# How Ladder Cracked TikTok and Grew 500% — Greg Stewart, Ladder

Channel: Sub Club by RevenueCat
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVUi0yFno5I
Duration: 1 hr 16 min
Language: English
Words: 14488
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/rVUi0yFno5I

---

[0:00] hello I'm your host David Barnard and my guest today is Greg Stewart CEO at ladder a fitness app dedicated to providing the world's best strength training plan from the world's best coaches every single day on the podcast I talk with Greg about profitably scaling Tik Tok ads price optimization and what the team learn from burning hundreds of thousands of dollars on Instagram ads hey Greg thanks so much for joining me on the podcast today thanks for for having me we're happy customer so happy to be here and doing this with you awesome so I'm super excited to talk through your growth strategy because you've unlocked some

[0:38] things I think a lot of folks have struggled on and I think you've got a lot of great knowledge and experience to share but let's get it off with what is Ladder because I think that's going to really help kind of inform how you approach your growth strategy so what is lad ladder is an app for strength training for people who are serious about Fitness we make it really easy to plan and maintain a progressive strength training routine cool so how long have you been at it what's kind of the journey been so far from like a product company standpoint yeah we launched the product in the middle of covid in July

[1:16] 2021 which was an interesting time to be launching a fitness app for sure wow was that good not as people would expect we locked the strategy down really in Q4 2018 and q1 2019 so before covid was part of our everyday lives and our Focus for our first phase for the product was somebody going to the gym so this is somebody who is already working out going to the gym for most of their workouts and looking for an easier way to plan their workouts just tired thinking about what to do or searching for content and so we are hyper focused on the 65 million Americans at the gym

[1:55] which we thought was a underserved segment from a technology persp perspective we were that user you are that user and our view that it was mostly casual Fitness and cardio that had the attention of innovators and of venture capital so we saw an opportunity and fortunately unfortunately depending on what time period you look at it co became part of our everyday life and we had a plan to launch and we did and had to be really creative to be relevant to a user who is getting bombarded by all kinds of new products at that moment and some somebody who was at home in their house with no equipment versus a full

[2:33] gym that they were used to trading with so I had to just be really creative to figure out how to stand out in that moment yeah so how did that early user acquisition go like what were some of the ways you got that initial traction even though you weren't maybe the best product Market fit for the time period you launched in you did start promoting the app and get some early traction what did that look like yeah well we had to be relevant for at home so we had to be conscious of that when we were thinking about about our content and working with our launch coaches and our coach

[3:05] Partners at the time now most of them are full-time teammates but at the time they were partners and these coaches had micro audiences on mostly Instagram so call it 10 to 50,000 followers and had a direct line into consumers who were looking for help in that moment in time how to stay interested and consistent when their whole have been flipped upside down based on their environment changing so we got pretty crafty at helping our coaches tell the right story to their audiences about ladder about their program on ladder the positioning talking to the right users and that was really helpful in going zero to one like

[3:49] we went zero to a million bucks of AR and the focus wasn't Revenue but more so on product iteration and using that initial cohort of members to make sure that one the thesis was right and there was a path to validating product Market fit but two that we just had got the product experience right or getting a feel for where we had to improve it before really pushing harder what did that look like you say Partners so when you were partnering with an influencer in that early stage you know sounds like it's evolved over time but in that early stage how did you form those Partnerships and you said there were

[4:23] micro influencers so it sounds like they didn't have a huge following themselves at the time what did that partnership look like and did you get a lot of traction even from those smaller audiences that those influencers had and varying levels of AUD micro meaning not millions of followers they're not household names but 15 to 50 to 100,000 followers which was an exciting basket because these folks were following those coaches for Fitness content these were coaches in the strength training space really reputable so they had a loyal hyper relevant following we didn't need huge following to tell the right story to get people into the app relevant

[5:01] hyper intent like the best way to do influencers is find that most relevant with like they can drive that super high intent user exactly and if Co did help at that moment is we could get on the phone with a lot of coaches that probably should not have been talking to a company at that stage we were very early we had no users and we were pitching on Google slides and we treated them with respect and we would put together custom PowerPoint decks with their face and brand and name and really tell a story to the coach which actually we learned was standing out versus other

[5:36] companies that were constantly bombarding them with different offers so we made it in that first moment all about them and how we thought about the coach and how important that role was to even the early endings of the business that led to some really exciting coach partners that most of them are still with us today I think a lot of folks try and figure out influencer marketing and fail so as much as you're open to sharing how those were even structured was there some kind of like affiliate was it a per post fee or how did you even structure those micro influencer campaigns we set it up where we wanted

[6:12] perfect alignment with these coaches and so the first phase at that point it was splitting every dollar after the Apple commission and we knew that wasn't a long-term path but we wanted to show these coaches that we weren't just here to be a platform partner we're going to invest heavily upfront and we're not thinking about this as a Marketplace our customer from the beginning is the consumer so we're looking for coaches who want to work with us to nail the consumer experience not who are looking for a coach tools business to partner with just to serve the audience that they had acquired so a really F

[6:47] partnership where we end did all the up for investment shot all the content flew them to Austin in the middle of covid which had all kinds of protocols and Co testing kits at our studio and just a nightmare from Logistics perspective but we got it done thankfully and it was exciting to have a great group of coaches to launch with at that moment yeah so the latter app is fairly unique in the fitness space and correct me if I'm wrong exactly how it works but I've used it a couple times when you open the app you actually pick a coach and there's like a lot of different coaching

[7:18] options with different styles of workouts with different equipment or no equipment and those kind of things so did you share the revenue based on who selected them as a coach and retained as a coach or did you use like affiliate codes or something else to track the revenue in order to share it with the influencers we had unique and still do UTM on their link and bio in Instagram so we could see everything that was coming in through that link they go to a landing page that is all about that coach because at that point on Instagram they' made a decision to be in this coaches program or team as we call them

[7:57] so the experience is tightly correlated if you're going down that path where you click out and it's the coach that you've just come from on Instagram and that's happening before you go into the app so that UTM led us track where it was coming from and we still have that same infrastructure in link and bio for all of our coaches the partnership and the way we work with coaches has changed but that kind of cor infrastructure is still in place interesting so then were you actually doing like web onboarding and even web pay walls or were you doing minimal onboarding and then sending them to the app it depends on where you come

[8:33] from and this is after a whole bunch of iteration but for the first year and a half most of our triers were coming from our coaches and we were helping them and creating the content and the positioning points and obviously the landing page and all of the collateral they would need to be effective to get folks into the app and they were talking about their program or their team in ladder and if you're going down that path you've already made a choice on the coach that you're looking to train with we need to get you into the app into that team as quickly as possible and so

[9:07] if you're coming through coach marketing typically Linkin bio you're going to go to One landing page which is just really quick high level educating on what the product is what the experience is a little bit on the coach what type of training style equipment that you need and then you're going right into the app if you come from any other source for the most part or any of our channels who are investing in growth you're going through a web onboarding where we're asking about 15 questions about your Fitness preferences so we're asking you how many days a week you work out how many days a week you lift weights what

[9:40] training Styles you gravitate towards what equipment you want to train with where are you working out what are your goals and we use those questions to recommend a team again those are our programs but we call them team at the end of that quiz and at the end of that quiz they've got three programs that are directly tied to the answers that they just gave us and you can think about our coaches almost like The Avengers each one represents unique trading Styles and we're not looking for thousands of coaches and really the same programming style across all over coaches we're looking for really exciting Variety in

[10:16] programming and having that be represented by the coach and that web quiz has actually been an amazing tool for us we've had a million people go through it over the last year and a half and it gives us a really clear glimpse into what the market is looking for versus what we have represented in our coach roster and so like a simple example is we saw about a third of our leads every day were saying they wanted traditional bodybuilding and at that moment it was mostly women who were coming through our funnel and saying that and we didn't have a traditional bodybuilding program so the conversion

[10:53] rate for that user versus someone who didn't say they wanted bodybuilding was half so we could really clearly underwrite what the demand would look like how big this team would be very quickly before we even had a conversation about who a great coach partner would be and once we lock that in we pick the programming style then we go out and we do hyper targeted recruiting of the r coach partner to join us to fill that modality so we've shifted from a world where we were completely dependent on coaches having an audience to where we know what's coming in every day and can be really smart about putting in the right

[11:35] programming style that's clearly missing from our product Suite but has real consistent demand that's coming through our funnel we had the same thing happen on mail bodybuilding and we launched a male bodybuilding team earlier this year those were our last two launches and they're some of our fastest growing most popular programs and they're all informed by that quiz a lot of people try influencer marketing and they think oh well if Kim Kardashian posted about my app that would just blow us up but you kind of win the opposite approach of like you're finding folks who don't who have decent followings but like you said hyper targeted followings and then help

[12:14] them build that up over time versus the inverse where you just try and get the biggest influencer regardless of the intent the fit with your product and stuff like that so it's something I think more folks should explore as an opportunity you know talked with several developers now about affiliate marketing and it's essentially what you're doing but then eventually you kind of transition that to them becoming part of the team which is really cool and we learned like this wasn't a Marketplace and it wasn't a tools for coaches platform it wasn't a Creator platform this is a consumer business from the start and we learned the importance over

[12:51] time of having the right coach partners that were excellent from a workout programming coaching perspective in and great Partners in terms of working with our team and we're excited to be part of a company at this stage and really grow something that was way more impactful long run than just finding folks with big audiences in fact some of the programs that are no longer on the platform they were some of our biggest audiences but maybe we overweighted that versus The Importance of Being a great coach and a great teammate to the business so in those early stages were there any other organic channels or any other of launch techniques or

[13:30] experimentation that you did in that early stage or was it primarily driven through this like just organic have the coaches post kind of thing that first phas it was all organic Instagram we did some creative things at a moment in time again we were launching in Co this is a strength training app if you remember that moment it was impossible to get any sort of equipment I tried yeah there was an article in the Walsh Journal I remember it I think it was on the cover and it was talking about the Kettlebell King of New York York and this guy was buying kettlebell inventory from defunk

[14:04] gyms commercial gyms in New York and he was taking those and selling them door too to folks in Manhattan and charging two to three times what they were worth of because you couldn't get them anywhere and none of these equipment manufacturers were really set up to be direct to Consumer they were all B2B to see so we had a moment where we scrambled to figure out how do we lock down some equipment so we removed that as a block for these potential trailers potential users and we found a partner after a whole bunch of work in the hardest moment to find equipment and we bought like $50,000 worth of kettle

[14:40] bells and dumbbells and this is like we were very early with very little money but we use that to create a Shopify shop that sold this equipment but you couldn't get access to the equipment unless you started a trial in our app and so you got access to the link inside of the app and our coaches would use that to say hey everybody's looking for kettle bells this is an amazing experience I'm going to coach you all the way through it but if you just get in the app and start a trial you're gonna get access to a store that actually has it in stock and that just

[15:10] gave them a really relevant bit of content to go out to their audience at a moment in time where you just couldn't get it you couldn't get it so we had to do some creative things to stand out at that particular moment that is such an awesome like Scrappy read the market figure out what's going to get you attention thing I mean I love hearing these kind of Scrappy stories and that's what it's all about right it's getting attention you need attention so how are you going to get attention Kim Kardashian posting yeah she's got 100 million followers but they're not as relevant okay micro influencers well

[15:42] what's a story that they can tell that's super compelling that's going to get you a ton of attention buying equipment like that such a cool Scrappy story so I think I heard you say that just on that organic strategy partnering with coaches that got you to a million dollars in ARR it did pretty pretty quickly and it was an entire motion of the team to help support these coaches and we're iterating on the Frog experience too to make it really efficient for a Trier coming in to experience the product there was no credit card collected upfront that's still true today because we were competing on product and the

[16:19] noise in the Market at that time was very loud everybody was building a fitness app and the consumer was open-minded but getting bombarded from offers and brand and some that they heard of some that they had not heard of after you hit that million dollars in ARR what was the next phase of growth what were you thinking about did you try meta ads Google ads what did you try next to kind of unlock that next level of growth the first two years were hardcore product iteration and just making sure again the thesis was right that the core delivery of the workout experience was right and then we built

[16:57] an entire set of tools for our coaches and our team to power all of this a product called Apollo which I think is the best software for coaches but it's just used for our team and constantly getting better and better but it it Powers everything that we do so for the first couple years mostly organic Instagram and just helping our coach exra we would launch new programs and teams which would be new audiences that we would help those coaches extract Travers from we rais a little bit of C capital or C+ capital in mid 2021 and we did what we thought every consumer should do or you're told to do

[17:37] and we started putting money into Facebook paid and that was an utter disaster and we got just absolutely slaughtered in that experience we learned a lot but it was macro and micro challenges the macro challenges where you had everybody in Fitness who were chasing the consumer at the same time and most of those Brands had much bigger budgets and a lot more experience and then it was also right after iOS 14 came out so everybody was upside down from a acquisition and attribution perspective which made even talking to agencies very difficult because everybody was in chaos and then from a micro perspective we learned a lot about our activation

[18:19] process our price point we talked about our early users were mostly coming from a coach and we talk to these people all the time we learned that they were following that coach and they were making a decision to go into the app to train with that coach but if you were somebody that was coming off a Facebook ad you might be the right user somebody's working out and looking for a solution like this but they had no context of any of our coaches or programming Styles so we had to be really good at getting them into the right program and the right workout as quickly as possible or they wouldn't

[18:51] give us a shot and there was no way we could get the unit economics to work and so that first phase we didn't have anything set up that was different than our influencer coach path and users came in and they were just confused they didn't know where to go and they were doing all the wrong things and we couldn't get people through through the workout we learned pretty quickly that we had to think from a product perspective a lot harder and seriously about activation in a user who is maybe the right user but knows nothing other than the ad or the content that they just saw to get them into the app so

[19:23] that was a huge learning and then we talked to those that did get into the app then didn't pay us which was most we talked to them and I probably had a hundred conversations with folks just learning and we learned at those conversation that our price point was totally out of whack and when we launched we were $60 a month and that's very expensive and the reason it was $60 a month was because the product had a component that gave you onetoone chat with the coach and it was never meant to be chatting with a friend type experience but it was designed almost like an OnStar button where you had a

[19:57] specific question question or an injury and you needed a modification to a movement or you didn't have equipment you would get within a reasonable amount of time an answer from the coach and so that's an expensive feature to maintain and we built software to make it as easy as possible but we priced the product around that in the first phase and we weren't sure how important it was to the experience well we learned from those leads we acquired from Facebook that they actually had no interest in chatting with the coach they wanted high quality workout programming they wanted an easy experience to know exactly what to do every day but they didn't want to

[20:32] pay 60 bucks a month you know they're looking at Netflix at the time or Spotify and were two three 4X what they're paying for every other content subscription and the price value equation was just completely out of whack and that became very very clear to us and so all those things together were just like three months of frustration where we learned a bunch but it just wasn't a good use of investor capital and we paused spending and put our heads down and committed to overhauling monetization strategy price point how we packaged and really nailing the activation experience for somebody coming in that just doesn't know anything about ladder other than the

[21:14] sound bite they just got before they came into the app and that was pretty much all the entire team's Focus all my focus Q4 of 2021 and launched all that the beginning of the year January is our super Super Bowl our user tends to be someone who's already working out but January is the most open-minded any consumer is in Fitness open to trying new things at that moment in time we geared up to have everything ready to go in January 2022 and it was exciting for us like we weren't spending on growth but we had acquired a for us a decent Siz database of leads and we had a new

[21:49] price point and new packaging and new positioning and we went out to that group and acquired a whole bunch of folks that had said no the first time and so we felt a lot lot more confident in the foundation of the product the trial experience the price point to really start thinking about investing in growth again and growing Beyond just the audiences that our coaches had acquired man there's like 10 questions I want to ask you packed into all of that first of all I don't think it was a bad use of investor money because spending whatever you did probably tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars taught you the

[22:26] lessons that you needed to go into hibernation mode for Q4 where you weren't spending on acquisition to retool everything and so I think people too often expect to just turn on ads and it's just going to work but you took the right lessons from that wasn't oh we just need to get more efficient with our ads oh we need more adte oh we need a different MMP oh we need this we need that it's like no we need a better product 100% and our DNA is product and marketing not Performance Marketing at the time so our default was what can we do in the experience what can we do in

[23:01] telling the right story to the right person not how can we out optimize this in Facebook ads but no it was a learning experience in the moment it felt like a gut punch every day coming into work and just looking at conversion rates and just money being lit on fire in a moment that was just hard but looking back it was the exact thing that needed to happen to make it really clear what to focus on to set us up for much more success longer term than that moment in sry yeah the other really interesting thing you said in there was that you originally were priced at $60 a month

[23:34] which yeah it does it sounds crazy like I don't know many apps are just 60 bucks a month but you got to a million dollars in ARR so the price wasn't an issue like you were actually delivering that level of value but you were delivering that level of value for people who are really bought into those specific coaches but then the point was you can't scale like that and I've heard a lot of talk about this in the industry like Eric sufur talked about this you find this initial product Market fit with an organic Channel or some like kind of narrow channel and you're like oh KAC is

[24:08] amazing like monetization is going through the roof and then you try and expand that audience out and you don't get those same willingness to pay you don't get that same engagement you don't get the same level of intent was it clear that you did have to change everything and lower the price I mean did you try or was there a thought maybe we could scale with more influencers or what was the thought process that led you to lower the price versus trying to find the right audiences who were willing to pay that high of a price we went through a really really deep exercise extracting as much information

[24:44] from our users our database our members people who didn't pay us to understand the price value equation for them and we weren't guessing when we launched at 60 bucks I have like this spreadsheet that was like my trying angulation of Super One toone Solutions maybe high performance training train something very specific all the way down to influencer PDFs and we had a combination of both we had the one and component which gave me a little bit of confidence the price higher and so your point before that made sense for that user because they're vieing these coaches as Heroes and they are but like they knew that before they got into the app so to

[25:24] pay 60 bucks a month to chat with your hero is really cheap right and so the value that they got out of it was high that was just a much smaller use case than the market that we were going after and really the market that would be required to go build a business that was sustainable over time on the influencer side we just never thought about ourselves maybe it changes long long term as a tools for business and what I learned on launching coaches which was really exciting but the most exciting moment is the first couple weeks because you're telling a fresh story to that coach's audience maybe

[26:01] they had an offering maybe they didn't and you're going to get a whole bunch of excitement and people into the app but it goes down over time and the reason for that is it was very hard to help them build their followings at Instagram faster than the value that we were extracting from it so it became clear that this was a growth hack the one that was great for a moment in time but it wasn't a growth engine that was sustainable it didn't go up it went down down over time and so that was just a really clear lesson to us on that audience saturation right so as a

[26:34] percentage of Their audience even if you could increase Their audience slowly you weren't increasing the audience fast enough to offset the saturation of whatever audience they did have before so the equation then looked like okay we could get a thousand more coaches but for all that effort maybe there's a better way so then what was the thought process how did you decide on a new price and kind of a new model to kind of swap in this new growth engine that you felt was more sustainable and Powerful in the long run we actually used reforge content for this which was a game changer in the moment because I didn't

[27:10] want to guess and time was not infinite in terms of Runway versus proving something out and they had just really great content about how to think about monetization strategy and how to extract the right pieces of information from cohorts of users whether those were paying subscribers or those that decided not to pay you through trial and they had some analysis in there and this type of work is fun for me I love this type of work that was the van West Andor pricing analysis where one of the questions we asked and we had 500 responses to this and we asked all those segments at what price point is ladder

[27:46] so expensive that you never buy it at what price point is Ladder expensive but you still consider purchasing it at what point is L price point is Ladder a good deal and at what price point is it so cheap that question the quality of the product and out of that there's a formula that spits out an optimal price point range and the game was slicing it by all these different cohorts so those that came from a coach those that came from Facebook ad those that cared about different objectives from a training perspective or modality and really triangulating around who we thought our core user was and the very clear lesson

[28:23] was people wanted the workout programming content high quality stra train content they didn't want to think about what to do that was by far the value prop so planning my workouts not thinking at all was what these people were screaming at us that they were getting from the product and then it became very clear that they had no interest in paying for a coach and the clearing price across all of these cohorts was 29 bucks and we sliced this a thousand different ways and I got a thousand different charts and a thousand page deck and it just became pretty clear through all of this work that that

[28:55] was the right price point for us to launch with and so when we launched it it was just Join one team so you're on that coach's team you can change once not twice per month if you want to but it's designed to be in a program and no onetoone access we have social experiences you get all that obviously we have gamification in the app you get all of that but no personalization in a much cheaper price point that reflects that did you do at that time or subsequently any AB price testing or do you even offer different cohorts to different prices like since you know that somebody coming from an influencer

[29:31] is actually willing to pay more do you charge them more or did you just normalize on 30 it wasn't worth the complexity of the over like it was so blatantly obvious that this was the right price and there was so much work qualitative and quantitative that went through this we talked through it as a team and then I talked through it with our board it just felt like a very clear move for us and creating the overhead of different SKS and trying to get different price points just didn't make sense we were trying to prove product Market fit and that we could grow and getting the price point to a place where

[30:01] we could start iterating on growth again that was the objective not trying to squeeze every dollar that we could out of every user coming in so we were trying for more simple the better get it right get the offering right learn from January and the flood of activity then and then start iterating on growth again assuming we felt confident that we got it right we're close enough to right okay so it's January 202 to people are excited about New Year's resolutions how'd it go what was that next lever in growth January was awesome because we went to this whole database of people that said no that we bought off Facebook

[30:40] but we had a much more compelling price point that was closer to their price value equation so January was our most exciting growth we had had and then we didn't grow in February and not growing in consumer and in Fitness in any month in the first quarter is a death sentence and that was a very clear like holy moment for the entire team and for me and really a forcing function to move the entire team and we're a small team you know we're 13 14 people into focusing on growth and figuring out a real sustainable Channel motion but growth Loop that we could rely on for

[31:22] the next couple of phases as a business and we didn't have infinite Runway and we knew we had to prove that we could do this and it just became the mission of every team member engineering product myself to go solve this problem there was no more important problem at the time yeah it's amazing what you can achieve when the whole company is focused on one thing and those incentives all lining up to solving that one problem so what worked and did you do any other experiments along the way that failed or what did you land on as that growth Loop we came up with a frame

[31:57] framework to figure out a basket of growth RS to experiment quickly and the framework essentially was we have to have a reason to believe that this can work so not just Pie in the Sky hopefully it will work but have a real grounded reason either from our experience or our advantages or how our business is built or our team that we thought there was a path to winning and we had to test it in our own team I went through the Facebook experience and I had an agency and I made all the mistakes in the world partnering with the wrong agency partnering with a in general and I'll never work with a

[32:29] marketing agency ever again outside of our team as a consumer business I have learned and that wasn't my DNA at that point I have learned that there is no muscle more important than growth and that includes investing in growth that includes the products I have growth that includes retention so to have those learnings and to have that dial being controlled out to the building now makes no sense whatsoever to me but out of that framework came a handful of grow loopes and one of those was SEO we're creating all of this content I talked to some really smart people I read a bunch of books and we felt confident that we

[33:05] could do it but we learned pretty quickly that this is a longtail strategy there was not going to be meaningful points on the board but we found I I found some course by going out to people that I think are smart and hacky and it was basically validating that this can work for you and we figured out a strategy using copy AI to create the text but it basically was movement how-to featuring content that we were creating in the app and we got to page one on Google for three of these within 60 days and so it was clear that we have really compelling content there is a

[33:41] path to winning in this strategy but it's not going to be fast enough to go prove what we need to go prove right now so that failed our validation test even though it failed that validation of it being a core pillar is it something that you've continued to invest in over time or did you just have to completely set that aside no we set it aside we'll come back to it for sure but it just wasn't going to move the needle and we didn't have the luxury of just like hoping certain things would work and diverting attention we had to have complete focus on one thing at a time and one of the

[34:16] growth Loops that was part of that process was Tik Tock and we obviously had experience on Instagram now a couple of years of learning how to be effective with our coaches to tell the r story to Their audience and we could see that that was getting harder and harder over time forget the paid side even on the organic side it was just getting harder to get the same reach as we went and Tik Tok as consumers we could see that the consumer was moving to Tik Tok we could see the growth and the engagement in Tik Tok and this was two or three years before that I mean we knew this was

[34:51] happening we have influencers on our staff we're talking about these things on a regular basis and I just started messing around long before that growth Lo validation this was 2020 I started messing around a little bit with one of our coaches who was super smart and been with us from the beginning and I said hey I think this is worth trying and seeing what we can learn it feels like our consumer is moving here and we have some interesting advantages and it doesn't cost us anything to learn on the organic side so we spent time together really dissecting we created a handle for her as is coach Lauren can

[35:27] and we started creating content and dissecting what was working and what was not working and trying to find repeatable outcomes on organic views but we learned pretty quickly that yes the relevant consumer is here the engagement was high once we got to a thousand followers we had link and bio it was generating some trials as we were going so there was enough of a path that it came back into our minds in the first quarter of 2022 so that was one of them hey we maybe can do this we've got strong creative abilities and we've learned a lot through Instagram and we've messed around with Tik Tok and we

[36:03] know that it's possible to get somebody off Tik Tok into our app and to pay us we pushed on that and I remember we had a moment where I took my creative director now VP of brand and creative who's been my partner in crime Philip edel he goes by hedel and I took him to breakfast and I said like hey man like do you want to work on Tik Tok with me and he said yes and I said well good it was an option like we're going to go work on Tik Tok he was super excited and edel is an unbelievably brilliant creative mind and was head of creative

[36:29] at Austin FC our MLS team and was there from launch so just really good at blank sheet iteration and a really really incredible mind that can solve problems and can solve creative problems and we had a coach that was launching around that time and we wanted to go figure out the organic we wanted to figure out can we create compelling content we did it with Lauren a little bit can we do it with somebody else and can we create a system that works and we started an account for one of our new coaches who had zero experience on Tik Tok we were like hey this will be your account but

[37:00] we're going to act as you for the first couple months we're going to take all your raw video that you've ever created and these are Fitness influencers so they have a lot of raw video on their phone and we're going to see what we can do and we started creating content with no new video but we got to 250,000 followers like 45 days later and we're like all right so like that worked and like we're generating million plus view outcomes and we're doing it on a weekly basis there's something there but it gave us a really strong understanding of the creative and how to iterate and the

[37:31] differences versus Instagram and just enough confidence to keep going like we felt like there was a Playbook there was a Playbook here so it all started with Organic and that was February March 45 days later we're like all right we've seen enough to maybe start putting some dollars to work and seeing what that turns into and how far off are we and we had all these scars from our Facebook experience so there's certainly some apprehen mention especially for me there's no one on our team at that point with a marketing in their title it was me and elel and I'm taking courses on Tik Tok Performance Marketing figuring

[38:05] out what buttons to click I love math I love Creative so I like the work but just didn't come from at D which actually was helpful thinking through with a completely open mind how to attack a problem on Tik Tok which is a new platform and behaved very differently with a very different use case than Instagram for the user and we started putting a little bit of money to work based on those learnings with Edo creating and he and I just talking all day long and very quickly started to turn into trials and paid members and it was infinitely more exciting than our first couple weeks of Facebook it gave

[38:39] us real conviction to keep learning but it all started with nailing the organic and then starting to put some Capital behind it and iterating on the paid side so what did that early motion look like since you started with this new coach and I imagine you started ramping up other coaches on Tik Tok around the time as well would you see what landed organically and then put money behind it or did you start creating content specifically for the ads or did you let the organic visibility kind of Drive what you actually put money behind we tried everything and everything was documented and we had a thesis and a

[39:15] reasonably different things would work but there are a couple of different ways to spend money on Tik Tok and what we've learned over time that is that organic is the best indication of when content we were creating brand ads featuring coaches that were winning on Tik Tok but really using the organic insights the hooks the messaging the copy the coach that where the outlier coaches that started to inform the type of content that we would create on the brand side and then we learned spark which is just wh listing and Tik Tok but taking the coach's organic content and then turning that into an ad and pointing that in a

[39:56] direction that we set and that was also explosive very very quickly for us and we worked with Tik Tock the company at that point who we gotten to know a couple of folks to figure out how do we connect ads manager I'm the only guy pushing buttons in there how do we connect ads manager to all of these organic accounts that we're building with our coaches because we were just doing codes which was not fast enough the amount of volume that it takes to win on Tik Tok is very high so you need a really high level of volume and speed of iteration to keep fueling the machine

[40:33] and so we connected all these accounts so that I could look every day to see what was high performing or outlier organic content related to ladder or their program and I could turn those into an ad in seconds and that became a big piece of our paid acquisition strategy that would live alongside the brand strategy so what kind of content did perform and then the thing I've always and talking to folks who've tried Tik Tok ads one of the challenging things is like turning something that's engaging as content itself into a call to action so what did the call to actions look like and how did you work a

[41:13] call to action into what looked like organic content step one which is just marketing oneone was understanding our customer and understanding them at a really really deep level and words that they use and I've done a lot of work take well feedback that's come through us through our own team but also dissecting the app store we have almost 16,000 reviews in the App Store and I've taken all that and very manually gone through and created value propositions and problem solution statements using the words that are coming out of our user mouth and how they were explaining the product and what they were getting and so like we really really understand

[41:56] understand our customer to the point where I don't think anybody in the world understands this customer better than we do and that obviously is then filtered through any sort of creative but especially on Tik Tok but for Tik Tok we had to learn how to create for Tik Tok on Instagram the motion is very very different especially on organic on Instagram you are rewarded for building up a following and then over time you spend your time trying to extract value and trying to monetize that audience that you've acquired so you build this million per following and you try to sell them relevant goods and services and sometimes those are your products

[42:31] and sometimes they're a brand Partners that's working with you as an influencer so the motion is build up a following put up great content and constantly speak to that following Tik Tok is the exact opposite where most of the content that's being consumed is through the foru page and the for you page is Tik Tok feeding you content that it thinks you like based on your prior user Behavior and the content that you were consuming and where you're stopping and so it's saying you like startups and you like subscription and you like baseball and it's feeding you that back to you but you have no idea who the creators

[43:05] are for the most part so most videos that we learned are an entirely different audience every time so we had to spend time with our coaches to basically unlearn all of the behaviors that made them successful on Instagram and they would have Notions of I wore this in the post yesterday or I haven't given them behind the scenes in a couple of weeks and with Tik tok's like it just doesn't matter you can assume it's a different Auditorium of people every video so if it's a new Auditorium of people there's no preconceived notions coming in there's no anchoring to what you did yesterday they're not going to

[43:40] your profile and consuming it linearly they're finding you through the for you page because Tik Tok thinks that your content is valuable to that user based on what it knows about that user's behavior and that just completely changes how you think about the creative and the type of creative that you're building I think what we learned with our coaches and then we have Tik Tok creators that are incredible in our team that are not coaches we learn the importance of first understanding the platform and how it's used understanding the for you page which was just spending time using the product second was what is the type of content that worked it's

[44:14] not high production it's not stuff that's working on Facebook or Instagram it's raw and shot with an iPhone and even editing in Tik Tok made the difference of it working or not versus using something that you had created in Instagram and then it's nailing the content and nailing the content for us has been different with each Creator they're all obviously under the fitness umbrella but they all represent a different genre of training style but really a different genre of white hot user that care about different things if you're somebody who's working out from home and you want a Pilates influence strength training routine that's really different than somebody's looking for a

[44:51] CrossFit type program in a commercial gym they're just solving for completely different different things meaning the content that's going to work is not going to be the same type of content and so we had to work with each of our coaches through this iteration period because for the most part we're starting from zero on figuring out what is the niche and the content type that gets to repeatable outcomes that's getting to the right user that then becomes trilers but it was all focused on the content to start not on any sort of acquisition or monetization it was all on can we create great content that is providing value

[45:24] and value in Tik Tok is you're either teaching them or they're entertained and that's it and if you nail those then they're willing to learn more and purchase from you but you've got to understand the fundamentals of what works for you the Creator and we just learn a ton and so we have this portfolio of coaches and we're learning across them which is just 10 Xing our speed because we're doing it so quickly across multiple people but can't stress it enough that versus Instagram or anything else it is the creative that you are winning or losing on right now and it is creative for Tik Tok and

[45:55] really understanding what that is can make or break a strategy and if you're not nailing that before spending a dollar on paid marketing you're going to give up pretty quickly and I've seen that in a lot of friends and colleagues and peers where I'm just like keep going you have to keep going with this and you have to learn it there's no Playbook yet which means it's ugly and it just requires blank sheet iteration and a lot of detail oriented work to crack it part of my question that you didn't answer was on the CTA but I think it was very formative that you didn't answer my

[46:28] question on CTA because being successful on Tik Tok it sounds like is a lot less about the CTA and a lot more about creating that valuable content I like that framework too you're educating or you're entertaining and maybe ideally you're both educating and entertaining at the same time but at some point they do have to know that this is about an app you do need to get them to take some kind of action so then once you had figured out some level of formulaic production of valuable content how did that become something that would actually drive people to the app with our coaches then it was iterating on

[47:09] call to action how do I get people like we're telling a very clear story in the content itself and so you know that this is the coach you know that this is plotty strength you know that there's a program and at the end we're iterating on creative ways to get people into their profil so click on the handle and going down into the link that is their ladder team landing page in their link and bio on Tik Tok which is their only link and that was just a game of iteration like it just happened each step it was nail the creative scale up the viewers which is just creating great

[47:41] creative and then figuring out how do I get someone to do something else how do I get somebody to go to my profile follow me click the link download the app and start a trial that was iteration it was just maniacal focus at that moment on that one thing it was different across the coaches we certainly learned where to start but it was different can you share some examples of what you're finding that did work and maybe even some contrasting of like this style CTA worked really well for certain coaches but didn't work for others but then this actually worked for another coach yeah it's changed over

[48:16] time like right now we're using a lot of ctas and a lot of like time based positioning where we start Monday or we start November 6th and to start with us my program is in my link in BIO and they were not writing it in the text because everyone's afraid that Tik Tok is solving against that but putting it in the video itself in font that's native to Tik Tok using Tik Tok as the editing tool so it just created ways of saying we've got you you know what this is go to my profile for XYZ go to my profile to start Monday go to my profile to

[48:51] start seeing results in the next four weeks we're using start before New Year's don't wait look good for the holidays feel great don't think about what to do every day we start Monday and just telling the user where to go like we learned that they will listen you just have to be explicit and say there's the next step here and the next step is to go to my profile and click the link and that's going to take you into the app and into this incredible experience where I'm your coach and you're going to be receiving programming for me on a daily basis that's awesome and from a

[49:24] Tik Tock perspective when you start putting money behind a creative are you letting the algorithm figure that out or are there specific targeting or is there anything else you're doing behind the scenes to help the money you put behind it be more effective there's a lot of hacky things that we're doing in Tik Tok that we have figured out just through having to figure it out I'll give you one example is everybody goes to our web quiz off a Tik Tok ad every single person and they're filling out those 15 questions so again a million people have come through that funnel and we're learning a lot about who they are but we know their

[50:00] Persona very very quickly based on their questions and we spent a lot of time getting that quiz dialed in to make sure that people were actually filling it out and not dropping off but the right user was filling it out and we built an entire Suite of software tools so that I could iterate without an engineer and I can move questions around and change media without having to disrupt our road map and that was a incredible product that still exists that could be a commercialized product that fuels all this but for us what was really impactful was using the answers on the quiz as conversion events for Tik Tok so

[50:38] Tik Tok isn't seeing basically anything happening in the app they're learning who our user is based on the answers that they're giving us and then learning off what a good user looks like off of those conversions which are just answering the question in the way that we know it indicates a white how user and that was really really important because for us and we learned this with the Facebook experience we had to be really good and Scrappy at getting to the right user and right now that's somebody for the most part who's already working out and the most expensive lead to acquire is casual Fitness and

[51:12] everybody in the world is advertising to that person they're telling a story about motivation and getting started and they're talking about the size of the workout library and how many coaches they have and it's going to be fun all of that is great but it's a really expensive lead that doesn't really convert very well in our product so if I'm attracting a lot of folks with that Persona they're not going to convert in the economics are going to break so we had to figure out how do we get dialed in in terms of getting to the right user and not getting to more casual Focus folks folks who have never lifted a week

[51:44] before never tried strength training we've got big Visions on how to help those people but at that moment in time we didn't have a product for it and using the quiz and mixtures of the answers on the quiz is instantly got Tik Tok dialed in and there was a week when we were iterating because I'm reading the answers right I had this spitting out into amplitude and then into a Google sheet so I could read the answers coming in and I could see the profile of these people and it was getting Tighter and Tighter and Tighter and Tighter and became very clear that we can get to the

[52:14] right person efficiently it maybe is not the obvious tactics that have been used either on Tik Tok or other platforms but this motion got it dialed in really tight and that's still true today that's a really solid funnel approach that I hadn't heard anybody using before that you're getting them out of Tik Tok onto the web not into the app and so you have a UTM in there so you're able to then send very early feedback because they're taking the quiz instantly so instead of waiting for a conversion event that's way down funnel and maybe in the app where you can't get good tracking you're actually getting that signal on the web

[52:59] where they are where you can get that feedback loop going which was very very important for managing spend tiktock is an unbelievable platform with 170 million Americans on it most days but it's still an early stage company and taking an established Facebook Playbook even though that's been disrupted with iOS 14 and the evolution attribution there's still a Playbook and a lot of people that have built big businesses in the back of Facebook and that's just not true yet on Tik Tok so it's a little bit Wild Wild West so we've had conversation with folks that will talk to us in the conversation and say well you can't

[53:36] raise your budget in any AD group AD set by more than 30% a day and my question would be like why what's the rationale like oh ADV that's we learn on Facebook and Performance Marketing we didn't hold any of those as truce going into this it's like all right if that's an assumption then let's 2x or 3x the budget in one day and see if it works and these little moves would work so we have people telling us one thing we're trying another and it's working I spoke at Tik toks one of their us all hands last December and I was talking to all their reps and really really smart

[54:08] people but most of these reps came from Facebook most of the folks in the audience came from Facebook so they would tell me and they were like we don't recommend touching your as manager and making budget changes you know within the week and I'm like within the week like I'm doing this three four five times a day and it's make or break on it working or not we've been able to use the quiz because now I have a pixel on every question and every combination of question that I can see the cost metrics in ads manager and I know what in the money looks like for an answer to each

[54:43] of our questions and then what happens Downstream in the app I don't even have to see what happens in the app I know it's going to happen on the app just based on these metrics and the reason it's very hard right now with Tik Tok we're fortunate it and that we're not spending time or money anywhere else we're unbelievably excited about Tik Tok and we just don't have any reason to go spend time elsewhere and what we learned very early on in our Tik Tok iteration was that most people wouldn't go down this happy path of going from ad clicking to the web quiz completing the

[55:15] quiz downloading the app we would get a bunch of people but it wasn't most we learned that for every one person that was answering the quiz three were going directly to the App Store and there taking a screenshot of the ad they were sharing it with them themselves and I talk to these people once they're in the app I'm dming them like how'd you get here I'm trying to extract and learn and we learn that people were taking screenshots of the app and then going to the App Store and going down that path which means I'm totally blind but we studied with a lot of math and rigor the

[55:45] correlation between those that were coming through our happy path and what was happening outside our happy path and those ratios were very very tight every time we had a new winning creative anytime we added material spend or made an unlock change and as manager I would see the same Step Up in AB Store direct trials and they would move in parallel the charts moved exactly the same so it gave me enough confidence even now to know that if it's in the money and as manager even though it doesn't reflect everyone it reflects only those that answered the quiz I can make all my decisions off of that and I know what's

[56:26] going to happen Downstream that's held true even as we five six seven 8X budget from a growth investment perspective so you've already talked about it saying in the money but how do you look at CA to LTV and payback periods and how do you spend into those creatives that are in the money cocktail LTB at this stage I think is Fairyland I think it's like pitch deck metrics because the LTB in a business that's been around for two or three years or a business that just started to invest in growth it's a guess and you can extrapolate but it's not a really good system to understand in my

[57:03] mind your unit economics at that moment and so we've anchored the entire team in business to payback period which is just way simpler cognitively to manage we spent X cost Y and how fast does it take based on what they paid and retention does it cost to recoup that investment and those inputs and the input levers and output metrics those are controllable by the team versus LTB longterm like yeah we can guess but I can't control that dayto day payback period we understand the leverage and we understand not even at the net faes but the gross bases what's dropping down in every dollar after I pay Facebook or

[57:45] after I pay Apple and we pay Revenue cat and any variable commissions what are we earning versus what we spent and so it's all payback period we're just constantly talking to the team and educating on how these things work so I almost never talk about LTB to CAC unless you're talking to some investor that has random rules that they heard from another investor on a podcast but I spend all this time saying what we spend what we get when do we get it back and how much burden is that going to take to hit the gas and is it changing or is it getting better and

[58:17] how do we improve payback period and that's been a much easier way to manage and really have control of the levers and payback period for us on Tik Tok has gotten better as we've put a lot more time and effort and money to work which has been really exciting so we're profitable on a uneconomic basis very very quickly low single digit months and it's been consistent and we've pulled on that a little bit recently with annual and we were mostly monthly for the first three years for a couple different reasons one we just didn't want the complexity of dealing with this but we wanted to have hard-earned retention

[58:56] where we were learning what is the correlation of behavior and membership to month one retention month two retention month three retention and having that masked in annual is really hard to use as a Guiding Light for the team but if month one retention shits the bed it's really clear what to Rally the team around but if it's Mass it's hard to understand what's really happening you have to go really close to the user to even have a first glimpse of how all these things work together so we started iterating very lightly on annual and this was a few months ago knowing that it would clearly have implications

[59:32] on Payback period and we had a good handle on retention and this was after a whole bunch of product iteration so it fell at the right time and for us it was simplifying the checkout experience making it really easy to understand the offer after trial having just a simple side by side between the monthly and the annual and getting pricing right on the annual and we had resources that we studied and we studied dualingo at nauseum who published a lot of information on their iteration around price boin we don't look to other companies to guide what we do but we use it as a starting point to put together a

[1:00:07] thesis of something that we would try and that was really really helpful for us but we went from zero essentially annual to 20% through that one move and then we recently iterated again on price point trying to understand what's the clearing price where it actually is more cash coming in because you're pulling in more demand without giving too much up on arpo or Mr and really deteriorating the value per user and we played around with price again and we're at about 30% we'll spend more time on it down the road but we're pretty excited by where it's at and the impact that it's had on our business and payback period so is

[1:00:41] that 30% of conversions are now selecting annual or 30% of Revenue is now coming in annual 30% of new members who get to the pay wall at the end of trial so 30% of new people that passay us are selecting annually check ah so you're still 70% monthly on new members on new MERS new members and then where did you end up landing on pricing so are you still at $30 a month for the core product and then how did that translate into your annual price we are the retail is $29.99 the first price point we tried and we had done some campaign marketing so we had data points to understand

[1:01:19] what's the clearing price if it's not a cash problem what's the price value clearing price for people in their heads and there are certain numbers that carry weight that look like other subscription apps whether it's $9.99 or 1499 19999 these are benchmarks in people's heads so we had you know rough parameters and our first iteration was taking it to 1999 and this last iteration was $4.99 so $179 so it's 50% off the monthly and we had learned there was Magic on that 1499 through a whole bunch of other price work and survey and really understanding those that didn't convert and we convert a high number of

[1:01:59] triers to pay member but those that didn't where is the price value you know we're obviously using campaign levers and different type of offers and 1499 was the clearing price at least cognitively for a lot of folks that's been an exciting move for us from an annual take rate perspective yeah that's still fascinating me so you're converting 30% of new incoming users at a 100 $80 upfront payment for the first year correct wow but it's a 50% discount on the $30 a month but 70% of people are still choosing to pay month-to month because it's not such a big upfront yeah it's still high vers the in our content

[1:02:41] we think is better than anywhere else and it's Progressive and new every week and it's being built by some of the best coaches in string so the content itself is definitely premium and content for us isn't class base where you shoot a piece of content front to back we shoot them as individual movements in our gym studio so when we launch a coach we'll shoot a thousand individual movements that are then used to construct workout programming but on the monthly side I think what was exciting for us one we were able to ship the entire team to growth because retention was really strong very quickly it was clear this is

[1:03:19] a retened product and very clearly we were beating the benchmarks for our industry but in consumer and you guys Revenue cap put out an awesome doc that Benchmark a whole bunch of companies both just consumer subscription then also by vertical and we were the top of the pyramid for every one of the charts on that page so retention was really really compelling at the monthly basis and like when we talk to companies that had to go figure out annual they had to go figure out annual to make the UN economics on paid marketing work but retention for us was strong enough where we were profit itable on the user on an

[1:03:55] un economic basis months after we acquired wasn't one month wasn't two months but months quick enough where you could get to break even and see the path very quickly and repeatably and so we had air cover on retention so it hasn't been a maker break for our business and cash and new economics because retention has been so strong now obviously annual is super exciting it does lock people in but it's cash upfront which for a business at this stage is really really helpful and sudden it lets us put it back into growth and continuing to press without just thinking about outside Capital to do that so we've talked about

[1:04:32] product a little bit but as you said having great retention meaning having a great product gave you air cover to experiment and figure all of this out what are the key things that you think are driving that highly retentive product in a space that is kind of notorious for shedding users who to have a New Year's resolution and stop working out three weeks later yep there are a lot of products that are just solving for you to pay for the annual one time and then maybe you use it maybe you don't but the metric that we stare at every day as a team is workout completions and we study this maniacally

[1:05:12] and we build product around workout completions and understanding what are the levers we have available to us that really do move the needle on someone completing the next workout or staying consistent with us and our view and if you read our app store reviews or some of the awards we've won I think we have the best product in the world in this space in this genre for this user and it was really built ground up as a consumer retention oriented team we had to become a growth user acquisition team but we're a product Centric retention oriented team we designed the experience really for ourselves as the users but thinking

[1:05:53] through what is the experience of working with a personal trainer which is by far the best experience that you could have like we would agree with that but it's prohibited from a price point for most people it's not convenient from a scheduling perspective it's awkward if maybe you want to work with a different coach and make a change it's just not accessible but having someone tell you what to do every day an unbelievable amount of value in that experience so we created this product really by dissecting our own usage patterns but also thinking through what are the anchors that are the five-star 12st star experience with working with a personal

[1:06:29] trainer and those anchors are programming you have somebody that tells you what to do you don't have to think there's no guesswork it's you wake up on Monday put your shorts on press the button and go so no thinking you can just trust that it's designed by an expert and it's the right thing based on what you're solving for coaching you have somebody there that's guiding you and answering your questions and accountability which You could argue is the most important factor you have a human being that's standing there with you and you're going to go show up because you don't want to piss off your coach they standing there they're

[1:07:02] waiting for you and it's an unbelievable motivator and it's really a lot of the value the workout programming is very valuable but that accountability is extremely valuable to showing up day in and day out and we learn that very clearly through this process on the accountability side we designed from the beginning social experiences that you won't see in our website nobody buys or tries a fitness app to make friends but that's exactly what's happened we created these experience where you're on a team we call them teams these teams are led by a coach this coach is a superhero strength coach that represents a specific programing modality that maps

[1:07:43] to what we know about you and what you're solving for these coaches are really really good in front of the camera they're unbelievable strength coaches but we've created moments in the app where they're talking to you and it feels very personal and so there are all these experiences that we've created that leverage other people talking to each other so you have somebody else that's generally completing the same workout as you on the same day though asynchronously so it's relevant content a relevant moment in time and you have these creators or these coaches who are there to basically help Drive early activity in these chats they look like

[1:08:19] slack groups but these things have taken on a life of their own and they're wildly popular and anytime you open our app and go into one of these team chats you'll hear somebody you'll read somebody saying I wasn't going to work out today and I came here and I saw you guys talking about it and it motivated me to go do it and this is every day we see it and we have figured out from a product growth perspective how to drive people into chat earlier and we know what that equals from a workout completion perspective we know what it equals from a consistency perspective and so using elements like that really

[1:08:50] studying dual lingo studying mobile games all these things that create addictive behavior but instead of pointing them at ads and Screen Time pointing them at workouts and using all of these levers to keep you going so we're just constantly thinking about how do we take this experience and keep you going and make sure that when you are slipping or you need varability or you're just tired and you need a kick that we've got the right thing that's happening inside of the app so all of that was really intentionally designed I think the last point on this experience is this isn't a Content Library it's not go in and choose a random 30 minute

[1:09:30] workout it's prescriptive you're on a team there are like tribal rituals within these teams so much so that people have pilgrimage to Austin to our office to meet each other who met each other in the app which is really remarkable but this experience gets all tied together in what we call strength series and strength series are six week programming cycles and we have six of them in a year we call them the the latter season and they're all tied to the fitness calendar so in June July we're shredding and all of our coaches have that as a theme now what they're doing how they're programming and their

[1:10:04] Maneuvers and movements are different but the theme is the same and it gives us this lever where we're working towards something at the member base and you got to complete 20 workouts in that string series to earn the badge and people care about it but it also gives us a window for new users to say this is a great time to start like this is the beginning so we get six High urgency High intent moments that are mapped to the calendar to get people in now we have people starting every day and you don't have to start in the beginning but it creates a really clean narrative for

[1:10:35] us to tell about why to start today so those were all built ground up as a product team trying to figure out what's the ideal experience here where we're keeping somebody for five years not five months but like what has to be true to keep somebody working out with us for five years and that's been the guy exting light for our team from a product perspective for those of you listening to this thinking I'm not a fitness app or even if I am a fitness app I don't have the coaches to replicate exactly this experience that ladder is creating I think there's so many lessons around

[1:11:07] how Greg and his team are approaching these things even if you can't replicate onetoone the exact retention methods and other things the idea behind it of having that product Focus of looking at dualingo style gamification and like how do we bring people in what are those core experiences that keep people engaged it's just such an important way to think and then as Greg said it's like when you get those things dialed in you have so much more flexibility in user acquisition in having a highly retentive user base you just have so much more flexibility as a company and it's just such a powerful tool that you can get to

[1:11:50] leverage in every other part of the business so where do things go from here Greg how's your year been sounds like things are going well yeah 2023 has been transformative for ladder what feels like counter everyone things that covid was probably where we peaked we've peaked after and haven't peaked yet but have accelerated postco we built an experience designed around a consumer regardless of where they're working out we can solve that at the program level so in a mobile world it's as exciting as it was when people were kind of Hostage and thinking about new Solutions but from a growth perspective I think you nailed it we have a highly rended

[1:12:27] product we have designed the team almost in spinning flywheels within our team where we can do a lot within a 15ers group but people aren't dependent or bumping into each other and that's by Design so all product and Engineering is thinking about is retention and workout completions that's all they're thinking about every single day and we have a really incredible creative team that deeply part part of as the performance marketer for ladder that has its own motion and we have a team that manages our programs and coaches that are working with our coaches at the team level staring at our data and trying to figure out how do we improve the

[1:13:04] experience and increase workout completion so we're doing a lot with a small group without having really bureaucracy and politics and meetings all the stuff that generally slows you down that's been just a weapon and it's helped us keep the team very lean but this year we started the year with 9,000 paying subscribers and we'll beat aggressive targ getting closed the year north of 50,000 paying members and I think we'll track towards something that's as exciting next year and we've got some really exciting Capital Partners who have supported that Vision that we've put out and we feel like we're just getting started 500% growth and not just 500% growth because I think

[1:13:43] a lot of people like you were saying you Orient everything around getting that conversion whether people use the app or not but 500% growth in a highly retentive cohort is a really great business that's how a subscription business becomes a dualingo not the pump and dump or hit a wall and the other problems that we do see in the subscription app industry it becomes layers of a cake like the simple way I explain it is we're spending X dollars in ad and our burn is nowhere close to what we're spending in ad because it's compounding over time these layers are being added on top not falling away very

[1:14:22] quickly you're doing is playing catchup to fill the Leaky bucket well I think that's a great place to wrap up and speaking of a small team doing Mighty things you hiring or anything else you want to share as we wrap up we are always excited to talk to smart folks we don't have any really critical missing pieces today it doesn't mean that won't change into next year so no clear open roles but I would encourage everybody to try the product everybody is skeptical including every investor I first pitch about another Fitness app but once they get in there and you get through one or two workouts you realize that this is

[1:14:56] not like everything else and you can see that how our members are talking about us in the App Store so try the product join lauder.com we'll ask you those questions we'll give you a recommendation on the right Plan and there's no credit card for the trial so absolutely no skin off your back to give it a shot there was one last little nugget in there if you're building something that looks like every other fitness app you probably shouldn't be building a fitness app and raising money yes and I think that just applies to any app don't go build another app that doesn't have clear differentiation and

[1:15:29] that's what you're building a whole business around is a product that really is differentiated in the space and that's why you've been able to grow and scale and make things work the way you have absolutely couldn't said it better myself awesome thanks so much for chatting today and look forward to seeing louder's success in the future of course thanks for having me thanks so much for listening if you have a minute please leave a review in your favorite podcast player you can also stop by chat. sub club.com to join our private [Music] community

---

About this transcript
Read from YouTube's own caption track and laid out by ViewRank AI (https://viewrankai.com).
ViewRank AI finds the videos already beating a creator's own average on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube Shorts, transcribes them from the audio itself in more than 60 languages, and turns what worked into new ideas and scripts.
Free transcript tools, no account needed: https://viewrankai.com/tools
How to read any video this way: https://viewrankai.com/llms.txt