How Ladder Became #1 Strength Training App

Building a consumer subscription business in a crowded market is difficult. Building one that survives a near-total collapse to reach nearly $100 million in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) is exceptional. Ladder, now the number one app for strength training, achieved exactly this by ignoring industry norms, rejecting the "content library" model, and mastering organic growth channels before they were obvious.

The journey from a struggling marketplace to a dominant fitness utility wasn't linear. It required a hard pivot, a willingness to negotiate debt with creditors, and a ruthless commitment to product-market fit. In a conversation with early investor Patrick O’Shaughnessy, founders Tom Digan and Greg Stewart broke down the operational mechanics, the rigorous customer feedback loops, and the specific growth strategies that powered their ascent.

Key Takeaways

• The fallacy of personalization: Ladder shifted from a 1:1 personal training marketplace to a "one-to-many" team-based model after realizing users wanted high-quality programming more than hyper-customization.
• Engineering over content: Unlike competitors who focus on building massive libraries of on-demand videos, Ladder operates as an engineering-first utility focused on workout completion rates.
• In-house creative control: The company cracked the code on TikTok customer acquisition by ignoring Facebook ad heuristics and bringing content creation entirely in-house.
• Empirical product development: Major features, including their recent expansion into nutrition, are driven by massive qualitative data sets—reading thousands of app store reviews and survey responses manually.
• AI as an accelerator: Ladder uses custom-built AI tools not to replace coaches, but to handle cognitive load, allowing them to scale human interaction to thousands of users.

From Near-Death to Market Dominance

Before becoming a powerhouse in strength training, Ladder was a business on the brink of failure. The original iteration, "Ladder 1.0," was a managed marketplace connecting consumers with personal trainers for 1:1 coaching. While the premise sounded logical, the unit economics were brutal. The business was operationally complex, difficult to scale, and essentially functioned as a low-margin call center.

By early 2020, the company was out of money and facing creditors. However, amidst the operational mess, the founders uncovered a critical insight by observing their most successful trainers. One coach, Lauren, was generating significant revenue not by customizing plans for every individual, but by selling a specific persona-based program to a group.

The team realized that the "personalization" the industry obsessed over was largely a myth. Consumers didn't necessarily need a workout built from scratch; they needed a high-quality plan designed for their specific goals (e.g., busy professionals wanting kettlebell training).

"We realized that maybe personalization isn't the secret here, but it's having good programming that's relevant to you... We had no idea how to grow. She [Lauren] figured out like I had this Instagram profile... and she was telling a story to her audience and they were coming in."

This insight led to the pivot: high-quality, team-based programming combined with group accountability. They tested the concept with a simple, barely functional MVP. The retention rates were immediate and staggering—north of 90%.

The Product Strategy: Engineering First, Creator Second

The fitness app market is saturated with "Netflix for fitness" models—platforms that offer thousands of on-demand videos. Ladder took the opposite approach. They identified that their core customer, the fitness enthusiast, views decision fatigue as a major pain point. They do not want to browse a library; they want to be told exactly what to do.

Greg Stewart, Ladder's CEO, likens the traditional fitness app experience to handing a user a box of 10,000 puzzle pieces and telling them to build a picture. Ladder’s approach is to hand the user the exact next piece required to complete the puzzle.

Solving for Workout Completion

While many subscription apps solve for the initial signup, Ladder’s "North Star" metric is workout completion. This distinction drives their engineering roadmap. Every feature is vetted against a simple question: Will this increase the odds of a user finishing their workout?

This focus led them to reject the standard industry practice of creating endless content. Instead, they utilized levers found in social networks and gamified learning apps like Duolingo—streaks, badges, and community accountability—to drive behavior. The result is a product that feels less like a media channel and more like a utility.

Rewriting the Playbook on Growth

Ladder’s explosion from $3 million to nearly $100 million in ARR was fueled by a mastery of short-form video, specifically on TikTok. However, their success required unlearning the best practices of the previous decade of digital marketing.

When the team began experimenting with TikTok, they found that the heuristics developed for Facebook and Instagram (such as letting ads run for two weeks to "learn") didn't apply. The platform functioned more like a television network than a social graph. Success depended entirely on the "hook"—the first three seconds of the video—and whether the content was entertaining enough to hold retention.

"If you talk to Facebook marketers who are moving to TikTok, they were applying all these rules and heuristics of Facebook and Instagram to TikTok. But these are two separate platforms... I realized pretty quickly that everybody is taking this mental model over a here and applying it and not trying to figure it out from scratch."

To win, Ladder brought creative production entirely in-house. They hired full-time creators and coaches, giving them the agility to iterate on creatives daily based on immediate feedback loops. They treated the ad algorithm like a video game, dissecting winning videos frame-by-frame to understand why specific visuals, outfits, or opening lines resonated with specific personas.

Radical Customer Listening

Perhaps the most distinct aspect of Ladder’s culture is its refusal to guess. The founders emphasize an extreme version of customer listening that goes beyond standard analytics. In the early days, this involved manually copying and pasting App Store reviews into Word documents to color-code and analyze sentiment patterns.

Today, this philosophy continues at scale. The company recently launched a comprehensive nutrition feature, not because investors requested it, but because a 50-minute qualitative survey of 5,000 members revealed it was the single biggest friction point.

Users were tracking macros in apps like MyFitnessPal but hated the experience. They wanted a single "system of record" that combined their energy output (exercise) with their energy input (nutrition). By listening to this demand, Ladder built a nutrition tracker that logged nearly 4 million meals in its first six weeks.

Operationalizing AI to Scale Intimacy

Ladder has integrated Artificial Intelligence not to generate generic workout plans, but to solve operational bottlenecks and enhance human connection. The company employs a "human-in-the-loop" strategy where AI handles data synthesis, allowing human coaches to focus on high-value interactions.

Ladder Pulse and Maiv AI

With chat groups containing tens of thousands of members, it became impossible for coaches to manually read every message. Ladder built "Ladder Pulse," an internal tool that reads chats and surfaces the most critical questions and sentiment trends to the coach. This allows a single coach to effectively manage and motivate a massive community without burnout.

Similarly, they developed "Maiv AI," a customer support tool that now handles 90% of incoming tickets. This automation has allowed the company to scale to over 300,000 paying members with a surprisingly lean team, maintaining high margins while improving response times.

The Future: A System of Record for Health

Ladder’s ambition extends beyond strength training. The founders view the app as the eventual "system of record" for health and fitness—a category winner akin to Spotify for music or Airbnb for short-term housing.

This vision involves a "push versus pull" strategy for expansion. Rather than expanding into new verticals for the sake of revenue (like generic supplements or dating), they wait for the customer to pull them there. This discipline allows them to maintain a lean operation while preparing for broader mass-market awareness through campaigns that move beyond their stronghold in short-form video.

Backed by a strategic partnership with General Catalyst that finances their customer acquisition, Ladder has secured the runway to play a long game. They are building not just for an exit, but to create a generational consumer business that fundamentally changes how people approach their health.