INTVL grew 4x with Paid Advertising

A viral fitness app, a creator founder, and the signal infrastructure that turned algorithm chaos into compounding revenue.

"The predictability is to dream for. It's been revolutionary for our business."Louis Phillips, Co-Founder of INTVL

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The setup

INTVL is the gamified running app blowing up your feed right now, a territory based game where users literally claim land by running it. The concept was built to go viral, and it has done so repeatedly, with co-founder Louis Phillips bringing both a creator's instinct for content and a catalogue of viral hits to back it up.

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But virality carries a quieter problem that founders only really see once they're inside it. One month you're stacking millions of views and the next the algorithm seems to forget you exist, with downloads sliding while you try to work out what happened. From the outside it looks like growth, but from the inside it tends to feel much closer to a lottery ticket with a logo on it.

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In Louis's own words: "We were just at the mercy of the algorithm."

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Why they called Scale

INTVL already had revenue coming in and content that was clearly resonating in market. What they didn't have was the one thing every founder eventually realises they need more than another viral hit, which is predictability.

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They had attempted to run ads themselves earlier on, but the Meta dashboard alone felt like a maze, and nobody on the internal team was deep enough in paid media to move the numbers in a meaningful direction. Hiring an in-house specialist meant overhead they didn't want at that stage, while a poor outsourcing decision tends to be one of the fastest ways an early stage company can burn cash. Louis picked up the phone and called us.

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The system that did it

What we built for INTVL was a three-layered system, with each layer designed to make the next one work harder.

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1. Custom signal infrastructure

Most agencies install a pixel and call that tracking, which only ever captures a fraction of the signal Meta actually needs to optimise a campaign properly, and the iOS privacy era only widened that gap further. The result, for most brands, is an algorithm that is being asked to make sophisticated decisions on increasingly incomplete data.

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What we built for INTVL was a proper signal stack. A server-side Conversions API implementation runs in parallel with the browser pixel, deduplicated cleanly, with first-party parameters engineered into every event so the data reaching Meta carries the kind of match quality the algorithm actually rewards. Web touchpoints are then stitched to in-app behaviour through a unified identity layer, which means the events Meta receives map cleanly onto the revenue INTVL is genuinely making.

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This is the layer nobody on the outside ever sees, and yet it tends to be the single biggest factor in whether an ad account ultimately scales or stalls. When the algorithm is being fed cleaner data, CPAs drop and the scaling ceiling rises in tandem. The engineering work itself isn't particularly glamorous, but the compounding effect on performance over the following months is genuinely difficult to overstate.

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2. Creative volume, then concentration

INTVL already had a content goldmine of their own, so the job here wasn't to reinvent their creative, it was to weaponise what was already working at the platform level.

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Phase one was deliberately broad. We tested dozens of creative angles across hooks, bodies, and CTAs, with each mapped against a different avatar profile. Some leaned hard on the brand name up front, while others let it slide in the way their organic content does so naturally. The wide net was the point, because the data only becomes genuinely useful once you've given it enough to choose between.

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Phase two was where the ruthless concentration came in. Out of everything we tested, five pieces of content emerged as absolute gems, and that is where the budget went next. Once those winners had been clearly identified, the compounding started to do the work for us.

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3. The fast scaling method

This is the stage where a lot of agencies tend to come unstuck. They find a winning creative, double the budget overnight in excitement, watch the campaign collapse under itself within days, and then quietly blame the platform for being unstable.

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Our scaling method takes a more methodical approach. Profitability gates are set first, followed by structured step-ups that respect the way Meta's learning phase actually behaves. Bid strategies progress in step with signal quality as the account matures, and the audience and budget structure consolidate over time as the account reaches Advantage+ readiness. Every budget graduation is tied to hitting genuine unit economics rather than a hunch about what should be possible.

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That is how INTVL moved from "let's give paid a go" to running a forecastable monthly growth engine within a matter of weeks.

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The result

The headline here isn't a single percentage figure, and that is a deliberate choice, because what INTVL actually unlocked is something most founders end up valuing far more than any one metric in isolation.

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INTVL can now forecast revenue and downloads with real confidence each month. The United States, which had always been their priority market, became their top performing region, reaching parts of the country Louis genuinely didn't know existed. The team's whole mindset shifted along with the numbers, moving from "we hope this hits" to "we know what input creates what output," which is the practical difference between a startup throwing things at a wall and a company quietly building toward something serious.

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As Louis put it: "Everything you said was going to happen, has happened."

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Why it worked beyond the tech

Plenty of agencies will plug into your account, run your ads, and email you a weekly dashboard, and that is where the relationship tends to begin and end. Our approach is closer to embedded partnership, and Louis described it cleanly when asked: weekly strategy calls, a shared Slack channel with his entire team on it, and a phased growth plan that tells you exactly which season of scale you are currently in.

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It is the difference between plugging in another tool and having a team that treats your business with the care you would expect from a co-founder.

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Louis's advice to every founder reading this

"What you put in is what you get out. If you want the ads to crank, your content has to be top notch. Sign up with Scale, then double down on creative. That's the play."

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Ready to stop playing the algorithm lottery?

If your organic is working but your revenue still feels like a coin flip, the problem isn't really your content, it is the system that sits around it. That system is exactly what we build for founders like Louis.