--- title: "Built With Science sends 90% of its traffic to a quiz, not the App Store" description: "Ethan Ethier helps run a fitness app with a built-in audience of 7 million YouTube subscribers — and almost nothing about its growth playbook looks the way you'd expect." language: "en" publishedAt: "2026-09-02T12:59:04.529Z" updatedAt: "2026-09-02T12:59:04.529Z" authors: - name: "David Barnard" url: "https://www.revenuecat.com/blog/author/david-barnard" category: "Growth" categoryUrl: "https://www.revenuecat.com/blog/growth" canonical: "https://www.revenuecat.com/blog/growth/ethan-ethier-build-with-science-sub-club-podcast-2026" --- # Built With Science sends 90% of its traffic to a quiz, not the App Store Ethan Ethier helps run a fitness app with a built-in audience of 7 million YouTube subscribers — and almost nothing about its growth playbook looks the way you'd expect. ## Table of contents - [The influencer app that waited a year to run ads](#the-influencer-app-that-waited-a-year-to-run-ads) - [The pricing page change that moved annual from 60% to 80%](#the-pricing-page-change-that-moved-annual-from-60-to-80) - [A gym buddy plan that 15% of trial starts take](#a-gym-buddy-plan-that-15-of-trial-starts-take) - [70% of their experiments fail. That's the system working.](#70-of-their-experiments-fail-thats-the-system-working) Built With Science scaled Meta ads from zero to $100,000 a month in profitable spend this year. Almost none of that traffic goes anywhere near the App Store. [Video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EyoYQU6JyV8) "About 90% of our traffic is actually going to our website, and we have a really long personalized quiz that we send all leads to," says Ethan Ethier, the company's Head of Growth and Operations. The quiz isn't a lead-capture gimmick — it does three jobs before a user ever sees a price. "It educates the user on the actual product, it overcomes objections, and it increases the perceived value of the product," Ethier explains. And the answers do real product work: they build the user's personalized training plan inside the app, so the funnel doubles as onboarding. They didn't take the web-first approach on faith, either. The team ran traffic head-to-head, App Store versus quiz, and the quiz won on conversion — decisively enough that direct-to-store now only makes sense for the highest-intent users who already know what they want. One wrinkle worth noting: when they rebuilt the same quiz on Android, it converted on par with the web. It was only App Store traffic that lagged. ## **The influencer app that waited a year to run ads** There's a persistent myth that if you have millions of subscribers, your app markets itself. Built With Science was founded with YouTuber Jeremy Ethier — Ethan's brother — whose channel has over 7 million subscribers. The app still had to be grown the hard way. The app launched in early January 2025. The first Meta ad didn't run until a full year later. "We wanted to double down on improving the product," Ethier says. "As long as we're constantly improving our trial-to-paid and retention, that lifts the floor for everything else." The logic: organic traffic converts at your ceiling, paid traffic converts below it, so buying traffic before the floor is fixed just buys expensive proof of the same problem. Once trial-to-paid, retention, and churn looked healthy, they scaled — and today organic converts at 35–40% trial-to-paid, with colder Meta traffic around 25%, at a premium $189/year price point. Just as counterintuitive: Jeremy barely appears in the ads. "We're not relying on Jeremy at all for ads," Ethan says. The team wanted to solve what he calls the bus problem — everything depending on one person's YouTube channel — so the Meta program runs on B-roll, testimonials, and static creative. A channel that scales without the founder's face is a channel that actually scales. ## **The pricing page change that moved annual from 60% to 80%** The team's biggest win of the year didn't touch the price. Built With Science charges $189 a year or $30 a month, and the old pricing page showed both plans side by side. Roughly 60% of subscribers picked annual. The winning variant showed only the annual plan upfront, paired with a day-by-day timeline of the free trial: day 1, you get your personalized plan; day 12, a reminder that your trial is about to end and you can cancel anytime. Monthly still exists behind a view-all-plans option. "We didn't change the price, we didn't change the positioning. It was simply a UI shift which had a massive impact for us," says Ethan. Annual take jumped to 75–80% — at nearly $190 a year, a substantial LTV shift from a layout change that mostly worked by shrinking the perceived risk of starting the trial. The same page also produced their biggest fail: an experiment that added more context to clarify the value proposition actually hurt conversion. Their read — at the moment a user is motivated enough to be looking at prices, more information is friction, not reassurance. ## **A gym buddy plan that 15% of trial starts take** One of the more unusual pricing mechanics in the app came straight from user requests for a family plan. During the web quiz, users can add a "gym buddy" — a partner who joins at 15% off for both people. Around 15% of everyone who starts a trial adds one. That lifts average order value on its own, but the quieter win is retention: gym-buddy subscribers stay on the app longer, the same dynamic family-plan apps see with their highest-retaining cohorts. And because the question lives in the quiz, the pricing page stays clean for solo users — no paywall clutter for an option most people won't take. ## **70% of their experiments fail. That's the system working.** "Probably 70% of the experiments that we run fail in the first go," Ethan says. "And that doesn't mean it's a failure... often we're iterating on these failures to uncover a winner." The process behind that: be obsessed with the problem, not the solution. The team starts with funnel data in Amplitude, finds the biggest drop-off, lists every plausible problem with that step before discussing a single fix, locks in the most likely problem as a team, and only then brainstorms solutions. Everything gets documented — which is what turns failures into iterations. A no-trial toggle test (pay upfront, get 20% off) initially lost; the written record pointed to copy that framed the free trial as the losing option. A rerun that made both choices feel good is now showing a strong lift. In [the full episode](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EyoYQU6JyV8), Ethan and David also get into Jeremy AI — the in-house chat coach one engineer built in a weekend that became a customer-favorite feature — quiet feature launches that keep engagement metrics honest, and how running their own in-app training studies feeds both the science and the marketing. **Guest links:** - [Ethan Ethier on LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/ethanethier/) - [Built With Science](https://builtwithscience.com/) - [Built with Science Careers](https://builtwithscience.com/careers/)