All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
00:00:00 · Will Ahmed, Jason Calacanis
[00:00:00] S0: On average, a Whoop member wears Whoop twenty three point six hours a day. We have just over fifty billion hours of continuous physiological data. So it's one of the largest health data sets in the world. [00:00:12] S1: For a dollar a day, this is like one of the best things you could spend on your health. [00:00:15] S0: You want people to love your product authentically. LeBron James is now a global ambassador for Whoop. He was one of the first 100 people to ever wear it. [00:00:23] S1: You're starting to understand things before the rest of the medical community is learning them. [00:00:28] S0: Through physiological signals, we might be able to predict that a biomarker is out of range without actually measuring the biomarker itself.
00:00:28 · Will Ahmed, Jason Calacanis
[00:00:28] S0: Through physiological signals, we might be able to predict that a biomarker is out of range without actually measuring the biomarker itself. [00:00:38] S1: As your wealth grows, have you noticed how much more complex things get between investments, tax strategy, and estate planning? Managing it all is a full time job that you didn't ask for. Creative planning can help. Their coordinated team of investment managers, CPAs, and affiliated estate attorneys can do much of the heavy lifting so you don't have to. Creative Planning, where wealth works together. Go to creativeplanning.com slash all in. I'm going all in. Alright, guys. Welcome back to the All-In interview program. And this is where guests we want to unpack for an hour or so, not talk about the news like we do every Friday. We wanna go deep, and health and technology is one of those areas that's super interesting to all the besties, and I was really excited that my friend Will Ahmed from Whoop decided he would carve out an hour for me and the All-In audience. You and I have spoken, I think, two or three times on the OG podcast this weekend startups that I've been doing for over fifteen years there in the journey for Whoop. But let's start with just the footprint of Whoop as an organization now, because I've known you for, yeah, well over five years, six years of of this journey. How many members, ballpark ish? How many people are using the Whoop, and how much data have you collected?
00:01:54 · Will Ahmed, Jason Calacanis
[00:01:54] S0: Yeah. So Whoop, we build wearable technology to improve performance and health. I've been building this company now for fourteen years. It was founded in in 2012. And I think like, a lot of maybe overnight success stories, it took a very long time to be an overnight success. You know, it took about twelve years for us to get to a million members and then another eighteen months or so to 2,000,000, about six months to 3,000,000, and and we expect to end the year around 4,000,000 members. [00:02:26] S1: 4,000,000 members. And, hey. Listen. I'll I'll tell people right out. The service at first seems expensive because I think it's like $40 a month, $30 a month. Am I am I in the approximate range or... What do I spend? 300 a year on this? [00:02:40] S0: Depending on what plan you're on, it's anywhere from 15 to $30 a month. [00:02:44] S1: I'm on the top top plan with the top top sensor. But you took a very thoughtful approach to saying we're gonna go for subscriptions, and we're gonna take out the cost of the device. So you don't have this cost losing the device anxiety. So take me to that decision. And to be totally honest, for a dollar a day, I think this is, one of the best things you could spend on your health or or even less than a dollar a day. But take me through that decision as a business to go with $30 a month.
00:03:11 · Will Ahmed
[00:03:11] S0: Yeah. Thank you. It's a unique business model. And in 2017, we had launched to consumers. It was a one time fee, $500. At that point in the company's history, we had really built Whoop as like a performance brand. You know? It was known amongst the best athletes in the world, and and we worked with all these sports teams. And we said, okay. We're gonna go to consumers and and target, you know, an athletic and fitness enthusiast audience. And over the course of the next twelve months of having that product in market, we really observed two things. The first is that people who bought Whoop would wear it for a long time. And that's always been a challenge in the wearables industry around drop off rates and engagement. And fortunately for Whoop, that's been a strength of our of our product. But then the other thing we observed was that not that many people were buying the product. So we still had a sales problem. And because the engagement was so high, we asked ourselves, well, is there a business model here where the entry price is lower so people can get introduced to Whoop? And if they fall in love with the product, then over time, it can be a good business for Whoop too. And I think that immediately created all kinds of of growth for Whoop back in two thousand eighteen and nineteen, and we quickly became a recurring revenue business versus a hardware business, which, of course, is more attractive to investors. And then, you what I underestimate is how much it changed our DNA because when you're a subscription business, you become really obsessed with your existing members, arguably more so even the new members. And so it's all about innovation cycles and continuing to rapidly improve the product and obsess over the member experience.
00:04:52 · Jason Calacanis
[00:04:52] S1: See, this is, I think, a critical observation for founders who might be watching. When you're selling widgets, you know, you're... It's about distribution and, you know, marketing. But once you get a subscriber, hey, they're your customer next month and the following month and the following year. So you start obsessing about churn and engagement. Right? The metrics kinda shift. Right?
00:05:15 · Will Ahmed
[00:05:15] S0: Yeah. Totally. You get you get very focused on user engagement, how often people are are using your product. You get focused on how effective it is. You know, how... Are you actually driving behavior change and and health improvement? It it changed our hardware cycles as well. So when you're a hardware business, you're incentivized to ship new hardware every 12 months whether or not it's actually innovative because you always need that next dollar from a hardware sale. And, also, when you're a pure hardware company, you're you're not incentivized to be innovating on top of that existing product, right, because you wanna convince people to buy the next thing. And for us, we're actually... We're the opposite incentives. We wanna launch hardware when it's really innovative and it's a step function better. And and then we're really focused on trying to continue to update the the membership and the subscription. So, you know, someone who joined, I don't know, eighteen months ago may not have known they were gonna have ECG monitoring or A fib detection or advanced labs, which is now the blood work feature that we have in the app or HealthSpan, which, you know, tells you your Whoop age and is a whole longevity feature, blood pressure insights, which is a new capability that allows people to to look at their blood pressure every day. So these are all examples of new features that we've brought to market with hardware that's in market.