Natal · B2C · pregnancy and postpartum fitness app
Let people pay with their health savings account (HSA) at checkout
Tens of thousands of dollars in two weeks, unpromoted
What they did
What happened
- Stage
- launched 2 weeks before recording
In their words
How Removing the Free Trial Grew Monthly Subs 2000% – Nancy Anderson, Natal
David BarnardYeah, yeah. One last thing I wanted to talk to you about is accepting HSA payments, and this is something pretty new. RevenueCat, we just did an integration with a company called Flex, Ladder has rolled it out, but very few, and your app, Natal, is one of the early adopters of this, which I think is a really cool opportunity for the health and fitness industry to be able to accept HSA payments. How did that all come about?
Nancy AndersonWell, it's kind of interesting because, for years, people have been submitting their subscriptions to insurance and getting it covered for pre and postnatal fitness for our app. So I knew that women were looking for this because... Really, we're in fitness, but we also sort of blend into healthcare a little bit because we're doing pre and postnatal corrective exercise and some physical therapy protocols. I always wanted to implement something like this where it would be easier for them, because we always had to say, "Oh, yeah, just you pay for your subscription and then take your receipt to your insurance company. And if you have dollars, they'll cover it kind of thing." And so many clients would come to us, because I'm in DMs, so I hear it all the time like, "Hey, just so you know, my insurance covered this." I never heard one client say that it didn't get it …
David BarnardWow.
Nancy AndersonSo when this came up and Max brought it up in a meeting and said like, "We can do maybe..." I was like, "Yes. 100%, yes. Our clients are already doing this. They already want this. They ask us all the time if we accept it." You know what I mean? We're super excited to roll it out, and we just launched it two weeks ago, and we've had tens of thousands of revenue come through it, but we haven't announced it. People are just finding it-
David BarnardThat is so cool.
David Barnard… their monthly budget... Yeah, and I would look at this. Because I don't take freebies in the app industry, and so my wife's on Ladder for $30 a month, I was on Ladder for $30 a month. I was thinking about the annual, which.... We should have just gotten on the annuals, but that's 170 bucks. That comes out of the budget. I see those charges every month, but the HSA, now, it's just free money that's sitting out there in my RevenueCat HSA account.
Nancy AndersonYeah, and I think the customers understand what this is, like, "Okay, it's going to be a little bit maybe more painful to get through checkout, but it's worth it." But what we did is we were offering a free trial with it, but we only are offering it on our annual subscription, which I think makes a lot of sense considering. So I guess we'll see how that pays off, but I'm so glad people have found it and are using it. To me, that's just a sign that once we start promoting it or running ads around it or whatever, it's going to do very well if this many people are using it already and we haven't even said anything about it. So we're super stoked for it, and I'm so happy to be able to offer it to our clients because... I mean, fitness is expensive. It's a tough time for a lot of people right now. When something has to go, a lot of time it's fitness.
Nancy AndersonWomen write me all the time, they're like, "I want to do your program so bad, but I can't afford it." I love that we can offer something that maybe it will open up our resources for a new audience that maybe couldn't afford it before. But if they have insurance, this gives them another avenue. That was another big piece of why I wanted to offer this is it's right there. So when someone says like, "Hey, I really want to use this, but I can't …
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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
- Never give away free workouts or freebies
- 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: web, hsa, pre-tax, insurance, web-checkout, annual-only-trial