Natal · B2C · pregnancy and postpartum fitness app
Offer a free posture check by a real expert that picks the first workout
68-70% who finish it complete their first workout
What they did
What happened
- Stage
- launched ~2 months before episode
In their words
How Removing the Free Trial Grew Monthly Subs 2000% – Nancy Anderson, Natal
Nancy Anderson… really just building what she wants. She's telling us the product roadmap, not me. And I think that if you have close proximity to your user, it's so much easier to map out your product roadmap and know what features to build. I mean, the last thing you want to do is spend 50 grand building a feature no one uses. So it's like when you can hear from your audience like, "Oh, there's a real pain point here. What can we do in the app to fix this?"
Nancy AndersonOne that we've done recently is a posture assessment where they can come in and get their posture analyzed by an expert, real person, not AI, and it tells them what they need to work on and then gives them that first activation steps like, "Okay, this is the program to start on. These are the custom routines to add in based off of what we found in your posture assessment." We found that when women come in and do that, they're... 68 or 70% of them go in and complete their first workout after that, which is like a really high... I think that's high.
David BarnardThat's really high. Yeah.
David BarnardThe posture assessment is a kind of thing I could see a Facebook ad, and you do run some paid ads and everything. So then how are you thinking about specific features as those kind of draw and something exciting that an ad could be... Are you thinking even in that way, or is it just like how can we...
Nancy AndersonYeah, we actually released the posture assessment to be free, so you can download the app and you can just do it for free. You don't have to be on a trial or anything to use it, but we don't promote it. It's kind of just a soft launch that we kind of threw out there. Because sometimes if we get inundated, it's actually real humans. It's our real coaches that are doing it. So I don't want to overwhelm them necessarily because we have that 24-hour role, they have to get responded to within 24 hours.
Nancy AndersonBut yeah, we think about it all the time. It's funny because, we talk about lead magnets and stuff, we as a brand, I've never done lead magnets. I don't post free workouts, and it's not because I don't want to give anything away for free. It's because I think it attracts the wrong type of audience personally, I found, and I think that... The work we do is really valuable and it's complex, and these are real experts that are coaching and that are …
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More from this episode
- Sell a program as a monthly 30-day group challenge with before/after photos100 signups in month one, 125 in month two; kept growing
- Run paid social ads before Apple's tracking changeWorked well for a couple of years, then Apple's tracking change hurt it
- Post funny, relatable personal content, not just product postsStories get ~50K views; organic beats competitors' by 90%
- Reply to every DM, comment and email with a real expert within 24 hoursTrial-to-paid ~68% vs 38% typical; not isolated
- End posts with a soft 'learn more' instead of a sales pitch
- Turn down brand deals and affiliate links to keep audience trustGives up an estimated $0.5-1M/year; benefit not measurable
- Turn the questions people keep asking in DMs into your main programOver 1M users; still the top traffic driver
- Merge several niche apps into one app users keep across life stagesLess confusion and a lower price; ARR +20% in Q1 2026
- Narrow to pre- and postnatal fitness and rename the brand away from the founder
- Have your in-house expert coaches film the brand's videosFounder says it's working well; no numbers
- Ask 10-15 onboarding questions and show only content for the user's stage
- Build a new program for every client requestBiggest fail of the year: too many choices, users didn't start
- DM every new user personally and invite them to a coach-run community31% of community joiners return on day 2; no baseline
- Never give away free workouts or freebies
- Let people pay with their health savings account (HSA) at checkoutTens of thousands of dollars in two weeks, unpromoted
- Push 'spend your HSA dollars before they expire' at year end
- Drop the free trial on the monthly planMonthly subs up ~2,000%, annual +21% (founder's rough recall)
- Raise subscription pricesARR still grew 20% that quarter
- Pay influencers to post about the brand
Tags: assessment, human-expert, first-workout, free-feature