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 demands, then we were 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 it 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 TikTok 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 Latter, 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 Latter cracked TikTok as a user acquisition channel in order to grow subscribers by 2000% over the last two years. All right, welcome Greg Stewart to the Subversive podcast. Super excited to have you on the show 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 let's 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 a best and banking working in Goldman Sachs covering technology 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. Latter, we've been working on for the last five years. Latter is a app for strength training for people who are serious about their fitness. And we originally 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 we're 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 North star of training delivery experience as close to personal training as possible. So we found a pain point 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, 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 before you join Latter 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 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 Latter 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 before I hit that, want to come 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 are 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 Dueling go really trying to create and deliver the greatest experience possible that both solves the core use case of delivering a plan for every workout. So creating these motivational elements that keep you excited, keep you engaged and wanting to come back for that next workout. We learned a ton in 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 five 10 15,000 followers and we helped create content with them to help get their followers into the app and using the product. And that gave us a good kind of initial user base to iterate from learn from talk to and really validate that we were on to something and helping form. 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 COVID was in our was in our lives. And we were mostly talking to a gym goer and thinking about somebody who had access to full set of equipment, obviously industry training, but going to the gym. And I 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 of time to make our programming relevant to somebody who was 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 be smart on how to adapt to that user working very closely with our coaches and constantly serving our members to understand what they had access to and what they were looking for to get going. And then we did some really hacky things to be relevant. There was a million companies that were getting started every day in the fitness space 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 catable king of New York. And this is a guy who was going around to to fung gyms and buying equipment kind of piece by piece and selling it door to door 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 the internet for companies in this space and found a partner in one and we bought $50,000 worth of kettlebells 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, kettlebells are out of stock everywhere. We actually have them in our shop and 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 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 outside's opportunities if you're able to meet your customers where they are and serve those really deep pain points. That COVID in the moment was an atel in for us because the hurdle to launch a new app in the space was very low in all of the kind of coaches content creators were flipped upside down 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 COVID our growth has been really exciting after COVID once the world opened up again and work out environments became more mobile. We see most of our members who were only going to the gym before COVID are now working out maybe most of the days the week of 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, 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 approach to growing on TikTok that has been so central to your growth 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 stories 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 their interest is over time it goes down so the opposite of an engine. We raised a seed around in twenty twenty one. 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 you could make. And it was 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. So 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 peak COVID. So you had every big brand and fitness aggressively spending to acquire this consumer who was 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 mathing for us. And we stopped. We did that for about three months. What came out of that though is a whole bunch of learning and insights that fueled what is the product monetization strategy and price point today. All of our users before that moment were coming through our coaches 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 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 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 for an activation perspective to attract and move through the funnel. A user would know or low context. And 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-to-one training. So high performance 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 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 one-to-one 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 texty relationship, but more of like an on-star button, where you had a specific question, you needed guidance on a modification or you had an injury, you needed 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 high end for apps because of that feature. When we started investing in Facebook and interacting with users that had no context for latter, we learned that $160 just seemed egregious to them. They're benchmarking us to every other consumer subscription that they pay for. Think about Spotify or Netflix. $9.99, $15, maybe a die-end, so $60 was multiples of that. And number two, they weren't willing to pay for the chat with the coach's 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, too, they were. And out of that came new packaging, simpler model, just one price point, no one-to-one concept. And a price point that was $30 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'd build an experience that helped shepherd 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 were a couple of 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 got to start somewhere. And so that's a worthwhile heuristic, but 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 short cuts approach, is you did the Van West Indoor, if 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 TikTok as the right channel? And then we can get into some of the really innovative stuff that ladder has done to grow on TikTok. Yeah, in the beginning of 2022, with new packaging, new price point, a lot more confidence in our 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 essentially took every person in the company and we were little, but we stopped focusing on feature development, which is very abnormal for our team. We're extremely consumer-oriented or tension-oriented team, but we had finite runway, we had to figure out a growth. We didn't think of that out then, we were going to have to pack up and we couldn't work with each other anymore. So we made the mission of the team to go solve growth. 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 a sign of life without having to hire an agency or do stuff outside of the company. And we started this rigorous iteration 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 MVP courses that helped us get line of sight. It gave us confidence that there's an SEO strategy for latter, but it wasn't going to be one that was going to get us to our next major milestone. And TikTok was probably the second one we started spending time on. We had some experience with TikTok 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 TikTok, but we could see that the consumer was moving to TikTok. So we started spending time on TikTok 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 one of my coaches, super smart coach, and essentially we started a TikTok handle and started experimenting on content types. And we have these very detailed notes that are ridiculous now when you look at these videos, dissecting all of the commonalities of videos that got to the right person, which you can tell based on the engagement in the comments. And that repeatedly we're 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 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 TikTok until we had line of 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, Simor2, Organic Instagram? And do we think we can do this on a skilled 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 these are educates or entertains and gets to the right user repeatedly. So it's all about organic content for us in those early innings, which gave us lightest sight and comfort and it's to start experimenting with a little bit of money behind some of that content. What were some of the metrics or criteria you used to know which organic content you should be pouring more fuel on in order to fuel the paid acquisition loop and how did you know kind of how much to put behind a given piece of creative? Well, how much is very simple because we don't have a lot of money. So we were trying to put his little, I think the first month or so we might have been 50 bucks a day. I mean very light just to see if we can we get people to click the ad. We took multiple creators and started scaling up on the organic side and what we would look at and dissect really were the comments in those videos. So were they 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 batch 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 ladders handle but taking winning content from the organic side. So we take a winning organic video featuring one of our coaches or a style of creative that work repeatedly and we would replicate that into a brand ad featuring that coach. Sometimes the identical to 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 TikTok and down into our funnel. So the creative side like we felt pretty confident early on. It was really smart creative folks and 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 that was a really important part of the duration after we felt pretty confident on the content side. We continue to iterate but we started to shift down the photo 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 work out 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 ask 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 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 spitted to 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're 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 you're giving us. Well, I imagine that had two important implications. So one is you're improving the product experience for new users and you mentioned target metrics. Imagine you were looking things like registration rate activation rate, trial star, a trial conversion rate. But then there's the second component that you hint at especially in the wake of a TT. 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 get back to the ad networks to optimize ad spend. You guys came up with this idea of a web based on boarding 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 so we had to figure out how to get to the right people. At that point, it wasn't casual fitness. This casual fitness, you're competing with huge brands and casual fitness, mean cardio, not shrink 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 tick tock learning on the right user. 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 hop persona for ladder. So 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 party person. They really want real strength trading. They want to plan for every workout. But then I imagine even within that because that's a 15 billion dollar US market. There were these different niches that you identified. And there's this tool that you call the ladder quadrant for identifying what the most valuable segments might look like. So as this started to scale and the model is clearly working and you've got product channel fit on tick tock, 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 that we didn't have to guess like we're also fortunate where we have no pressure to launch a new coach. So our growth engine is not reliant 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 to also give us insights into where their holes in our coach roster. What is the market looking for consistently that's coming through our funnel and where we not well equipped to service that user. And so we could see it different moments in time certain modalities and personas that weren't represented our roster. I mean a couple of years ago was female bodybuilding. We had enormous amount of leads coming in that were saying they were women looking for bodybuilding programming. They are going to the gym full access to equipment. And that was in a modality that we had on 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 underwrite the growth trajectory of any new team or program that that we would add to ladder. And we're extremely selective. We are bringing these people on to our team full time. So this is not like an influencer coach, you know, a toolset. We're looking for coaches who are really smart. Want to be part of building something that is bigger than just them and their brand. And that's not the right path for every coach. But our coaches, we've gotten better or better on how to underwrite 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 to ladder goes through rigorous trials with us, then you with all of our group heads. 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 by the end of it, what is your 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 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 It's almost like a code test of your engineer to make sure that all the things that we've learned are true. And how hold up when we actually put you through real-life programming and real users are actually consuming that concept. So I don't know, we don't have anybody's full-time job is to recruit coach. We launched three coaches last year. We over two and a half extra business didn't have to launch a ton of coaches. We're always looking at our funnel to understand where is new demand to be met. But 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 doing it 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 test week given the 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. It's got a lot easier to, like as 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 got a lot easier than it was a few years ago. We were much smaller and had had no name. Well, in that latter part, I think goes over looked 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 TikTok 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 player is going to work with a player, so it sounds like you're getting some of that to supply a referral. For sure. And it's like, we have, you know, we're nearing 200,000 members and we have 18 programs. So 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 as an extension to the product, like a modality and experience that isn't currently in our roster that we know they're strong demand for and will be a good fit. So we kind of think about the adventures. Each of our coaches represents a unique person, unique persona and training style that 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 in their own right on TikTok, are the center of your acquisition strategy on TikTok and now on Instagram as well. But there's another element to the coaches being the center of your core product experience 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 to ladder takes and some of the product features or other elements of the ladder experience that has led engagement retention to be unusually high on your category. For sure. And before I hit that with it with our coaches, some of them work 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 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 typically not the biggest following 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 coach again they represent a unique program style unique persona and these teams become almost tribal and 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 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 community social element is extremely important to us from our attention perspective these groups are extremely active. And as we've grown we've expanded those chats outside of the team we have platform level chats that are topic based and we look to our members 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 these like really interesting chats that are unbelievable active people around the world who are just sharing information and learning from each other and then we created. And then we created that's like your fitness 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 of answers making friends in real life and we're seeing more and more 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. And people are organizing themselves and finding each other in and really celebrating the latter experience together which is really powerful and then we spend 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 doing go who are 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 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 friendly perspective and those are important none of them were built all the once they've all been built with some insight that lever could be incremental from a workout perspective which then is incremental from retention perspective we have a feature in the app if you open the app on the home screen you'll be able to do that. So you can see 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 circles how far through the workout they are and you have the ability to cheers members and 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 shares to receive too long term retention which gives us confidence to go iterated that feature and make it better and help drive adoption so. Or nor star for anything we build is always anchored to work out completion so can we keep you coming back into the app and keep you focused on completing that next workout which ultimately is to staying with flatter for the long run. Well, I just want to emphasize about what you said there because I think they're so important one is your focusing on the inputs not the outputs and I feel like in fitness in particular can be so tempting to focus on top line subscribers and subscription revenue growth. The reality is so many people will start a new fitness regimen in January as part of a news resolution and then they turn and if all you're looking at is. You know subscriber counter subscription revenue growth and you're going to miss what's happening under the hood and under the hood of people are engaging and retaining there 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 for everything else the second thing is. Like so many other consumer apps you've looked to do a link of inspiration around these manufacturer motivation techniques streaks badges leaderboards etc but often where I see that fail is. When you do sort of a blind copy pace without thinking from first principles what's unique about your customer and your product and so it sounds like you've really tailored these techniques 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 upfront there isn't a single company in our space that doesn't collect the credit card to activate a trial and when we did that we realized it was weird but it fell intuitive to us. If our product is better we want more people to be in the product and creating a gate upfront even if you weren't being charged kind of makes 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 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 gross strategy they're taking by how aggressive their paywell is and obviously it's an over simplification but you've got the class of apps and there's nothing wrong with this you've got indeed developers and small teams that are very aggressive about paywalling the experience upfront and it's a great way to make sure that you're generating some amount of revenue and if you're acquire users through page channels that 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. Well congratulations on all of the traction, all of the success. Where does latter 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 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 latter? It's probably pretty boring answer but we're spending most of our time kind of engaging with our members and figuring out what do we need to go build to improve the experience increase work us 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 inform 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 of the long term. So the product iteration never ends. Like you'll see us looking for new modalities where we have line-as-site undemand. 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 a place where our members are super excited and coming to us and asking for branded performance wear and so we'll launch 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 members two years ago. We could see that people were tracking their workouts outside the app. They were using spreadsheets. They were using apple notes. They're using paper notebooks and you can see the pain and so we built basically a product in itself inside the app called the LiDAR 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 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 realm. Yeah well it sounds like lots of exciting opportunities for expansion but all rooted in this nucleus of coach center, group center, team center, fitness and the incredible and enthusiastic community that you built around that. One last question I have to ask. I've been remiss if I didn't ask it. So TikTok has been so important for your growth. Obviously there's a lot of uncertainty around right now around where TikTok goes in the US. How do you think this plays out over the next few months and how is latter sort of mitigating any risk associated with TikTok given the uncertainty? Sure our personal view is TikTok 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 TikTok for their livelihood. It's a new administration coming in lots of data to process. Our view is whatever happens from 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 ban 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 Reels and Reels basically became their competitive product to TikTok so instead of creating content to get to the audience you 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've scaled that up successfully using the same creator same strategy where it's probably you know every other day it's meta more than TikTok in terms of where leads are coming from so what we've gotten really good at is understanding our core user what they care about how to create creative it's relevant to them in short form video and whether or not TikTok is here for good or not short form video is not going anywhere it's with the consumer prefers at least for the time being and we build an entire motion around that that's agnostic to platform but we're experimenting with other channels as well our organic growth is growing as we've gotten bigger more more people are talking about us we've built a PR motion internally within our team to amplify our reach outside of just our own 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 unique message versus our peers in a really high quality compelling brand content that is help 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 TikTok's going anywhere but even if it does at this point you sort of expanded beyond being overly reliant on TikTok for a while. Without a doubt and the attention goes somewhere. We saw it even in those 10 hours you can see meta sorry it's a 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 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 your bias 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 of this if you read our app service with 60,000 apps to reviews and we're serving them 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 and make you cry. If I'm ever like lost on my way all I do is go read app service and feedback and it immediately grounds me in what in what we're doing. I think the second part is like I get to work with my friends and I've been we have 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 in 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 tech talk ban question ever again over time and 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 beyond a tech talk itself so that's just been this like buzzing narrative that I have to like stop and like put together smart thoughts and articulate that we are not just a tech talk business we built the most attentive product and fitness and that's where it is at a core and we're really good at finding people who are relevant to that product and tech talk has just been one place that's effective for us in doing that. I thought there would be a lot of end balance on the tech talks out 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've 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 curve ball I mean you mentioned COVID and so that certainly builds trust. Next question you 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 and 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 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 a real estate tech and bring on traditional real estate people was never the right call it was bring on really smart people who understand us all. consumer problems can work backwards, bringing 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 and how things are done. Yeah, we generally don't follow that path and try to avoid that trap. Yeah, well in real estate and fitness are probably two categories that have been entrenched long enough that there's a lot of groupthink and so there can be some real alpha to thinking about things differently from first principles. Okay, a couple more here besides latter. What's your favorite consumer subscription app in Hawaii? Maybe most of you, none of these will be like super groundbreaking. Most of you Spotify use it every day. If I'm working in my desk, I've got Spotify on so that's a product that's probably highest on my list of usage outside of our own. Dueling goes amazing. We spend a lot of time both getting to know prior Dueling Go teammates who were around the early choppers of that venture. There's a ton of learn from that company and so we spend a lot of time in Dueling Go and it's just a terrific product. And obviously TikTok changed the game from a media perspective. TikTok 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 TikTok has totally changed the game from a content perspective, content consumption perspective. So those three 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 Dueling Go in particular come up as remarkable, but there's a good reason for that. They've done an amazing job. If you could go back and give yourself advice as a new founder, what would it be? That's a good question. Advice a new founder, I would say you have to be black 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 from an agency perspective to just solve this for us. And that was just 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 TikTok who controls ad manager every day. And we're very active. So I didn't come from growth, I don't come from marketing. We just had to learn it. Then we spent a lot of time learning it from the ground up. Again, without any preconceived notions of how these things should go. So I would say it's not all about paid ads. Like paid ads work when you have a really good product and a consumer that stays with you. And it was really good understanding, a unique understanding of your user where you can speak to them or 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 lived to tell the tale because there are a lot of consumers in Scripture apps where that ultimately lands up being the death knell and the the unineconomics don't work anymore. Last question, how do you believe AI will impact the fitness category over the next two to three years? I can speak from Ireland. We're using AI in every area of our business right now. So 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. 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 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 feature called workout modifications, which lets 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 program in this design 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 team to go support those different use cases as we expand. So we've been, we have a person our team who is only working and thinking about AI. So we've already invested in it. 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 any requests for the audience? Obviously, try the product. There's 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 I'd love for you to try it joinlater.com. Thanks again for coming on, Greg. It was a pleasure. And I use the app this morning and had a great experience and will be continuing to use it for a long time to go. Thanks again. Thanks so much. Appreciate having me.