Who She Is
The woman who decided midlife was a starting line, not a finish line
Alicia Erickson is 51, based north of Seattle, and spent 13 years running a portrait photography business before pivoting to health and fitness. When her second daughter left for Arizona State, she looked at her husband and asked: who are we now, and what comes next? Her answer was to go all in on herself in ways she never had before.
At 45, she quit alcohol. Not because anyone pushed her to, but because perimenopause had changed how her body handled it and she hated how it made her feel. She stopped CrossFit and high-intensity interval training. She started lifting, walking, dialing in her nutrition, and cutting sugar. Her body changed in ways she did not expect.
She had always had confidence. This amplified it.
“I was like, wow, okay, there’s some muscles popping. Okay, got abs. I didn’t realize I had all those abs.”
Alicia Erickson @aliciae • 781K followers
The Before
Years of showing up, 5,000 followers, and a frozen ice cube
Alicia read Atomic Habits and was immediately influenced. In the book, the author references the image of an ice cube that sits at 31 degrees through all your effort, still frozen, until the single degree that changes everything. That was her experience with social media.
For years she posted consistently. CrossFit content, photography, fashion, health and fitness, stories, engagement with other creators. Nothing dramatic happened. She kept showing up anyway, not chasing virality, but because she believed social media could be a force for inspiration if you curated it intentionally.
In December 2023, on vacation at Disneyland with her family, her reels started going viral. She would ride an attraction, check her phone, and gain another 5,000 followers. By March 2024 she had 300,000 followers. The ice cube had melted.
300k Followers by March 2024
From roughly 5,000. During a December 2023 Disneyland trip her reels went viral — she'd ride an attraction, check her phone, and pick up another 5,000 followers. “A hundred people is not nothing. Imagine if you were in a room with a hundred people and they’re all listening to you speak. That would be a big deal.”
Alicia Erickson @aliciae • 781K followers
Why Playbook
She looked at the midlife space on the app. Nobody was there. So she became that person.
Before the viral moment, Alicia had already started building the infrastructure for a shift out of photography and into fitness. Website, email list, certifications in progress. When her audience exploded and women started asking for more, she needed to move faster than she had planned.
She had already been using the Playbook app as a subscriber herself. She liked it. She scanned the midlife women’s fitness space on the platform and did not see obvious competition. She joined as a creator and built out her program. The decision was characteristically low drama. She saw a gap, she had the content and the following to fill it, and she moved.
“I don’t really see any other women in the midlife space doing this on this app. So I’m going to go be that person.”
Alicia Erickson @aliciae • 781K followers
How She Does It
What thousands of followers did when she gave them somewhere to go
The years of posting had prepared her for the moment when it arrived. Every reel, every story, every time she showed up and talked directly to the camera, was infrastructure. When the audience was suddenly there, she already knew how to hold their attention. What she built inside Playbook was an extension of that same instinct: give women a place to land and make it impossible to feel lost once they get there.
Every program comes in two versions, gym and home, so no subscriber has an excuse not to start. The names do not sound like fitness products. ReclaimHER. She-Ra Era. At Dawn WE LIFT. Muscle Mommy. They sound like something a woman wants to be part of, which is exactly why they travel. Nutrition guides and modification resources sit alongside every workout, because Alicia understands her subscriber is not a college athlete. She is a woman in midlife with a full life and a body that needs to be met where it is. Most creators build an audience. Alicia built a community, and Playbook gave her somewhere to put it.
“All of those years sharing on social and sharing on my stories and getting on and talking on stories prepared me for that moment. I wouldn’t have been ready for it if I hadn’t done all that beforehand.”
Alicia Erickson @aliciae • 781K followers
The Results
More than 10,000 paid subscribers. Six figures a month.
Paid Subscribers 10,000+
Steady daily growth rate Monthly Recurring Revenue 6 Figures
7-figure annual run rate Trial-to-Paid Conversion 60%+
Top of Playbook benchmark range Choose Annual Billing Upfront 85%+
Highest in the creator set Subscription Pricing $29.99/mo.
$199.99 Annual That figure, 85% of subscribers choosing to pay for a full year upfront, is worth pausing on. Annual subscribers are not an upsell trick. They are what happens when an audience decides they are not leaving. Alicia built that kind of loyalty in a demographic the fitness industry had largely written off.
What’s Building Next
She has the subscribers. Now she’s building the business around them.
Alicia is operating in a space she effectively created on Playbook, serving an audience that has proven it will pay, stay, and refer. The more than 6,000 new subscribers she added in the last 60 days are not coming from a one-time viral spike. They are coming from a creator who figured out the compounding logic of social media and applied the same logic to building a subscription business.
The viral moment was hers. The audience was hers. What Playbook gave her was the infrastructure to turn both into something that compounds, a business with real recurring revenue, real retention, and a subscriber base that keeps growing long after the algorithm moves on. Most creators who go viral are forgotten within a year. Alicia is still adding thousands of subscribers a month. That is not luck. That is what happens when the right creator finds the right platform and builds something that lasts.
