WHOOP's CEO on how a subscription model changed the company's product cycle. Because members pay monthly, WHOOP adds features like ECG and blood-pressure insights to hardware people already own, and ships new devices only when they're a step change.
…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 than new members. And so it's all about innovation cycles and continuing to rapidly improve the product and obsess over the member experience.
…When you're selling widgets, You know, it's about distribution and 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 kind of shift, right? Yeah,
totally. You get very focused on user engagement, how often people are using your product. You get focused on how effective it is. You know, how are you actually driving behavior change and health improvement? 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 not incentivized to be innovating on top of the existing product, right? Because you want to convince people to buy the next thing. And for us, we're actually with the opposite incentives. We want to launch hardware when it's really innovative and it's a step function better. And then we're really focused on trying to continue to update the membership and the subscription. So, you know, someone who joined, I don't know, 18 months ago may not have known they were going to have ECG monitoring or AFib detection or Advanced Labs, which is now the blood work feature that we have in the app, or HealthSpan, which tells you your whoop age and is a whole longevity feature. Blood Pressure Insights, which is a new capability…
Yeah. And what that does is you get over the issue we have with Apple products, which is like you're taking on as WOOP the responsibility for telling me when to upgrade and why I should upgrade. But it's not like some high pressure thing, like your iPhone cycle, where they're constantly, you know…
Yeah, the three main pillars on WOOP are around sleep, recovery, and strain. And so most people start their day by looking at how well they slept last night. And that'll be everything from our sleep score to their sleep consistency. Do they go to bed and wake up at the same time? Your hours of…
on a second. I just had