Tom Digan & Greg Stewart - Building the World’s Best Fitness App - [Invest Like the Best, EP.454]

And welcome everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and this is Invest Like the Best. This show is an open ended exploration of markets, ideas, stories, and strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money. If you enjoy these conversations and want to go deeper. Check out Colossus, our quarterly publication with in-depth profiles of the people shaping business and investing. You can find Colossus along with all of our podcasts at Colossus.com. Trick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of Passive Sum.

All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of Positive Sum. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of Positive Sum may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. To learn more, Visit PSUM dot VC Mm. Ladder was my first angel investment ever. It was made entirely on trust in Tom Deegan, 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're approaching a hundred million dollars in ARR and more than three hundred thousand 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 calls a cave process, where a huge amount of effort and time went into cracking the tick tock algorithm just to make short form content work as a growth engine.

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript, segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.

10 free credits is 10 episodes like this one a month. Episodes nobody has transcribed yet cost their length in hours, because we have to actually transcribe them.