Natal · B2C · pregnancy and postpartum fitness app
Narrow to pre- and postnatal fitness and rename the brand away from the founder
What they did
- Stage
- ongoing
In their words
How Removing the Free Trial Grew Monthly Subs 2000% – Nancy Anderson, Natal
David Barnard… for me because I just had a baby," and that tells a difference. We were talking about storytelling, the name of the app tells a story that that's who you care about, that's the community you're building, and that's what you're working toward, and that's what you're going to get when you download the app versus if you're a gen pop, Nancy Anderson Fitness app, it's like, "What is that? I don't know who Nancy is." But Natal, it's like, "Oh.." yeah.
Nancy AndersonYeah, and that's actually one, I think, mistake I did make early on is... Nancy Anderson Fit was the brand for a long time, and that's tough. In hindsight, I probably wouldn't have spent so much time building a brand with my name across it. I would have had another name, like Natal, for example. So that's kind of been a soft pivot that we're trying to sort of make because I have 10 probably coaches, amazing, talented, very experienced coaches, DPTs, physical therapists working for me too, so it's not the Nancy show. You come in and maybe you're getting coached by Lindsay or Brittany or Athea or these other coaches that work for us who are incredible. I also didn't want to keep using my name because, one, I just don't want to be the face of the brand forever, because there's other faces and I want them to shine too, which, talk about like UGC...
Nancy AndersonI have my coaches create content for us, which I think is a way to do UGC without making it kind of that diluted way of doing it. We scope ideas from my coaches, and they shoot those, and that's been something that we're trying out, working well.
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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
- 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: niche-down, brand-name, founder-name