Built With Science · B2C · science-based fitness coaching app
Add more explanation to the pricing page to make the value clearer
Hurt conversion; extra text overwhelmed buyers who were ready to start
What they did
What happened
In their words
Scaling Meta Ads from zero to $100K a month — Ethan Ethier, Built With Science
David BarnardOkay. Wow. Yeah, that's a big increase in dollar-wise and LTV-wise, that's a big shift. So what's your biggest fail of the past year?
Ethan EthierWe recently added more context to one of our pricing pages as an experiment just because the problem we're trying to solve is making the value proposition a lot clearer. And what we noticed was that actually had an opposite effect. Adding more context onto this page seemed to actually hurt the conversions a lot more than not having anything at all. I think our learning for that was it just reinforced how adding too much context, especially at a state where a user might be already excited and motivated to buy, might just overwhelm them, than actually get them to start.
David BarnardYeah, that makes sense. And then you had another one, and I really like this one, so I don't want to leave it off, around the no trial offer.
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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
- 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
- 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, value-proposition, copy-length