Built With Science · B2C · science-based fitness coaching app
Make both the free trial and the pay-now discount sound good
Very strong lift after a few weeks, vs the version that shamed the trial
What they did
What happened
- Effort
- A few weeks, test still running
In their words
Scaling Meta Ads from zero to $100K a month — Ethan Ethier, Built With Science
Ethan EthierIt was a mix of both. We always knew we wanted to test no trial, and we took inspiration from some of the other in-app paywalls. We haven't seen it anywhere on the web, but what's funny enough is going back to my point about documenting everything. So this experiment hasn't been winning, so we went back to the drawing board and looked at why we think it's not winning.
Ethan EthierAnd one of the core hypotheses for why it wasn't working is because the copy on the toggle, the no trial option as being way better, and you're kind of losing out if you just start the free trial. So that was our hypothesis. So we actually have been rolling out another arm. It's been a few weeks now where we make both options seem pleasant, so it's not one framed as good or bad. It's more of like, "Okay, they're both good." And that actually has been a very strong lift.
David BarnardNice, nice. So yeah, it may end up winning, and then back to our conversation earlier, you got to understand what you're testing, why, and then know what to change when it didn't work because it might not be that it was a bad idea, maybe you just didn't quite execute it the way that's going to make it work.
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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
- 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
- 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, trial-toggle, neutral-framing, copy