How Ladder Nailed Product/Channel Fit on TikTok and Meta to Grow 2,000%

once we narrow down on a Persona that very clearly is in demand then we work backwards to find the right coach to represent that Persona and programming style within the app we mapped out the entire funnel and went piece by piece so the first step was creative then it was can we get them to click can we get to the homepage and ultimately went through this iteration that resulted in this quiz question flow that we ask a handful of questions to understand what Persona we're talking to and to recommend the right program for you so we had to figure out how to get Tik Tok learning on the right user and after a whole bunch of iteration on conversion events we figured out answers on our quiz that represented the right Persona welcome to subversive a podcast dedicated to sharing stories from the best consumer subscription apps in the world we'll bring you lessons for how to grow your consumer subscription business including

insights and inflection points that led to exponential growth from leaders at category defining companies and Innovative startups let's get into the show my guest today is Greg Stewart the CEO of ladder an Innovative strength training app that matches Elite coaches with teams of Fitness enthusiasts based on their unique goals in today's episode we discuss how ladder cracked Tik Tok as a user acquisition channel in order to grow subscribers by 2,000% over the last 2 years all right welcome Greg Stewart to the subversive podcast super excited to have you on the show to today we've known each other for over a year now I've been a long time latter user and now investor and just couldn't think more highly about everything you and the team are up to it latter so we'd love to start with just a little bit of background let's hear a little bit more about you and what inspired you to go create another fitness app well thanks

for having me excited to be here my background you know kind of a windy road to right now first half of my career was on the finance track I was in Investment Banking working at Goldman Sachs covering techn ology companies Great foundation for learning great network but didn't want to be building Powerpoints and Excel for the rest of my life so took that experience with me and over the last 10 years have been working on a handful of startup Ventures most recently latter ladder we've been working on for the last five years ladder is a app for strength training for people who are serious about their Fitness and we originally you know came up with the concept and built the beginning version of the product around ourselves as the user folks that were already working out had Incorporated strength into the routine but were tired of thinking about what to do every day and when you looked at the plethora of

apps that were out there most were geared towards cardio most were geared towards at home very few that had tackled strength training with a Northstar of trying to deliver an experience as close to personal training as possible so we found a paino as the user we wanted something to kind of reduce or eliminate the cognitive load of thinking about what should I be doing every day how can I trust that I'm doing the right workouts to get to the goals that I'm solving for got it well and as a former consultant myself I can certainly relate to not wanting to spend an entire career building slides so you made this transition into Tech I know you had a couple of other roles at tech companies uh before you joined ladder and you said that what inspired you to do it obviously health and fitness is one of the more crowded categories within subscription apps but you saw this white space in the market

particularly around strength training and it sounds like particularly Fitness enthusiasts so people who are maybe going to the gym already or or lifting a little bit more than your casual person just doing a workout here and there what were some of the early I guess mistakes or learnings that led to where ladder is today and I know you also launched around the time of the pandemic and so how did that impact things in those early days yeah I think and before I hit that one of kind of our core insights early on was that almost nobody was using software as kind of the core innovation of what they were delivering so most of our peers were simply taking content that either already existed or they're making it just delivering it in an app based experience and that was certainly novel moving from VHS to DVDs to the internet to on your mobile phone you could take it anywhere but nobody was thinking about companies like

dualingo really trying to create and deliver the greatest experience possible that both solves the core use case of delivering a plan for every workout but also creating these motivational elements that keep you excited keep you engaged and wanting to come back for that next workout we learned a ton the

first couple of years the first two years was all hardcore product iteration we were very Scrappy on how we acquired our initial users we had a handful of coaches that we launched with they had small followings on Instagram you know call it 5 10 15,000 followers and we helped create content with them to help get their followers into the app and and using the product and that gave us a a good kind of initial user base to iterate from learn from talk to and really validate that we were on to something and help inform really what the iteration Cycles would look like from a product perspective we locked down the strategy before covid so we had the kind of core thesis the core components of what we would build at the end of 2019 beginning of 2020 before Co was in our was in our lives and we were mostly talking to a gymgo and thinking about somebody who had access to full set of equipment obviously into string

training but going to the gym and that obviously wasn't a reality for most people during the pandemic people were home with very limited equipment you couldn't buy equipment nobody had it in stock and we had to Pivot for that moment in time to make our programming relevant to somebody who is still looking for great strength training workouts but now had less equipment maybe consuming this content in their basement no people around them really had to just be smart on how to adapt to that user working very closely with our coaches and constantly surveying our members to understand what they had access to and what they were looking for to get going and then we we did some really hacky things to be relevant there was a million companies that were getting started every day in the fitness base because the fitness kind of landscape from the consumer lens was upside down so a lot of companies trying

to capitalize that equipment was a huge hurdle I mean there was a I remember an article in the Wall Street Journal talking about the cattle ball King of New York and this is a guy who was going around to Def Funk gyms and buying equipment kind of piece by piece and selling it door Todo in Manhattan and the reason he was doing that was because you couldn't get anything in stock all these equipment companies were set up to work with businesses not direct to Consumer so it was really hard to find equipment we kind of scoured uh the internet for companies in the space and found a partner in one and we bought $50,000 worth of kettle bells and dumbbells and just kind of held it aside when you couldn't buy any of that equipment in that moment in time and we used it as a hook to get into the app so our coaches would tell their following like hey kettle bells are out of stock everywhere we actually have them in our

shop you can get access to our shop if you start a trial so it was a good hook and message when we had no brand recognition no awareness of what we were doing to get somebody to open up and download the app and and give us a shot yeah it's such a great story of doing things that don't scale and I feel like a lot of people these days talk about all the Tailwinds that the pandemic generated for Consumer apps and particularly consumer subscription businesses was great once people had sort of made the transition but in those early days it was really a crisis for a lot of people and a lot of companies and I think what a lot of Founders don't think about is those moments of Crisis also create outsize opportunities if you're able to meet your customers where they are and and serve those really deep pain points Co in the moment wasn't a Tailwind for us because the hurdle to launch a new app in the space was very

low and all of the kind of coaches content creators were flipped upside down and putting all their content on YouTube so there was so much content that was flooding and a consumer that was looking for Solutions but very very hard to stand out very hard to get the capital markets to notice another fitness app even if it was truly differentiated so it was hard in Co our growth has been really exciting after covid once the World opened up again and workout environments became more mobile you know we see most of our members who were only going to the gym before covid are now working out maybe most of the days of the week at the gym but then also consuming and completing workouts at home when it's convenient for them so we built a product that flexes across environments which became super relevant after the pandemic well and I know you

said one of the ways in which things were really difficult during the pandemic and even the early days after the pandemic was acquiring that initial critical mass of users and you went through the same challenge that I think a lot of subscription businesses do which is they go spend money on meta and that didn't necessarily work so well so can you speak a little bit more to that and then how you found your way past the typical Playbook into this Innovative uh approach to growing on Tik Tok that has been so Central to your grow story for sure yeah we had I wouldn't call it a growth engine we had a growth motion that was this organic kind of Instagram create content with their coaches have them tell a story to Their audience but that was not a forever strategy we couldn't grow our coaches following faster than the users we were extracting out of it and so we knew that there was a shelf life on that strategy the most

exciting moment was when we launched a new coach You' see a flood of new people it's a new solution they're interested and over time it goes down so the the opposite of an engine we raised a seed around in 2021 and we did what we thought every consumer company is supposed to do and we started investing in Facebook and we didn't have the right experience or any experience in our team we made all the kind of wrong choices that that you could make and it was a an exceptionally difficult moment for the company we did spend money on ads it didn't generate very many users we hired an agency we picked the wrong agency we should never have hired agency in the first place but when it really difficult was this was right around the time of one iOS 14 which had the whole world upside down so the agencies didn't know what they were talking about it was a whole new world and two it was PCO so you had every Big

Brand in Fitness aggressively spending to acquire this consumer who is now at home and more open-minded on new products that they would go try so we spent some money on Facebook very quickly we realized the math just wasn't Ma nothing for us and and we stopped and we did that for about three months what came out of that though was a whole bunch of learning and insights that fueled you know what is the product monetization strategy and price point today all of our users before that moment were coming through our coach's social followings and that's a user who has context they were following that coach they believed in the authority of that coach they knew the type of workouts and they'd already made a decision ision before coming into the app so the level of awareness and context were very high when we started investing in meta at the time in Facebook these were users that were were probably the right persona but had no

idea who we are who our coaches were had no real context coming in so the first thing we learned was that we weren't really set up from an activation perspective to attract and and move through the funnel a user with no or low context so we realized we needed to go back to the drawing board on how we treated somebody coming into the funnel who was being introduced to us for the first time through an ad the second thing we learned that was super important was we got pricing wrong and our price point we launched was $60 a month and the way we got there is I have this spreadsheet where I Benchmark every offering in our space on a monthly basis all the way to highly customized one toone training so high performance training you're training something very specific you hire a coach that's the highest kind of ticket of working with a coach or consuming workout content and on the bottom end it was free workouts

on YouTube and maybe a little bit above that was PDF content that you would buy from a coach and we had a onetoone component in the app at that point which we weren't really sure how important it would be we had these coaches on our team we had a small user base and we created this functionality where you could text with the coach in the app not meant to be a friend kind of texting relationship but more of like a an OnStar button where if you had a specific question you needed guidance on a modification or you had an injury you need to tweak the programming then there was an expert that would actually respond to you and we priced the product around that so we weren't all the way one to one we weren't totally one to many so we priced ourselves on the highend for apps because of that feature

when we started investing in Facebook and interacting with users that had no context for ladder we learned that one $60 just seemed egregious to them they were benchmarking us to every other consumer subscription that they pay for you know think about Spotify or Netflix $9.99 15 bucks maybe at the highend so 60 was multiples of that and number two they weren't willing to pay for the chat with the coach feature they didn't really want it and they certainly didn't want to pay for it and that was exciting because that would be our most expensive feature to maintain long term with a whole bunch of question marks of how it would scale but we learned that wasn't important to retention it wasn't important to conversion and people didn't want to pay for it so we took all of these insights and put ourselves on a mission at the end of that year to stop investing in growth had the entire team focused on overhauling monetization we

went through a whole bunch of willingness to pay work with our users segmenting by level of context to they were and out of that came new packaging simpler model just one price point no Ono one concept and a price point that was 30 bucks a month so half of where we came out and we started the next year at a lot more healthy place from an acquisition perspective for a new user coming in the price point wasn't scary any longer and we' built an experience that helped shepher you through the beginning moments of ladder to get you through the right first workout in the app as quickly as possible yeah and I want to get to this Innovative acquisition engine that you all have built in a moment here but before I do that there are a couple key points in there for me one was first you have to really make sure you've nailed product Market fit with the right customer and at the right price before acquisition is

going to work right because even if you've chosen the right channel you might not know it if you don't have the right product targeting the right user through that channel the second thing which is more tactical is I see a lot of consumer subscription businesses just either go and copy the prices of their competitors which you know if you you got to start somewhere and so that's a worthwhile herotic but it's it's just a jumping off point the next step is they'll run an AB test in the product and that's great and ultimately you're going to want to run an AB test but what I love about what ladder did and this is typical you guys tend to take the more rigorous no shortcuts approaches you did the van West andorf you did the conjoin and you really figured out not just that $60 was too expensive but why it was too expensive which turned out to be because your highest cost feature just wasn't relevant to a lot of users and so then

you cut that out and you end up with this $30 per month price point that's much more palatable so now you've sort

of laid the foundation for more rapid product driven growth but like most fitness apps paid acquisition plays an important role Facebook hasn't been working so what ultimately LED you to Tik Tok as the right Channel and then we can get into some of the really Innovative stuff that ladder has done to grow on Tik Tok yeah in the beginning of 2022 with new packaging new price point a lot more confidence in in our kind of core offerings and our positioning we had to go figure out how to grow we felt like we solved a lot of the issues with the product with activation with price point but we still didn't have an engine that was reliable we were still relying on organic social which is helpful but not a forever strategy so the beginning of that year we spent we essentially took every person in the company and we were little but we stopped focusing on feature develop which is very abnormal for our team

we're extremely consumer oriented retention oriented team but we had finite Runway and we had to figure out how to grow and if we didn't figure that out then we were going to have to pack up and we couldn't work with each other anymore so we made it the mission of the team to go solve growth and we thought about it as an engineering problem set not just a creative problem set we mapped out what we thought were growth Loops where we thought we had an advantage and could win where it would set up well with our product where we could learn pretty quickly and get sign of life without having to hire an agency or do stuff outside of the company and we started like this rigorous iteration kind of growth Loop by growth loop as things were eliminated moving on to the next and we tried SEO we knew that was going to be a long-term strategy but we found some really hacky kind of MVP courses that helped us get line of sight

and it gave us confidence that there's an SEO strategy for ladder but it wasn't going to be one that was going to get us to our next major major Milestone and Tik Tok was probably the second one we started spending time on we had some experience with Tik Tok leading up to that but it was more just dabbling on the side we had coaches who were very proficient in Instagram and almost no experience with Tik Tok but we could see that the consumer was moving to Tik Tok so we started spending time on Tik Tok as users kind of learning what is the content that is being consumed how is it being consumed how is it different from other platforms and can we create content that leads to repeatable outcomes without spending money and so I grabbed you know one of my coaches like super smart coach and essentially we started a a Tik Tok handle and started experimenting on content types and we have these like very detailed kind of

notes that are ridiculous now when you look at these videos dissecting all the commonalities of videos that worked that got to the right person which you can tell based on the engagement in the comments and that repeatedly were getting outlier outcomes in terms of views so they're getting to more people and that learning gave us a lot of confidence very quickly I think the first account we started with a coach we took it zero to 250,000 followers in the first like 50 days or so and that was a couple people on our team just really studying the organic content so we didn't think about spending a dollar on Tik Tok until we had line a sight on organic to know one can our creators win in this environment can we get to the right consumer can we get them through Lincoln bio similar to organic in Instagram and do we think we can do this on a scaled basis and that early iteration was really exciting and we did

it again with another coach and it just gave us a really good foundation on the creative side which we think is arguably the most important thing to master it's not it's less about button clicks and optimization it's more about the creative the creators and really understanding how do you create great content that either educates or entertains and gets to the right user repeatedly so it was all about organic content for us in those early Innings which gave us line of sight and confidence to start experimenting with a little bit of money behind some of that content what were some of the metrics or criteria you use to know which organic content you should be pouring more fuel on and in order to fuel the paid acquisition Loop and how did you know kind of how much to to put behind a given piece of creative well the how much is very simple because we didn't have a lot of money so we we were trying

to put as little I think the first month or so it might have been 50 bucks a day I mean very light just to see if we can we get people to click the ACT we took multiple creators and started scaling up on the organic side and what we would looked at and dissect really were the comments in those videos so were the getting outlier views and were the comments getting to the right people so if we had a female coach are the comments men talking about her outfit or are they women talking about the workout and you can really quickly see which piece of content are getting to the right Persona that we're intending to get to with that particular Creator and that was enough line of sight to give us you know really insights into what the next patch of organic content would look like and it constantly was being fueled by what was happening on the organic side on the paid side we felt like we had enough chops on organic to at least

see what would happen putting a little money behind it and when we started it was mostly brand ads so it looks like it's coming from laders handle but taking winning content from the organic side so we would take a winning organic video featuring one of our coaches or a style of creative that worked repeatedly and we would replicate that into a a Granddad featuring that coach sometimes the identical creative to the organic and that was kind of the the beginning and pretty quickly we realized like yeah we can get people to click the Box we can get people out of Tik Tok and down into our funnel so the creative side like we felt pretty confident early on we have some really smart creative folks in our team and it's obviously a superpower having these coaches who are creators who are side by side full-time teammates working on this with us so like that was a a really important part of the iteration after we felt pretty

confident on the content side we continued to iterate but we started to shift down funnel like focusing on one moment at a time instead of trying to solve every metric in the funnel which we tried on Facebook we were solving clicks and we were solving first workouts and conversion to pay and it really made it difficult to Zone in on one particular problem go deep before moving on so we mapped out the entire funnel and went piece by piece so the first step was creative then it was can we get them to click can we get to the homepage and ultimately went through this iteration that resulted in this quiz question flow that we asked a handful of questions to understand what Persona we're talking to and to recommend the right program for you but even that quiz iteration started as a result of going direct to app and that not working so having no visibility having someone go straight into the app

vers versus having them answer some questions giving us line of sight on who these people are and seeing because we're having all this stuff spit into a Google sheet are they getting closer and closer to the right Persona and so the

we probably spent four months only working on the quiz we had this room in our office where we had all the questions printed out and all the metrics we were constantly updating it and moving it around to get more and more people through the funnel and then creating Marketing in the middle of those questions to reinforce our value prop based on the answers that that you're giving us well and I imagine that had two important implications so one is you're improving the product experience for new users and you mentioned Target metrics so imagine you were looking things like registration rate activation rate trial start rate trial conversion rate but then there's the second component that you hinted at especially in the wake of ATT you know if you try to send a user straight into at least an iPhone app then you're sort of in this black box and you don't have a lot of data you can give back to the ad

networks to optimize ad spin you guys came up with this idea of a web- based onboarding quiz where eventually you're actually able to predict the value of Any Given user because you're funneling that information back to the ad networks and so how did that then inform and accelerate your learnings as far as the right ad creative well more more so we had to figure out how to get to the right people and at that point it wasn't casual Fitness because casual Fitness you're competing with huge Brands and Casual fitness mean cardio not strength training and it's an enormous Market folks who are maybe going zero to one really heavy leaning heavily leaning into motivation and getting started that's a really expensive user to acquire and not one that we were very well set up to capture and convert with our product at that point so we had to figure out how to get Tik Tock learning on the right user and

after a whole bunch of iteration on conversion events we figured out answers on our quiz that represented the right Persona and so we could see in real time what are the costs of those quiz answers that is being informed every second we launched a new ad we know you know 10 minutes later what the initial read is on that ad based on what we knew about the white hot persona for ladder so it basically gave us a glimpse and a mechanism to figure out how do we get to the right user how do we have confidence that we're getting the right user which creative is getting to the right user which creators are getting to the right user and then going back and creating more of that based on those insights based on what those users wanted well

and so then you mentioned that you sort of iterated your way to this Fitness Enthusiast who's not just the sort of casual cardio person they really want real strength trading they want to plan for every workout but then I imagine even within that cuz that's a$ 15 billion do US market there were these different niches that you identified and there's this tool that you call the lad quadrant for identifying what the most valuable segments might look like so as this started to scale and the model's clearly working and you've got product Channel fit on Tik Tok tell me a little bit more about how you identified what those next niches were that you wanted to really go into and then how you recruited the right coaches to be the face of each one of those market segments yeah we're fortunate where we didn't have to guess like we're we're also fortunate where we have no pressure to launch a new coach so our growth

engine is not riant on constantly recruiting and launching new coaches so it's not a Marketplace today so it's hyper controlled but because of this quiz you know we now have millions of people who are coming through this set of questions who are telling us what styles of training they're looking for what their fitness goals are where they're working out what equipment they have access to and it gives us really good Intel to one map them to the right program that we have or team as we call them but two it also gave us insights into where are their holes in our coach roster what is the market looking for consistently that's coming through our funnel and where are we not well equipped to service that that user and so we could see it different moments in time certain modalities and personas that weren't represented in our roster I mean a couple of years ago it was female bodybuilding we had an enormous amount

of leads coming in that were saying they were women looking for bodybuilding programming they were going to the gym full access to equipment and that was in a modality that we had in our platform not because we didn't think it could work but we had no reason to believe that we needed to launch it but there was enough demand coming through where it gives us confidence to under the growth trajectory of any new team or program that that we would add to ladder once we narrow down on a Persona that very clearly is in demand then we work backwards to find the right coach to represent that Persona and programming style within the app and we're extremely selective like we are bringing these people onto our team full-time so this is not like an influencer coach you know tool set we're looking for coaches who are really smart want to be part of building something that that is bigger than just them and their brand and

that's not the right path for every coach but our coaches and we've gotten better and better on how to underrate coaches and obviously we've gotten more and more access to high quality folks as we've gotten bigger but every coach that is brought on ladder goes through rigorous tryouts with us they meet with all of our group heads uh so we're trying to understand who they are we're trying to understand if they're additive to the culture trying to understand if there's ego there and what they're solving for long term and then we actually have them program workouts for the week we give them access to our tools we give them access to all the movements we've ever created with all of our coaches and we have them create a week of workouts we pay them for that week the team does the workouts we rate them quantitatively qualitatively and we use it as a gut check to make sure that this coach is extremely high caliber and

Technical in the modality and Persona that they represent we also do simulated engagement we have them do intro videos outro videos voiceovers chat engagement to make sure that they have the full toolkit of skills at the kind of foundational level to be successful on ladder yeah so you put them through the ringer and and by the end of it what is your uh acceptance rate in terms of the number of coaches that start the process and then how many you get out the back end it's it's very high once we start once we put them through test week because at that point we've learned enough and there's enough conviction five meetings have happened like we know a lot so that is basically a it's almost like a code test if you're an engineer to make sure that all the things that we've learned are are true and H hold up when we actually put you through real life programming and real users are actually consuming that content so I

don't know we we don't have anybody's full-time job is to recruit a coach we launched three coaches last year we over two and a half X the business didn't have to launch a ton of coaches we're always looking at our funnel to understand where is nude Dem man to be met but like right now we don't have a very specific modality that we're trying to fill I'm sure that will change as we get more data through the year but there's no pressure to force ourselves into a recruiting process just to do it so the hit rate is more on the first second call on both sides making sure the fit is there yeah and we're do we we're where they send us sample programming we go through all the stuff that they've created and by the time we get to test week most folks will make it through that because we're trying to only put one through Tex week given the kind of level of effort it takes on both sides yeah yeah it's very expensive by

the end of the funnel but it sounds like your filters at the top of the funnel are very efficient and it's got a lot easier too like guess we've grown the audiences of our coaches have grown their Authority has grown people understand the latter brand and fitness so the ability to cold Outreach or have one of our coaches make an intro and somebody pick up it's gotten a lot easier than it was a few years ago we were much smaller and had had no name well that latter part I think goes overlooked at times we talk about the benefits of Supply driven growth in terms of attracting demand but there's also this element particularly among influencers on Tik Tok or Instagram where if you become a really compelling brand and you're helping creators make a good living they will often refer the other best creators like a players want to work with a player so it sounds like you're getting some of that to supplier

referral for for sure and it's like know we have you know we're nearing 200,000 members and we have 18 programs so like like they're it's infinitely scalable at the team and Coach level and anytime we're going to go out and proactively recruit we think about it as an extension to the product like a modality and experience that isn't currently in our roster that we know there strong demand for and will be a good fit so we kind of think about the adventur each of our coaches represents unique person unique Persona and training style that they uniquely represent within the app and so we kind of have the best coach that has gone through our system representing that person that modality in each of the modalities that we cover love it well so we've talked a lot about

how these coaches many of whom at least in the early days were also influencers and their own right on Tik Tok um are the center of your acquisition strategy on Tik Tok and now on Instagram as well um but there's another element to the coaches being the center of your core project experience and and a big part of why you have best-in-class retention within the fitness category so can you talk a little bit more around this group centered approach to Fitness and specifically strength training that ladder takes uh and some of the product features or other elements of the latter experience that has led engagement and retention to be unusually high in your category for sure and before I hit that with with our coaches some of them weren't big influencers many of them were like we believe that they could work within our growth engine and we could build a following with this coach using kind of our engine and our team to

help them iterate through the creative process so like we learned a lot of lessons early on that audience size is not a good metric for programming quality coach quality or team fit so it's not it's typically not the biggest followings that we have within our roster they grow with us but it's not one of the most important things that we're solving for upfront first and foremost they have to be world class at the programming style that they represent but for to your question yeah when we built this from the beginning how we thought about it was delivering a plan so no guesswork removing all the cognitive load you can trust that you're doing the right thing and then creating motivational elements to keep it exciting and fresh and that comes in a few different experiences we deliver in the app one we have a concept of teams like we don't call them programs we call them teams teams are led by a coach

again they represent a unique programming style a unique Persona and these teams become almost tribal in how they interact we have space in the app that almost is like slack groups in each one of these teams with people all over the world who are generally pretty close to your persona consuming the same workout on on generally the same day and interacting with each other in the app with the coach also in there participating with this group so there's a real sense of doing it with people like you not that it's just for people like you so the the community social element is extremely important to us from a retention perspective these groups are extremely active and as we've grown we've expanded those chats outside of the team where we have platform level chats that are topic based and we look to our members to understand what type of topics we should be introducing we have pre-imposed natal we have equipment

we have supplements we have music jams or workout jams all of these like really interesting chats that are unbelievably active with people around the world who are just sharing information and learning from each other and then we created family that's like your family exactly when we survey our members which we do all the time and we ask them the biggest unexpected benefit of ladder by far the number one answer is making friends in real life and we're seeing more and more of that happen in real life outside of the app with members congregating and meeting up you know first finding each other in the app and then meeting up and doing workouts together in real life we've created Geo chat rooms with with every kind of major Metro and people are organizing themselves and finding each other in and really celebrating the lad experience together which is really powerful and then we spent a lot of time trying to

understand motivational mechanics of both the social platforms that use all of these levers to keep your attention so that they can sell your attention and we looked at apps like dualingo who were using these same levers to help you continue the lesson that you're working on from a language perspective and to keep going which was super inspiring for us so we've got a collection of features whether it be badges streaks really gamified elements that make it fun and friendly competitive from a you know friendly perspective and those are important none of them were built all at once they've all been built with some insight that lever could be incremental from a workout perspective which then is incremental from a retention perspective we have a feature in the app if you open the app on the home screen you'll see avatars at the top and those are people that are actually working out right now and the yellow bar on the circle is how

far through the workout they are and you have the ability to Cheers members I think the average cheers per workout right now is eight or nine so these are heavily used and we spend a decent amount of time correlating number of cheers to received to long-term retention which gives us confidence to go iterate on that feature and make it better and help Drive adoption so our Northstar for anything we build is always anchored to workout completions how can we keep you coming back into the app and keep you focused on completing that next workout which ultimately leads to staying with ladder for the long run

well and two things I just want to emphasize about what you said there because I think they're so important one is you're focusing on the inputs not the outputs and I feel like in Fitness and particular can be so tempting to focus on Topline subscribers and subscription Revenue growth but the reality is so many people will start a new fitness regimen in January as part of a New Year's resolution and then they turn and if all you're looking at is you know subscriber count or subscription Revenue growth then you're you're going to miss what's happening under the hood and under the hood if people aren't engaging and retaining they're probably not going to stick around the following year so it's great that you're focusing on number of workouts because that's the leading indicator um for everything else the second thing is like so many other consumer apps you've looked to do a lingo for inspiration around these

manufactur motivation techniques streaks badges leaderboards Etc but often where I see that fail is when you do sort of a blind copy paste without thinking from first principles what's unique about your customer and your product and so it sounds like you've really tailored these Techni for ladder and for your customer and your unique product use case and that has led to much better results yeah for sure and like the focus on workouts and product you can see it in how we treat trials we don't take a credit card up front there isn't a single company in our space that doesn't collect a credit card to activate a trial and when we did that we didn't realize it was weird but it felt intuitive to us that if our product is better we want more people to be in the product and creating a gate up front even if you weren't being charged kind of makes it harder for somebody to come in and try so we don't take a

credit card and we spend a whole bunch of time from a product perspective trying to get you through those first couple of workouts I think if you look at some of our peers most of that energy is going into getting you to pay and getting you to pay an annual subscription and then maybe carrying a little bit less about what happens from a workout perspective yeah well obviously it happens in the fitness category but I see it everywhere where you can almost infer the scale of a company's ambition and what sort of growth strategy they're taking by how aggressive their pay well is and obviously it's an oversimplification but you've got the class of apps and there's nothing wrong with this you've got Indie developers and small teams that are very aggressive about paying the experience upfront and it's a great way to make sure that you're generating some amount of Revenue and if you're acquiring users through

paid channels that uh you're returning on ad spend as quickly as possible but it doesn't really scale because Beyond a certain point you're only going to be able to acquire so many users that way and the companies that are really going for those multi-billion dollar Venture outcomes they tend to almost do the reverse it's like the first goal is get that user to the aha moment get them to that activation metric where you know they're engaged and then everything else will follow from there eventually if you're delivering value that they will pay for it yes well congratulations on

all of the traction all of the success where does ladder go from here I know one of the biggest questions in the fitness category in particular is there have been a number of apps that have scaled nicely for a little while and then they sort of hit this glass ceiling and and they're not able to replicate the same success they had early on to the extent you can share you know what does the future look like for ladder it's probably a pretty boring answer but we're spending most most of our time kind of engaging with our members and figuring out what do we need to go build to improve the experience to increase workout increase long-term retention so we just did a platform wide survey and like having chat in the app is an enormous superpower because we have direct relationships with our users we had 5,000 people reply the average response time was 45 minutes so people spend a lot of time with us and it gives

us a whole bunch of ammunition on what we think could move the needle and it'll in narrowing down and spending more time with those users to figure out how much of this we should think about in the near term versus the first is the long term so the product iteration never ends like you'll see us looking for new modalities where we have line of sight on demand we're launching a apparel store this week actually and we held off on it for a long time because it didn't it wasn't helping us in the core value problem of delivering a plan but we've gotten to place where our members are super excited and coming to us and asking for Branded performance Weare and so we'll launch a a core line later this week which we're really excited to see what happens it's nobody's full-time job yet but we'll go test kind of what the appetite for these sorts of products outside the core subscription are and then we're always looking for new ways

to add value to our our members two years ago we could see that people were tracking their workouts out outside the app they were using spreadsheets they were using Apple notes they were using paper notebooks and you could see the pain and so we built basically a product in itself inside the app called the ladder Journal which gives us a ton of data on what's happening at the user level but really Consolidated this pain point of having to manage the know cross apps but all kind of pointed at the same thing tell me what I'm doing I want to see my progress and what I should be doing next there are probably other areas outside of our core value prop where having a plan is relevant so we noodle on you know concept of nutrition and just different ways to deliver value to our user where it's already happening just away from us and there's an interest in bringing that into one home yeah well it sounds like lots of

exciting opportunities for expansion but all rooted in this nucleus of Coach centered group centered team centered Fitness and the incredible and enthusiastic community that you built around on that one last question I have

to ask I'd be remiss if I didn't ask it so Tik Tok has been so important for your growth obviously there's a lot of uncertainty around right now around where Tik Tok goes in the US um how do you think this plays out over the next few months and how is Ladder sort of mitigating any risk associated with Tik Tok given the uncertainty sure our personal views Tik Tok goes nowhere and I've been communicating that to our team for a long time now and we were shocked to see that even went down for a little bit but we were back you know basically 10 hours later and it was performing better than other it's 180 million Americans many of whom are relying on Tik Tok for their livelihood new Administration coming in lots of data to process our view is whatever happens from a an ownership structure perspective that the product from a consumer perspective doesn't go anywhere having said that obviously we're a smart

team and thoughtful and need to be you know make sure that it isn't all of our eggs in one basket last year when the initial uh band got through Congress and Senate that we started iterating on meta again and we were seeing really strong performance on organic Instagram because Instagram was prioritizing reals and reals basically became their competitive product to TK talk so instead of creating content to get to the audience you've acquired you're creating content to get to new people that the algorithm is serving based on what that content is and who they think will get value from it so it behaves very similarly we we've scaled that up successfully using the same Creator same strategy where I it's probably you know every other day it's meta more than Tik Tok in terms of where leads are are coming from so what we've gotten really good at is understanding our core user what they care about how to create

creative that's relevant to them and short form video and whether or not Tik Tok is here for good or not short form video is not going anywhere it's what the consumer prefers at least for the time being and we build an entire motion around that that's agnostic to to platform but we're experimenting with other channels as well organic growth is growing as we've gotten bigger more and more people are talking about us we've built a PR motion internally within our team to amplify our reach outside of just our owned audience that that has been paying dividends and we're investing more and more in brand as an amplifier to our story really trying to create a unique message uh versus our peers in really high quality compelling brand content that has helped bring in a person that might not have known or been conscious of Latter before before that campaign I tend to agree with you I don't think Tik

tok's going anywhere but even if it does at this point you've sort of expanded Beyond being overly reliant on Tik Tok for grow without a doubt and the attention goes somewhere we saw it even in those 10 hours you can see Meta started to really perform from an organic and paid perspective so the attention will go somewhere but our personal view is something gets worked out that satisfies the requirements of the US government and the consumer won't really feel the the difference let's

wrap up with a quick lightning round here so I'm going to ask you a few questions you can respond with you know a brief sentence or two the first one obviously you're biased here you're the CEO but what do you think is the best thing about working at ladder and if you could change one thing what might you change I'll do two best things one best thing is like people are getting real value out of this if you read our ab store reviews we have 60,000 abst reviews and we're survey members all the time it's like life-changing I mean the product is delivering extreme value for folks and it's impacting their life in an extremely positive way and that's amazing you read these stories and it's absolutely incredible it'll make you cry if I'm ever like lost on my way all I do is go read abore reviews and feedback and it like immediately ground me and what and what we're doing I think the second the second part is like I get to

work with my friends and I've been we have a a very small team for our size you know not much more than 20 people but a good core of us have worked together for you know 10 years multiple Ventures multiple failed startups and to have one that's really delivering value and growing and that we're proud of and using ourselves is amazing I mean you get to go to work excited and there's no problem you can't tackle because you trust the people that you're working with what I would not like I'm really excited to not answer like the Tik Tok band question ever again o over time and it it would come in waves of the last few years and my response to investors was it's working today and growth is not working for a lot of companies in our space and the habits that we built are extractable well Bey on uh Tik Tok itself so that's just been this like buzzing narrative that I have to like stop and and like put together smart

thoughts and articulate that we are not just a Tik Tok business we build the most retentive product in Fitness and that's what it is at a core and we're really good at finding people who are relevant to that product and Tik Tok has just been one place that's effective for us in doing that I thought there would be a lot of inbounds on the Tik Tok set but this was the quietest one I think the trust is there and they'll figure it out like they'll figure out how to go capture the right attention somewhere else I feel like we' built enough trust in track record the last five years to like figure out hard problems and get to the right people regardless of where they are yeah well and it's not your first time going through a major curveball I mean you mentioned Co and so that certainly builds trust next question so you mentioned you started your career in finance somewhere to me I started my career in Consulting and then

even though you've been in tech for a decade now you don't you didn't have a lot of experience in Fitness prior to starting ladder and so what's an advantage and disadvantage of being a relative Outsider in the space where you're creating new technology and new products I think it's an enormous Advantage like we have expertise in our coaches who are world class at what they do and so we have experts that are around us and we're constantly working with to improve the product but it gave us like a blank sheet approach to how to build this we had no preconceived notions of how this should go other than we were all Fitness consumers like not building a business but Fitness consumers and if you think about most companies in our space think about the gyms the entire business is predicated on you buying and not going so paying and not going that just didn't feel like right to us like the right way to build

a company so I think it it helped us like come in with a completely fresh perspective on it should go like this because we think as the user this will be great and then we've had just a ton of interaction with our members to learn from and and iterate on over time so I think it's a good it's a good balance like we before this we spent a lot of time in real estate Tech and bringing on traditional real estate people was never the the right call it was bringing on really smart people who understand how to solve consumer problems can work backwards bring like an engineering mentality to problem solving and could very quickly learn a new industry using first principles as a guide versus all these views of how things should go how things are are done yeah we we we generally don't follow that path and try to avoid that trap yeah well in real estate in Fitness are probably two categories that have been entrenched

long enough that there's a lot of group think and so there can be some real Alpha to thinking about things differently from first principles okay a couple more here besides ladder what's your favorite consumer subscription app and why maybe most you none of these would be like super Crown Breaky like most use Spotify I use it every day like if I'm working at my desk I've got Spotify on so that that's a product that's probably highest on my list of usage outside of our own duelingo is amazing we spent a lot of time both getting to know prior dualingo teammates who were uh around the early chapters of that venture there's a ton to learn from that company so we spend a lot of time in Du lingo and it's just a a terrific product and obviously Tik Tok change the game from a media perspective like Tik Tok is not a social platform it looks more like TV in terms of how content is consumed and now it looks more like

search than anything else so Tik Tok has totally changed the game from a a Content perspective content consumption perspective so those three are are heavily heavily used within our team for sure I mean I'm right there with you I may have to stop asking this question because the number of times Spotify and do lingo in particular come up is remarkable but there's a good reason for that they've done an amazing job um if you could go back and give yourself advice as a new founder what would it be that's a good question advice as a new founder I would say you have to be block belt at growth and product which we didn't know in the beginning like we were really good at product in even in Prior Ventures we knew how to extract information from a human being and turn it into a product that people love and use what we didn't really understand is how hard growth is especially in this category and it just doesn't get figured

out so I made all the wrong choices we talked about where I thought I hired smart people you know from an agency perspective to just solve this for us and that was just not not a recipe for Success like we have gotten equally proficient at building products and finding the right people for those products I am still the guy in Tik Tok who controls Adge manager every day and we're very active so like I don't come from growth I don't come from Performance Marketing we just have to learn it and we spend a lot of time you know learning it from the ground up again without any preconceived notions of how these things should go so I would say like it's not all about paid ads like paid ads work when you have a really good product and a consumer that stays with with you and a really good understanding unique understanding of your user where you can speak to them we're paid and investing in growth really works but the equal importance of

those two things I think has become extremely clear to us through living through the Pains of not being proficient at both at one point in time well and I'm glad you learned the paid ad lesson early and live to tell the tale because there a lot there are a lot of consumer subscription apps where that ultimately ends up being the death Nell when that the unit economics don't work anymore last question how do you believe AI will impact the fitness category over the next two to three years I could speak from ourland like we're using AI in every area of our business right now so like first and foremost we've been able to keep the team small we don't have a single person our team whose job is to be a manager or who is a manager more than half their time and that includes me so it's given us a ton of horsepower outside of humans to go build this business without over complicating kind of the human resource side of it

that's been huge like our view in in what we're delivering like we believe in the power of human connection and human motivation so the face of our coaches it's not one to one but we create experience that feel very personal to deliver that on the back end we're using AI in everything that we do we just launched a fature called workout modifications which let you swap in a movement based on some criteria that you're giving it but it is learning now across all of our programs all of our teams every movement to get better and better at the right movement to prescribe that maintains the Integrity of the programing that's designed by the coach there's no way to do that from a human perspective so we're using it in every inch I think for us it'll enable us to deliver a better and better experience that is disconnected from just growing the the team to go support those different use cases as we expand

so we've been we have a person in our team who's only working and thinking about AI so we've already invested in it's become an enormous component to our business I don't see that changing cool well that's great to hear and thanks again for coming on the podcast Greg it's been a pleasure as always before we wrap up any final thoughts you want to share or or any requests for for the audience I would say try the product there's no no credit cards there's no downside and if you need validation we're in the Wall Street Journal today is the number one product in our space so would love for you to try join ladder.com thanks again for coming on Greg it was a pleasure and I used the app this morning and had a great experience and we'll be continuing to use it for a long time to come thanks again thanks so much appreciate having me