The Breakout Growth Podcast

BetterMe’s Founder & CEO on Growing Health & Wellness Apps to Over 100 Million Users

Mar 10, 2022

Victoria Repa, founder and CEO of BetterMe, a Ukraine-based health and wellness app developer, shares her journey of growing the company to over 100 million users. She discusses the balance between business growth strategies and the importance of empathy during the Ukraine conflict. Victoria emphasizes user-centric development, highlighting how feedback drives innovation in their health coaching and mental health offerings. The conversation dives into the strategic use of push notifications for user engagement, showcasing BetterMe's commitment to fostering healthier lifestyles.

54:15

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Episode guests

Victoria Repa

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Episode notes

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Quick takeaways

Victoria Repa emphasizes the importance of cultivating healthy habits over unrealistic expectations to promote sustainable lifestyles through BetterMe's apps.

BetterMe's growth strategy relies heavily on user understanding and continuous engagement, utilizing rigorous analytics and a culture of experimentation to enhance experiences.

Deep dives

The Genesis and Vision of BetterMe

BetterMe, founded by Victoria Reaper, is a behavioral health care company that has achieved over 100 million downloads globally. The platform aims to provide a holistic approach to health and well-being, featuring distinct mobile applications for mental and physical health. BetterMe encourages users to abandon unrealistic expectations and instead focus on cultivating healthy habits that evolve into a sustainable lifestyle. The application is designed inclusively, catering to diverse individuals at the beginning of their health and fitness journeys.

Intro

2min

Empathy in the Face of Geopolitical Crisis

2min

Building a Better Me: Health and Wellness Innovations

29min

Engaging Users Through Push Notifications

11min

Navigating the User Journey in Health Apps

7min

Insights on Growth: Lessons from Building Better Me

3min

In this week’s episode of The Breakout Growth Podcast Sean Ellis and Ethan Garr chat with Victoria Repa who is the founder and CEO of BetterMe, a Ukraine-based developer of health and wellness mobile apps. We have held off on publishing the podcast for a few weeks as the world has been focused on the tragic situation in Ukraine. We did not want to do anything to shift the focus but decided to share this episode now in the hopes that it could help Victoria amplify her messages to the growth community asking for help and support in Ukraine. Victoria shared these links with us and, if you are in a position to help, we hope you will consider doing so: https://how-you-can-support-ukraine.super.site/ and https://bit.ly/3IDf3tw

Our hearts go out to Victoria, her 230-person BetterMe team, and all of those impacted by this war.

BetterMe Health Coaching and BetterMe Mental Health are mobile apps created to make health and wellness more accessible. Victoria’s philosophy centers around helping people develop healthy habits that over time transform into an overall healthy lifestyle. In just over four years, the apps have grown to a combined total of more than 100 million users around the world.

Driving BetterMe’s growth trajectory is an intense focus on experimentation and learning that is guided by a “fail fast and fail cheap mantra.” This approach allows Victoria’s team to continuously improve its understanding of users, their behaviors, and the problems they look to BetterMe to help them solve.

Learning and evolving is critical in growth, and the BetterMe journey demonstrates how fast-growing companies use data to continuously optimize their offerings. At one point BetterMe had seven apps in its portfolio before eventually consolidating down to a single offering. Then, as B2B opportunities came into focus, Victoria’s team iterated again to add a second mobile app to address changing market needs.

We hope this pre-war story will help shine a light on the contributions and achievements of Ukrainians. Please consider visiting the links shared above to find out how you can help. In addition, here are a few other organizations working to make a difference in Ukraine:

https://wck.org

https://help.rescue.org/donate/ukraine-acq

https://www.care.org

https://novaukraine.org

We discussed:

* Making healthy lifestyles accessible to everyone (5:50)

* Victoria’s inspiration and journey to BetterMe (10:19)

* The Silicon Valey growth approach powering the business (12:16)

* Powering growth through data (28:33)

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