The experiment that came from a podcast episode
Nancy Anderson’s biggest win of the past year didn’t come from her own product team. It came from listening to a previous Sub Club episode featuring Zumba.
The tip: remove the free trial from the monthly subscription option. Anderson was skeptical. “I was shocked that it worked personally. I was like, is that going to work?” She ran the experiment anyway. Monthly subscriptions went up 2,000%. Quarterly subscriptions rose 46%. Annual subscriptions rose 21%.
The result wasn’t just a win for the revenue line. It validated the core thesis she’d been building her business on for eight years: if you build enough trust before the paywall, users don’t need a test drive. “They come in, they don’t even want or need a trial. They’re ready to buy.”
The 68% trial conversion rate (and why it has nothing to do with the paywall)
Natal’s conversion metrics are hard to explain through conventional CRO logic. When users hit the web checkout, 93% of them download the app. Their trial conversion rate is 68%, against a health and fitness industry average of around 38%. They achieve this at $25 a month — a premium price for the category.
Anderson’s explanation is simple and inconvenient for anyone who prefers a spreadsheet: it’s trust, built long before the paywall.
“It’s just a signal that trust has been built before the paywall,” she says. “So when they get to the paywall, it’s not feeling risky to them, it’s not feeling scary… They already trust us.”
That trust is operationalized in a way that most apps would find unscalable. For eight years, every DM, comment, and email across all platforms has been answered within 24 hours — not by AI, not by a customer service script, but by real coaches, physical therapists, and pelvic floor specialists. It costs more per hour than a standard support rep. Anderson considers it the most important line item in the budget.
“Our organic content outperforms our competitors by 90%,” she notes. The paywall conversion numbers are the downstream signal of that investment.
The growth lever no dashboard can measure
The central tension in Natal’s growth strategy is that its most powerful levers produce no direct data point. You can’t run an A/B test on empathy. You can’t isolate the ROI of a specific DM conversation in a Shopify report.
“Growth would be easier if I could [A/B test trust],” Anderson admits. “You go to these meetings with men and women who are just so data driven… well, why would we do that? We can’t measure it. And it’s like, you can’t measure everything in your dashboard.”
This is also how Natal’s hero program — Ab Rehab, which has driven over a million users to the app — was built. Not from a market analysis, but from noticing a recurring pattern in Facebook group comments and Instagram DMs from women asking for help with postpartum core recovery. “I never would have built it if I wasn’t close to the customer,” Anderson says. “That never would have showed up in my Shopify reports.”
The downstream signal of all this unmeasurable trust? 20% ARR growth in Q1 — while raising prices.
HSA payments: unlocking a whole new audience
Natal is also among the first fitness apps to accept Health Savings Account (HSA) and Flexible Spending Account (FSA) payments at checkout, through RevenueCat’s integration with Flex.
The motivation was straightforward: Anderson had been hearing for years from women who wanted the app but couldn’t afford it. Because Natal’s programs include corrective exercise and physical therapy protocols for postpartum recovery, they qualify as eligible HSA expenses. Accepting those pre-tax dollars effectively cuts the out-of-pocket cost by 30–40% for eligible users.
What surprised Anderson was how quickly users found it without any promotion. “People are just finding it at checkout and using it,” she says. The end-of-year HSA spending deadline — when users must spend their remaining balance or lose it — creates a natural, high-intent promotional window that most health and fitness apps aren’t yet capitalizing on. “Don’t lose your HSA. You can use it to do our programs, to use our app.” For apps in the health, fitness, or mental health space, this is one of the most concrete near-term growth opportunities available.
In the full episode, Nancy and David also discuss why she turned down $500k a year in brand deals, the mistake of building four separate apps instead of one, and why free workouts attract the wrong audience.