How Ladder Became #1 Strength Training App

Summary

• Ladder — Patrick’s first-ever angel check — has gone from 9,000 paying members at the start of 2023 to north of 300,000, “knocking on the door at 100 million of recurring revenue,” as the #1 grossing fitness app in the App Store and top 100 of all US apps. The thesis: unbundle personal training into its three pillars — “programming, coaching, and accountability” — and rebuild each in software, borrowing motivational mechanics from Duolingo and social networks rather than looking at fitness apps at all.
• The company “easily could have died and probably should have died many times.” Ladder 1.0 (pre-2020) was a personal-training marketplace that “starts to look more like a call center” at scale; in the early period there was no product-market fit, and by March 2020 there were debt collectors and creditors being negotiated at 20 cents on the dollar — the lesson: “when you get them to really believe there’s a chance you get zero, there’s a door to negotiate.”
• The founding product insight was that personalization was fake: the back end revealed “big bucket personas” like “Sally Pilates” sold as bespoke coaching. One trainer, Lauren, capped at $4k/month because “the constraint is human time” — so they jimmy-rigged group programming for a specific persona, got ~100 signups at $100/month off her Instagram, and saw 90%+ renewal on an app that “looked like s*… but the promise was being delivered.”
• Greg’s operating algorithm is aggressively empirical: “don’t listen to investors on product feedback — that is by far number one,” the north star is workout completions, and big bets come from member data — a 5,000-response, 50-minute annual survey surfaced nutrition, which went from beta (20% “would switch” → 85% → ship) to almost 4 million meals logged in six weeks, given away free to win trust from MyFitnessPal users who “hate it.”
• The growth unlock was learning TikTok from first principles: an account taken 0→250,000 people in ~45 days, budget changes “seven to 10 times a day” against platform advice (“the things you had most conviction in are the opposite of what we’re telling our clients to do”), and full-time in-house creators because “you have to own the creative.” Recurring revenue went from ~$3M at the start of the TikTok push to the current inflection.
• The capital structure is the quiet edge: a General Catalyst customer value fund deal finances investment growth monthly because “the capital markets aren’t funding CAC in consumer companies” — Ladder now generates cash, has more money in the bank than at its Series B close a year ago, and controls its own fundraising timeline while shifting spend toward brand, celebrity, and TV to fix an awareness problem.
• The endgame is the “system of record for health and fitness” — Uber/Airbnb/Spotify-style category winner where “there’s no clear winner” — with potential commerce, supplements, and biomarkers layered on. The biggest competitor “is YouTube — like by far, it’s not even close,” not Peloton; GLP-1s are framed as a macro tailwind (the science supports strength training alongside); and AI helps a 50-person team avoid expanding much more (Mave AI handles 90% of support).

Deep dive

1. Unbundle the personal trainer: programming, coaching, accountability

• Greg’s definition of the business: “Ladder is the number one app for strength training,” built on the observation that “arguably the most reliable way to get to the results that you’re looking for is hiring a coach” — unattainable for most. Personal training decomposes into three pillars: programming (“no guesswork, no thinking”), coaching, and accountability (“you don’t want to piss off your coach — which is a really powerful motivator”), and Ladder rebuilt each in software.
• Why this one won among “4,000 million fitness apps”: most competitors are creator-led content libraries where “the motion is just constantly creating more and more content.” Ladder is engineering-first and studied Duolingo and social networks, not fitness — “we just don’t look at fitness almost ever” — pointing motivational mechanics at workout completion instead of attention.
• Scale today: north of 300,000 paying members versus 9,000 at the beginning of 2023, “getting pretty close and knocking on the door at 100 million of recurring revenue.”

2. Ladder 1.0 should have died — and Tom bet everything anyway

• Tom’s framing: “there’s really two Ladders… Ladder 1.0 is everything pre-2020.” The original product was a managed marketplace for personal training — operationally complex, and at scale “it starts to look more like a call center,” forcing you to “automate away the very human you were selling” to get venture margins. Meanwhile all industry innovation chased the casual cardio consumer while the strength-training enthusiast was ignored.
• Tom left a lucrative hedge fund career, moved to Austin explicitly to put “distance between New York and my Bloomberg terminal and the easy way out,” and raised from friends and family — then doubled and tripled down on them when things got dark. His verdict, exactly as hedged: “not sure I would do it again or recommend other people take that path.” Why startups at all: “you can’t just will hedge fund returns — I think Bernie Madoff tried to do that.”
• Greg’s stakes were just as personal: after “10 years of not a lot of success tied to a lot of work,” his wife told him “this is the last one — if you don’t figure this one out, there are no more startups.” He joined the wreck rather than starting fresh because his team from a prior venture was the asset: “keep this group together… I wanted to hold on to it for dear life.”
• The day after Christmas 2019, Tom — by then the largest financial shareholder, mindset shifted “from co-founder to steward” — proposed leadership changes to the board, naming Greg CEO. “Our problems were hardly solved, but it felt like the problems were now worth solving.”

3. Survival 2020: creditors at 20 cents, steaks and cigars at 10pm

• March 2020, world locked down: “mornings were for the messy stuff” — debt collectors, untangling finances — afternoons for building the new product, and fundraising at every moment. Greg’s first job was literally “where’s the money going,” because nobody had visibility into cash flow.
• The creditor lesson, from negotiating with “hardcore creditors like American Express who doesn’t really mess around”: “when you get them to really believe — and it was true — that there’s a chance you get zero, there’s a door to negotiate. We were negotiating with big creditors at 20 cents on the dollar.” They worked the creditor list like a sales pipeline: close each door, don’t let it overhang the business.
• The texture that kept them going — Tom’s Goodfellas-in-prison analogy: office empty, grinding since 6am, and at 10pm “cooking steaks on the grill, smoking cigars in the office… shaking martinis… high-fiving about raising $10,000 checks.” It finally felt like the romanticized startup — except “it was survival, and when it literally is survival, it’s not hard to know what to work on.”

4. Fundraising is skin in the game — and the speaker is uncertain

• The fundraising masterclass in raising with nothing to show: the round in March 2020 had no lead (“who would lead a round in our business at that moment?”), so the founder priced an inside round himself and wrote the first check to lead with conviction — putting his 401(k) into the business and “trying to sell anything that’s not nailed down.”
• The best specimen: the founder spotted a Permanent Equity LP stake on his balance sheet, called likely Brent Beshore for his investor list mid-pandemic (“the S&P is down 35%… of course I’m not giving you my investor list — you’re my smallest investor”), and got referred to “Bill.” Bill haggled the mark (“what about down 10%?” — “what about down 50?”), sent the money the next day, bought the stake and matched it into the round — “he didn’t need to see a deck. We didn’t have a new product yet.”
• Tom’s later reflection on why he can sell traces to his dad, a mortgage originator working a Zach Morris cell phone while driving with his knees: people need to like you and root for you, trust you (“integrity is everything”), and you must be “relentless, but not in an annoying way.” The line that pumped him up, via Ken Griffin: “if we’re all going to eat, someone’s got to sell.”

5. Personalization was bs — Lauren proved the real model

• Studying the failing marketplace, Greg found the “super personalized” programming was actually “big bucket personas — the names were like Sally Pilates.” Conclusion: “maybe personalization isn’t the secret here, but having good programming that’s relevant to you.”
• The second insight came from Lauren, a high-ticket NYC trainer earning $4k/month on the platform whose earnings had stopped growing because she’d filled every hour: “that’s a bad business. You’ve capped how big this can get. The constraint is human time.”
• February 2020, they jimmy-rigged the app so Lauren could program for a group — “busy women in New York, kettlebell training,” non-customized but persona-specific, with a shared chat — and she pulled ~100 signups at $100/month “very fast” from a 5–10k Instagram following, while the company was “in process of dying.”
• The magic: members who’d never met found each other in the app, posted about Lauren and Ladder, then met up in a New York park — and “the renewal rate was like 90% plus.” Greg’s honest read: “if you looked at the app, you would go, this is garbage. But the promise was being delivered.” A second coach trial produced the exact same outcome, and Greg phoned nearly every member to extract the pain points: “I’m tired of thinking about what workout to do… I don’t want to go spend $1,000 on a coach.”

6. The CEO algorithm: members over investors, workout completions over everything

• Asked for his equivalent of the Elon algorithm, Greg leads with: “don’t listen to investors on product feedback. That is by far number one.” No one person is the source of truth — investor prescriptions got tested against the user base “and they would say no, I don’t want that.”
• The north star is workout completions, not first payment: “we’re solving for you to actually complete workouts with Ladder.” Every build must prove a thesis that it increases completions; “don’t do 10 other things just because it’s interesting… do the one thing and do it really well, and then do it again.”
• The method is brute-force listening: in the early days Greg copy-pasted every App Store review into 100-page color-coded Word docs; now the annual survey draws 5,000 responses averaging an hour, across 230 questions — including, for the first time this year, whether members are on GLP-1s — and ChatGPT synthesizes what used to be manual deconstruction.
• Greg’s warning to would-be consumer founders: “if you want to be by yourself with headphones on working on consumer, it’s a losing strategy… that’s how consumer companies die — they just freaking guess.”

7. Nutrition: from survey kernel to 4 million meals in six weeks

• Nutrition — “the biggest thing we built since the first version of the product” — came straight from the survey: a third of members track macros, 90% of those use an app, most use MyFitnessPal “and they hate it.” To the customer it’s one problem set — “I want to lose weight, I want to gain muscle… outputs is activity and exercise, input is what you’re eating” — managed painfully in two places.
• The design split is looking backwards versus forwards: tracking macros is table stakes (“make it really easy to log”); the real opportunity is prescriptive — “not what you did, but what to do. I’m at a restaurant, here’s the menu, what’s the best choice right now based on my goals?”
• The commercial call: give tracking away free to win trust from existing trackers rather than convert new ones — because owning both sides of the equation yields “the clearest picture of any potential product around this consumer” and “a million products we can now build.”
• Shipping discipline: team alpha, then a 2,000-member beta surveyed weekly on “how likely are you to switch from your existing app?” — the number climbed from 20% to 85%, at which point “we’re ready, we’re done.” Six weeks post-launch: “almost 4 million meals logged, which is insane thinking about those early stories where we knew all the faces in the app.”

8. Cracking TikTok from first principles — the growth s-curve

• The setup: during the winter-2021 Texas freeze, Greg read Crossing the Chasm and emerged with a 100-page deck — “I figured out who our customer is.” The pre-existing pitch was “we’re weights, we’re body weight, we’re gym, we’re home… all things to all people and it wasn’t working”; the fix was narrowing to one persona and refusing to tell “a story that’s relevant to a Peloton user.”
• The platform insight: TikTok “is not a social platform. It’s a media company” — consumed like TV, where the algorithm decides who sees content, so the whole game is content that routes to the right persona. Greg and one creative partner started coach accounts from scratch and took the first from 0 to 250,000 people in ~45 days, dissecting winners on whiteboards: “what is she wearing, what word was first, what was the setting.” The edge wasn’t TikTok genius: “we knew our customer inside and out” from those dissected app-store reviews.
• On paid, Greg refused agencies and Facebook orthodoxy: “I make budget changes seven to 10 times a day” versus the official “you shouldn’t touch it for two weeks” — and a TikTok employee told him “the things you had most conviction in are the opposite of what we’re telling our clients to do.” He was troubleshooting TikTok’s own ad tech; the engineers from China would concede “oh wait, he’s right.” For Greg it “became a video game… it’s like trading.”
• The curve: recurring revenue was ~$3M when the TikTok journey started, ~$4–5M when paid spend went in, “and it exploded since then.” The structural lesson: “you have to own the creative” — Ladder posted full-time TikTok-creator job descriptions in 2023 when “people were like, what the hell is this job?”

9. The GC deal changed the game — now buy awareness

• The financing unlock: “the capital markets aren’t funding CAC in consumer companies — we can’t just go raise a bunch of money just to put it into TikTok, no matter how good the product is.” General Catalyst’s customer value fund now finances investment growth monthly with payback over time — leaving Ladder cash-generating, with more money in the bank than at its Series B close a year ago, and in control of its own fundraising timeline (“who are the five human beings, forget firms”).
• The next problem is awareness, not product: “we certainly don’t have a product problem… most people still don’t know who Ladder is” — despite being the #1 grossing fitness app and top 100 among all US apps, because creator-led short-form never led with the brand. Next year: celebrity partnerships, out-of-home, TV — “small controlled bets, big on scale,” with the thesis that brand consciousness makes the short-form engine convert better.
• Greg’s pitch on consumer to a young founder, unvarnished: the business is “half our team works on workout completions, half works on trials off TikTok — that’s the business,” and you must be “black belt at both… great product, no growth, doesn’t work. Great growth engine, no product, leaky bucket.” Also: “growth hacks are not a real thing,” “be ready for 10 years,” and it’s “really f*ing hard.” Tom’s counter, kept as said: “I’d probably say don’t do it.” There’s probably easier things to get funded to do.

10. Endgame: the system of record — and the competitor is YouTube

• The vision: “the system of record for health and fitness. There’s a category winner in every category — transportation it’s Uber, short-term housing it’s Airbnb, Spotify in music. There’s no clear winner in the health and fitness category.” Expansion is governed by push versus pull — “are we being dragged into this area by our members?” — which is why nutrition sat on the deck for five years before critical mass, why potential commerce (“hey coach, what’s that creatine you’re having?”), supplements, and DEXA/biomarker features are being considered, and why there’s still no Android app: it “could absolutely take the business sideways for a year. Will we have an Android app? Yes. We won’t have it this year.”
• The competitive frame investors get wrong: “who’s your biggest competitor? Is it Peloton? It’s like no, it’s YouTube — like by far, it’s not even close.” Members would pay “a dollar” for a 10,000-workout library because “our members are paying us not to think” — Greg’s puzzle analogy: the member has the picture on the box, and Ladder hands them “each piece in order, one by one,” while most fitness products are “a bunch of random pieces.” A future free-library on-ramp could pull YouTube’s outer rings toward a plan.
• On the two exogenous forces: GLP-1s are a tailwind — “all the science would support that you need a strength training plan alongside your GLP-1” given muscle-loss risk, with possible provider partnerships. AI means “we can kind of have our cake and eat it too” — personalization at scale that was impossible four years ago, Ladder Pulse (reads every coach chat, surfaces the three burning questions and the never-answered member), and Mave AI handling 90% of support flow so one person handles support for north of 30,000 paying members as a non-full-time job. Team: 50 people including 20 coaches, one of whom works only in AI.
• Greg’s moat claim against AI commoditization: “I would challenge someone to try to build the experience that we’ve built using AI — we’re going to lean into the things AI can’t touch: a compelling brand, a tremendous amount of trust.” And the Peloton whipsaw as investor-narrative caution: first “how could you possibly compete with Peloton, a $50 billion company,” then post-COVID, “how can you build a good business? It can’t be done” — “used against us kind of twice now,” while Ladder just kept shipping.

Verification Notes

• The speaker of the Bill fundraising story is not directly identifiable in the raw captions; its attribution was neutralized.