Built With Science · B2C · science-based fitness coaching app
Spend the first month of ads just learning your paid trial-to-paid rate
Took about a month to get a baseline to set the allowed cost per customer
What they did
What happened
- Effort
- About one month
In their words
Scaling Meta Ads from zero to $100K a month — Ethan Ethier, Built With Science
Ethan Ethier… the Meta world was definitely new for us. And I think one of the biggest things that we needed to figure out right away was just getting more data, especially when it came to trial to paid, because like I mentioned earlier, organic, you have a certain trial to paid threshold or baseline because these users are generally a lot warmer. Whereas trial to paid, you're essentially tapping net new cold users who've never really seen the brand before.
Ethan EthierSo we knew trial to paid was going to be lower, but we just needed to get a baseline of what that number would be in order for us to calculate how much we could actually spend to acquire a customer. So that took around a month to do, and once we had a good set of numbers to work with, then it was all about testing different angles and different avatars who would resonate well with the product and how our product can uniquely solve their pain points.
Ethan EthierSo we had a lot of learnings from surveys, from past customers coming in from warm traffic, and we pretty much just doubled down on finding specific avatars that work well. And right now we're in a process of constantly iterating on what's winning while also slowly adding on new new avatars. So we're just trying to create a proper iterative and testing loop that allows this engine to keep on running.
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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
- 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: meta, trial-to-paid, cac-target, baseline