How Ladder went from 0 to 100,000 cross-platform subscribers with the help of RevenueCat 

Ladder, the #1 iOS app for strength training, offers new, personalized workout plans each week designed by expert coaches.  With popular modalities such as bodybuilding, HIIT, kettlebell training, Pilates and yoga-infused strength training and more, the platform is designed with the serious gym-goer in mind. Ladder keeps members consistent and tracking toward their goals, not only with effective workouts but also with a community that keeps them motivated. 

With a 4.9 rating on the App Store based on more than 50,000 reviews, Ladder CEO Greg Stewart and his team have created an award-winning workout app, recognized in 2024 as Women’s Health Best Strength-Training App, CNET’s Best Workout App for Strength Training, and was among CNN and Fortune’s Best Workout Apps of the year. 

The Challenge

Supporting cross-platform purchases without losing focus on product 

When Ladder first launched its new iOS app in 2020, they were offering subscriptions exclusively through Stripe. However, about 6 months later, they became aware of Apple’s restrictions around web purchases and were required to implement Apple in-app purchases in order to stay on the App Store. Building cross-platform entitlement and receipt validation would require extensive engineering effort.  As a rapidly scaling app, Ladder’s engineering team needed to focus on the product, not building and maintaining cross-platform purchase infrastructure. Ladder CEO, Greg Stewart, recalls:

“As a relatively lean engineering team, we wanted to avoid the complexity of developing and maintaining separate in-house solutions for Apple and Stripe purchases. It was clear that developing a completely homegrown solution for cross-platform subscriptions wasn’t feasible.”

Strategic decisions, investor funding and affiliate payouts hinged on reliable data  

Ladder is a data-driven organization with sophisticated reporting needs. The team relies on detailed internal reporting to drive business decisions and manage variable compensation payouts for creators and affiliate partners.

“Detailed user reporting is crucial for us due to our diverse product offerings and specific reporting requirements for variable compensation payouts. We needed a solution capable of providing individual transaction-level revenue data that could be consumed by our internal database and reporting tools.”

Raising capital was also a priority for this rapidly accelerating business, and detailed, timely reporting would be key to build trust with existing and prospective investors.

Greg’s team needed a unified source of cross-platform purchase data that allowed for granular, accessible reports to meet the needs of their internal and external stakeholders alike. Unfortunately, StoreKit alone wasn’t going to work, especially across two different platforms.

“We quickly discovered that Apple’s reporting didn’t quite meet our needs and building out a home grown solution to integrate the data was going to require extensive development to build and maintain, especially with multiple payment platforms. Relying solely on App Store Connect reports didn’t tie back to individual user transactions, delaying reporting and payouts.”

Getting the right data to drive growth and retention 

Ladder’s data-driven mentality extends beyond just reporting. Greg’s team wanted to build a comprehensive marketing strategy directed by timely and accurate purchase events. While data privacy restrictions can limit user tracking, reducing visibility into behavior and attribution, Ladder wanted to find smart ways to determine which channels, sources, and discount offerings drove valuable acquisition. 

The team also saw an opportunity to use purchase events at key lifecycle moments as inflection points to better retain and monetize their user-base. However, to make this possible, Ladder required a way to get purchase events sent reliably to their lifecycle marketing tool, Braze. 

The solution 

RevenueCat handled cross-platform purchases while Ladder built a winning app 

Ladder trusted RevenueCat as their solution for implementing in-app purchases for iOS. They also leveraged RevenueCat’s turn-key Stripe Billing integration for their web product offering to provide a seamless cross-platform experience- for their team and their end users. 

RevenueCat’s cross-platform integration ensures that whether users subscribe on web or mobile, they have access to their purchases across platforms and devices. RevenueCat also acts as a source of truth, unifying data from Apple, Stripe, and in the near future, Google Play and sending it everywhere and anywhere it’s needed. 

Leaving cross-platform purchases to RevenueCat allowed Ladder’s engineering team to focus on building features that matter. 

“After the initial implementation, we rarely need to dedicate development hours to our purchase infrastructure. We leverage RevenueCat as the source of truth for entitlements for each of our products. It’s a core part of our infrastructure, and the information is used across the entire organization. ”

Granular, unified data to fuel decision-making and payouts 

Ladder utilized RevenueCat’s pre-built integrations for Segment and Amplitude to funnel key purchase events to their data and analytics tools. 

“RevenueCat’s Integrations have been a game-changer for revenue reporting, as we can see almost in real-time exactly where we stand. It’s also been extremely beneficial for our end-of-month reporting, which is quite detailed. Having access to user-level spend, store fees, offer code usage, and currency—and then being able to tie that to user behavior, their renewal count, and whether they came in with a discount code—has been invaluable.”

Ladder trusts RevenueCat as a source of truth for granular data that drives major decisions and affiliate partner payouts. “We use the Segment integration to BigQuery extensively for all our financial reporting and affiliate-related payouts at month-end. It’s crucial in providing us with precise information on new paying members, renewal metrics, and reactivated members—broken down by dollar amount, currency conversion and product type.”

Full funnel marketing driven by real-time data 

Ladder leveraged RevenueCant’s Webhooks and Braze integrations to support the entire marketing funnel, from acquisition through to retention. 

Ladder’s acquisition campaigns feature unique UTM links that contain information about where the newly acquired user came from. RevenueCat’s Webhooks send purchase data to Ladder’s analytics tooling where that user-level purchase data can be matched/bucketed with various UTM acquisition sources. 

“RevenueCat’s Webhook events enables us to attribute ad spend with granular precision to paid conversions, cost per trial, and payback periods. Matching UTM links with purchase data allows us to precisely identify which ads and affiliate partners drive the most paid conversions, yield the best retention rates, and generate full-price versus discounted purchases.”

For up-sell and retention campaigns, Ladder uses their RevenueCat and Braze integration. Detailed customer and event data is passed from RevenueCat to Braze, enabling win-back and upgrade offers that are bespoke to a subscriber’s individual plan. 

“Given that many of our users have redeemed introductory offer codes for their first membership payment, it’s imperative that we know exactly what subscription a user had. With RevenueCat and Braze, we’re able to do this. When a user turns off auto-renew, we trigger a Braze pop-up with a custom discounted win-back offer. As part of our push to drive annual over monthly subscriptions, we trigger a campaign based on an upcoming renewal date to present a custom upgrade offer.“

The results

100,000 more paying members with 45% less code

RevenueCat enabled Ladder to simplify implementing and maintaining cross-platform subscriptions, freeing up significant engineering resources for more value-added work.

“RevenueCat has saved us countless hours. We estimate that we have saved 30 – 45% lines of code mostly on the backend. When Apple encounters issues with validating receipts or accepting new subscriptions, RevenueCat quickly backfills any missing data, saving us time and effort.”

RevenueCat was able to scale with Ladder and support their lean engineering team during their exponential growth: “RevenueCat has helped support our growth from 0 to over 100k paying members over the past couple of years.“

Better reporting, better decisions, more funding 

Ladder’s 0-100,000 growth was supported by the team’s strong data-driven approach to decision making, made possible by RevenueCat’s unified subscription and purchase data. 

“With RevenueCat’s integration to our database and reporting tools, we can quickly understand our position in near real-time, enabling critical business decisions based on that data. Given our global customer base, it is very beneficial that we can convert local currencies to USD in the dashboard.”

Ladder’s affiliate partner model has proved to be a strong contributor to its success, and RevenueCat makes sure that their valuable network of referring affiliate partners can get paid on time and with confidence. 

“RevenueCat has saved us countless hours by eliminating our reliance on Apple App Store Connect’s delayed reporting and payouts, which don’t tie back to individual users.”

With better reporting, comes better decisions and even more growth. So it comes as no surprise that investors would want in on the action. RevenueCat’s reliable real time data helped facilitate Ladder raising more funding towards acquiring the next 100,000 paying users.

“We use the data RevenueCat provides for investor-level reporting, which has been crucial for securing funding and reporting on business health and growth.”

Thousands of churned users won back

Through piping real time user event-data to lifecycle marketing tool, Braze, Ladder was able to implement successful upgrade and winback campaigns with real business impact.

“RevenueCat’s Braze integration has been extremely valuable as it increases our retention rates and saves members who would have otherwise churned. We estimate this helps save thousands of churning/churned members per month—a number that’s only growing as we expand.”