Built With Science · B2C · science-based fitness coaching app
Sell the app as a trainer in your pocket, not a tracker, at $189 a year
Kept $189/year since launch; 35-40% organic and ~25% Meta trial-to-paid
What they did
What happened
In their words
Scaling Meta Ads from zero to $100K a month — Ethan Ethier, Built With Science
Ethan Ethier… we are slightly on the premium side, so about $189 for the year or $30 a month. And we actually just launched with that when we launched the app back in 2025 through YouTube, and we pretty much kept the pricing the exact same the entire time. And the reason for that is because the way we position our product is not as an app, but as a tracking app that most workout nutrition apps out there are, but it's more of a personal trainer in your pocket.
Ethan EthierSo the positioning of it is you're comparing costs of a personal trainer versus a trainer in your pocket. So that way we can charge a little bit more premium. Also, we do have that added benefit of all the trust that's been built through the YouTube. And when it comes to approaching Meta with this pricing, it's kind of the same thing. We don't mention that the app is a tracker at all. It's more of a coach who's going to guide you on your journey. So I think with that positioning, we're able to actually do well with this pricing.
David BarnardYeah, and you have one really cool pricing thing that I don't see a lot of people do is a gym buddy plan where you bundle two together, almost like a family plan, but a gym buddy plan. How do you do that?
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More from this episode
- Spend a year fixing trial-to-paid and retention before buying any adsFounder says it lifted the floor for every channel; paid traffic later converted at 25%
- Hype the app launch to your YouTube viewers, course members and email listA launch spike, then a steady trickle; not a growth engine on its own
- Mention the app softly mid-video, and tell user transformation storiesStory videos bring more trials than broad educational ones; old videos give steady monthly trials
- Hire clippers to post long-video clips on Reels and TikTok, then reuse winning hooksSome clips go viral; their hooks now shape new long videos
- Scale Meta ads without the famous founder: B-roll, testimonials and AI image adsScaled from zero to ~$100K/month (host figure); 25% trial-to-paid
- Spend the first month of ads just learning your paid trial-to-paid rateTook about a month to get a baseline to set the allowed cost per customer
- Judge ads by how many trials pay, not by how cheap the trials areClickbait ads brought cheap trials but a huge drop in trial-to-paid
- Build a dashboard that confirms which trials came from Meta, and send Meta your best users
- Send ad clicks to a long personal quiz on your website, not the App StoreQuiz beat direct-to-store; now gets ~90% of traffic; same quiz in the iOS app did worse
- Offer 15% off each if users add a workout buddy to their plan15% of trial starts add a buddy; higher order value and better retention
- Build free calorie and macro calculators that rank in AI search and lead to the quizWorking well, founder says; tools convert slightly better than blog posts
- List every reason a page fails before brainstorming fixes, and write each test down~70% of tests fail first time; written notes turn failures into later winners
- Release new features quietly, and announce only once usage proves themFounder says it gives cleaner reads than email-hyped launches; no numbers
- Build an AI coach trained on the creator's videos that reads each user's own dataOne of customers' favorite features, founder says; no numbers
- Team up with researchers and run studies with your own app usersFounder says it adds credibility; no numbers
- Show only the yearly plan first, with a day-by-day trial timeline and reminder promiseAnnual picks rose from ~60% to 75-80%, with no price change
- Add more explanation to the pricing page to make the value clearerHurt conversion; extra text overwhelmed buyers who were ready to start
- Offer 20% off to pay now, with a toggle back to the 14-day free trialQuite negative, even with a 30-day money-back guarantee
- Make both the free trial and the pay-now discount sound goodVery strong lift after a few weeks, vs the version that shamed the trial
- Film a months-long science experiment video with real people in a rented studioOne of the year's top videos; decent but not major app conversion
Tags: premium-pricing, positioning, personal-trainer-anchor