BetterMe

BetterMe's shocking belly fat ad outlasted its polished workout ads in memory. BetterMe ran an illustration ad of gross belly fat that people still remembered a decade later, and it is called the best ad ever. Polished ads with skinny workout girls were forgotten.

Lennox's takeaway is to make ugly ads that show what you sell and the pain it solves in the first second. Skip TV-style creative and anything slow to get to the point. Her reasoning: "sometimes your feed is so pretty that you need something ugly to take your attention from it." BetterMe was her first mobile app job, and the team had no playbook and learned app marketing by testing.

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Big markets like fitness still had room for new entrants after BetterMe. Lennox warns against entering crowded categories without a unique, defensible product, but says large markets such as fitness kept space for new players after BetterMe.

She names mental health, food scanners and AI note takers as very hard to enter. Execution speed and marketing can be the edge, as with Cal AI, which entered a seemingly saturated calorie counting market and won through hustle and marketing. Quote: "if you're entering a red market, it's crazy."

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