Tom Digan & Greg Stewart - Building the World’s Best Fitness App - [Invest Like the Best, EP.454]
Episode publishedPodcast: Invest Like the Best with Patr...Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
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Here's an interesting question to think about: If your finance team suddenly had an extra week every month, what would you have them work on? Most CFOs don't know because their finance teams are grinding it out on lost expense reports, invoice coding, and tracking down receipts until the last possible minute. That's exactly the problem that Ramp set out to solve. Looking at the parts of finance everyone quietly hates and asking why are humans doing any of this? Turns out they don't need to. Ramp's AI handles 85% of expense reviews automatically with 99% accuracy. Which means your finance team
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of Positive Some. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of PositiveSum. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of PositiveSum may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. To learn more, visit psum.vc.
Ladder was my first angel investment ever. It was made entirely on trust in Tom Degan at a point when I had no idea what I was doing in venture capital. What followed over the next seven years is one of the most unlikely and dramatic business stories that I've been a part of. Today, Ladder is the number one strength training app. They are approaching $100,000,000 in ARR and more than 300,000 paying members. But the path from near death to dominant fitness app involved debt collectors, leadership changes, and a full reset during the pandemic pivot. At one point, Greg Stewart entered what he cal
Ladder is the number one app for strength training. We've built a system that's designed to make it as easy as possible to maintain a consistent routine. We spent a lot of time thinking about personal training. Arguably, the most reliable way to get to the results that you're looking for is hiring coach, unattainable for most, inaccessible for most. But personal training, if you think about how it breaks down, it's programming, coaching, and accountability. Programming, you know exactly what to do. Someone prepared it for you. There's no guesswork. There's no thinking. Coaching, you have an ex
How has it been so successful? Because I feel like this is almost a Silicon Valley meme. You have a fitness app like this 4,000 fitness apps. To what would you attribute the fact that this one is the one that seems to have come to dominate in the sea of competition?
It seems not simple, but it's understanding your customers being an engineering first business. If you look at most companies in our space, they're started by creators. And they're good products, they're good companies, but the creator is the face of that business. They make every decision and they don't have a DNA that's rooted in engineering and problem solving. And when you look at these apps, they're mostly just content libraries. And the motion is just constantly creating more and more content. But what we saw was nobody was spending time thinking about how to use these incredible levers
Just to give people a sense of scale, roughly how many people use it, what sort of revenue does the business do, just give people a sense of how big the business is?
We're north of 300,000 paying members today. At the beginning of '23, we were 9,000 paying members, so the growth is exciting. We're getting pretty close and knocking on the door at a 100,000,000 of ARR, so been very exciting from a revenue growth perspective. But it all boils down to we've created a product that gets people the results that they want
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