Redefining Adversity In Business

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How it all started

It all started with these questions -

• How could you measure the body,

• What does it mean to peak on a given day,

• What does it mean to get fit, &

• What does it mean to run down?”

Will. a college athlete, learned to push himself as hard as possible but soon noticed that sometimes even at peak fitness, his performance was subpar at best. This observation made him question the human body and what it meant to be in peak performance. What was he doing wrong and why, despite all the efforts put into training, the results still didn’t add up. These questions and his curiosity to understand how the human body performs, what effects exercise, sleep, and diet truly have on human performance, and whether they make any difference or not, drove him to start a company called Whoop.

The first launch came with a lesson in marketing.

In 2015, the company launched its first product. A device that had no screen, no notifications, and only focused on tracking recovery. Sounds simple enough, except it came with a 500-dollar subscription charge. That was an outrageous sum of money for a company that nobody knew about. As if that wasn’t enough, investors turned him down for several reasons including the fact that Whoop would be competing in a market with established players like Apple which had also launched a smartwatch in the same year.

Faced with multiple rejections, Will did three things that turned the fate of his company around.

First, he niched down his audience.

Instead of trying to sell to everyone, Will decided to focus on people who really needed his product: pro athletes.

“If we could get this super elite layer of athletes to wear and authentically get a lot of value out of WHOOP, we could potentially build a whole brand around performance. That brand would put us into the consumer market and help us one day to hopefully build a big consumer business. There was a benefit that I didn't fully appreciate at the time, which was starting with a pretty small market, but a market that could potentially fall in love with your product and also put up with some things that early on didn't quite work, because they like the promise of it so much.”

Whoop got the visibility it needed. Pro athletes like Lebron James and Christiano Ronaldo were making use of his product. But that didn’t solve the cash issues he was having. Investors still didn’t buy into the idea and Whoop was burning cash, fast.

So, they decided to pivot

Instead of trying to sell the devices, why not give them out for free? That is exactly what he did. Will slashed the subscription charge from 500 dollars to 30 dollars and also offered a free upgrade for its users each time there was a new release. This meant the old devices were passed down by their owners. Here’s the genius of this idea. By slashing the subscription cost, Will was able to eliminate the cost barrier that prevented most people from using his product. But he made up for it by collecting performance insights.

It worked. The more people used Whoop, the more the company gathered relevant performance data. Soon, Whoop became the official fitness wearable of the NFL and PGA Tours. This was a new beginning, not only for the company but the professional athletes as well, who for the very first time owned their training data.

You may not be in the wearable fitness industry, but there are key insights you can get from this story;

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1

Learn to ignore the rejections and focus on the future.

Focus less on where you are now and more on where you are going to be in the future.

“There's sort of a trick in fundraising, which is that you want to be projecting the world ahead. You don't really want to be talking that much about where you are today. Everything that we could do to paint the picture of where this thing would be was useful from a capital-raising standpoint. I think I was just perpetually fundraising for that whole first 12 months. Another uncomfortable thing about starting a company is you get rejected a lot more than you've ever gotten rejected in your life.”

2

Focus on a niche audience.

While facing rejections, Whoop took a decisive step to narrow down its focus. Instead of trying to appeal to a wider audience, they focused on professional athletes. These instantly set them apart from other wearables. For instance, Apple watches appealed more to the general audience who were only interested in counting steps, whereas Whoop’s devices went to a deeper level by attempting to unlock the secret to peak performance. Meaning that they had to go much further than just counting steps. This simple strategy made them different from Apple and other wearables in the market.

3

Find your own voice

Nothing screams branding like having your own voice. Think of some of the most successful companies you know. What do they have that sets them apart from others? What you will notice is that at the heart of every major brand is a sense of uniqueness. When a brand develops a unique identity, it is capable of facing even the most ferocious competitors and coming out unscathed. Products can be copied but not identities and Amazon learned this lesson the hard way after it tried to replicate what Whoop was doing but failed. This led to one of the best marketing comebacks in history - inscribed behind each of Whoop’s devices are the words -

“Don’t bother copying us, We Will Win”

Here’s some advice from Will for Entrepreneurs -

“Something that is valuable to develop really at any age, but was especially important for me to start developing as someone who wanted to be an entrepreneur, is this notion of finding your voice and intuition and figuring out what it is that sets you on a path to making a good decision. You have all these different voices that are giving you points of view. I think you'll be best off if you can use all of those to inform what's within, which is your own voice.”