Jax Dwyer
THE CLIENT
A personal communication coaching app in a competitive self-improvement market
The client runs a mobile coaching platform built around one of the most universally sought skills: the ability to communicate with confidence.
The issue? Their paid acquisition costs were climbing in a way that was starting to compress margins and make scaling feel risky.
THE CHALLENGE
Creative fatigue was eating into a paid media channel that should have been working
Before working with Cult Media, the client was running roughly 20 new ad creatives per week through their paid channels. For most brands that sounds like a reasonable testing cadence, but at their spend level the audience was burning through creative faster than the team could replace it. CAC had settled at $37 per trial start and was not moving in the right direction.
Trial start was the goal, as ~45% converted to the paid annual plan of $100, meaning a strong profit margin if trials could be attained consistently.
The brief was to bring that number down, and to find the creative angles and audience messaging that would hold performance over time rather than spike and decay.
THE APPROACH
Volume, variation, and a systematic read of what the data was saying
Cult Media replaced the existing creative cadence with UGC-led production running at 80 new pieces of content per week, giving the paid media team enough variety to test meaningfully rather than recycling what had already fatigued.
The first batch tested across two core variables:
1) creator gender and
2) pain point framing.
Early results pointed toward male creators outperforming, and one angle in particular was pulling significantly better hook rates and lower drop-off than anything else in the mix: interview preparation.
Once that signal was clear, the team doubled down. Variations were built around the winning creator, testing different hooks, different script structures, and different entry points into the interview preparation angle.
Alongside the creative work, Cult Media reviewed the client's onboarding flow to identify where users were dropping off after clicking through.
The registration step was sitting early in the experience, before users had built any investment in the product. Moving it to later in the onboarding sequence, after curiosity and intent had time to develop, addressed the single largest source of funnel loss.
RESULTS
The campaign ran for six weeks. CAC on trial starts moved from $39 to $14, a 64% reduction.
The creative testing phase brought it down in stages as winning angles were identified and losing ones were cut. The onboarding change accounts for the final drop, from $18 to $14, as users who had previously been lost at the registration wall started converting instead.
Stage | CAC |
|---|---|
Before Cult Media | $37 |
After creative testing (winning angle identified) | $21.20 |
After onboarding funnel change | $15-$16 |
WHY IT WORKED
The interview preparation angle worked because it connected the product to a moment of real urgency.
Someone preparing for a job interview is not browsing casually: they have a specific, time-sensitive problem and they are actively looking for something that helps.
That context made the product feel immediately relevant rather than aspirational, and it shortened the distance between seeing the ad and wanting to try the product.
The volume made the rest possible. At 20 creatives per week, the client was testing too few variables too slowly to separate signal from noise. At 100 per week, patterns became visible quickly, and the team could make confident decisions about where to concentrate the budget rather than waiting weeks for statistically meaningful data to emerge from a thin test.
