Ethan Ethier
Runs growth at Built With Science, a fitness app ($189/year or $30/month, 2026) built on the audience of his brother Jeremy Ethier’s 7M-subscriber YouTube channel. Scaled Meta ads in-house from zero (January 2026) to ~$100k/month, sending ~90% of paid traffic to a long web quiz. (Whisper transcripts spell his name “Etienne”.)
Strong on: taking an influencer-born app to paid acquisition, web quiz vs App Store traffic, web pricing-page experiments, problem-first experimentation, SEO/AEO calculators feeding a quiz.
Bias to keep in mind: his organic baseline is unusually warm (huge, trusting YouTube audience) and the product is premium-priced fitness — results like 35–40% trial-to-paid may not transfer to apps without an audience. Single-company experience.
Sources: sources/youtube/sub-club-by-revenuecat/ (EyoYQU6JyV8).
Notes citing Ethan Ethier
- Built With Science — scaling Meta from $0 to ~$100k/month on top of a big YouTube audienceCase study of a 7M-subscriber fitness creator's app — a year of product work before any ads, a month to baseline Meta trial-to-paid (~25% vs 35–40% organic), avatar-based creatives without the influencer's face, in-house buying, 90% of traffic to a web quiz.
- Creative volume and hit rate — why you need dozens of ads per winnerPaid social for apps is a volume game — one operator saw 1 winner per ~85 videos and ~$800k of $1.5–1.8M spend wasted; teams now ship 400+ concepts/month, test in cheap geos, and treat flat, "stable" performance as a sign they stopped searching for breakout creatives.
- Free web tools (calculators) as SEO/AEO entry points into the quiz funnelAs AI search eroded blog SEO (30–40% of Built With Science's traffic), they built calculators (calories, macros) that rank well in AI answers, deliver value and hand off into the web quiz — converting slightly better than blog posts; plus Reddit as an early AEO lever.
- Is my app ready for Meta ads? Funnel benchmarks and the 7-point checklistSteve P. Young's 7 checks before spending on Meta ads for an app — funnel conversion targets (5–10% install→trial, 30%+ trial→paid, ~2% install→paid), proof strangers pay, LTV, tracking, research, concepts, budget.
- Is paid acquisition incremental? Organic ceilings, cannibalization and geo holdoutsOrganic-heavy apps (Replika, Solid Starts) eventually saturate their niche and find that new paid spend often cannibalizes organic; Simply measures this with geo holdouts (switch app or web campaigns off per country) and aims for "enough truth" in CAC models, not perfect attribution.
- Paid social creative testing for apps — levers, hook/hold rate, 3-day testsThe levers of paid social (Meta/TikTok/YouTube) for apps, hook-rate and hold-rate targets, and Ivy's 3-day creative test (4 creatives per themed ad set, $50/ad set) run on highest-converting weekdays.
- Partner ("gym buddy") and family/bundle plans in web funnelsAsking in the quiz whether the user wants to add a partner at 15% off each got ~15% of Built With Science trial starts to take it, raising order value and retention; Simply's multi-profile, multi-app family plans are its best-retaining segment and are sold on the web.
- Running funnel experiments — problem first, big swings, document everythingBuilt With Science's experiment process for web quiz, onboarding and paywalls — find the biggest drop-off, list problems before solutions, test bundled big swings when traffic is limited, write every test down (≈70% fail first time), and re-check winners months later by segment (Simply's soft-paywall lesson).
- Send paid traffic to a web quiz or straight to the App Store?Evidence from Built With Science (90% of paid traffic to a long web quiz after it beat direct-to-store head to head) and Simply (web flows made Facebook work for the first time, ~20% of Simply Piano revenue) on when a web quiz outperforms an app-install campaign — lean-back social users, older non-app-native audiences, bundles.
- Ugly ads — why unpolished, shocking creatives win (and when brand matters)Yuliya Lennox's "make ugly ads" case — pattern-break the pretty feed, say what the product does in the first second, lead with the pain — plus the rare cases (trust-sensitive brands like Solid Starts) where an off-brand ad backfires.
- Using AI to scale app ad creatives (without fake testimonials)Where AI helps app ad production in 2026 — permutations of real-human ads (ElevenLabs voice/translation, Suno music), AI statics, LLM-brainstormed extreme hooks, Veo 3 / Higgsfield video — and why fully synthetic "testimonials" carry FTC and backlash risk.
- Web paywall and checkout best practices for web2appChecklist for the web paywall/checkout in a web2app funnel — hard paywall without trial, ≥50% real discount with a real timer, long scroll with FAQ and social proof, per-day pricing, intro price that renews higher, Apple/Google Pay, guarantee, personalised coupon.
- Web pricing page — show annual first with a trial timeline (60/40 → 75–80% annual)Built With Science's biggest 2026 win — a web pricing page showing only the annual plan with a Blinkist-style day 1 / day 7 / day 12-reminder trial timeline moved plan mix from ~60/40 to 75–80% annual with no price change; adding more context hurt; a "pay now, 20% off" no-trial toggle lost until both options were framed positively.
- Why run web2app funnels (and when not to)The business case for selling app subscriptions through a web quiz + web checkout instead of the app store — fees, cash flow, attribution, control — plus the cases where it underperforms.