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

Recruited reputable strength coaches with 10K-100K hyper-relevant Instagram followers. Pitched each with a custom deck featuring their face, brand and name, which stood out from brands spamming them. Terms: every dollar split after Apple's commission, with Ladder doing all upfront investment (shot all content, flew coaches to its Austin studio). Helped coaches with positioning, content and story for their audience. Later brought most coaches on as full-time teammates and learned that coaching quality and being a good partner matter more than audience size.

Each coach has a unique UTM link in their Instagram (later TikTok) bio leading to a coach-specific landing page: quick overview of the product, the coach, training style and equipment, then straight into the app and that coach's team, skipping the quiz because the user has already chosen the coach.

After Facebook users arrived with no context on any coach and got lost, rebuilt activation: all non-coach traffic goes through a ~15-question web quiz (days per week working out, days lifting, training styles, equipment, location, goals) that ends with three recommended teams tied to the answers, then into the app to start the right workout quickly. Built internal tools so the founder can reorder questions and change media without engineers.

Compared quiz answers with the coach roster. About a third of daily leads (mostly women) wanted traditional bodybuilding, which Ladder lacked, and those leads converted at half the rate of others. Used that to size demand for a new team before choosing a coach, then did hyper-targeted recruiting for the right coach. Repeated for male bodybuilding.

During the COVID equipment shortage, found a supplier and bought ~$50K of kettlebells and dumbbells, then set up a Shopify store whose link was only available inside the app after starting a trial. Coaches promoted it: everyone is looking for kettlebells; start a trial in the app to get access to a store that has them in stock.

No credit card collected to start the trial, from launch to today, so the product can win on experience in a noisy market.

After a seed round in mid-2021, put money into Facebook paid with an outside agency, right after iOS 14 disrupted attribution and while bigger fitness brands competed for the same users. Cold users arrived with no context on coaches, got confused, and faced a $60/month price.

Founder held ~100 conversations with Facebook trialers who didn't pay and learned they wanted programming, not 1:1 coach chat, and compared $60/month to Netflix and Spotify. Following Reforge material, ran a Van Westendorp survey (500 responses: too expensive to buy, expensive but considered, good deal, too cheap to trust) and sliced results by cohort (coach vs Facebook source, goals, modality). Relaunched in January 2022 at $29.99/month: join one team, switch up to twice a month, no 1:1 access. Did not A/B test or segment prices, to keep things simple.

Timed the relaunch for January, when fitness consumers are most open to trying something new, and went back to the database of leads bought through Facebook who had declined at $60/month, offering the new $29.99 price, packaging and positioning. Paid spend was still paused.

After growth stalled in February 2022, the whole 13-14 person team focused on growth. Built a basket of growth loops, each needing a grounded reason to believe (experience, advantages, team) and a fast in-house validation test; one channel at a time. Brought all growth in-house after a bad agency experience.

In 2020, as Instagram reach declined, the founder and one early coach (Lauren Kanski) created a TikTok handle for her, posted content and dissected what did and didn't work to find repeatable organic view outcomes, at no cost. Once the account passed 1,000 followers it got a link in bio.

As one growth loop in 2022, used Copy.ai to write movement how-to pages featuring exercise content already shot for the app, following a course on scrappy SEO.

For a newly launching coach with no TikTok experience, Ladder's creative director (Etsel) and the founder ran her account as her for the first couple of months, editing her existing raw phone footage with no new shoots. Rules learned: every video reaches a new audience via the For You page, so each must stand alone and either teach or entertain; raw iPhone-shot content edited inside TikTok beats polished Instagram content; coaches must unlearn Instagram habits (outfits, behind-the-scenes cadence); find each coach's niche and content type. Learnings were shared across the portfolio of coaches.

After nailing the content, iterated per coach on getting viewers to the profile, the only link in bio, and the coach's team landing page. Current CTAs are time-based ('we start Monday', 'we start November 6th', 'start before New Year's', 'see results in 4 weeks'), written in the video in TikTok-native font using TikTok as the editor rather than in the caption, and say exactly where to go.

Organic performance is the best signal of winning creative. Brand ads borrow hooks, messaging, copy and outlier coaches from organic. Also run Spark ads (whitelisting) on coaches' organic posts. Instead of exchanging post codes (too slow), worked with TikTok to connect Ads Manager to all coach accounts so the founder can check outlier organic Ladder content every day and turn it into an ad in seconds, sustaining the high creative volume TikTok needs.

Only after 45 days of organic success did the founder (taking TikTok performance marketing courses) and the creative director start putting small amounts of money behind the learnings, with no marketer on staff.

Every TikTok ad click goes to the 15-question web quiz rather than the App Store. Pixels fire on every question and answer combination, and answers that indicate a 'white-hot' user (already working out, not casual beginners, the most expensive and worst-converting lead) are used as TikTok conversion events, so the algorithm learns from early on-web signals instead of in-app events it can't see. Answers flow into Amplitude and a Google Sheet, which the founder read daily while iterating. Knows the cost per answer that is 'in the money' and what it means downstream.

Found by DMing new users that most TikTok viewers screenshot the ad and go straight to the App Store (3 for every quiz completer), invisible to tracking. Checked rigorously that direct App Store trials stepped up in parallel with quiz conversions every time a new winning creative, extra spend or Ads Manager change landed. Since the ratio is stable, all decisions are made on quiz metrics in Ads Manager.

Ignored Facebook-era rules such as not raising an ad set budget by more than 30% a day or not touching budgets within the week; tested 2-3x budget jumps in a day and makes budget changes three to five times a day, guided by quiz metrics.

Treats LTV:CAC as 'fairyland' for a young company. The whole team is anchored on payback period: what was spent, what comes in after Apple, Facebook, RevenueCat and variable commissions (gross basis), how fast it is recouped given retention, and how much burn hitting the gas requires.

Sold mostly monthly for the first ~3 years so month-1/2/3 retention stayed a clear signal for the team. Once retention was understood, simplified the end-of-trial checkout to a simple side-by-side monthly vs annual choice with a clear offer, annual priced at $19.99/month equivalent, using Duolingo's published pricing iterations as a starting thesis.

Used surveys of non-converters and campaign-offer data to find cognitive clearing prices (familiar anchors like $9.99, $14.99, $19.99). Moved the annual from $19.99/month equivalent to $14.99/month ($179/year), 50% off the $29.99 monthly, aiming for more cash without giving up too much ARPU.

Product and engineering optimize one metric, workout completions. Modeled on the personal-trainer experience (programming, coaching, accountability). Users join a coach-led team whose members do the same workout on the same day (asynchronously) and talk in Slack-like team chats; coaches seed early activity and appear in personal-feeling moments in the app. Product growth work pushes new users into chat earlier, with known effects on workout completion and consistency. Also borrows gamification from Duolingo and mobile games.

Programming runs in 'strength series': six-week cycles, six per year (the 'Ladder season'), each themed to the fitness calendar (e.g. shredding in June-July) across all coaches. Completing 20 workouts in a series earns a badge members care about. Each series start is a high-urgency moment for acquisition ('this is a great time to start'), feeding CTAs like 'we start Monday'.

Manually went through almost 16,000 App Store reviews plus team feedback to write value propositions and problem-solution statements using the words users use, then filtered all creative (especially TikTok) through them.