Built With Science · B2C · science-based fitness coaching app
Hire clippers to post long-video clips on Reels and TikTok, then reuse winning hooks
Some clips go viral; their hooks now shape new long videos
What they did
What happened
In their words
Scaling Meta Ads from zero to $100K a month — Ethan Ethier, Built With Science
Ethan Ethier… the past few years of going through business is focus is key. And for Jeremy right now, and for the business as well, YouTube long form is the highest ROI thing that we can do, and we just want to focus on doubling down on not only increasing the output, but also the quality of the content that we put out. That said, we are working on a few other projects where someone, maybe a third party or another person that we hire can do independently.
Ethan EthierSo for example, we just onboarded a few clippers who are taking some of our existing long form and posting that across Instagram Reels and TikToks. And that's actually been quite helpful because when they're posting, some of these videos will go viral and we're able to see what sort of hooks that they use in those videos to inform some of our future videos. So it's kind of been a two-way feedback loop for us.
David BarnardAnd then how does that play into ads? Because I know this is one of the main topics I wanted to talk to you about today. Y'all have scaled up from nothing to $100,000 a month in ad spend profitably and are really making a big push in that side of things. So how do you think about the pipeline of ad creation? Are you using a ton of Jeremy's videos as source for that or is it totally different? Or what does that look like?
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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
- 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: instagram, tiktok, clipping, hooks, repurposing