After posting, direct messages came in, fast and furious.

Women who'd struggled with the same things Katie had wanted to know:

What did you eat? How did you work out? Can you help me?

Ten years later, the company that arose out of this innocent post — Love Sweat Fitness — reaches over 2 million women across its platforms.

The couple has built a full-time business with a team, 10 supplement SKUs, a workout app, and digital meal plans, all distributed through SendOwl. But according to Ryan, they're "just scratching the surface."



A business model born out of the comments section

Most businesses start with a product idea, and look for customers. Love Sweat Fitness did the opposite... or at least something quite different.

"We didn't know what it would become," Ryan says about those early Instagram days. "But an incredible community of women who could relate began to form around Katie."

For years, the same community requests kept appearing in comments and DMs:

Can you create a meal plan?

What supplements do you use?

Will you make a workout program?

In 2021, after what Ryan describes as "endless requests from our community," they launched LSF Nutrition supplements. The response validated everything: they nearly sold out in the first week.



"That was when we knew it was time to quit our full-time jobs and give this everything we had," Ryan says.

The digital products followed the same pattern.

Their very first ebook sale came from an Instagram post Katie created.

No ads or elaborate funnel, just a direct response to what their community kept asking for. Today, thousands of customers access their MOVE app and ebook meal plans, all delivered through SendOwl's platform.

The practice that costs nothing... but drives everything

If you ask Ryan what small practice makes the biggest difference in their business, his answer isn't about marketing automation or conversion optimization.

"Speaking directly to our customers," he says. "We are very connected with them on social media, replying to every comment and DM that we receive."

But LSF takes this further than most brands would consider feasible. Every quarter, they host Town Halls with their VIP customer groups. These are live conversations where customers get early looks at upcoming products and, more importantly, get to shape them.

"These have been incredible all around."

"They get a sneak peek at what we have coming and are able to provide feedback that drives our product pipeline, updates we make to the brand and more."

It's the kind of practice that doesn't scale in the traditional sense. But for a business built on community, it's the entire foundation for long-term loyalty. Those quarterly conversations become product roadmaps, the DM replies become customer research, and the comment responses become brand strategy.

The mistake that taught them to build differently

When the supplement line nearly sold out in its first week, LSF did what many fast-growing businesses do: they hired quickly.

"We scaled our internal team very quickly right after launching the supplement line, which turned out to be much more than we actually needed," Ryan admits.

The correction wasn't easy. "It required a lot of reflection and some tough decisions on our part." But the lesson stuck. Now they approach team building with more intention, and their P&L reflects it.

For a business that built its reputation on being personal and responsive, there's an irony in having scaled the team too fast. The mistake reinforced what they already knew: bigger isn't always better, especially when your competitive advantage is being genuinely connected to your customers.

How to decide what not to build

With 2 million women across their platforms and a community that's constantly requesting new products, features, and content, saying no is a daily requirement.

"I feel like this is the most common issue we deal with as a small business owner," Ryan says. Their filter is consistent: "We start with the things that are going to make the biggest impact for our community, what is going to help them reach their goals, what is going to deliver on the things they have asked us for."

He's candid about the discipline this requires: "It can be tempting to do the things we want first, but we try to have a community first lens on every business decision."

This philosophy shapes everything from which supplement to develop next to which features to add to their digital products. SendOwl handles the delivery infrastructure for their ebooks and app access, which means the LSF team can focus their limited capacity on what their community actually wants rather than on payment processing and digital delivery logistics.



The zero-budget growth plan

Ask Ryan how he'd double the business in six months with no budget, and his answer comes immediately: "Create more content for Instagram, TikTok and YouTube."

It's not a theoretical answer. It's their actual strategy. "It's nearly free to do — and any given video can pop off, go viral and drive more business than an ad," he explains.

This isn't about hoping for viral luck. It's about understanding that for LSF, content is the product, or at least the front door to it. An Instagram post sold their first ebook. An Instagram page started the entire business. "Organic social media has been our primary way to gain customers," Ryan says. "This is still true today."

For a business selling digital products through SendOwl, this approach creates a clean loop: content builds community, community requests products, products get built and delivered digitally, customers create more word-of-mouth content. No complicated funnel required.

What happens when you build what people want

If you had to explain Love Sweat Fitness to a 10-year-old (Ryan's preferred framing), it would sound simple: "A community first nutrition and fitness brand that helps women create a life they love."

But that simplicity required building in a specific order: community first, products second. The supplements came seven years after the Instagram account. The digital products came when the audience said they needed them. The team grew (then contracted, then grew again more intentionally) based on actual demand rather than projected demand.

"We have built the brand into our full-time business with a team to support the vision," Ryan says, "but we are just scratching the surface and are very growth minded."

Most businesses struggle to find product-market fit. LSF had the opposite problem: a market explicitly telling them which products to build. Their primary challenge wasn't finding customers. It was deciding which of their community's requests to fulfill first.

SendOwl's platform handles the unglamorous but essential work of delivering their digital products: the meal plans, app access, and ebooks that thousands of customers purchase. This lets Ryan, Katie, and their team focus on what actually differentiates them: being absurdly responsive to their community and building exactly what those 2 million women keep asking for.

Which, ten years after that first Instagram post, turns out to be a pretty effective business model.