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Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

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

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Colossus

Technology, Business, Investing

4.72.5K Ratings

🗓️ 13 January 2026

⏱️ 77 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

My guests today are Tom Digan and Greg Stewart. Tom is the co-founder of Ladder, and Greg is its CEO. Ladder was my first angel investment. What followed over the next seven years is one of the most unlikely and dramatic business stories I’ve been a part of. Today, Ladder is the number one grossing fitness app in the App Store, approaching $100M in ARR with more than 300,000 paying members. But the path from near death to dominance involved debt collectors, leadership changes, and a full reset during the pandemic. Tom and Greg built Ladder by being relentlessly empirical about their customers, ruthless about prioritization, raising money wherever they could, and doing whatever it took when most founders would have quit. We cover the messy early years when survival meant negotiating creditors, how they found PMF by reading thousands of app store reviews, and how they built a TikTok growth engine with no performance marketing experience. They share their long-term vision for becoming the category winner for health and fitness and the impact of AI and GLP-1s on their business. This is a conversation about how hard it really is to build something valuable, told by two people who lived through all of it. For the full show notes, transcript, and links to mentioned content, check out the episode page ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠here⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠.⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ----- ⁠Ramp⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠’s mission is to help companies manage their spend in a way that reduces expenses and frees up time for teams to work on more valuable projects. Go to⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠ramp.com/invest⁠ to sign up for free and get a $250 welcome bonus. ----- ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Vanta is trusted by thousands of businesses and continuously monitors your security posture and streamlines audits so you can win enterprise deals and build customer trust without the traditional overhead. Visit vanta.com/invest.  ----- ⁠Rogo⁠ is the AI platform for finance. They're building agents for Wall Street that are trained to understand how bankers and investors actually do work: from diligence and modeling, to turning analysis into deliverables. To learn more, visit rogo.ai/invest. ----- ⁠WorkOS⁠ is a developer platform that enables SaaS companies to quickly add enterprise features to their applications. Visit ⁠WorkOS.com⁠ to transform your application into an enterprise-ready solution in minutes, not months. ----- ⁠Ridgeline⁠ has built a complete, real-time, modern operating system for investment managers. It handles trading, portfolio management, compliance, customer reporting, and much more through an all-in-one real-time cloud platform. Visit⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ridgeline.ai⁠. ----- Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant (⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://thepodcastconsultant.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠). Timestamps (00:00:00) Welcome to Invest Like The Best  (00:04:26) Episode Intro (00:05:45) Ladder: The #1 Fitness App (00:09:28) The Messy, Early Years (00:14:47) Sponsors (00:16:20) The Darkest Point (00:18:17) Why Greg Joined Ladder (00:19:45) The Turning Point: Ladder 2.0 (00:21:57) The Key to Negotiating with Creditors (00:23:16) Fundraising Challenges and Strategies (00:25:50) Developing Ladder Teams (00:31:31) Listen to Your Customers (00:32:57) Launching Nutrition (00:38:53) Sponsors (00:39:31) Don’t Listen to Investors on Product Feedback (00:40:18) The Cave Process (00:43:13) Crossing the Chasm (00:43:53) How to Crack TikTok (00:51:10) The Content Frontier (00:52:07) Controlled Bets at Scale (00:54:19) Why you should Build a B2C Company (00:57:37) The Impact of AI and GLP-1s (01:02:32) Sponsors (01:02:53) Staying Focused on the Core Product (01:05:00) Building the System of Record for Health and Fitness (01:09:45) What It’s Like Talking to Investors Now (01:12:32) The Kindest Thing

Transcript

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0:00.0

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?

0:05.9

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.

0:13.7

That's exactly the problem that Ramps set out to solve. Looking at the parts of finance, everyone quietly hates and asking why are humans doing any of this?

0:21.7

Turns out they don't need to. Ramp's AI handles 85% of expense reviews automatically with 99%

0:27.8

accuracy, which means your finance team stops being the department that processes stuff and starts

0:32.6

being the team that thinks about stuff. Here's the real shift. Companies using Ramp aren't just

0:37.1

saving time. They're reallocating it. While competitors spend two weeks closing their books, you're already planning next quarter. While they're cleaning up spreadsheets, you're thinking about new pricing strategy, new markets, and where the next dollar of ROI comes from. That difference compounds. Go to ramp.com slash invest to try ramp and see how much leverage your team gains when the

0:55.9

work you have to do stops getting in the way of the work that you want to do. Investing is hard.

1:00.1

It's an apprenticeship industry with messy data, complicated workflows, and decisions that demand

1:04.1

judgment. Investing needs specialized AI, and that's why I'm so excited about Rogo. Rogo is an AI platform

1:10.4

purpose-filled for Wall Street, not a generic chatbot, but a suite of

1:13.5

agents designed around how bankers and investors actually work, from sourcing, diligence, and

1:17.9

modeling to turning analysis into deliverables. Finance requires deep domain expertise far

1:22.9

beyond your average chatbot. As listeners of this podcast know, every investment firm is unique,

1:27.4

with its own thesis, internal notes, templates, and ways of investing. Generic AI can be impressive, but it doesn't actually understand your process, and that's where the advantage lives. For me, three things set Rogo apart. One, it connects directly to your system, so it can work with your actual data, internal, and external. Two, it understands your workflows, how work really happens across a deal or an investment. And three, it runs end to end and produces

1:48.4

real outputs in the way that your best people do, auditable spreadsheets, investment memos,

1:53.0

diligence materials, and slide decks that match your standards. Rogo is built by a deeply

1:57.4

technical AI team with real finance DNA, large language models for finance

2:01.6

professionals by finance professionals, and it's already being adopted by some of the most

2:05.4

demanding institutions in the world. The teams that get this right early won't just move faster,

2:09.9

they'll compound better decisions, train their own AI analyst, and the gap will widen.

2:14.2

The Rogo team's vision is distinct, make the most ambitious investors even better,

...

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