Built With Science · B2C · science-based fitness coaching app
Offer 20% off to pay now, with a toggle back to the 14-day free trial
Quite negative, even with a 30-day money-back guarantee
What they did
What happened
In their words
Scaling Meta Ads from zero to $100K a month — Ethan Ethier, Built With Science
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.
Ethan EthierYeah, so we are also testing a no trial offer compared to the 14-day free trial. We though it'd be a big win just because a lot of our traffic right now is organic and they're already warm and trust the brand, but we're seeing it's quite negative just because it does, of course, add a little more friction, even with a 30-day money back guarantee.
David BarnardTo be more specific, the trial is actually a toggle, right? Where they get 20% off for not doing a trial and paying upfront?
Ethan EthierExactly. Yeah, so you could pay upfront and get 20% off, or you could toggle off and just take the 14-day free trial.
David BarnardYeah, at $190, maybe that's part of why it's not working for you, but that's an experiment I think more people should do. Had you seen that in another app or did y'all just come up with that idea?
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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
- Add more explanation to the pricing page to make the value clearerHurt conversion; extra text overwhelmed buyers who were ready to start
- 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, no-trial, pay-upfront-discount, money-back-guarantee, trial-toggle