How Freeletics is rising above the crowded fitness app industry with Eleanor Hughes

[00:00:01.270] - Olivier Destrebecq
Welcome to the Subscription League, a podcast by Purchasely. Listen to what's working in subscription apps. In each episode, we invite leaders of the app industry who are mastering the subscription model for mobile apps. To learn more about subscriptions, head to SubscriptionLeague.com. Let's get started.

[00:00:20.800] - Olivier Destrebecq
Welcome to the show. Today, I have the honour to welcome Ellie Hughes, Marketing Director at Freeletics. Welcome to the show, Ellie.

[00:00:27.310] - Ellie Hughes
Thank you very much. Thank you for having me.

[00:00:29.260] - Olivier Destrebecq
You're welcome. I also have Jeff with me today. How are you, Jeff?

[00:00:32.200] - Jeff Grang
I'm great. Ready to work out, Olivier?

[00:00:34.480] - Olivier Destrebecq
Yes, definitely. Before joining Freeletics, you've worked in marketing for some very well-known brands, Ellie. You worked at Sony PlayStation, Getty Images, Rockstar Games, Intel, all large brands. Now you're at Freeletics, which is more of a startup. Or at least when you joined, was probably a lot more of a startup. What pushed you in that direction?

[00:00:54.880] - Ellie Hughes
Yeah, I mean, the first few jobs I had were in big marketing and PR agencies here in Germany. Of course, they had the really nice clients, and I spent three, three and a half years working, for example, for PlayStation, which was a dream at the time. It was great. It was a great learning curve, and I appreciate the time that I spend doing that.

[00:01:14.110] - Ellie Hughes
But agency life is not for everyone, I have to say. After five years, I was feeling like I needed something different. For me, it was really important to have a tangible impact. I just wanted to actually be the person to make the decisions and not just execute on what someone told me to do. I had this feeling that I had been working and giving everything, basically, for all of these CEOs that would never know who I was, they would never know my name. They'd never know I had anything to do with the results that they were seeing.

[00:01:41.620] - Ellie Hughes
Really, I just wanted to get on to like the in-house side of things and have impact. I wanted to go to a company that had a purpose and had a great team and just felt like more, and gave me a bit more purpose to get out of bed every morning, which is absolutely what I found. To be honest, I was actually a Freeletics user before I joined the company back in 2014, and I was just a real fan of the brand. They were so different in just how they did things and how they communicated. It was just a match made in heaven, and yeah, been there ever since.

[00:02:13.900] - Olivier Destrebecq
Yeah. I mean, ever since is in 2015, right, that you joined Freeletics? I'm not going to say it's almost 10 years, but it's getting there. You've climbed the ranks, and now you're Marketing Director. What was it like in the early days, when I'm assuming... How many people were there when you joined?

[00:02:29.860] - Ellie Hughes
When I joined, I think we had just hired 100 people. And yet, I mean, the company, maybe it was just two years old, so it was super, super young. The fluctuation was also huge because you had the people who were there in the very early days, and they didn't necessarily agree with becoming, in their eyes, a more professional company. Even though when I came in, I was like, "Wow, this is wild."

[00:02:52.360] - Ellie Hughes
I mean, it was very startup, very just do-it-yourself, super hands-on. Everyone just kind of got in there. The team was actually very young at the time, quite inexperienced sometimes as well, which wasn't necessarily a bad thing. There was a lot of learning by doing, but everyone just had a lot of energy, and you could just really tell that everyone really loved the company, the product, the mission. Everyone was so passionate, and because it was such a small company—back then, we're probably talking about between 80 and 100 people—it really felt like you were really involved in every part of the business, like you knew what was going on. You could really try a lot of stuff.

[00:03:29.890] - Ellie Hughes
For me, I was able in my first months to try out stuff that I'd never done before in marketing. It was just a really great experience and opportunity for anyone who was there, really. I'm very happy that the vibe and the culture, which is so unique, and also the positives of being in a small team, are actually all things that we've managed to retain now even almost 11 years later, which is not always the case. But yeah, no, I'm really happy about that too.

[00:03:55.750] - Olivier Destrebecq
Yeah. I mean, you just pointed out that Freeletics has been around for 11 years, which is a pretty long time. If I remember correctly, the anecdote that you told us is that some of the history took place in the parks in Munich. Can you tell us a little bit about that story? The early days of Freeletics, how they got started.

[00:04:13.000] - Ellie Hughes
Yeah. Before the company was basically officially founded, the three founders, who were all from Munich, they had this idea, this vision. They wanted to help people become the greatest version of themselves, but they also wanted to give them a way to develop their willpower. They were thinking, "Okay, there's a lot of different ways we could do this." The conclusion was, okay, fitness is the best way to do this, because the body is the stone on which you sharpen your mind, and working on your body is a great way to work on your mind as well. So they were like, "Okay, we want to do fitness, but we want to do fitness in a really hardcore, a different, very unique way."

[00:04:46.210] - Ellie Hughes
This crazy initial growth that was happening even before the company was actually founded was, they were going out into the parks, into general open spaces with friends and family, and they were just doing these workouts. But you have to imagine these workouts were absolutely horrible. I don't think any PT would ever tell you to do these kinds of workouts. It's like hundreds of burpees, and sometimes there was a puke bucket involved, and things like this. It was very, very, very hardcore.

[00:05:12.780] - Ellie Hughes
But they were doing it because people around them would come up to them and they'd be like, "What is this? What are you doing? Tell me more." By doing this, they were actually, through word of mouth, basically, they were gaining newsletter subscribers. That was the first idea, like, "Hey, let's get these newsletter subscribers in, and let's send them weekly plans."

[00:05:31.680] - Ellie Hughes
There wasn't a huge science to it at the time. It was like, "We have these cool workouts. We're just going to put a few things together each week, like 2 or 3 workouts, and we'll send it to them." That worked really well. I think there were over 10,000 newsletter subscribers. I mean, this was super local. No investment, nothing.

[00:05:45.930] - Olivier Destrebecq
[crosstalk 00:05:46].

[00:05:45.930] - Ellie Hughes
Yeah, exactly. But they were students. They didn't have a team, they didn't have a company. There was no money, basically, so they stopped. This is where the magic really happened because the users, these newsletter subscribers, started sending emails to the support team saying, "Where's my newsletter? Where's my next week of workouts? I need to know what to do next." They actually started sending their PayPal logins by email and saying, "Take what you want, just keep giving me my plan." If that's not a sign that you're onto something, then I don't know what is.

[00:06:17.250] - Ellie Hughes
They decided basically, "This is our shot. We need to do something. This is a last ditch attempt. We don't have any money. We're going to invest the last few euros we have, and we're going to build three super simple PDFs, and we're going to put them on Shopify and see what happens." And they did that. Freeletics was then profitable from the first afternoon. The money that they made with the PDF sales actually funded the first version of the app and the growth, and then the company was founded. That's how it came to be. Then, yeah, it was five years of bootstrapped growth, and after five years, it was 34 million users.

[00:06:55.350] - Jeff Grang
When market fit slaps you in the face.

[00:06:59.160] - Ellie Hughes
Absolutely. 

[00:07:01.200] - Jeff Grang
Well, that was a long time ago. The fitness space is probably one of the most challenging of the App Store. It feels like there is 100 new apps every day, feels there is always a new fancy kid on the block. It must be tough to stay on top, and Freeletics managed to stay on top all that time. What are the challenges that you face today, and how do you stay on top of the charts?

[00:07:22.200] - Ellie Hughes
Well, there's a lot of challenges. Like you said, it is really hard. Really, really hard. I think really there's three main components of why it's so tough. The first one would be the competition. The competition is insane. I didn't know this until recently, but there are 97,000 fitness apps out there, which is just mind-blowing. That's already tough, right? That's tough.

[00:07:43.740] - Ellie Hughes
But then you've got to add in gyms, personal trainers. You've got YouTubers now and influencers. There's just competition everywhere in all kinds of forms. That obviously makes it as well more expensive to reach that target audience with ads, other customer acquisition channels, and that competition is just made it more expensive. You really have to get more creative, but also diversify what you're doing to acquire and keep those customers.

[00:08:12.360] - Ellie Hughes
The second part would be, I'd say, the nature of our app. I would say that the apps you're most likely to actually pay for are ones that make your life easier. They take some stress away, or something that you just consume, something that's enjoyable, right? Well, Freeletics does guide you, so it takes away a lot of that stress of, "What's the right training I should be doing? Do I need to research stuff?" You don't need to think. You just need to do what it tells you.

[00:08:37.050] - Ellie Hughes
But it does demand physical, quite unpleasant effort from you. In a nutshell, the app helps you to suffer, right? This is actually a huge hurdle when it comes to conversion retention, especially if you compare it with something like Duolingo or Clash of Clans, something that's just easy and simple to do. It's a very different category there. That's that's also something that's that's tricky.

[00:09:02.190] - Ellie Hughes
Third of all, I would say the retention. It's also because of the nature of the fitness industry. You have gyms who are really happy to acquire as many people as possible. They just want to get you in. But they're also really happy when you churn. They don't actually want you to show up to the gym, because they'd have a massive problem if everyone suddenly started coming to the gym. That's great for them, because that's the nature of fitness, right?

[00:09:26.250] - Ellie Hughes
But we want to retain people, and we want them to keep coming back and build a habit that they stick to. But maintaining a fitness habit is really, really hard for people. Most people fail. That's that's the huge challenge for us. Obviously, a lot of the things we do in terms of retention, in terms of product features, is around that retention, getting people to keep coming back.

[00:09:49.590] - Ellie Hughes
First of all, we have to also see, okay, what are these magic points where we think, "Okay, this person needs to get to this point, and then we know that they tend to retain better than others." For example, we have this aha moment that we call, and it's this point of where they activate a habit-building moment, and that's when they do two workouts in the first week. When someone does that, then we know, okay, they have a really high chance of really retaining and sticking to the workouts and actually doing it.

[00:10:16.450] - Jeff Grang
Sorry to interrupt, but how do you identify that two workouts in the same week?

[00:10:19.930] - Ellie Hughes
We do a lot of research. We have hundreds of millions of data points from our users, because we have 57 million users now. We can basically just kind of follow it and see, okay, almost putting them into cohorts and saying, "Well, look, this group of users, they are sticking. They're retaining, they're training regularly." Where do we see that point of differentiation? Basically it's just having 10 years worth of data from a lot of people and being able to say, "Okay, these are the candidates where we know these people tend to retain, and also these are the ones that tend to churn."

[00:10:51.430] - Ellie Hughes
This is just one example of a point where we say, "Okay, look, if we get to this aha moment, they're more likely to stay with us." What can we do to increase that? I mean, for example, we're only 60 days into the year, but we've added a few little product features where we've already seen a 5% increase, for example, in that moment. We see that more users are hitting that moment, and therefore we can assume that those people are going to retain for longer.

[00:11:14.950] - Ellie Hughes
Even though it's hard to get people to work out, I mean, there's a science to it. It's not impossible. It's very nice actually, that our general retention rate overall is actually above the industry average. When you look at our general customer base and look at them in other areas and for other apps, for gyms, et cetera, the average would normally be about 3%, which is low, of course, because it's a high effort activity. But we're already ahead of that by... Obviously, it depends on what kind of platform you're looking at, but we're ahead by, I'd say, well, it's around 70%-170%, so we do have a great advantage already.

[00:11:52.600] - Ellie Hughes
The retention has been uplifting. We're doing more and more with features to keep that uplift. Also, the conversion rate has been increasing since 2019, and also a lot more this year. We have a lot of bets coming up for this year where we really just want to keep increasing that uplift and basically, yeah, tackling the biggest challenge of being in the fitness industry.

[00:12:12.730] - Jeff Grang
It seems that your positioning in terms of very demanding app, very hard workouts, is also a place where you expect people to be hardcore user by default and by design.

[00:12:25.000] - Ellie Hughes
It definitely was the case for the first few years, absolutely. I'd say around 2017, we realised, at some point, if you're going hardcore, you're going to reach saturation of the hardcore niche, and not everyone wants to do a hardcore workout. So we did change the algorithm, and we brought in AI anyway to be more flexible, more personalised back in 2017. Also, the marketing, this really changed. 2017, 2018, 2019, we really tried to move away a little bit, also in the product, from that, "Hey, this is hardcore, you got to do burpees till you puke," that kind of thing.

[00:12:58.390] - Ellie Hughes
Now it's much more whatever your level is. We even have training plans in the app for beginners, but also older users. We definitely have users who are well over 50, for example. We are able to cater to a lot of different people, and we've tried to shed a little bit that image of just being the hardcore workout app that's for people who just like pain and gain. That's not what the product is anymore. Luckily, because we definitely needed to evolve in that direction to be able to continue being successful in the long term in the industry.

[00:13:29.500] - Jeff Grang
We talked a little bit about the seasonality and how the physical gym make you become a customer just by Christmas or the New Year's resolutions. Now is the time. We talked also about that to retain the subscribers you acquired at that period. I'm very curious to understand and to know what you're doing for the low, the bad seasonality, the slumps that you can have during the year. Is there any strategy, price testing or price positioning that you keep for these specific periods?

[00:13:55.900] - Ellie Hughes
I mean, for us, really it's a 24/7 thing. Whether it's January or whether it's May or October, we want you to come in and we want you to continue. It's the same thing with the January people. They sign up, doesn't mean they actually necessarily work out. Regardless of the seasonality, we are always trying to basically keep people subscribed, but also keep them active. The super overarching part of that is basically just provide the best solution, so a solution that actually works, that gets people results, but also with the best user experience, because if the user experience is lacking, then people are not going to use your product.

[00:14:33.040] - Ellie Hughes
That's why we've spent... I mean, we've literally spent 11 years building the best digital personal trainer you can get so you have the best personal guidance, but also making sure that it's flexible. You have these plans that are generated by AI, but they're also validated by humans here with us, and they're fully adaptable by you. They say the workout or the fitness regime that you actually do is the most effective for you. I mean, 20 PTs could put together a fantastic, most effective ever training plan for you, but if you don't do it, it's not worth anything.

[00:15:11.950] - Ellie Hughes
Like I said, these hundreds of millions of data points we have, we use those to create the plans, but we use the product and the features to keep it flexible and to take away all of those obstacles that people have in everyday life that stops them from working out. Time, motivation, equipment, space. I know it's boring, all of the stuff. Only by doing that do they actually find something they can do, and then they develop a habit that ideally, they continue for the rest of their lives.

[00:15:38.950] - Ellie Hughes
On the one side, you have to create a product that not just works, but something that works for the customer in any moment. But then of course, you need to stop them from churning. That's also a very, very tough thing. Of course, one of our goals this year is to reduce cancellations and to stop people from churning, and to keep people being sticky, like we call it. We want them to open the app every month. We want them to finish the training plans that they actually start.

[00:16:04.570] - Ellie Hughes
We've added in 3 or 4 different product features and developments where we've really actually seen uplifts and effects. We see people coming in every day. Actually, the engagement rate of the paying users that we have has already increased by almost 4% this year already, and it's only been two months.

[00:16:25.540] - Olivier Destrebecq
What kind of feature have you put in there to get that lift?

[00:16:27.640] - Ellie Hughes
There's a couple of different things, but mainly, we introduced at the end of last year this idea of base. Now the base is a feature where we say, okay this is actually 17 minutes of any kind of activity you want, but it's something that you do every single day. We literally don't care what it is. It could be walking, it could be Zumba, it could be stretching, it could be skiing. It doesn't matter. But it's basically getting into this mindset of doing something every single day, because if you have this base, it makes it more likely that you are actually going to step it up and then actually do your workouts more regularly.

[00:17:03.460] - Ellie Hughes
We're introducing people to this idea of there's no excuse, you have to do something every single day. But it is a very low barrier, because, I mean, anyone can probably do 17 minutes of walking throughout their day. This had an effect.

[00:17:15.580] - Ellie Hughes
Plus, we also introduced a daily athlete score at the end of last year, which was really interesting, because no one else in the industry has done this yet, which is, I mean, like the name suggests, it's a score, but it's like a snapshot that quantifies your fitness level on any given day based on your previous performance, I think, for the last few months for sure. It breaks it down into different metrics so you can see where you could improve, where you're doing really well in terms of consistency, but also in performance. What's your speed like, what's your endurance like, what's your strength? All of these things.

[00:17:48.070] - Ellie Hughes
That is also giving people a reason to come in to check, to see, "I do need to work on this," or, "Where am I standing?" But also things like mixed modality that we brought in, which just makes it more flexible for people to switch between the kinds of modalities they want in terms of their workouts. Do you want to run? Do you want to lift weights? Do you want to have no equipment whatsoever?

[00:18:08.710] - Ellie Hughes
That's something we're continuing to work on, but we do see that people react very positively to that, especially through streaks. Your base streak, how many days in a row can you actually do your base, plus the notifications around that have really increased the engagement.

[00:18:22.090] - Olivier Destrebecq
I want to switch gears a little bit, because it sounds like you guys have done an awesome job of working on the product and keeping the user in the app and coming back and all that. But with the end-of-year New Year's resolution, you guys also created a great marketing campaign that's called Not Just A Fling campaign. I encourage anybody out there listening to the podcast to go Google it, go watch it. It's actually very fun.

[00:18:45.760] - Jeff Grang
Yeah, we'll put it in the article too.

[00:18:48.130] - Olivier Destrebecq
It was very interesting to watch it, because you guys made the parallel with a lot of wordplay between fitness and dating. That was a fresh perspective on exercising and all the apps around fitness. What pushed you guys to do something that I would consider completely different?

[00:19:03.580] - Ellie Hughes
Well, first of all, I'm really glad that you said it was different, because that was definitely my goal. I mean, as you can imagine, January is the month for the fitness industry. It is the most competitive but also the most important month for the industry. A lot of brands basically fund themselves through the year based on their January performance. It's very competitive, but it's also very important.

[00:19:29.470] - Ellie Hughes
Leading up to this, in 2023, we actually did a brand refresh. We tweaked a few things, changed a little bit our visual language, but also the direction that we were taking. We had a new marketing strategy. We had a new fresh product positioning. Basically all of this together just felt like the opportunity for us to do something different, and especially to do something that was very edgy and provocative, because like you said, we really wanted to stand out, and we wanted to be top of mind, basically.

[00:19:58.450] - Ellie Hughes
The philosophy that we have for the product is all about consistency and commitment. Like I was saying with the base, something you do every day, you're committed to it. If you bring that consistency, we bring you the results. We were talking about commitment and consistency, and Freeletics being the right partner for you in terms of fitness, the one that you need for the long term. Basically we just realised that there was a lot of parallels between this and dating.

[00:20:26.140] - Ellie Hughes
I mean, we like to do different things and we like to have a little bit of humour, and we were just playing with this. We were just thinking we have to do this. This wonderful coincidence, almost, where we found ourselves in this perfect position to just highlight the core of our philosophy in a very honest way, but then also putting it in this weird context. It just gave us so much room to just play with all these double entendres and all this dating lingo, and also the visuals as well.

[00:20:50.950] - Ellie Hughes
Just to make people stop for a second and be like, "Wait, what did I just see?" Then you look at it more and then you're like, "Wait, no, it's completely innocent." But it's this moment of this jarring, like, "Oh, that's not what I expected." Yeah, it was the reason to just be different and to be top of mind.

[00:21:07.540] - Olivier Destrebecq
You guys did an awesome job on that. We're March 1st right now, so it's been running for two... Probably even more. I don't know if you started before New Year's or not. I'm curious to hear what results have you gotten so far.

[00:21:19.240] - Ellie Hughes
Overall, we're really, really happy with it, which is great. I mean, we wanted reach. It was all about brand awareness, putting that refreshed, slightly different brand out there, and by doing that, supporting the organic growth, but also trying to support the performance of our acquisition channels. It's a very nuanced, mixed set of goals that we had. It was really great, because, I mean, the content was stellar, the best content I think we've ever done, and we could run it across all of our channels.

[00:21:48.940] - Ellie Hughes
But we also, for the first time ever in Freeletics history, we did out-of-home ads with it. We put it on billboards in Germany, which was really great to see, but we also put it on Times Square in New York, which was absolutely mind-blowing. A super highlight of my career to see that. It was really ridiculous. But awareness or brand marketing campaigns can be really unsatisfying, because it's really hard to track those hard KPIs. There are some, of course, but it just never really translate as neatly as it would, for example, if you're just looking at conversion rates or something like this.

[00:22:21.610] - Olivier Destrebecq
Did you have specific KPIs for that one or-

[00:22:23.230] - Ellie Hughes
We did, but again, they're not super, super trackable. Things like we wanted specific reach, we wanted to target a certain audience, like a little bit of a younger audience, for example. There's quantitative and qualitative KPIs. But we also had channel-level KPIs, where it was really nice to see that we were able to hit these KPIs. We had really great individual results in all of those individual channels, which was really nice. I mean, we had 2.6 billion impressions across all the channels, which is pretty insane.

[00:22:53.530] - Olivier Destrebecq
That's a lot of people.

[00:22:54.040] - Ellie Hughes
That's a lot of people. Of course, you're going to be hitting a couple of people multiple times, but to have that kind of reach is really, really great for us. We also used in-app events really nicely for the App Store, so we actually saw a really big impact in terms of installs. We do a lot of these, and it was the most installs we've ever had off the back of an in-app event.

[00:23:13.990] - Ellie Hughes
Also in terms of impressions, it was the second biggest we've ever had after Black Friday. It was a really great result, and the CPM was $0.05 or something like that. It really was fantastic. Yes, it is a fragmented picture because you have a lot of moving parts, but all the individual good results made it a win for us overall. And we had zero complaints, which for me was a major win as well. All in all, very happy, yeah.

[00:23:39.160] - Jeff Grang
We already said that you made your year, that 2024 is wrapped.

[00:23:43.030] - Olivier Destrebecq
Maybe a little early.

[00:23:43.600] - Ellie Hughes
I mean, it made my 2023. It definitely made my 2023. It's one of the highlights of my career so far, and it's been a while. This is one of the biggest and most wonderful things I've done. But yeah, now it has to be it has to be topped, right? This year needs to be bigger and better, but we're already working on something, so we'll see.

[00:24:01.366] - Olivier Destrebecq
Nice.

[00:24:01.960] - Jeff Grang
Nine years at the company and still being surprised and obsessed by doing even better. I mean-

[00:24:07.990] - Ellie Hughes
That's Freeletics.

[00:24:09.520] - Olivier Destrebecq
You did something different for the marketing. Did that translate into something different in the app? Did you do some work to match that difference in the campaign back into the app, too?

[00:24:23.140] - Ellie Hughes
In terms of the app, we already had a couple of things there. We had, for example, the Daily Athlete Score, and we also had the Base. What we did introduce for the campaign was the Base streak, so that idea of tying really nicely into the commitment, into the consistency. That's when we said, "Hey, look, you do it for multiple days. There's a bar that fills up, and you can see how many days in a row you've been doing it. You'll get reminders and things like that."

[00:24:45.760] - Ellie Hughes
We did have a challenge in the app around the streak. We had prizes for people who maintained their streak for two weeks and for the whole month, so there was definitely something on that side as well. We'd actually been running for a long time—we're talking like six months plus—we'd been running some A/B tests for lots of different aspects around the onboarding for web and app.

[00:25:06.150] - Ellie Hughes
It just so happened, and this was like a very happy coincidence that we'd taken all of the positive learnings out of these many, many AB tests, and we'd put them all together into one final major A/B test, and it just happened to be from the 1st of January. Pretty much that test was very successful, by the way. But I really think that the improved onboarding also definitely positively impacted the performance of the campaign as well. That was a happy coincidence. But in terms of the product, we did have a couple of little also challenges, but also something like having streaks. We see it with other apps as well. It definitely gives people an incentive to keep coming back and to keep interacting with them.

[00:25:43.770] - Jeff Grang
Well, it's very good that when all the initiatives turned into very positive outcomes, the most important moment of the year.

[00:25:51.630] - Ellie Hughes
Yeah.

[00:25:52.350] - Jeff Grang
There was something else I'd like to talk about. Apple has recently announced that they would allow contingent pricing, so to allow a discount on a subscription based on another subscription that you might have, opening the gates to partnerships. I know that you have some experience, and you launched some experience around the Super Bundle with the Pliability, Skill Yoga, and Waking Up. Can you tell us more about that? It's very recent, so maybe you have some first outcomes that you might be willing to share.

[00:26:19.920] - Ellie Hughes
Yeah. This idea kind of came around a similar time where the contingency pricing came out, but it wasn't off the back of that. We had been, for a while, thinking, okay, what are completely different approaches for us to test to improve the conversion rate? Aside from all the tests that we're doing, aside from these little product improvements, was there something that we had not yet explored?

[00:26:45.210] - Ellie Hughes
It's funny because we came up with this idea, and we thought, "Yeah, this is awesome, we're going to test this." But we'd actually already been in this idea with another brand. For example, I don't know if you know, but Revolut, they have introduced last year a set of benefits. These are like app subscriptions that you get if you subscribe to one of their products and you're in a paying tier. At the time, we were like, "Yeah, that's a great idea. Sounds good." For us, it was obvious, as acquisition improves conversion, it's a great idea.

[00:27:12.120] - Ellie Hughes
Then we kind of forgot about it for a few months. Then we were sitting down like, "We need to think about just creative ways to improve the conversion rate." Then we came up with this idea, and it's pretty much the same thing. We're testing one super bundle where you get five app subscriptions but for one price, which means you pay the regular training and nutrition price for Freeletics, and you get the two subscriptions to the two apps, but you also get these three external app subscriptions for free on top. As you said, Pliability, Skill Yoga, and Waking Up.

[00:27:45.120] - Ellie Hughes
We're doing this, because we want to test what happens when we actually offer more customer value at no added cost. There's no catch. But also, we wanted to make sure, and that's why we chose these partners, that the user was getting the best possible start into their fitness journey. We were thinking, "Okay, how can we, how can we support them more? What are the gaps that we have that we know we have, and how can we fill those gaps with something else?" That was the idea.

[00:28:12.240] - Ellie Hughes
Then we found these really great partners who were willing to get involved. It's super, super, super early. We just started testing last week and, well, it was an A/B/C test, and we've actually had to pause it as of, I think 1 or 2 days ago, because not everything was going to plan with the data. So it's still very early days, but it will be super interesting for us to see how it performs. Also, of course, the impact on the conversions and also the customer experience, then of course if you want to scale and continue in the future. But first, we have to go through a successful testing period to get to that knowledge.

[00:28:48.600] - Jeff Grang
Maybe the retention also might be good, because when you get three subscriptions, you have three times more chances to have one that actually catches you for a long time.

[00:28:56.670] - Ellie Hughes
Yeah, hopefully.

[00:28:57.930] - Olivier Destrebecq
That A/B/C test, what are you taking away from that does not working out? I guess it's not that the test failed. It's more like the data wasn't coming through. What lessons are you taking away from that?

[00:29:09.000] - Ellie Hughes
First off, I think it's a really positive thing that we took the decision to stop it, to figure out the issue and then to try again, because I feel like a few years ago, it would have been a case of, "Okay, well, something seems like it's not working, so the test has failed, and let's scrap it and move on." It's good to see that we are really, truly invested in testing things properly. I mean, we A/B test things all the time, but we don't really A/B/C test things very often. 

[00:29:34.230] - Ellie Hughes
I think one learning here is be sure about the A/B/C tests. Be sure it cannot just be an A/B test. I think, yeah, just in terms of the variants, but also all the different things that you change. We've just changed the mobile design, we've just changed a lot of different things. In this case, it just seems like there's a couple of issues. Issues with the signals, issues with potentially the tracking links, but also issues with the mobile design.

[00:29:58.230] - Ellie Hughes
There's just a few things that we have identified that need to be fixed. But also a couple of things, when you look at it, you think, "Okay, well, maybe we need to tweak that to make it clearer, or maybe we need to do this," but obviously, that's slightly more difficult when you have two variants. I think the learning is, first of all, really be sure you want to do an A/B/C test, and that you can do an A/B/C test.

[00:30:17.310] - Ellie Hughes
I think it's really important that you never are afraid to stop and to say, "Okay, look, something's wrong. Let's stop, let's investigate, let's be sure everything is working correctly so that we can base our next steps on the correct data." Because if the data is flawed, then you might as well not test, and to not test is just silly.

[00:30:40.590] - Olivier Destrebecq
If people want to learn more about you and what you do at Freeletics, where can they keep up?

[00:30:47.400] - Jeff Grang
It's already the end.

[00:30:48.540] - Ellie Hughes
It's already...

[00:30:50.910] - Olivier Destrebecq
We're talking about-

[00:30:52.350] - Ellie Hughes
We've all got to go do work now. Yeah, of course, it would be great if everyone who's interested would follow us. We're on all the usual social media channels as Freeletics, and they can also check out Freeletics.com. We're also Freeletics on LinkedIn, where I am also, so if anyone wants to keep up, they can absolutely do that. Personally, I can also really recommend to just try out the app, not just as the marketing person, but also as a user for almost 10 years.

[00:31:23.310] - Jeff Grang
User of almost 10 years and employee for 9. I have an additional question. It seems like a great place to work. Do you have open positions, and where can people find these open positions?

[00:31:33.240] - Ellie Hughes
We do, actually. The easiest way really is just to Google "Freeletics jobs." We put them on our website and also on our LinkedIn. We do have a couple of product jobs, so we have a couple of developer jobs. We also have a Japanese translator job available in case someone speaks Japanese. I'm about to start hiring for an influencer marketing manager, if anyone is out there who might be interested, because this is going to be a very exciting job. 

[00:32:02.760] - Olivier Destrebecq
Nice. It's nice to see a company grow and hiring in different directions.

[00:32:05.820] - Ellie Hughes
Yes, absolutely.

[00:32:06.900] - Olivier Destrebecq
Well, thank you very much. It was really a pleasure to have you on the show and listen about everything that you've learned and done at Freeletics. Thank you very much.

[00:32:14.367] - Jeff Grang
Thanks, Ellie.

[00:32:15.150] - Ellie Hughes
Thank you so much for having me. It was great.

[00:32:17.850] - Olivier Destrebecq
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