Built With Science · B2C · science-based fitness coaching app
Hype the app launch to your YouTube viewers, course members and email list
A launch spike, then a steady trickle; not a growth engine on its own
What they did
What happened
In their words
Scaling Meta Ads from zero to $100K a month — Ethan Ethier, Built With Science
David BarnardBut that's not been the case. Y'all are doing meta ads, you are growing the app in a more traditional way than I think a lot of people would expect for a influencer built app. So I'd love for you to talk through some of that with me. Even when you launched it with three million subscribers, was it just a massive spike?
Ethan EthierThat's a great point. And when we did launch the app, we had hyped it up obviously to our members and also to just our email lists and publicly. So we did see a spike when we officially launched it, that was about two years ago. But when it comes to actually marketing the app, like you mentioned, we've been slowly adding on new channels such as Meta, such as SEO, AEO. But for us, the core piece of content has really just been on education and building trust. It's been less of something that we try and pitch all the time.
Ethan EthierIt's more of, "Okay, we're creating this piece of content, how can we position the app so it compliments the piece of content that we're putting out?" So it's not necessarily we're thinking about, "Okay, we have this app, we want to create a piece of content that pitches the app." So it's kind of a different framing. And for us, that trust has been a key moat for us. And I think with the age of AI, when you can build pretty much anything, that's …
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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%
- 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
- 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: youtube, launch, audience