Natal · B2C · pregnancy and postpartum fitness app
Never give away free workouts or freebies
What they did
- Stage
- ongoing
In their words
How Removing the Free Trial Grew Monthly Subs 2000% – Nancy Anderson, Natal
Nancy Anderson… 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 developing these programs. And when you just throw something out for free, you're kind of devaluing them too in my opinion. And also, it's complex, so me giving you something for free doesn't mean it's going to fix your problem. You might need custom coaching, and that's why we want you in the app so that we can work with you and we can customize your approach. It's that high-end customer service thing. How can I give you high-end customer service if I'm just giving you a free workout on Instagram or in a blog post kind of thing? We don't typically do …
Nancy AndersonBut the posture assessment specifically, I do want to try to use as a lead magnet. We haven't built it basically in a way where they can just click and be there because it's inside of the app. That's something that we do want to explore, and I guess we could test and see if that works well. I don't know. But we do find that a lot of people use it once they get inside the app. Organically, I promote it. It does really well if I promote it on …
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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
- Offer a free posture check by a real expert that picks the first workout68-70% who finish it complete their first workout
- DM every new user personally and invite them to a coach-run community31% of community joiners return on day 2; no baseline
- 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: no-free-content, lead-magnet, perceived-value