“We correlated the number of cheers received to workout completions and long-term retention and so we realize the importance of this feature and people feeling like there are others that are doing it with them... we now use that to figure out how do we incentivize and increase the number of outbound cheers.”

Social Cheers Feature Correlates Directly With Workout Completions and Long-Term Retention

Ladder discovered that users who receive cheers from other members during workouts are significantly more likely to complete the workout and retain long-term. The mechanism is social accountability and belonging. Once identified, the team engineered an early-trial cheers boost — new users now receive more inbound cheers in their first days — to create the psychological connection before it forms naturally.