Founder Playbook · Sub Club by RevenueCat
12 tactics from Greg Stewart
How Ladder Cracked TikTok and Grew 500%
Watch the full episode“we did what we thought every consumer should do or you're told to do and we started putting money into Facebook paid and that was an utter disaster and we got just absolutely slaughtered in that experience we learned a lot”
Burning money on Facebook taught the product lessons no other way could
Ladder launched Facebook ads before the product was ready for cold traffic: onboarding assumed users already knew the coaches, price was $60/month, and there was no web quiz to route strangers into the right program. The spend was lost money short-term but revealed every product gap at once. Greg re-framed it: they paid for a clear diagnosis of what to fix — activation, price, and positioning — which wouldn't have been visible from organic coach traffic alone.
“the van Westendorp pricing analysis where one of the questions we asked and we had 500 responses to this and we asked all those segments at what price point is Ladder so expensive that you never buy it at what price point is Ladder expensive but you still consider purchasing it at what point is Ladder a good deal and at what price point is it so cheap that you question the quality of the product and out of that there's a formula that spits out an optimal price point range”
Van Westendorp on 500 users surfaces the clearing price better than guessing
Facing a pricing reset after the Facebook burn, Greg ran Van Westendorp surveys across multiple cohorts — coach referrals, Facebook leads, users with different training goals. Slicing by cohort revealed the clearing price was $29/month regardless of origin. The exercise replaced opinion with data and gave the team conviction to launch a completely redesigned offering with confidence rather than guesswork.
“on Instagram you are rewarded for building up a following and then over time you spend your time trying to extract value and trying to monetize that audience that you've acquired so you build this million per following and you try to sell them relevant goods and services Tik Tok is the exact opposite where most of the content that's being consumed is through the for you page”
TikTok is a fresh auditorium every video — unlearn everything from Instagram
Instagram creators optimize for a loyal following they sell to repeatedly. TikTok's For You Page means most viewers have never seen the creator before and never will again. Ladder had to coach their fitness influencers to stop referencing yesterday's post and treat every video as a self-contained pitch to strangers. The mental model shift: every TikTok video is a cold ad, not a community update.
“we started creating content with no new video but we got to 250,000 followers like 45 days later and we're like all right so like that worked and like we're generating million plus view outcomes and we're doing it on a weekly basis there's something there”
Grow a TikTok account to 250K followers in 45 days using only existing raw footage
Before committing budget, Ladder took a brand-new coach account, grabbed all the raw phone footage she had ever shot, and iterated on editing and format to reach 250K followers in 45 days without filming anything new. The exercise proved TikTok viability for the Ladder content style, built platform intuition about what hooks worked, and gave the team enough organic data to start putting paid dollars behind winners.
“what was really impactful was using the answers on the quiz as conversion events for Tik Tok so Tik Tok isn't seeing basically anything happening in the app they're learning who our user is based on the answers that they're giving us and then learning off what a good user looks like off of those conversions which are just answering the question in the way that we know it indicates a white hot user”
Use quiz-answer events as TikTok conversion signals instead of in-app events
TikTok's algorithm struggles to optimize toward in-app subscription events — there's too little signal and too long a lag. Ladder solved this by treating every quiz answer as a conversion event with a Pixel. TikTok learns what a high-intent user looks like from quiz signals before the person even opens the app. The quiz-to-App-Store correlation proved so tight that Greg could manage all spend decisions from quiz metrics alone without checking downstream app events.
“LTV at this stage I think is Fairyland I think it's like pitch deck metrics because the LTV in a business that's been around for two or three years or a business that just started to invest in growth it's a guess and you can extrapolate but it's not a really good system to understand in my mind your unit economics at that moment and so we've anchored the entire team in business to payback period”
Manage paid spend by payback period — LTV at year 3 is a guess, not a metric
LTV projections for early-stage subscription businesses are extrapolations built on tiny cohorts — they feel precise but they are not. Ladder replaced LTV/CAC with payback period: how many months until gross margin from this subscriber recoups the acquisition cost? This metric is concrete, computable from real data, and drives the right daily decisions. Ladder hit profitability on a per-user basis in low single-digit months and could see it improving in real time.
“we were mostly monthly for the first three years for a couple different reasons one we just didn't want the complexity of dealing with this but we wanted to have hard-earned retention where we were learning what is the correlation of behavior and membership to month one retention month two retention month three retention and having that masked in annual is really hard to use as a Guiding Light for the team”
Stay monthly until retention is proven; then introduce annual to compress payback
Most apps rush to annual plans to improve cash flow. Ladder deliberately stayed monthly for three years so that every retention signal was unmasked — a bad month-one retention figure was immediately visible and fixable, not buried under annual pre-payments. Only after achieving top-of-benchmark monthly retention did they introduce an annual option, taking their annual mix from 0% to 30% almost immediately with a simple side-by-side paywall tweak.
“anytime you open our app and go into one of these team chats you'll hear somebody you'll read somebody saying I wasn't going to work out today and I came here and I saw you guys talking about it and it motivated me to go do it and this is every day we see it”
Team chats driven by coaches become the accountability loop that beats churn
Nobody signs up for a fitness app to make friends, but Ladder's team-level Slack-style chats became the real churn defense. Coaches seed early activity; members keep the conversation going; people who were about to skip a workout log in, see the chat, and show up anyway. Ladder measured the path from chat engagement to workout completion and built product features specifically to drive people into chat earlier. Social accountability, not discounts, is their retention lever.
“we have six High urgency High intent moments that are mapped to the calendar to get people in now we have people starting every day and you don't have to start in the beginning but it creates a really clean narrative for us to tell about why to start today”
Six annual strength seasons create 6 high-urgency acquisition windows per year
Ladder invented six-week 'Strength Series' programming cycles mapped to the fitness calendar, each with a theme like shredding in summer or building in winter. The series gives the growth team six recurring urgency windows per year: 'This is the beginning of the season, start Monday.' Users can join at any point, but the season-start narrative creates FOMO that drives conversions even from users who have been sitting on a free trial for weeks.
“we saw about a third of our leads every day were saying they wanted traditional bodybuilding and at that moment it was mostly women who were coming through our funnel and saying that and we didn't have a traditional bodybuilding program so the conversion rate for that user versus someone who didn't say they wanted bodybuilding was half”
A 15-question quiz routing 1M users became the product roadmap for which coaches to hire
A million people completed Ladder's 15-question web quiz in 18 months. When a third consistently chose 'traditional bodybuilding' but Ladder had no such program, conversion rate for that cohort was half the average — a clear signal. The quiz became a demand-forecasting tool: identify the missing modality from unmet quiz responses, model the revenue, then recruit the exact right coach to fill it. Ladder's last two launches came directly from this data.
“it all started with nailing the organic and then starting to put some Capital behind it and iterating on the paid side”
Prove organic TikTok works before spending a dollar on paid ads
Ladder's paid TikTok strategy was deliberately sequenced: first build a playbook on organic with a new coach (250K followers in 45 days), learn which content hooks drove profile clicks and app installs, then amplify only the organic winners with budget. The organic phase de-risked paid spend by proving the audience existed and the creative worked before a single dollar was committed. This order — organic proof, then paid scale — is the opposite of how most app UA teams operate.
“we started the year with 9,000 paying subscribers and we'll beat aggressive targeting closed the year north of 50,000 paying members”
9K to 50K paying subscribers in one year running TikTok as the only paid channel
Ladder entered 2023 with 9K subscribers and closed the year at 50K+ — a 500%+ gain — running a single paid channel (TikTok) while maintaining top-of-benchmark monthly retention. The growth came from an entirely in-house motion: no agencies, founder and creative director running ads personally, organic signals feeding paid decisions, and a web quiz converting cold traffic. The business was profitable on a per-user basis in low single-digit months throughout.