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

David Barnard: 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 TikTok ads, price optimization, and what the team learned from burning hundreds of thousands of dollars on Instagram ads. Hey, Greg, thanks so much for joining me on the podcast today.

Greg Stewart: Thanks for having me. We're happy customers. So happy to be here and doing this with you.

David Barnard: Awesome. So I'm super excited to talk through your growth strategy. Cause you've unlocked some 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 kick it off with what is ladder.

Cause I think that's going to really help kind of inform how you approach your growth strategy. So what is ladder?

Greg Stewart: 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.

David Barnard: Cool. So how long have you been at it? what's kind of the journey been so far from like a product company standpoint?

Greg Stewart: Yeah. We launched the product in the middle of COVID, in July 2021, which was an interesting time to be launching fitness app for sure.

David Barnard: wow. Was that good?

Greg Stewart: not as people would expect. We locked the strategy down, really in Q4, 2018. 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 of thinking about what to do or searching for content. And so we were hyper focused on the 65 million Americans at the gym. Which we thought was a underserved segment from a technology perspective.

We were that user, you are that user. And our view that it mostly casual fitness and cardio that had the attention of innovators and of venture capital. So we saw an opportunity, and fortunately or unfortunately, depending on what time period you look at it, COVID became part of our everyday life.

We had a plan to launch and we did and had to be really creative to be relevant to a user who was getting bombarded by all kinds of new products at that moment. And somebody who was at home in their house with no equipment versus a full 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.

David Barnard: 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, did, start promoting the app and get some early traction. What did that look

Greg Stewart: Yeah, well, we had to be relevant for at home, so we had to be conscious of that when we were thinking about our content and working with launch coaches and our coach 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 to consumers who were looking for help in that moment in time, how to stay interested and consistent when their whole routine had 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 we went zero to a million bucks of ARR 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.

David Barnard: What did that look like? You say partners. So when you were partnering with an influencer in that early stage, you know, it sounds like it's evolved over time, but in that early stage, did you form those partnerships? And you said there were micro influencers. 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?

Greg Stewart: And varying levels of audio 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. 

David Barnard: Relevant, hyper intent, like, the best way to do influencers is find that most relevant with like, they can drive that super high intent user.

Greg Stewart: Exactly. And if COVID 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 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.

David Barnard: 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?

Greg Stewart: we set it up where we wanted. perfect alignment with these coaches. And so 1st phase at that point, it was splitting every dollar after 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. And 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 GS to serve the audience that they had acquired.

So I really felt partnership where we did all of that for investment and shut all the content. flew them to Austin in the middle of COVID, which had all kinds of protocols and COVID testing kits at our studio and just a nightmare from a logistics perspective. but we got it done thankfully. And, was exciting to have a great group of coaches launch with at that moment.

David Barnard: Yeah. So the ladder 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 of times when you open the app, you actually pick a coach and there's like a lot of different coaching options with different styles of workouts with different, equipment or no equipment and those kinds 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?

Greg Stewart: We had unique and still do UTMs 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.

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 let us track where it was coming from and we still have that same infrastructure in Lincoln bio for all of our coaches, the partnership and the way we work with coaches has changed, but that kind of core infrastructure is still in place.

David Barnard: Interesting. So then were you actually doing like web onboarding and even web paywalls, or were you doing minimal onboarding and then sending them to the app?

Greg Stewart: It depends on where you come from. this is after a whole bunch of iteration, but for the first year and a half, most of our trialers were coming from our coaches and we are helping them and creating the content and the positioning points and obviously the landing page and all of the collateral that they would need to be effective to get folks into the app.

And they were talking about their program or their team and ladder. And if you're going down that path, You've already made a choice on 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 if you're coming through coach marketing, typically link in 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 where we're 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 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 training styles and we're not looking for thousands of coaches and really the same programming style across all of our coaches. We're looking for really exciting variety and 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 are coming through our funnel and saying that, and we didn't have a traditional bodybuilding program. So the conversion rate for that user versus someone who didn't say they want a bodybuilding was half. And so we can 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 locked that in, we picked the programming style, then we go out and we do hyper targeted recruiting of the right 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 know what's coming in every day and can be really smart about putting in the right programming style that's clearly missing from our product suite, but has real consistent demand that's coming through funnel.

We had the same thing happen on male bodybuilding and we launched a male bodybuilding team earlier this year. Those were our last two launches and there are some of our fastest growing, most popular programs and they're all informed by that quiz. 

David Barnard: 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 went the opposite approach of like, you're finding folks who don't have decent followings. But like you said, hyper targeted followings and then help them build that up over time versus the inverse where just try and get the biggest influence or regardless of the intent, the fit with your product and stuff like that.

So something I think more folks should explore as an opportunity. You know, we've 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.

Greg Stewart: 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 time of having the right coach partners. That were excellent from a workout programming coaching perspective in 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.

David Barnard: So in those early stages, were there any other organic channels or any other kind of launch techniques or, 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?

Greg Stewart: That first phase, it was all organic Instagram. we did some creative things, at a moment in time. Again, we were launching in COVID. This is a strength training app. if you remember that moment, it was impossible to get any sort of equipment, 

David Barnard: I tried. 

Greg Stewart: an article. Yeah,

there was an article in the, Wall Street Journal. I remember it. I think it was on the cover and it was talking about the kettlebell king of New York. And this guy was buying kettlebell inventory from defunct gyms, commercial gyms in New York, and he was taking those and selling door to door.

To folks in Manhattan and charging two to three times what they were worth simply 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 B to B to C. So we had a moment where we scrambled to figure out how do we lock down some equipment.

So we removed that, as a blocker 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 kettlebells and dumbbells. And this was like, we were very early with very little money, but we use that to create, shop, 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've got access to the link inside of the app and our coaches would use that to say, Hey, everybody's looking for a kettlebells. 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 going to get access to a store that actually has it in stock.

And that just 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.

David Barnard: that is such an awesome, like scrappy, read the market, figure out what's going to get you attention kind of thing. I mean, love hearing these kind of scrappy stories and that's what it's all about. Right. It's getting attention. need attention. So how are you Kardashian posting.

Yeah. She's got a hundred million followers, but. They're not as relevant. Okay. Micro influencers will, 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's 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.

Greg Stewart: it did. pretty quickly. and it was an entire motion of the team to help support these coaches. And we're iterating on the product experience to make it really efficient for a trial or coming in to experience the product. There was no credit card collected up front. that's still true today because we were competing on product and the 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 brands. Some that they heard of, some that they had not heard of. 

David Barnard: 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?

Greg Stewart: first two years were hardcore product iteration and just making sure again, that the thesis was right, that the core delivery of the workout experience was right. And then we built an entire set of tools for our coaches and our team to power all of this, a product called Apollo, which think is the best software for coaches, but it's just used.

for our team and constantly getting better and better, but it powers everything that we do. so for the first couple of years, mostly organic Instagram just helping coach extract, we would launch new programs and teams. Which would be new audiences that we would help those coaches extract trialers from.

we raised a little bit of seed capital or C plus capital in mid 2021. And we did, what we thought every consumer should do or you're told to do. 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 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 I was 14 came out. So everybody was upside down from acquisition and 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 process, our price point. We talked about our early users were mostly coming from a coach and we talked 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're somebody that was coming off of Facebook ad, you might be the right user. Somebody who'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 to the right workout as quickly as possible, or they wouldn't give us a shot.

And there was no way we could get the economics to work. And so that first phase, we didn't have anything set up that was different. that are 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.

learned pretty quickly that we had to think from a product perspective. A lot harder. It's just about activation and 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 that was a huge learning. And then we talked to those that did get into the app and then didn't pay us, which was most, we talked to them.

I probably had a hundred conversations with folks just learning. And we learned in those conversations that our price point was totally out of whack. Yeah. And when we launched, we were 60 a month and that's very expensive. And the reason it was 60 a month is because the product had a component that gave you one to one chat with the coach and it was never meant to be chatting with a friend type experience.

But it was designed almost like an on star button where you had specific 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 and 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 pay 60 bucks a month.

You know, they're looking at Netflix at the time or Spotify and word two, three, four X. What they're paying for every other content subscription and the price value equation, which is 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 pause 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 soundbite that 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 of that at the beginning of the year. January our 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 size, database of leads. And we had a new 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 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 

David Barnard: 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 lessons that you needed to go into a 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 ad tech. Oh, we need a different MMP. Oh, we need this.

We need that. It's like, no, we need a better product.

Greg Stewart: 100 percent and our DNA is product and marketing. not performance marketing at a time. So our default was, what can we do in the experience? What can we do in 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, a moment that was just hard. Yeah. 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 time.

David Barnard: Yeah. The other really interesting thing you, said in there was that you originally repriced at $60 a month. which Yeah, it does. It sounds crazy. Like, I don't know many apps that are 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 Seufert's 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, CAC is 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,

Greg Stewart: went through a really, really deep exercise, extracting as much information 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 triangulation of super one to one solutions, maybe high performance training training, something very specific.

All the way down to influencer PDFs. And we had a combination both. We had the one to one component, which gave me a little bit of confidence to price higher. And to your point before, that made sense for that user because they're viewing these coaches as heroes. And they are, but like that before they got into the app.

So to pay 60 bucks a month to chat with your hero is really cheap.

David Barnard: right,

Greg Stewart: so the value that 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 of weeks. Because you're telling a fresh story to that coach's audience. Maybe 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're 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 over 

time. And so that was just a really clear lesson to us on that.

David Barnard: audience saturation, right? So as a 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 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.

Greg Stewart: actually use reforge content for this, which was a game changer in the moment because I didn't 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 man, love this type of work. That was the Van Westin door 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 so expensive that you'd never buy it at what price point is ladder expensive, but you still consider purchasing it at what point is left price point ladder a good deal and at what price point is it so cheap that you'd 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 was people wanted the workout programming content, high quality strength training content. They didn't want to think about what to do. That was by far the value prop. So playing 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 was 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 one to one access. We have social experiences. You get all that. Obviously we have gamification in the app. You get all that, but no, personalization in a much cheaper price point that reflects 

David Barnard: did you do at that time or subsequently any AB price testing or do you even offer different cohorts, different prices? Like since you know that somebody coming from an influencer is actually willing to pay more, do you charge them more or did

you 

just normalize on 30? 

Greg Stewart: it wasn't worth the complexity of the overhead. 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 then I talked through it with our board it just felt like a very, clear move for us and creating the overhead of different skews 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 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 or close enough to right.

David Barnard: Okay. So it's January, 2022, people are, excited about year's resolutions. How'd it go? was that next lever in growth?

Greg Stewart: January was awesome. cause we went to this whole database of people that said, no, that we bought off Facebook. 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 shit 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 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.

David Barnard: Yeah, 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? what did you land on as that growth loop?

Greg Stewart: We came up with a framework to figure out a basket of growth groups 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 Facebook experience and I had an and I've made all the mistakes in the world partnering with the wrong agency, partnering with the agency in general, and I'll never work with a market 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 growth loops 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 could do it, but we learned pretty quickly that this is long tail strategy. There was not going to be meaningful points on the board, but we found, I found some course by going out to people that think are smart 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's 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 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. 

David Barnard: 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? you just 

Greg Stewart: 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, a time. And, one of the, growth loops that. was part of that process was tick 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 right 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 tick tock, as consumers, we could see that the consumer was moving. to tech doc. We could see the growth and when the engagement and tech doc and this was two or three years before that.

I mean, we knew this was 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 of validation. This was 2020. 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 coach Lauren Kansky. 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 Lincoln 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 of, Hey, we maybe can do this.

We've got strong creative abilities and we've learned a lot through Instagram and we have messed around with Tik TOK. And we know that it's possible to get somebody off Tik TOK into our app and to pay us. we pushed on that. And, remember we had a moment where I took my creative director, now VP of branded creative, who's been my partner in crime.

And, I took him to breakfast and I said, like, Hey man, like, you want to work on TikTok with me? he said, yes. And I said, well, it wasn't an option. Like we're going to go work on TikTok. he was super excited and Edsel, just an unbelievably brilliant, creative mind. And it was head of creative 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 TikTok. We were like, Hey, this will be your account. but we're going to act as you for the first couple of 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 a 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 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, seen enough. to maybe start putting 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 apprehension, especially for me. there's no one on our team at that point with a marketing in their title. It was me and Edsel. I'm taking courses on tick tock performance marketing, figuring out 

what buttons to click.

love math. I love creative, so I like the work, but just didn't come from from that DNA, which actually was, helpful thinking through with a completely open mind, how to attack a problem on Tik TOK, which was 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 Edsel creating, he and I just talking all day long. And very quickly it started to turn into trials, into paid members, and it was infinitely more exciting than our first couple weeks of Facebook. it gave 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.

David Barnard: so what did that early motion look like? since you started with this new coach and imagine you start ramping up other coaches TikTok around this 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?

Greg Stewart: documented and we had a thesis and a reason to believe different things would work. but there are a couple of different ways, to spend money on TikTok. And what we've learned over time that is that organic is the best indication of winning content. we were creating brand ads, featuring coaches.

that we're winning on TikTok, but really using the organic insights, the hooks, the messaging, the copy, the coach 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 whitelisting TikTok, but taking the coaches, organic content.

And then turning that into an ad, pointing that in a direction, that we've sat in, that was also explosive very, very quickly for us. And we worked with Tik Tok, the company at that point. who we've 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 tick tock is very high. So you need a really high. level of volume and speed of iteration to keep fueling the machine.

And so we connected all of 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 brand strategy.

David Barnard: So what kind of content did perform and then the thing I've always, talking to folks who've tried to talk ads, one of the challenging things is like turning something engaging as content itself into a call to action. So what did the call to actions look like?

And how did you work a call to action into what looked like organic content.

Greg Stewart: Step one, which is just marketing 101 was understanding our customer. And understanding them at a really, really deep level and the words that they use. And, I've done a lot of work, take world feedback that's come through us, through our own team, but also dissecting the app store.

we have almost 16, 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's mouth and how they were explaining the product and what they were getting.

And so like we really, really 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 TikTok. But for TikTok, we had to learn how to create for TikTok. 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 try and monetize that audience that you've acquired. And so you build this million person following, and you try to sell them relevant goods and services.

And sometimes those are your products and sometimes they're a brand partners that's working with you as an influencer. So the motion is build up falling, put out great content and constantly speak To that following tech dog is the exact opposite where most of the content that's being consumed is through the for you page and the for you page is tech talk feeding you content.

That it thinks you'll like based on your prior, user behavior and the content that you are 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 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 a behind the scenes in a couple of weeks.

And with TikTok, it'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 your profile and consuming it linearly.

They're finding you through the For You page because TikTok 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 you're building. I think what we learned with our coaches, and then we have, TikTok creators that are incredible in our team that are not coaches.

We learned 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 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 Tic Tok 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 influenced strength training routine, that's really different than somebody who's looking for a CrossFit. Type program in a commercial gym. They're just solving for completely different things meaning the content that's going to work It's 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 I'm 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 trialers 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 and value on TikTok is you're either teaching them or they're entertained and that's it.

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 learned a ton. And so we have this portfolio of coaches and we're learning across them, which is just 10Xing speed because we're doing it so quickly across people.

But can't stress 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 TikTok and really understanding what that is. 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.

David Barnard: part of my question that you didn't answer was on the C. T. A. But I think it was very informative that you didn't answer my question on C. T. A. Because Being successful on TikTok, 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?

Greg Stewart: With our coaches, then it was iterating on call to action. How do I get people like telling a very clear story in the content itself. And so, you know, this is the coach, you know, that this is plotting strength, you know, that there's a program. And at the end, we're iterating on creative ways to get people into their profiles of clicking on the handle and going down into the link.

That is their ladder team landing page in their Lincoln 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 nailed, the creative. Scale up the viewers, which is just creating great 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 

David Barnard: Can you share some examples what you're finding that did work 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.

Greg Stewart: Yeah, and changed over 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 Lincoln bio and they were not writing it in the text because everyone's afraid that tick tock is solving against that, but putting it in the video itself in font that's native to tick tock using, tick tock is the editing tool.

So, it just created ways of saying, we've got you, you know, what this is, go to my profile for X, Y, Z, go to my profile to start Monday, go to my profile. To start seeing results in the next four weeks, we're using start before new years, 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 had to be explicit and say, there's a 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 from me on a daily basis.

David Barnard: that's awesome. And from a tick 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. 

Greg Stewart: figured out just through having to figure it out. I'll give you one example is that everybody goes to our web quiz off at TikTok app, 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 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 TikTok. So TikTok 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 out 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. right now that's somebody for the most part is already working out. And the most expensive lead to acquire is, casual fitness.

And 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, 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 and the economics are going to break. So we had to figure out how do we get dialed in, terms of getting to the right user and not. getting to more casual focus folks, folks who have never lifted a weight 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 instantly got tick tock dialed in, and there was a week when we were iterating because I'm reading the answers, right? I had the 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 right person efficiently. It maybe is not the obvious tactics that have been used either on tick tock or other platforms, but this motion got it dialed in really tight and still true that.

David Barnard: that's a really solid funnel approach that I hadn't heard anybody using before that you're getting them out of tick tock 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 where they are, where you can get that feedback loop going.

Greg Stewart: Which was very, very important for managing spend. TikTok 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 tick tock.

So it's a little bit wild wild west. We've had conversations with folks that talk to us the conversation and say, well, you can't raise your budget in any ad group. I'd say by more than 30 percent a day. And my question would be like, why, what's the rationale? I was like, Oh, that's what we learned on Facebook and performance marketing.

we didn't hold any of those as truths going into this. It was like, all right, if that's an assumption, then let's two X or three X 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 I spoke at Tic Toks, one of their us all hands last December. And I was talking to all the reps and really, really smart 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 or 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, 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 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 TikTok, fortunate in that we're not spending time or money anywhere else.

we're unbelievably excited about TikTok and we just don't have any reason to go spend time elsewhere. And what we learned, very early on in our TikTok iteration was that, most people wouldn't go down this happy path. of going from ad, clicking to the web quiz, completing the quiz, downloading the app.

We would get a bunch of people but it wasn't most. We learned that for every person that was answering the quiz three were going directly to the app store. And they were taking a screenshot of the ad. They were sharing it with themselves. And I talked to these people. Once they're in the app, I'm DMing them.

Like, how'd you get here? Like, I'm trying to extract and learn. And we learned 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 rigor, the 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 unlocked change in as manager, I would see the same step up in app 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 going to happen downstream that's held true even as we, five, six, seven, eight X budget, from growth investment perspective.

David Barnard: So you've already Talked about it saying in the money, but do you look at CAC to LTV and payback periods? And how do you spend into those creatives that are in the money?

Greg Stewart: cocktail TV at this stage, I think is, fairyland. I think it's like pitch deck metrics. because the LTV in a business has 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 not a really good system to understand in my mind, your unit economics, uh, at that moment, and so we've anchored the entire team and business to payback period, which is just way simpler cognitively to manage.

We spent X costs 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 LTV long term like, yeah, we can guess, but I can't control that day to day payback period.

We understand the levers and we understand not even at the net basis, but the gross basis, what's dropping down in every dollar. After I pay Facebook or after I pay Apple and we pay revenue cap and any variable commissions, what are we earning versus what we spent? And so it's all payback period.

And we're just constantly talking to the team and educating on how these things work. So I almost never talk about LTV 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 burn is that going to take to hit the gas and is it changing or is it getting better? And 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 TikTok has gotten better. as we put a lot more time and effort and money to work, which has been really exciting.

So we're profitable on a unique economic 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 of different reasons. One, we just didn't want the complexity of dealing with this, but we wanted to have harder and retention 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 mass.

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's around 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 on payback period. and we had a good handle on retention, and this was after a whole bunch of product iteration. So it felt 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 Duolingo at Nauseam who published a lot of information on their iteration around price point, we don't look to other companies to guide what we do, but we use it as a starting point to put together a thesis of something that we would try and that was, really, really helpful for us, but we went from, zero essentially, uh, annual 20%, through that one move.

And then we recently iterated again on price point. Okay. 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 arpu or MRR really deteriorating the value per user. and we play it 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.

David Barnard: 30 percent of conversions are now selecting annual or 30 percent of revenue is now coming in annual

Greg Stewart: 30 percent of new members who get to the paywall at the end of trial, so 30 percent of new people that pass are selecting annual at 

David Barnard: Oh, so you're still 70 percent 

Greg Stewart: time. On new members, 

on new

members. 

David Barnard: Yeah. 

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?

Greg Stewart: We are. retail is 29. 99, the first price point we tried. And we had done some campaign marketing. So we had data points to understand 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 14. 99, 19. 99. 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 1499. So 179. So it's 50 percent off the monthly. And we had learned there was magic on that 1499 through a whole bunch of other price work and surveying and really understanding those that didn't convert.

And we convert a high number of, trialers to pay a member, but those that didn't. Where is the price value? You know, we obviously using campaign levers and different type of offers and 14. 99 was a clearing price, at least cognitively for a lot of folks. that's been an exciting move for us an annual take rate perspective.

David Barnard: Yeah. that's still fascinating. So you're converting. percent of new incoming users at a 180 upfront payment for the 

first year. 

Greg Stewart: Correct. 

David Barnard: But it's a 50 percent discount on the 30 a month, but 70 percent of people are still choosing to pay month to month because it's not such a big upfront.

Greg Stewart: Yeah, it's still high versus our content. 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 and strength. So the content itself is definitely premium and content for us isn't. Class based where you shoot a piece of content front to back.

We shoot them as individual movements in our gym studios and when you 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 shift the entire team to growth because retention was really strong.

Very quickly. It was clear that this is a retentive 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 and 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 talked to companies that had to go figure out annual, they had to go figure out annual to make the economics on paid marketing work. But retention for us was strong enough where we were profitable on the user on a economic basis.

Months after we acquired. It wasn't one month. It 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 make or break for our business and cash and new economics because retention has been so strong now, obviously annual is super exciting.

does lock people in, but it's cash upfront, which for a business at this stage is really, really helpful and exciting and it lets us put it back into growth and continuing to press without just thinking about outside capital to do that.

David Barnard: So we've talked about 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 have a New Year's resolution and stop working out, three weeks later,

Greg Stewart: Yep. 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 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 apps or reviews or some of the awards we've won. I think we have the best product in the world in this space in the 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 the users. But thinking through, what is the experience of working with a personal trader, which is by far the best experience that you can have. Like we would agree with that, but it's, prohibitive from the 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, 12 star experience with working with a personal 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. 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 gonna go show up because you don't want to piss off your coach They're standing there. They're waiting for you And it's an unbelievable motivator and 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 learned 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 programming modality that maps 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 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 or 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 studying Duolingo, studying mobile games, all of 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 durability, 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. This isn't a content library. It's not go in and choose a random 30 minute workout. It's prescriptive. You're on a team. There are like tribal rituals within these teams so much so that people 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 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 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 strength 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 us to tell about why, to start today.

So those are 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 guiding light for our team from a product perspective.

David Barnard: for those of you listening to this thinking, 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 how. Greg and his team are approaching these things. Even if you can't replicate one to one, the exact retention methods and other things, the idea behind it of having that product focus of looking at Duolingo style gamification and like, how do we bring people in?

What are those core experiences? 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 leverage in every other part of the business.

So, where do things go from here? Greg, how's your, your Ben, sounds like things are going well.

Greg Stewart: Yeah, 2023 has been transformative a lotter. what feels like counter cyclical. Everyone thinks that COVID was probably where he peaked. we've peaked after and haven't peaked yet, but it accelerated post COVID. We build 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 retained product. We have designed the team almost in spinning flywheels within our team. where we can do a lot within a 15 person 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 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 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, 9000 paying subscribers and we'll, beat our, aggressive target and close 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 put out and we feel like we're just getting started.

David Barnard: 500 percent growth and not just 500 percent growth. Cause I think a lot of people, like you were saying, you orient everything around getting that conversion, whether people use the app or not, but 500 percent growth in a highly retentive. Cohort is a really great business. that's how a subscription business becomes a Duolingo, not the pump and dump or hit a wall and the other problems that we do see in the subscription app industry.

Greg Stewart: 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 an ad because it's compounding over time. These layers are being added on top, not falling away very quickly. Where all you're doing is playing catch up to fill the leaky bucket.

David Barnard: 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?

Greg Stewart: 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 not like everything else.

And you can see that and our members are talking about us in the app store. So try the product. Join lighter dot 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.

David Barnard: 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.

And I think that just applies to any app. Don't go build another app that doesn't have clear differentiation. And 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.

Greg Stewart: Absolutely. Couldn't have said it better myself.

David Barnard: Awesome. Thanks so much for chatting today and look forward to seeing louder success in the future.

Greg Stewart: Of course, thanks for having me.