Built With Science · B2C · science-based fitness coaching app
Film a months-long science experiment video with real people in a rented studio
One of the year's top videos; decent but not major app conversion
What they did
What happened
- Effort
- Months of work, rented studio
In their words
Scaling Meta Ads from zero to $100K a month — Ethan Ethier, Built With Science
David BarnardIt was done in a very scientific way and a very informative way. I believe that's probably one of his better performing videos in the last year, right? With that kind of a video, it's more about the trust and the science and stuff, but did that one perform well? How do you think about those kind of experiments and that kind of science and that kind of content actually impacting the app business?
Ethan EthierYeah, so I think for that piece of content, that was definitely a big bet that just Jeremy wanted to take. It definitely was one of our highest performing videos this year, and it was honestly very fun to do. We rented out a full studio, brought in all these participants, but I think for us, it was just we wanted to take a shot at trying something completely new. It did have a decent conversion to the app, but it was more for just educational and also entertaining purposes.
David BarnardI imagine that was pretty expensive too. That's another thing I think a lot of people don't think about with these influencers is that some of these videos end up being very, very expensive and very, very time-consuming to produce because it's not just you see a polished 20-minute final video, but there's hours and hours of recordings and planning sessions and scripting and so much goes into that. So I imagine that one specifically with all the …
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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
- 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
Tags: youtube, big-bet-video, science, high-production