Natal · B2C · pregnancy and postpartum fitness app
Push 'spend your HSA dollars before they expire' at year end
What they did
- Stage
- planned
In their words
How Removing the Free Trial Grew Monthly Subs 2000% – Nancy Anderson, Natal
David Barnard… and so then hopefully more and more health and fitness and mental health and other apps... If you're in that space, you should totally check this out because, if you qualify, it potentially could be a huge unlock. So yeah, I'm fascinated by it, and it's really cool that you all started. Yeah, we'll have to follow up in a year or two and see if they retain at a higher or a lower rate and see what the conversion rates are and things like that.
Nancy AndersonTotally. And I think the big push for it will be end of year because those dollars don't roll over so people have to use them. So that's a great time too to push campaigns around like, "Don't lose your HSA. You can use it to do our programs or use our app," free marketing idea.
David BarnardYeah, yeah, yeah. All right. Well, as I do with all guests now, I wanted to ask you three questions. The first one, what is the biggest fail of the year? We'll start with fail, and then we'll go to the biggest win. The experiment that bombed, tactic that fell apart, content that bombed, or you felt like didn't appropriately represent you brand, any fails that you learned from the last year?
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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
- Let people pay with their health savings account (HSA) at checkoutTens of thousands of dollars in two weeks, unpromoted
- 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: hsa, seasonal, year-end, campaign