WHOOP,Inc.: Digital Entrepreneurship During the Covid-19 Pandemic

Abstract

This case is about WHOOP, Inc., a digital startup in the fitness technology space, how it responded to the Covid-19 pandemic, and its evolving business model and opportunities in the competitive wearables industry. WHOOP launched as a wearable device company. Its business model evolved from selling a device to providing software as a service (SaaS). Industry competitors included large digital organizations like Apple and Google, sportswear companies such as Under Armour and Nike, and global wearable device startups like Oura, a health technology firm in Finland. In early 2020, as a response to the Covid-19 pandemic, WHOOP launched research initiatives to track user wellbeing in the social-distancing conditions imposed worldwide. The company responded to disruptions to its supply chain, developed and evaluated algorithms to detect Covid-19 infection, and created partnerships with research organizations. Going forward, WHOOP proposed to define a strategic response to business disruptions and the new digital platform competitors.

Keywords

digital entrepreneurship digital fitness Covid-19 business disruption resilience digital platform

A Digital Fitness Startup Responds to the Covid-19 Crisis

“When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be.” -Lao Tzu

When Will Ahmed co-launched a wearable device company in 2012, he could not have imagined his startup would play a role in early detection of a worldwide viral infection and the resumption of professional sports during a global pandemic. WHOOP, Inc., a digital fitness startup based in Boston, Massachusetts, called itself “the human performance company,” delivering wearables and insights to consumers. Ahmed sought to solve the problem that gave rise to its mission statement: unlock human performance.¹ WHOOP technology consisted of a screenless wearable strap, a suite of algorithms to process data from sensors on the strap, and mobile and desktop applications to deliver analytics and insights to a user.

As of November 2019, WHOOP had raised approximately $105 million.² The startup relied on a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model with a $30 monthly fee to deliver strain, recovery, and sleep analyses to subscribers. Its focus on rich analytics and experimentation to optimize human performance, and the promise not to monetize user data,³ had carved a unique niche for WHOOP among professional athletes, including golfer Rory McIlroy, NBA star LeBron James, and Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps. The monthly subscription fee and detailed analyses were also attractive to amateur and aspiring athletes seeking to improve their performance.

Even for well-funded digital startups with a significant and enthusiastic customer base such as WHOOP had already generated, the scaling stage was fragile. Seventy percent of tech startups failed in the first 20 months after raising funds. This fact was particularly discouraging for consumer hardware startups, with a failure rate of 97% (CB Insights, 2020). Likewise, digital startups found themselves on shifting ground, creating processes, defining strategy, building teams, and acquiring the capabilities to create and capture value.

At the beginning of 2020, WHOOP faced a competitive and dynamic business environment with several multinational apparel and technology companies showing renewed interest in the industry. Google, for example, had acquired Fitbit in November 2019, while Apple had increased fitness and health features of the Apple Watch and turned it into a worldwide leading smartwatch device with approximately 55% market share by early 2020 (Strategy Analytics, 2020). In addition, the regulatory environment was changing. In response to the increased control large digital companies exerted over personal data, advocacy groups across the globe opposed Google’s acquisition of Fitbit; and the E.U. and U.S. governments initiated antitrust probes into the deal (Reuters, 2020). Further, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the EU and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) had granted customer data protections, including access and deletion rights required for digital companies.

The Covid-19 pandemic strained world economies in the first half of 2020 with dire results for small businesses and startups. Globally, by early April 2020, more than 70% of startups had terminated full-time employees, 41% of startups held three or fewer months of cash, and 62% of investors had either slowed or canceled funding (Gauthier & Morelix, 2020). The global wearables market in which WHOOP operated was gravely impacted by Covid-19 and expected a drop in year-to-year market growth from 89% in 2019 to 9.4% in 2020 (International Data Corporation, 2020). At the same time, Covid-19 led to an increase in global entrepreneurial activity as entrepreneurs pivoted their businesses and seized upon ingenuity to fight the pandemic (DeCuyper et al., 2020).

Several factors made WHOOP a responsive and resilient startup. First, Ahmed was resolute in hiring talent who brought new ways of thinking and acting into the company and who were not attached to their own ideas. He noted, “That’s what we look forward to when we hire people at WHOOP: high intensity and high humility.”⁴ Second, the company had an unwavering commitment to data-driven decision-making and a customer focus, which made it adaptable and is a key determinant of success for entrepreneurs (Liguori & Pittz, 2020). Third, according to Deborah Poole, Chief Business Officer at WHOOP, the company started to establish a nearshore manufacturing location. Fourth, in June 2020, WHOOP integrated its services with Strava,⁵ a social network for athletes. This move signaled a willingness to consider becoming an ecosystem player in select strategic instances.

The fitness technology industry and the pandemic offered opportunities to continue evolving WHOOP’s business model into an ecosystem player, connecting its software applications with other relevant services. WHOOP could provide application programming interfaces (APIs), liberating data from the underlying services. Further, WHOOP could become a digital platform allowing third parties to innovate its offerings, which would advance its growth boosted by network effects. As WHOOP entered the second half of 2020, Ahmed planned a strategy for the company in a Covid-19 world. There were several essential questions to contemplate: What could WHOOP do to increase its resilience? Should WHOOP seek to become a central player in the digital fitness ecosystem? Should it transform its SaaS model into a digital platform to speed growth and ability to compete with large technology players like Apple?

The Origin of WHOOP, Inc.

Spun out of Harvard iLab, WHOOP was founded in 2012 by three students: Will Ahmed, Aurelian Nicolae, and John Capodilupo. WHOOP started with an athlete’s dilemma in mind. Will Ahmed, captain of Harvard’s squash team at the time, wanted to figure out the best way to optimize his team’s performance. Through his fascination with “what he was doing to his body and teammates dealing with injuries,” he realized that “no one focused on what happened outside the three-to-four-hour training session including recovery and sleep behavior” (Higgins, 2020). As a result, Ahmed set out independently to research human physiology during his senior year. He wrote his thesis, The Feedback Tool: Measuring Fitness, Intensity, and Recovery, on how to understand the human body. He explained his study as a “precursor to the building of WHOOP, which measures exercise intensity, recovery, and sleep.”

In the world of sports technology in 2012, Ahmed noted that all coaches wanted was more data on players’ performance-based activities. When coaches were questioned about challenges with their players, they identified injuries, overtraining, and lack of recovery. WHOOP countered this approach with a “contrarian point of view,” as Ahmed called it, by highlighting the fact that coaches already had information on training hours spent with players, but no information on the other 20-plus hours when players were on their own. Following this line of thought, WHOOP created a 24/7 monitor that also focused on sleep and recovery, providing even greater value than coaches had envisioned.

Thinking about wearable technology, Ahmed was fascinated by the old-fashioned chest strap, the first accurate consumer heart rate monitor (American College of Cardiology, 2017). He admired the accuracy of the wearable, but thought it was “ugly and clumsy.” He recalled the trust consumers placed in performance-based metrics, such as steps taken and calories burned, offered by early wearables like Fitbit. Over time, performance-based metrics led to “high drop-off rates and lack of consistency, because people started to realize that measuring steps was not a valuable metric” (Higgins, 2020). In the wearables market, industry consolidation had left fewer competitors.

WHOOP in Early 2020

In the months leading to the Covid-19 pandemic, WHOOP offered a subscription model that included a wearable band and access to a personalized analytics dashboard. The startup focused on customer acquisition and retention and a steady commitment to customer privacy.

The WHOOP Strap 3.0

WHOOP’s main product, the Strap 3.0 (see Figure 1), was “a wrist-worn wearable device designed to improve training, sleep, and lifestyle choices with real-time feedback on the body” (Draper, 2020). However, what WHOOP offered was the machine learning and analytics-driven service behind the Strap, which measured a person’s strain, sleep, recovery, and hence readiness to perform optimally. The company’s value proposition was to deliver insights generated through machine learning. When a person subscribed to WHOOP, the user received a wrist strap and access to a dashboard rich in personal insights (Figure 2).

Figure 1.

WHOOP Strap Version 3.0 (Source: Whoop.com).

Figure 2.

WHOOP’s Analytics Dashboard on the App (Source: Screen Captures by the Authors).

Since the company inception in 2012, the WHOOP Strap had seen three versions. The latest version, 3.0, was launched in 2018. Thanks to the technical expertise of co-founders Capodilupo and Nicolae, and the entrepreneurial and design-focused spirit of Ahmed, the WHOOP Strap evolved quickly through multiple versions. It went from version 1― a big, bulky, unwearable wearable with “slow data-collection ability”― to version 3, a sleek, design-focused, five-day battery life, with 24/7 passive data-monitoring, a wearable device worn mainly by athletes and performance-focused individuals.

WHOOP focused its innovation efforts on the product offering, specifically the Strap. Hardware enabled the collection and aggregation of data, and also the analytics that provided the unique value to subscribers. The sensors in the Strap 3.0 measured “heart rate, heart rate variability (HRV), skin conductivity, ambient temperature, and accelerometry.”⁶ Software calculated respiratory rate from heart rate data.⁷

Software-as-a-Service Model

As the wearables industry continued to struggle with the question of which business model held the golden ticket, WHOOP took advantage of its agility as a new entrant in the industry to innovate its business model. At first, the startup followed the conventional approach of “selling for hardware as hardware.” The first version of the product sold for $500 and provided access to a full offering, which included the Strap and the personalized analytics dashboard (app and desktop applications).

In 2017, WHOOP transformed into a subscription model. All original WHOOP users who had purchased the Strap before the company transition to a subscription model were unaffected, and they retained access to the analytics. New users paid $30 per month or a slightly discounted rate for committing to a 12- or 18-month subscription, which included the Strap. WHOOP also offered a B2B membership for users seeking premium analytics with additional features, such as coach assistance and performance experts to interpret data.

Will Ahmed credited the transition to a subscription model to three critical observations, and to taking action based on these insights. Ahmed detailed the first observation on existing WHOOP users. “Although not a lot of people were buying, WHOOP had really high user engagement for the people who did. Over time, they were still using it. […] The benefit of this [subscription] model is that over time it can be quite high margin. As you keep people on WHOOP and move beyond the incremental value of the hardware, it starts to look a lot like a software-as-a-service business.” Second, he discussed ecosystem players. “What we also saw in the public market was that a company like Fitbit was being valued at roughly 1x revenue, which isn’t great. Whereas a company like Peloton, in the private market, was getting valued at 20 x annual recurring revenue (ARR). I knew I wanted WHOOP to grow up to look more like Peloton than Fitbit.” Finally, he outlined the startup’s self-evaluation and positioning. “Our cost of goods was coming down over time, and we saw that if we had a lower upfront cost, people were more likely to engage with WHOOP. All of those reasons combined, we transitioned to the subscription business model, which for us has definitely been the right decision.”

WHOOP’s subscription model strategy laid out by Will Ahmed was now largely based on user growth and user retention. It was also the main revenue stream for the company. Similar to Netflix and unlike Facebook, he described WHOOP as “based on users paying for a subscription every month, and WHOOP providing those users a world-class service. The product is the membership. You are not the product.”

User Acquisition

WHOOP’s business goal was user acquisition and user retention (Higgins, 2020). Ahmed stated, “We want to sign up new members, we want to keep them on WHOOP.” To do this, WHOOP needed to foster a community of WHOOP users. To grow the community required identifying and converting potential users, without forgetting existing ones who could help WHOOP grow organically.

WHOOP used several channels to reach potential customers: their own website, active social media accounts, journal publications, sponsorships of sports and sports-related events, partnerships with adjacent communities and health and wellness experts, and the WHOOP podcast. The short-term goal of these channels was to attract potential users and convert them to WHOOP users. The long-term goal was to educate the public on what it meant to reach optimal performance, frequently allowing non-WHOOP voices into the channels. This allowed the company to demonstrate its unbiased commitment to “unlock human performance,” offering its subscribers insights that had not yet been converted in technology form.

Data Monetization and Privacy

In a world where user data practices were under scrutiny and increasingly regulated (e.g., GDPR, CCPA), and given that the company did not want to be “like Facebook,” WHOOP needed to develop a precise data and analytics strategy early on. Ahmed credited the careful user data practices to early considerations back in 2014, when two of their first 100 users were world-renowned athletes LeBron James and Michael Phelps. Ahmed explained, “Those aren’t the types of people that just randomly let you collect their data. They make sure that it’s being properly protected.” He added, “You also want to build an early concern for data in your culture.”

WHOOP’s primary source of revenue was its subscription model with activewear and accessories such as bands, clasps, and batteries contributing other revenue streams. Ahmed made it clear that WHOOP focused on profiting exclusively from the “world-class service” it provided, and not from selling personal user data. “WHOOP insights as a business run on data doesn’t mean that we should be selling your data to other third parties and other companies. WHOOP is taking the high ground in the space, and WHOOP can be a leader not just in the accuracy of the data that we’re collecting, but also in the security and the privacy with which we hold that data.” One of the strict policies Ahmed always observed was the requirement to obtain permission from a user before accessing any of that user’s data.

The Digital Fitness Market and Competition

The wearables market in 2020 hosted a multitude of players, from startups to multinational apparel and tech companies, including U.S. digital tech giants Apple and Google (see Table 1). Although WHOOP played in this market, the company did not view all players as competitors. WHOOP defined itself as a data company, not a wearables company. Ahmed said he was most often asked about the Apple Watch and Fitbit. Although he was not focused on smaller players, he knew OURA was a growing company that offered a similar solution.

Fitbit

In 2019, Fitbit was one of the leading providers in the wearables market, with over 28 million registered users and selling about 16 million units of smart fitness devices (Fitbit, 2020). Fitbit started in 2007 as the initial fitness tracker that grew the wearables segment. Focused on affordability and behavioral change, Fitbit had quickly attracted a broad population of users interested in reaching fitness goals by offering a solution that tracked fitness and health-related metrics, such as counting steps, calories, distance, active minutes, heart rate, and sleep. Contrary to WHOOP, Fitbit had multiple product segments: four smartwatches, six trackers, a premium Fitbit membership with additional features and analytics for $9.99 per month, and a range of accessories to accompany the devices. Retail prices of Fitbit devices varied from $69.95 to $249.95; and unlike WHOOP, Fitbit offered the devices for purchase through multiple channels.

Fitbit was the leading wearable until the Apple Watch came along in 2015. Combatting fierce competition from Apple in 2019, Google announced it was buying Fitbit for $2.1 billion. This led to heightened concern from the public and regulators over Fitbit users’ health data under the control of a tech giant already scrutinized over data privacy. The acquisition was halted until the U.S. Department of Justice could finalize its investigation.

Apple Watch

In 2015, Apple launched the Apple Watch. Although it was first marketed as a fashion accessory, Apple shifted strategy and focused on fitness-related features. Most notable was that the Apple Watch became part of Apple’s ecosystem of devices, allowing users to connect and pair their watch to their iPhones and Apple accessories. Unlike with WHOOP, Apple Watch features went beyond health and fitness. The Apple Watch was a mini iPhone, with a screen on a person’s wrist, that allowed users to talk, text, take pictures, access apps, and make wireless payments. Since 2015, Apple had focused on developing Watch technology to improve user health and fitness, adding innovative health and fitness features with each new version, such as ECG reading, fall detection, and emergency calls.

In early 2020, Apple had five versions of the Apple Watch, each known as a Series. In line with existing Apple products, the Apple Watch price point targeted high-income users. The latest started at $399, while the previous Series 3 started at $199. Although at a much higher price point than Fitbit, Apple had been able to leverage existing customer loyalty and become a leading global player in the wearables sector.

According to a 2019 report from Strategy Analytics, Apple sold approximately 30.7 million watches worldwide, 36% higher than the previous year (Niu, 2020). Unlike Google and Fitbit, Apple was known to push for strong data privacy practices and regulation, while publicly critiquing other tech companies for failing to consider the importance of privacy. However, Apple privacy practices had recently been questioned after reports surfaced on data breaches and third-party app security.

OURA Ring

Oura Health was a private health technology company founded in 2013 in Finland. Oura products had entered the U.S. market as the company saw growth potential. Oura had created a scientifically validated wearable sleep tracker in the form of a ring. Its technology was capable of recognizing the wearer’s daily choices and rhythms to define how well a person slept. Oura was known as one of the best sleep tracker wearables in the market. In 2018, the Oura ring and app had received the prestigious Red Dot Award for product design (Michelen, 2018). Oura’s product included an analytics dashboard; sensors to measure HRV, skin temperature, and respiratory rate; fertility tracking for women; and a meditation mode.

Differences between Oura and WHOOP existed in their business models. Oura followed the traditional sell-for-hardware model and offered four rings at three different price points. The black and silver rings sold for $299, the Stealth ring $399, and a ring with diamonds $999. Oura had prioritized hardware performance and reliability over community growth, while WHOOP supported both. In 2018, Oura named a new CEO, Harpreet Singh, who grew the company by more than 100 employees, launched a second version of the ring, and sold over 150,000 units in 90 different countries (Oura, 2020).

At the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, Oura Health was the first company in the space to announce a partnership with the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), to conduct a study on the ring and its potential use to detect early physiological signs potentially indicating the onset of the virus (Peters, 2020). Midway during Covid-19, Oura Health announced a partnership with the NBA (Cohen, 2020), as the federation planned to resume games and needed to protect the health of players. Thus, in early 2020, although Oura had been slow to attract broad consumer interest, brand recognition for the company grew significantly.

WHOOP and Covid-19

Covid-19 disrupted WHOOP’s day-to-day business operations, as with most businesses in Boston, Massachusetts. In early February, WHOOP started to experience manufacturing and supply chain disruptions. Poole described, “We were communicating longer and longer shipping times to our new subscribers. What had been previously a two-day delivery was suddenly an eight-day delivery, or a nine-day delivery, or a ‘we are not so sure when it’s coming.’ That was a real area of concern.”

In March, when Covid-19 cases surpassed the two-digits in the U.S. and quarantines became the norm, “Consumer appetite was just gone overnight,” Poole explained. WHOOP froze hiring and mounted a vigorous response. “We went through a very active scramble to reforecast and try to figure out what this means in the new world, and to aggressively slash our forecast for the rest of the year,” Poole added. She elaborated on WHOOP consumers’ reaction:

“We were not sure if, in a time of uncertainty, people would view our product as a luxury or a necessity. [WHOOP] was a premium-price product, and we were curious how many people would cut us out of their budget. We were very pleasantly surprised to see that people put us in the necessity camp—we had an extremely small number of cancellations. All across the U.S., our biggest market, people were suddenly fixated on their health and wellbeing: the idea of tracking sleep and trying to figure out how to keep yourself healthy and sane became much more relevant.”

The dip in demand was brief, and soon the company experienced a larger-than-expected demand. Poole detailed, “In a three-month period, we went from slashing our models and forecasts, trying to figure out what a barebones 2020 looked like, to suddenly being at many multiples of what we had ever expected it to be.” Because WHOOP had good relationships with its manufacturers in China, it was able to boost production once work restarted. In the medium term, Poole explained, WHOOP planned to launch a nearshore manufacturing location in Mexico to diversify production.

Before the Covid-19 pandemic, WHOOP created the Red Recovery Policy,⁸ which required employees to work from home if the WHOOP algorithms, which everyone used, indicated their body showed early signs of sickness. Then, when the pandemic emerged, WHOOP changed its application to allow subscribers to join a research study and track relevant symptoms. “We were starting to see in our own data that respiratory rate was a leading and specific indicator of Covid-19 infection,” Poole explained. The startup also launched a series of research partnerships with research centers and universities, such as Duke University, Central Queensland University, Harvard University, and Cleveland Clinic, to evaluate the use of WHOOP in early virus detection and assess the impact of its effects. As a bonus, the Professional Golfers Association (PGA) and other professional athletes adopted WHOOP as part of their plan to restart competition. Figure 3 presents a timeline for some of these events.

Figure 3.

Timeline of WHOOP Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic.

The Future of WHOOP

In 2020, before the Covid-19 pandemic, the wearables space was expected to grow considerably (Gartner, 2019). Several factors affected consumer adoption of wearables, such as convenience of the hardware and software, the perceived credibility (including perceptions of privacy and accuracy), and the influence of referent groups (Zhang et al., 2017). WHOOP collected data, marketed services to users, and brought innovation to its hardware and technology building on these factors.

Table 1.

WHOOP Competitors.

Company	HQ	Products	Revenue 2019 (USD)
Garmin	Europe	Garmin Vivofit 3, Garmin Vivoactive, Garmin Vivosmart, Garmin Forerunner	$1,048M (fitness segment)
Xiaomi	China	Mi Band, Mi Band Pulse, Mi Fit	$8.8B (IoT & lifestyle segment)
Huawei	China	TalkBand B3, TalkBand B3 Lite, Band 2, Color Band A2, Fit, Watch 2	$66.6M (consumer business)
Apple	US	Apple Watch	$24.5B (wearables segment)
Fitbit	US	Fitbit Zip, Fitbit One, Fitbit Flex, Fitbit Charge, Fitbit Alta, Fitbit Charge HR	$1.4B
Whoop	US	WHOOP Strap + personal analytics dashboard	Undisclosed
Oura	US (founded in Europe)	Oura Ring + personal analytics dashboard	Undisclosed
Nike	US	Nike+ FuelBand, Nike+ FuelBand SE, Nike_ Running App	$1,404M (equipment segment)
Under Armour	US	Under Armour Band, MapMyFitness, MyFitnessPal, Endomondo	$136,378 (connected fitness segment)

In July 2020, venturing outside the fitness space, WHOOP planned to launch a back-to-work solution for companies, public agencies, and universities. WHOOP was a partial solution to Covid-19, offering an early warning of infection. Poole noted, “We are getting a lot of interest from companies that are interested in both sides of the equation: the wellness benefit and also the early detection.”

When asked about the future of WHOOP and scaling the startup, Will Ahmed touched on three points: innovating from within, expanding globally, and monitoring closely the socio-political and economic landscape. On his first point, Ahmed explained, “It’s WHOOP’s responsibility to collect data and give users feedback on it. The mechanism for collecting data is one that WHOOP is planning to deeply innovate around. In general, I think wearable technology should either be cool or invisible, and most wearable technology is stuck in the middle.” To his second point, Ahmed explained that WHOOP strategy for expanding was simply to have a clear message and maintain a consistent story. “WHOOP is at a stage, fortunately, where people are joining because of who we are, not who we’re trying to be.”

Finally and most important, Ahmed called WHOOP “an evolving technology in an evolving world. It’s our responsibility as a business to be pretty thoughtful about [this world], and to set WHOOP up to be successful, regardless of the economy.” As he evaluated the next phase for WHOOP in the unfolding Covid-19 crisis, he considered how the evolution of the business model would need to face the pandemic and intense competition, maintain its ethical stand on customer data, and strengthen resilience of the startup.

Supplemental Material

sj-pdf-1-eex-10.1177_2515127420975181 - Supplemental material for WHOOP, Inc.: Digital Entrepreneurship During the Covid-19 Pandemic

Supplemental material, sj-pdf-1-eex-10.1177_2515127420975181 for WHOOP, Inc.: Digital Entrepreneurship During the Covid-19 Pandemic by Kenza Qermane and Rubén Mancha in Entrepreneurship Education and Pedagogy

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Rubén Mancha

Notes

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