“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.