Yoav Sharon
Leads growth and product at Simply (hellosimply.com), a portfolio of creative-learning apps; Simply Piano holds ~80% of the piano-learning app market by his account (2026), across 11 languages and 180 countries.
Strong on: web funnels as audience expansion (made Facebook work for Simply), multi-app cannibalisation measurement, family/multi-profile plans, monthly-vs-annual plan strategy, purchasing-power pricing indices and deep localisation (Japan).
Bias to keep in mind: a large, mature, well-funded company — tactics like full country localisation and fortnightly platform account-manager meetings assume scale. Shares few exact numbers.
Sources: sources/youtube/sub-club-by-revenuecat/ (Xv04J1cr16Q).
Notes citing Yoav Sharon
- International expansion — which markets, localization depth and local pricingLocalization as a growth lever in 2026 — start where you have an edge, use cheap similar-converting geos, price with a purchasing-power index (Simply's "Big Mac index" lifted ARPA), localize consistently end to end, and expect culture-specific surprises (Simply's Japan paywall; Replika's failed Japan bet).
- Is paid acquisition incremental? Organic ceilings, cannibalization and geo holdoutsOrganic-heavy apps (Replika, Solid Starts) eventually saturate their niche and find that new paid spend often cannibalizes organic; Simply measures this with geo holdouts (switch app or web campaigns off per country) and aims for "enough truth" in CAC models, not perfect attribution.
- Lead ads with the product's "magic moment" (often an AI feature)Features that make people react — PhotoRoom's AI background removal, Simply Draw bringing a child's drawing to life, Cal AI's photo-to-calories, Pingo's AI roasting pronunciation — make the best ad hooks, cut CAC and can unlock markets that never worked with paid ads.
- Partner ("gym buddy") and family/bundle plans in web funnelsAsking in the quiz whether the user wants to add a partner at 15% off each got ~15% of Built With Science trial starts to take it, raising order value and retention; Simply's multi-profile, multi-app family plans are its best-retaining segment and are sold on the web.
- Running funnel experiments — problem first, big swings, document everythingBuilt With Science's experiment process for web quiz, onboarding and paywalls — find the biggest drop-off, list problems before solutions, test bundled big swings when traffic is limited, write every test down (≈70% fail first time), and re-check winners months later by segment (Simply's soft-paywall lesson).
- Send paid traffic to a web quiz or straight to the App Store?Evidence from Built With Science (90% of paid traffic to a long web quiz after it beat direct-to-store head to head) and Simply (web flows made Facebook work for the first time, ~20% of Simply Piano revenue) on when a web quiz outperforms an app-install campaign — lean-back social users, older non-app-native audiences, bundles.
- Web paywall and checkout best practices for web2appChecklist for the web paywall/checkout in a web2app funnel — hard paywall without trial, ≥50% real discount with a real timer, long scroll with FAQ and social proof, per-day pricing, intro price that renews higher, Apple/Google Pay, guarantee, personalised coupon.
- Why run web2app funnels (and when not to)The business case for selling app subscriptions through a web quiz + web checkout instead of the app store — fees, cash flow, attribution, control — plus the cases where it underperforms.