Natal · B2C · pregnancy and postpartum fitness app
DM every new user personally and invite them to a coach-run community
31% of community joiners return on day 2; no baseline
What they did
What happened
- Stage
- ongoing
In their words
How Removing the Free Trial Grew Monthly Subs 2000% – Nancy Anderson, Natal
David BarnardGot you.
Nancy AndersonSo yeah, we kind of filter it down like that. We have found that too many onboarding questions, people can't get through it and they just get frustrated and, not enough, they're confused when they get in there, they don't know where to start. It's this constant balance of how much... So we're kind of playing with that right now. We're adding a few more slides that kind of niche down a little bit more of where to put them because we don't want people being confused when they get in the app, but we also are reaching out to them. As soon as they get into the app, a real person is reaching out to them like, "Hey, just shooting a DM. Welcome to the app. Let me know what I can help you find." And at first, if they connect with a coach or they go into our community and connect, we find through our stats that they're more likely to come back.
Nancy AndersonIn our in-app community, if they get in there, 31% of them are coming back on day 2 and 14% are still returning by day 3. You know what I mean? What we find is it's not really the feature, it's just an in-app community, something special, but I think it's the validation, the support, the feeling of like, "Oh, I'm not alone here." There's expert coaches in there that are coaching all day, every day, answering your questions, pelvic floor questions, whatever you need. Complex things that you'd have to pay a couple hundred dollars for a session with a doctor of physical therapy to even get your answers, well, we're answering them in the community. "Oh, by the way, it's for free. You can come in, anyone can ask those questions for us." So it's like that and helping them kind of get to where they need to be …
David BarnardYeah. And then I would imagine that's part of why you have such great conversion to paid is because you get people to that moment of feeling heard and understood and that they're seeing the right content so that they'd start a program instead of being overwhelmed by 10 different programs. So it sounds like that is pretty key to why you see the numbers you do. And then when they feel engaged and cared for and listened to and supported and related …
Get tactics like this every Monday
New tactics from the week's founder interviews, each linked to where it was said.
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
- Offer a free posture check by a real expert that picks the first workout68-70% who finish it complete their first workout
- 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: welcome-dm, in-app-community, expert-coaches