A year of flat growth against 315K followers and 100K app downloads points somewhere specific. Women know who Hailey is. The question is what happens after they arrive, and that is the lowest-hanging fruit.
Three recommendations
Who I'd bring in
Four numbers I'd want in week one
Everything below is the reasoning, the lifecycle map, and the detail behind each recommendation.
One note on where this comes from. I'm a member and inside the audience you're selling to. Most of what follows is what I noticed as a customer.
You have demand. You need a system that converts it and keeps it.
315K on Instagram. 100K app downloads across 53 countries. An expert roster (Sims, Wright, Shepherd, Williden, Smith-Ryan) that nobody else at this price can match. If awareness were the constraint, a year like this one would have produced growth.
So the constraint sits after arrival. It lives between discovering Hailey and becoming a member, and then between a new member and a renewing one. That's good news. Those are the two cheapest places in any subscription business to find growth, and neither one needs more spend or more posting to move.
The math, roughly: a few percentage points on trial-to-paid and a few points on month-three retention compound month over month, across everyone who arrives. A 10% lift in traffic has to be bought again next month, and it lands in the same leaky funnel.
I ran a third-party audience analysis on haileyhappensfitness.com to see where these women spend time outside your channels. It produced a target list worth acting on, and one finding about how to talk to them.
| Where they are | What the data shows | What it's for |
|---|---|---|
| r/Menopause r/Perimenopause r/xxfitness | 226K, 160K, and 3.1M members. The three highest-affinity communities in the entire dataset. | Presence and listening, not ads. Also the cheapest customer research available to us. |
| Five midlife fitness podcasts | This audience indexes 94 to 99 on shows including Hit Play Not Pause, which Hailey has already guested on. | Guest bookings, with a separate tracked link per show so we learn which ones convert. |
| prevention.com verywellfit.com | Domain authority 86 and 75, roughly a million monthly visits each, and high affinity with this audience. | Earned media placements. |
| The Menopause Society menopause.org | The highest-trust institution with this audience anywhere in the report, at a brand affinity of 94. | A credibility partnership. The expert roster makes this plausible in a way it wouldn't be for most fitness brands. |
| drstacysims.com | 21K monthly visits and high affinity. Dr. Sims's own audience is already here. | Deliberate cross-promotion, rather than waiting for the next mention. |
| flippingfifty.com fabulous50s.com | Both score high. This audience reads competitors too. | Competitive intelligence, and a reminder that she is still shopping. |
Against a typical internet user, this audience over-indexes on Healthy Living by 1495%, Sports by 559%, Food and Drink by 351%, and Medical Health by 176%. Business and Finance runs 53% below average.
These women are researching their health. They are not shopping for workouts. That is a difference in how we speak to them, not just where we find them, and it is the strongest argument for the expert-led positioning Hailey has already built. It also means the content that earns the most attention is the content that explains something, which is what she is already best at.
This audience uses AI search tools at more than 500% above the US average, while sitting at roughly parity on Google. Meanwhile, in the "best fitness app for perimenopause" and "best strength training app for women over 40" roundups that dominate those results, Hailey Happens Fitness does not appear. The apps that do appear have weaker programming and thinner expert credibility.
That gap is inexpensive to close and it compounds, because the same third-party content feeds both search engines and the answer engines this audience is already using. It is the work behind the earned media line in section 07.
A note on the data. This is third-party modeled audience analysis, not first-party measurement, so treat the figures as direction rather than precision. Your own numbers would sharpen all of it, and that is part of what I would want to see in week one.
Each one closes a gap. I'd sequence them this way because of what is already in flight. The custom app and the site redesign change what is worth building right now.
Gate the "find your level" assessment that already sits on the homepage as a call to action. Six to ten questions about training history, frequency, equipment, and goal. Email to see the result. The result is a real answer: you're an intermediate, here's the program that fits, and here's why.
One asset doing three jobs. It captures the email, it segments the list by training level, and it routes her to the right program instead of the cheapest one. It is also the only call to action that works everywhere. A woman watching a Reel who isn't ready to buy anything will still want to know what level she's at, and it holds up on a podcast while she's driving.
Three sequences, in priority order. Trial onboarding. Ten days built around one activation event: the first workout completed, the best early predictor of whether she is still here in month three. Program-end routing. When a member finishes a program, something happens: her progress, her next program, and where she goes from here. Win-back, for lapsed members and for the very large group who downloaded the app and never converted.
Underneath all three, segmentation by training level from the assessment, by program, and by lifecycle stage.
Hailey's voice and presence are the brand. The problem is that everything currently depends on her doing the production, planning, and quality control. Without a written standard, a brief format, and a feedback loop, it's hard to hit the quality bar.
What I'd build: content pillars mapped to lifecycle stages, so posting has a job beyond reach. A hook library pulled from her own best-performing posts, so the standard is evidenced instead of described. A one-page brief format. And a weekly rhythm where Hailey does the part only she can do, which is being on camera and holding the point of view, while a social media manager handles everything on either side of it.
Moving off Exercise.com and redesigning the site are the best marketing opportunity you will have for the next few years, but only if the requirements go in before the build instead of after it.
A short list of events the new app has to emit, agreed before the build.
Specify this now; it costs the engineering team very little. If we retrofit it later, it becomes a project of its own. It is the difference between the new app being a better experience and the new app being the thing that finally tells you why women stay.
| Skillset | Engagement | What they'd do | When |
|---|---|---|---|
| Social media manager | Part-time or contract | The production gap. Shooting support, editing, clipping long-form into Reels and Shorts, scheduling, and community management, all working to a brief so that quality becomes checkable. | Immediate |
| Analytics implementation | Contract, short | Translate the measurement spec into a tracking plan the app developers can build against, and instrument the new site. | Before app build |
| Paid media | Contract, ongoing | Account structure, testing discipline, and creative iteration against a funnel instead of a single offer. I would own the strategy, the budget, and the creative direction. | Ongoing |
| Earned media and PR | Contract, as needed | Getting HHF into the third-party review and comparison content where midlife women currently go to find fitness programs and apps. Guest podcasting, guest speaking, and media placements to drive visibility and authority in the women's fitness space. | Planning Q4, execution Q1 |
I'd own the strategy and sequencing, the lifecycle architecture and copy, the creative system and briefs, the measurement definitions, and the management of everyone above.
Everything above is built on what I can see as a member and from the outside. It is a hypothesis, and the first thing I'd do is find out where it's wrong. Four numbers would either confirm this sequencing or change it:
If those aren't available today, then establishing them is the priority.
The hardest part is already built. What's missing is the connective work between the audience Hailey has and the product she's made, and that's the work I'm excited to do.