September 6, 2026 · 6 min read
In July I wrote about how Walk With Me found its first 300 users after $2,000 of ads produced nothing and 500 cold messages produced one reply. That post ended with me promising to double down on the one thing that worked: describing what the app does, honestly, on pages that each solve one problem. Two months later, here's the scorecard. I've rounded everything down to clean numbers, because the exact figures change every day and I'd rather undersell.
Over 700 people have signed up and walked with the app. They come from more than 15 countries, they've scheduled over 170 walks, and together they've logged more than 6 million steps. Six million. For an app with no marketing budget that has only been in the stores since February, I still find that number a little hard to believe.
The spread surprised me too. I expected the United States, and it is the biggest group. But Italy is second, and the United Kingdom, India and Hungary are right behind. Here's the order of the top countries by number of walkers:
| Rank | Country |
|---|---|
| 1 | United States |
| 2 | Italy |
| 3 | United Kingdom |
| 4 | India |
| 5 | Hungary |
| 6 | Canada |
| 7 | France |
| 8 | Turkey |
Hungary is there because that's where I walk, and Budapest was the first city with a real community. Italy is there because the Italian version of the website took off on its own, which brings me to search.
The July post had a screenshot showing 16,000 impressions over an entire quarter, and I was thrilled. As I write this, Google shows a Walk With Me page more than 30,000 times a day. Over the last six months that added up to over 550,000 impressions and 3,700 clicks, every one of them unpaid, and well over a hundred of those clicks now arrive every single day.
You can see the cliff in the chart. Part of it is honest growth from months of new pages. Part of it is a fix: in early August I found a setting on the site's hosting that had been quietly turning Google's crawler away for about a week and a half. The day after I fixed it, impressions jumped tenfold and kept climbing. I'm including that because a chart like this without the explanation would be a little too flattering.
What are people searching for? Mostly some version of "walking buddy". The page about finding a walking buddy is the most visited page on the site. "Walking partner near me" is smaller but wild: roughly one in four people who see us for that search click through. Then there's the long tail, hundreds of different phrases in a dozen languages that each send a click or two.
The part I didn't plan for is how much of the traffic isn't in English. The Italian homepage, the Dutch homepage and the Turkish walking buddy page each pull their own steady stream of visitors. "Wandelmaatje app" is a phrase I had never seen before it started showing up in the search reports. Translating the whole site into 20 languages felt excessive when I did it. It turned out to be one of the better decisions.
The July post described the plan: one page per problem, each mirroring a store listing. Two months on, I can see which problems people have. The walking buddy page leads, the page about meeting people through walking is close behind, and the homepage is third. The page comparing walking apps gets shown a lot but clicked rarely, which tells me the title needs work, not the page. Pages about dog walking and safe walking are smaller but steady, and they bring in a very specific kind of visitor: someone who already knows what they want.
None of those pages have changed much since May. What changed is that Google trusts them more, so it shows them to more people. That trust is slow to earn and, from what I can tell, slow to lose, which is the whole reason I chose this over ads.
Walks cluster. Budapest was first, because I live there and scheduled the early ones myself. London, Rome and Bengaluru followed, each with its own city page and its own little group of regulars. The app works anywhere, but it works best where a few people keep showing up, and those four cities are where that's happening right now.
The rest of the map is dotted rather than clustered: single walkers in places I'd never heard of, scheduling a walk and hoping someone joins. They're the Pioneers, the first person to schedule a walk in their area, and there are more of them every week. Every cluster above started with one of them.
Both stores are moving the same direction as search, which makes sense: most people find the website first and the app second. Since launch in March, the app has been installed over 1,000 times across both stores, roughly 590 on Google Play and 480 on the App Store, still without a single paid ad.
The shape of the two charts matters more to me than the totals. Google Play installs crawled along for three months and then bent upward in July, and the curve is steeper now than it has ever been. On the App Store, a good day in spring meant four or five downloads. In late August, a normal day means ten.
Somewhere along the way the website stopped being a landing page and became a library. There are 90+ articles on the blog now, every one of them available in 20 languages. More than 40 of them are walking routes through real cities, each with a map and a route file you can download and follow. Twenty of those cities have audio tours you can listen to in the app while you walk. And since this month there's a public walking leaderboard where the top three walkers of every month get their moment.
Inside the app, one screen wins: Steps. It's opened more than the map and more than the chats. That's why the September update moved it to the centre of the app, added daily and friends boards, cheers, twelve months of history and a community record to chase. I wrote up everything in the September update separately, because it's a lot.
More of the same, honestly. More pages that each answer one real question, more cities with routes and audio, and an app that's worth opening every day even when nobody's walking nearby. If you're one of the 700, thank you. If you're not yet, Walk With Me is free on the App Store and Google Play, and the leaderboard resets on the first of the month.
September 4, 2026 · 9 min read
Steps moved to the centre of the app, the ranking got daily boards and cheers, chats finally behave, and picking a location works like it should. Here's everything in the September update and why we built it.
July 29, 2026 · 7 min read
Walk With Me vs Strava for walking: one is built to track your solo miles, the other to find people to walk with. Here is how to tell which one you need.
July 27, 2026 · 6 min read
Had a walking app shut down on you? You are not alone. Here is why it keeps happening to social walking apps, and how to move your habit somewhere steady.
