Scaling Meta Ads from zero to $100K a month — Ethan Ethier, Built With Science

“as long as we're constantly improving our trial to paid and retention, that lifts the floor for everything else”

“when we did launch the app, we had hyped it up obviously to our members and also to just our email lists and publicly. So we did see a spike when we officially launched it”

“if it's more of a educational broad type of content where maybe we're sharing a specific diet or a workout program, a program that reaches a higher audience, larger audience, then that might not necessarily get the same amount of trial activations as to a video that where maybe we're telling a story about someone who started on the app”

“we just onboarded a few clippers who are taking some of our existing long form and posting that across Instagram Reels and TikToks”

“everything we've done from that end is mainly through B-roll cell videos. We've used some testimonial content, a lot of statics now with AI.”

“we just needed to get a baseline of what that number would be in order for us to calculate how much we could actually spend to acquire a customer. So that took around a month to do”

“We've tested a lot of ads that are more like, I guess, click baity-style or encourage a click and encourage someone to start a trial, but we can quickly see from the trial to paid that this is not the user that resonates the best with the app.”

“one of our engineers built a custom dashboard where basically we can see and validate that every single new trial is coming specifically from Meta, just because with all our organic reach right now, Meta can often blend who's coming from where”

“it educates the user on the actual product, it overcomes objections, and it increases the perceived value of the product while also helping them understand how personalized the product actually will be for them”

“the positioning of it is you're comparing costs of a personal trainer versus a trainer in your pocket. So that way we can charge a little bit more premium.”

“we offered users the option to add a gym buddy, we call it, to their plan and get their plan at a discounted rate”

“we decided to invest in hiring an external consultant to help us with some of this AI search”

“we'll list out as many problems as to why that pricing page isn't converting before anything else”

“this often inflates a lot of the engagement metrics that you obviously want to measure when you launch a new feature. So we've actually taken the opposite approach where we'll roll out a new feature, we won't say anything, and we'll just see how the metrics do on its own.”

“Jeremy AI has actually been one of our customer's favorite features”

“he'll reach out to some of the expert researchers and coaches and dieticians to collab with for videos in terms of promoting some of the research that they find”

“all we did was change the layout so that it presented the annual upfront and reduced risk of actually starting the free trial. So we didn't change the price, we didn't change the positioning. It was simply a UI shift, which had a massive impact for us.”

“Adding more context onto this page seemed to actually hurt the conversions a lot more than not having anything at all.”

“we are also testing a no trial offer compared to the 14-day free trial. We though it'd be a big win just because a lot of our traffic right now is organic and they're already warm and trust the brand, but we're seeing it's quite negative”

“we actually have been rolling out another arm. It's been a few weeks now where we make both options seem pleasant, so it's not one framed as good or bad. It's more of like, "Okay, they're both good." And that actually has been a very strong lift.”

“It definitely was one of our highest performing videos this year, and it was honestly very fun to do. We rented out a full studio, brought in all these participants”