Built With Science · B2C · science-based fitness coaching app
Scale Meta ads without the famous founder: B-roll, testimonials and AI image ads
Scaled from zero to ~$100K/month (host figure); 25% trial-to-paid
Workedpaid-social
What they did
Deliberately avoided relying on Jeremy (already stretched) to remove the single point of failure of the YouTube channel. Creatives are B-roll 'sell' videos, testimonial content and many AI-made static ads. Angles are built around specific avatars and their pain points, sourced from surveys and past warm-traffic customers; winners are iterated while new avatars are slowly added. Run in-house rather than via an agency. After the Andromeda update, the focus is on better creatives rather than campaign/bid/targeting tinkering in Ads Manager.
What happened
Scaled from zero in January 2026 to about $100K/month profitably (host's figure); Meta trial-to-paid ~25%.
- Stage
- Scale (scaling paid)
- Effort
- Zero to ~$100K/month over 2026
In their words
Sub Club by RevenueCat · Scaling Meta Ads from zero to $100K a month — Ethan Ethier, Built With Science“everything we've done from that end is mainly through B-roll cell videos. We've used some testimonial content, a lot of statics now with AI.”
“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”
“So for me, that was just a reminder to focus on creating better creatives rather than tinker around and mess around with the targeting that's really out of your control.”
Related topics
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More from this episode
- Built With Science: 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%
- Built With Science: 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
- Built With Science: 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
- Built With Science: 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
- Built With Science: 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
- Built With Science: 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
- Built With Science: Build a dashboard that confirms which trials came from Meta, and send Meta your best users
- Built With Science: 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
- Built With Science: 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
- Built With Science: 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
- Built With Science: 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
- Built With Science: 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
- Built With Science: Release new features quietly, and announce only once usage proves themFounder says it gives cleaner reads than email-hyped launches; no numbers
- Built With Science: 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
- Built With Science: Team up with researchers and run studies with your own app usersFounder says it adds credibility; no numbers
- Built With Science: 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
- Built With Science: Add more explanation to the pricing page to make the value clearerHurt conversion; extra text overwhelmed buyers who were ready to start
- Built With Science: 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
- Built With Science: 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
- Built With Science: 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