The editorial team recently spoke with Furkan Kaya, co-founder of the personalized fitness app Lightweight!, who leads its growth and promotion strategy, to understand how to scale apps without relying on paid advertising even in competitive mobile categories.
Paid social and mobile acquisition costs continued to rise through 2025. According to the Q4 2025 mobile ads report, advertisers are paying more for both impressions and installs, with CPI increasing by roughly 8% and CPM rising by around 4–5%. Basically, more advertisers are competing for essentially the same ad inventory, while engagement quality is weakening, which reduces the efficiency of paid traffic. This imbalance is most visible in iOS environments, where CPI increased by ~44% QoQ, reaching $9.11 compared to roughly $6 previously. Yet, the disproportion isn’t industry wide. Health and fitness apps are among the three most cost-intensive categories, alongside gaming and on-demand services. The pressure is not uniform across geographies either. Tier 1 East markets saw cost increases of around +25%, followed by the US at +17%, indicating broad-based inflation rather than isolated spikes.
Taken together, it becomes more clear than ever that scaling user growth through ads is becoming highly expensive and less predictable across both categories and regions. As a result, apps are increasingly forced to explore alternative growth mechanisms.
Point A: Why No Paid Ads and Influencer Campaigns
Traditional app marketing typically depends on paid social advertising and influencer partnerships. These channels do function as acquisition drivers, but their economics have become increasingly inefficient. Rising CPMs and CPI inflation reduce returns, while performance volatility makes long-term scaling difficult. As acquisition costs increase, growth becomes less a question of product strength and more a function of a continuously expanding budget.
‘When promoting Lightweight!, the aim was not to compete in saturated categories that increasingly operate as bidding markets. Instead, the goal was to attract users organically, allowing them to discover and engage with the product on their own terms. This required a different approach: non-paid growth mechanisms embedded directly into the app itself’, notes Furkan Kaya.
Point B: Product Market Fit As the Most Efficient Marketing Strategy
Instead of winning views and installs through constant cash injections, app builders should shift the focus to the product itself: its functionality and the value it delivers to users. This is only possible if you have thoroughly studied your audience. For example, Furkan Kaya is sure that in health & fitness apps, most people want ownership over their training. They want to feel that the program they follow reflects their own beliefs, preferences, and experience. By providing in-depth workout analytics tailored to each user and adapting with every new app iteration, the app delivers a genuinely personal experience. This approach naturally fosters a stronger user connection, which ultimately leads to higher engagement.
Communicating the Value
With attention spans getting shorter, value needs to be communicated immediately and clearly. Research from Carleton University shows that users form a first impression of a webpage (which is quite similar to other forms of online content) in as little as 0.05 seconds. In this very short time, the brain processes visual information and makes a rapid overall judgment rather than a detailed evaluation. Users quickly decide whether something looks professional, modern, and trustworthy, and whether it matches what they are looking for. If the value proposition is unclear or the product has no clear edge, no amount of advertising can fully compensate for it.
Furkan Kaya notes: ‘To capture attention, value communication must be embedded at the product design stage. The goal is to create a solution that users do not need a long explanation to understand. For example, when users see muscle heatmaps combined with TikTok-like exercise browsing, they can instantly grasp the core value.
A secondary benefit of this approach is that content strategy effectively becomes part of onboarding. Users learn training principles and exercise science through branded social media, while simultaneously discovering the product and understanding how to use it before they even download it. As a result, social media and word-of-mouth shift from pure advertising channels into acquisition channels. More importantly, the app attracts users with higher intent and trust, which ultimately improves conversion rates and long-term retention’.
Point C: The Expected Results
Unlike traditional paid acquisition channels, a promotion approach based on intrinsic app value often creates a long-lasting effect. Thanks to the increased value, user retention improves, while word-of-mouth becomes an intangible asset of the app.
‘I strongly believe that product success is not primarily a matter of app exposure. Product–market fit either exists and brings users in or it doesn’t. This approach proved viable in fitness app marketing. In paid acquisition tests, the download-to-paid conversion rate was consistently lower than among users who discovered the product organically through the community ecosystem’, adds Furkan Kaya.
Eventually, this becomes rather cost-effective. For example, the Lightweight! app reached more than 750,000 total users to date, including over 150,000 active users. Achieving a similar scale through paid app marketing would likely require around $3 million to $6 million in ad spend, based on elevated Q4 2025 rates. However, this does not include additional costs from testing, failed campaigns, or the need to over-acquire users to compensate for churn and lower retention. In reality, the total investment would likely be significantly higher.
