Nancy Anderson Fit · B2C · fitness programs brand
Turn the questions people keep asking in DMs into your main program
Over 1M users; still the top traffic driver
What they did
What happened
- Stage
- ~8 years ago
In their words
How Removing the Free Trial Grew Monthly Subs 2000% – Nancy Anderson, Natal
Nancy Anderson… launched, and I was coaching them in Facebook groups or whatever, but I was only doing postpartum core rehab, like Ab Rehab stuff, in person still because it's kind of complex. It's hands-on work. You need something kind of different for each person. So I hadn't yet figured out a way to build it into an effective scalable online program, but I kept seeing a trend come in with comments, DMs, and inside the Facebook groups that I was coaching.
Nancy AndersonIt's like women were coming to me, asking about getting back into fitness postpartum, asking about symptoms that were directly related to postpartum core rehab. I realized, because I was so close to those conversations and so close to those clients, like, "Oh, this is not a one-off. This is a gap that no one is serving or they're not serving well for it to be effective. I'm going to figure out how to make this scalable." So I did, I buckled in, and I figured it out, and I launched it, and we've had over a million users use this program. Eight years ago is when I launched it, maybe a little bit longer now, and it's still our hero program. It drives the most traffic to our app. It's what we're most famous for. It's the program that most people stop me in public and talk about. It's that one. And I never would have built it if I wasn't close to the customer because I never would have heard that feedback. That never would have showed up in my Shopify reports. You know what I mean?
David BarnardAnd it doesn't show up in an A/B test. You can A/B test up and down and price and all the different things, but you're going to lose the why if you're not in that community. That's another thing I love about the business you're building too is that you're almost building a community first, and then the app is just a way to make money to build the community. There's a famous... I think it was Walt Disney, like, "I make movies to make money so I …
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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
- 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
- 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: customer-feedback, hero-program, dms