Built With Science · B2C · science-based fitness coaching app
Offer 15% off each if users add a workout buddy to their plan
15% of trial starts add a buddy; higher order value and better retention
What they did
What happened
In their words
Scaling Meta Ads from zero to $100K a month — Ethan Ethier, Built With Science
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?
Ethan EthierYeah, so this was actually an idea brought up by one of our product managers, but we got a lot of requests from existing members. Saying, "Hey, do you guys have a family plan? I want to bring my husband, my wife." And this came up often enough that, "Okay, maybe we wanted to test something." So what we simply did was on our web quiz, we offered users the option to add a gym buddy, we call it, to their plan and get their plan at a discounted rate.
Ethan EthierAnd that actually has been quite successful for us. Around 15% of anyone who starts a trial will actually add on a gym buddy. So not only has it increased just overall AOV, but also we found that when someone does select a gym buddy, then they're more likely to stay on the app. So that's also increased some of our retention.
David BarnardYeah, that's fascinating. I was talking to Life360 about this, and that's one of the things they said was that their highest retaining cohorts are the family units. And that's very much a family app, but they're for them. And I imagine for a lot of folks, if you can get multiple people committed, and then it's a little bit like, "Well, maybe one's using it and the other isn't, but then you don't want to cancel and don't want to switch to the …
David BarnardYeah. And speaking of the pricing page and going back to the Gym Buddy thing, so you asked that question in onboarding so that you don't have to confuse the paywall for people who don't have a Gym Buddy? So a person who doesn't get a Gym Buddy doesn't even ever see that they can get that discount. So your pricing page is very focused on just the annual and monthly, right?
Ethan EthierCorrect. Well, on the quiz actually is where we ask, "Hey, do you have a gym buddy? Would you like to add them onto your plan?" They can say yes, they can say no. But if they say no, on the pricing page, we actually have just a really small toggle that says a little bit about the gym buddy. So they have that option as well if they opted out on the quiz.
David BarnardYeah, because I could see it becoming one of those paywalls that just has way too many options and makes it confusing. So it makes sense to ask it in a quiz and then not make it super prominent on the paywall itself. We've been talking about meta growth and then the YouTube channel as a base, but I know you've also been working on SEO and now AEO and getting more and more people saying that ChatGPT sent them to the app. How's that going?
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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
- Sell the app as a trainer in your pocket, not a tracker, at $189 a yearKept $189/year since launch; 35-40% organic and ~25% Meta trial-to-paid
- 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: web, two-person-plan, family-plan, quiz-funnel, social-accountability