, in today’s episode we’ll be talking about how to build apps that engage with people on a big scale and yet - they don’t lead to forming an addiction. To that end, we have Yves (ИВ) to talk about his app WeWard as a great example.

Today’s Topics Include:

• Yves background
• What is WeWard
• How to make money while promoting eco-friendly behaviors without encouraging unhealthy screen habits
• Making sure streaks enhance user well-being and don't foster addictive behaviour
• Benefiting users and the plant by driving behavior change
• Android or iOS?
• Leaving his smartphone at home, what features would Yves miss most?
• What features he would like to see added to his smartphone?

Links and Resources:

• Yves Benchimol on LinkedIn
• WeWard
• Business Of Apps - connecting the app industry

Quotes from Yves Benchimol:

"Create a habit to people is very complicated, but when you create a habit. It's very difficult also to remove. Some people say that it's more difficult to remove a bad habit than creating a good habit. So to create a good habit, you have to use the classic tricks that the brain likes. And the brain, if you read some cognitive science book, you will understand that every brain is working the same."

"If you want to launch an app, I would suggest try to focus on the main benefit of the app, try to run the most simple version of the app. Remove every aspect, like the streak was not part of the app when we launched it, the gamification was very little. The concept was giving reward to people for working, so it was just a step counter and you earn one coin every 1,000 steps.

Today the app is well more developed with social environment gamification but at the beginning we just need to verify the concept and you can have thousand and hundred of thousand of users with a very simple concept, you just need like to simplify as much as possible, because this is where you will have the ability to test more quickly and to improve your app and to test and learn the most faster."

Host

Business Of Apps - connecting the app industry since 2012