"Today's episode is a conversation with the founders of the company that was my very first ever angel investment, a company called Ladder. At the time, I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. I didn..."

"and unlikely and dramatic, which is why I'm excited to do this with you guys to tell the story of the business that you've built so far and and where it might go. The idea, I think, for our conversati..."

"How has it been so successful? Because I feel like this is almost like a Silicon Valley meme like you have a fitness app like there's 4,000 million fitness apps to what would you attribute the fact th..."

"Just to give people a sense of scale, like roughly, you know, how many people use it? What sort of revenue does the business do? Just like give people a sense of of how big the business is. >> Yeah, w..."

"So sort of having like laid that quick simple groundwork for what the thing is. I would love to rewind time and Tom have you talk about actually we've literally recorded podcast at the same table. I d..."

"there's really two ladders or two different companies here. Same name. I would call ladder 1.0 as everything pre2020 and after 2020. The name's ladder and we're in the fitness space, but it was a it w..."

"really any customers to speak of. There was no signs of product market fit at that point. Fortunately, this is where Greg answers the the picture. So Greg and I went to went to Notre Dame. I should di..."

"we were back to where we had started in a lot of ways. It was the end of 2019 and I'm realizing that we have this opportunity to reset and to really think about like what what can ladder 2.0 be. But i..."

"Just to put like a finer point on the situation for you personally. You've left this job. We're making a bunch of money. You're in Austin. You moved your family. You've gotten most of your good friend..."

"Why not? You have to just like know deep down that you'd be willing to do whatever it takes, you know, including like, you know, some very difficult conversations with your wife and you're building a ..."

"Why did you decide to join it? You know, if you think about the circumstance that you were opting into, uh he said it best, you know, no money, no product market fit, like need needing a whole new tea..."

"Talk about what a given day was like in when you guys joined forces there's still this mess to clean up and then there's this thing you have to go build and it's like two sides of the coin. How what w..."

"But it it was survival and like when you're in a moment where it literally is survival it's not hard to know what to work on where it wasn't hard for us to know what mattered. We needed to not run out..."

"What's the key to that? What's the lesson? uh begging you money. >> Like when 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. Like ..."

"If you were to teach a class on fundraising for startups now, you you've done this as masterfully as anyone with the with their cards you were dealt. What would the lesson plan look like? >> One of th..."

"Again at this point I'm trying to figure out how to sell anything that's not nailed down. And so it's you know 401k put that in done. Uh what else can we do? And um this story here is funny because I'..."

"So he bought your steak and then also invested in the round that you were that you were investing in. >> I think he matched what he was what he was sending me which was which was awesome and that kind..."

"And what I noticed was like the coaches could set their own price and like some people had crazy high prices, some people had more approachable prices. And they're building this as customizable progra..."

"Like you've capped how big this can get. You the constraint is human human time. So these two insights of calling [ __ ] on personalization, kind of watching what Lauren was doing and seeing how she w..."

"We’re in process of dying in this moment. She went out to her Instagram audience and we had like a 100 people sign up at 100 bucks a month very fast. Like that was the most exciting thing I'd seen yet..."

"So all these like little glimmers of hope on this concept of programming that's not personalized, but it's high quality. It's meant for a specific persona. This social accountability element. all thes..."

"Did anything surprise you in those conversations? >> It validated a lot of things we were learning in in real time. It's like why did you join? I'm tired of thinking about what workout to do. I'm alre..."

"Your finance team isn't losing money on big mistakes. It's leaking through a thousand tiny decisions nobody's watching. Ramp puts guard rails on spending before it happens. Real-time limits, automatic..."

"If you think about the uh everyone's very fond of the Elon algorithm for company building now, uh it's been kind of passed around as like one one method for doing this. If you had to distill your like..."

"and what can we go build to go improve the odds of you doing that and and staying with us? And how we get to that is we don't guess. Like we absorb every piece of information that's coming in and it's..."

"And out of that work it became very clear that it was nutrition. And what we learned was we have a third of our members who are tracking macros. And of of that third, 90% are using an app. And of that..."

"and then once we have that kernel like we go very we do another survey we go very deep on nutrition like extremely deep to understand and we all review it, read everything, we synthesize it and it giv..."

"What did you learn there? What do people want on nutrition? >> There are two halves to this. And from my perspective, it's looking backwards and looking forwards. What they were doing is tracking look..."

"So we we made a a conscious decision not to charge for it. So we're going to give this part away. We want to go build trust with this group and win over tracking with ladder. We're not going to convin..."

"If we think about what nutrition does for us, it gives us the whole math equation of inputs and outputs. There's no product in the world that that has that. So the picture around the consumer, it's th..."

"like the ad tech was very new and so Greg was very much like triaging and troubleshooting their ad tech in real time. The other story that just speak to Greg going into his cave. Um it's it is winter ..."

"Like you have unlimited time right now to talk to us about solving this problem and like how you've how you cracked the code of growing through something like Tik Tok like the more detail the better. ..."

"He's got the creative mind. and we grabbed a coach and we said, "Hey, we're going to start an account from scratch. Uh, you're not on TikTok. We want to go learn. Give us all your raw video that you h..."

"So we got views, we had proof points of traction and then we said all right we have blink and bio. Can we get somebody into the app and and we did very quickly and we're getting the right people into ..."

"I launched my first ad. Okay, like we could do this. But like very quickly it was getting people into the app and then it just became a drug addiction. I mean it's like trading. I'm bad at mental math..."

"And we had a lot of bad content that didn't work. And then we had stuff that started to work. And we have these whiteboards. We dissected every inch. It's like, what is she wearing? What word was firs..."

"So, we started investing in creators full-time. We had JDs on the website in 2023. It said full-time Tik Tok creator. People were like, "What the hell is this job?" But it's no different than social m..."

"So, if it's a celebrity partner, we need to know exactly who that audience is. Is this someone that resonates with our user? Are they going to amplify the right message that represents ladder? And lik..."