180 Countries, 850M+ Installs: The MWM App Playbook

Ahead of his appearance at Appsforum in just a few weeks, Charles Perrot, COO at MWM, shares his lessons on leadership, which partnerships and ads work best, and what the future looks like for creative apps.

You started at MWM in sales and marketing before stepping into the COO role. How has that journey shaped the way you think about scaling apps and building global operations?

Before MWM, I worked in sales and marketing on hardware products in retail and e-tail. That gave me end to end exposure to the product lifecycle and real customer purchase behavior at the intersection of B2C and B2B, and it taught me how to build partnerships that scale distribution. But titles matter less than being in execution. We’re a startup in a fast, unforgiving market, and you earn judgment by expertise. When I joined MWM, I knew little about mobile apps.

I learned by getting hands-on with ASO, shipping our first paywalls and subscriptions, launching flagship products, and managing the relationship with Apple. You can’t read your way to operational intuition; you ship, measure, fail, break things, and try again. That bias to action, to experiment, A/B test, and iterate, still defines how we scale teams and products.

MWM apps now span 180 countries and 850M+ installs. What were the biggest operational challenges in taking apps global, and how did you overcome them?

Everyone cites localization. The harder problem is running, reading, and acting on experiments at global scale. Onboarding, paywalls, pricing, trial durations, offers, business models, CRM, none of it behaves the same in Country A and Country B.

Manually coordinating those tests and comparing LTVs across markets is impossible. We built internal tools and automation to orchestrate experiments, attribute correctly, and optimize toward LTV per cohort. That is how we lift conversion and monetization country by country without flying blind.

When managing a portfolio of creative apps, what testing practices have proven most effective for quickly validating product-market fit?

Ship a real MVP and put paid traffic through it. With Meta or TikTok you can get enough qualified users quickly to see real behavior. Then iterate on signal, activation, early retention, paywall engagement, time to value. There is almost never a perfect first version. The advantage comes from moving quickly, learning quickly, and repeating the loop.

MWM is known for performance marketing excellence. What are the most important UA lessons you’ve learned about driving sustainable growth across different regions?

Everything starts with our internal LTV model and the robustness of our attribution, and that is what lets us make good decisions in paid marketing and manage dozens of channels across countries with different campaign optimizations. The goal is to scale profitably everything that can be scaled. When a new creative opens an opportunity, we move fast and get a reliable projection as soon as possible through our LTV model, then we move just as fast to cut spend when ad fatigue appears and we cannot iterate the creative in time, in order to protect margin.

Creative is the primary lever in UA today. It determines targeting as much as performance on CPA. We read LTV by cohort and by country, then adjust pricing, trial durations, offers, and CRM to lift LTV, and we feed those gains back into bidding and budgeting.

You’ve worked extensively on strategic partnerships at MWM. Which types of partnerships have had the most impact on scaling your portfolio?

This is an ecosystem business, you do not win alone. I am proud of our work with Apple across Editorial, Developer Relations, Business, and Services. From the outside you see featuring, which is great, but the real value is the ongoing support to build better products, early feedback, and access to new iOS features and App Store capabilities like Custom Product Pages and win-back tools.

I am also proud of our partnership with TikTok. We were early in Paris; it took time to learn a platform that changed the rules, but with steady iteration and strong technical support from their team, it is now a meaningful UA engine that evolves quickly and listens to feedback.

I could name others, AppLovin comes to mind for the team’s mindset, but it comes down to the same thing: partners who help us test faster and adopt new capabilities sooner have the biggest impact.

As COO, how do you decide when to lean on ads, subscriptions, or in-app purchases? Have you seen models that work better for creative apps?

I do not decide in a vacuum. Tests and their impact on LTV decide. Most of our apps are hybrid by design, and we continuously experiment with pricing, trial lengths, offers, and paywall flows. Some products intentionally avoid ads for experience reasons, but otherwise it is an A/B-driven logistics exercise guided by user value and long-term economics.

MWM’s scale is impressive, but what are the tactical lessons that a solo developer could realistically apply from your playbook?

Go big on creative first. That is where you learn which audiences convert, what messages land, initial acquisition costs, and whether there is room to scale in a category. Then run focused monetization A/B tests. Realistically, not every solo developer can operate a full UA and monetization stack.

If you are building something genuinely unique, we can help on the scale side through MWM publishing so you can stay focused on product and user experience while still competing with category leaders.

Where do you see the next wave of opportunity for creative apps worldwide? What role will MWM play in shaping that future?

Building an app is getting dramatically easier, and that acceleration will continue. The edge will shift to the quality of ideas, timing, iteration speed, and the growth stack around the product, ASO, UA, and monetization optimization. We have built those capabilities for our own apps and for partners through publishing.

The next step is making them accessible to more creators so the best ideas and user experiences can find their audience and scale. That is where I see MWM contributing, not just with tools, but with the operational know-how that turns creativity into durable businesses.