Founder Playbook · Sub Club by RevenueCat
8 tactics from Greg Stewart
TikTok as a Growth Loop for Ladder: How the Fitness App Pivoted from Instagram to TikTok
Watch the full episode“It was all focused on the content to start, not on any sort of acquisition or monetization. It was all on: can we create great content that is providing value? And if you nail those, then they're willing to learn more and purchase from you. If you're not nailing that before spending a dollar on paid marketing, you're going to give up pretty quickly.”
Nail organic before spending a dollar — profitable paid TikTok requires a proven organic playbook first
Stewart's TikTok formula was explicit: first spend months testing organic content at zero cost to find repeatable million-view hooks, then put paid dollars behind proven creative. Ladder reached 250K followers on a new coach account in 45 days with no new video shot, just repurposed existing content. The organic signal is the selection filter for ad spend; without it, paid TikTok burns cash on creative guesses.
“On Instagram you are rewarded for building up a following and then over time you spend your time trying to extract value. TikTok is the exact opposite. Most videos that we learned are an entirely different audience every time. So you can assume it's a different auditorium of people every video.”
TikTok's For You Page means every video is a cold pitch — unlearn Instagram's build-an-audience logic
The mental model that makes Instagram coaches fail on TikTok: Instagram rewards building a loyal following that you then monetize; TikTok's For You Page distributes each video to a cold audience algorithmically selected by interest signals. Every TikTok is effectively an ad to strangers. This means no callbacks to previous content, no assumed context, and hooks must be self-contained. Ladder had to actively unlearn Instagram behaviors with each coach.
“We're using the answers on the quiz as conversion events for TikTok. TikTok 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.”
Use quiz answers as TikTok pixel conversion events to teach the algorithm your ideal user
Stewart solved the deep-funnel attribution problem on TikTok by routing users from ads to a web quiz, then firing TikTok pixel events on specific quiz answers that correlated with high-quality subscribers. TikTok never needed to see in-app events — the quiz answer became the training signal. This technique bypassed iOS 14 attribution limits, accelerated algorithm learning, and let Stewart iterate ad spend multiple times per day rather than waiting for downstream conversion data.
“I've taken all of our almost 16,000 reviews in the App Store and very manually gone through and created value propositions and problem-solution statements using the words that are coming out of our users' mouths and how they were explaining the product. I don't think anybody in the world understands this customer better than we do.”
Mine your app store reviews to build value propositions in the user's own words
Before writing a single TikTok script, Stewart systematically mined 16,000 App Store reviews to extract the exact language users used to describe their problem and Ladder's value. This verbatim vocabulary informed every hook, every CTA, and every coach's messaging. The result: creative that resonated because it mirrored what target users already believed about their own fitness journey, not marketing language invented in a boardroom.
“The most expensive lead to acquire is casual fitness and everybody in the world is advertising to that person. If I'm attracting a lot of folks with that persona, they're not going to convert and the economics are going to break. We had to figure out how do we get dialed in on getting to the right user.”
Target 'already working out' users, not casual fitness — wrong ICP breaks your economics
Ladder's early paid spend failure came from targeting the wrong ICP: casual fitness users who responded to motivational creative but had no urgency to subscribe. Stewart identified 'already working out' users as the high-converting segment and redesigned the quiz, the creative, and the pixel signals to filter for this audience. Paid economics only work when the ICP is specific enough that creative can credibly address their exact problem.
“We learned Spark, which is just whitelisting on TikTok but taking the coach's organic content and turning that into an ad and pointing that in a direction that we set. That was explosive very quickly for us.”
Spark Ads — whitelisting organic coach content as an ad — was explosive for Ladder
TikTok's Spark Ads let you take an organic post from a creator's account, boost it with paid budget, and control the CTA destination. For Ladder, this bridged the organic-to-paid gap: proven organic content became the ad creative, so social proof (real follower counts, organic engagement) was visible to paid audiences. This hybrid format outperformed brand-produced ads because TikTok's algorithm treats Spark Ads like organic posts.
“For every one person that was answering the quiz, three were going directly to the App Store. We studied with a lot of math and rigor the correlation between those that were coming through our happy path and what was happening outside it, and those ratios were very very tight every time we had a new winning creative.”
Correlate quiz-path metrics with direct App Store installs to scale spend confidently when blind
Ladder discovered that 3x more users went directly to the App Store than completed the web quiz funnel — invisible in tracking data. Stewart's solution: rigorously validate the ratio between tracked (quiz) and untracked (direct App Store) installs across multiple creative changes and budget shifts. Once the parallel movement was confirmed as stable, quiz-path metrics became a reliable proxy for total business impact.
“It's not high production. It's not stuff that's working on Facebook and Instagram. It's raw and shot with an iPhone. Even editing in TikTok made the difference of it working or not versus using something that you created in Instagram.”
TikTok creative must be raw, shot on iPhone, and edited in TikTok — polished content fails
TikTok's algorithm deprioritizes content that looks like an ad — polished graphics, professional color grading, and branded formats all signal paid content and kill organic reach. Stewart found that even the editing tool mattered: video edited within TikTok's native editor outperformed identical content re-uploaded from Instagram. The platform rewards authenticity signals at every technical level, not just content style.