Whoop Founder & CEO Will Ahmed said the recent growth of the health wearable company is due to people caring “more about their health today than they did a year ago,” which he credited to both changing cultural trends as well as the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. Speaking during SBJ's Dealmakers in Sports virtual event, Ahmed said Whoop seeks to use data to “help coach (users) on what are the right things for you versus not.” He said the vision for Whoop was for it to be a “24/7 life coach” with software and analytics “dedicated to helping you understand your body.” But Ahmed noted that while they had a product that people “often fell in love with,” the original “high upfront cost” of the wearable kept the consumer market down. “The missing piece was finding the business model that made consumers comfortable trying it and then hopefully really getting value out of it over time,” Ahmed said. So, the “fundamental shift” Whoop made was to a subscription model, and for Ahmed, selling technology as a subscription has been a “critical transition for the consumer market.”
Quick Hits:
- On what draws people to wearable technology: “People don't buy a wearable because they want to have something on their wrist. They buy it because they want to understand their bodies and hopefully improve their health.”
- On the role wearable technology can play in health: “You don't just find out once a year that you've got something wrong when you visit your doctor, you find out the second it's wrong.”
- On the importance of collaboration in a business: “I think that friction brings out great, great results, but you want to make sure that the group of people ultimately comes up with the best idea for the company, not ‘I came up with the idea.’”
