Building WHOOP with Will Ahmed: Fitness Wearable Redefined

0:00LinkedIn News

0:06Innovation ultimately is solving problems. It came back to my own personal pinpoint. It just takes a while to build that trust. The problem that I was trying to solve, it was all I was thinking about. You have to be obsessed with the human condition. I'm Tomer Coyne, Chief Product Officer of LinkedIn, and this is Building One. I watched a lot of products go down this rabbit hole of product scope creep, where you keep adding these things and you dilute everything else in the process. That's Will Ahmed, the founder and CEO of Whoop, a wearable that's popular with pro athletes. He's talking about the virtues of building a narrowly focused product.

0:44We're going to get into that and so much more, so stick around.

0:57Not so long ago, the biggest feature in wearables was counting steps. We've made big strides since, and today, wearables come with the promise of being your always-on, on-the-go device with personalized care and even early disease detection. But that promise depends on a lot of data and features which are still in beta mode. Wearables serve a wide range of needs from many consumers, and there's a constant debate on which one is better. That's why I'm excited to talk today with Mil Ahmed, the founder and CEO of Whoop. Whoop stands out in the wearable fitness tracker space, in part because of its narrow and deep focus as a product.

1:37Originally geared towards professional athletes, Whoop captures a ton of interesting data, but it tries to avoid overwhelming users with it. It's designed to be invisible. So invisible, it doesn't even have a screen. It's just like a simple bend on your wrist. In this episode, we'll learn about things like the virtues of building narrow and deep, how building for pro athletes is different than building for any other consumer, why Will believes that building original hardware was essential for Whoop, and how restraint is a key principle when showing users their data. So let's get into it.

2:18I believe you started WHOOP right after college. And I know you've been into sports and you were pretty young. So what got you into building WHOOP? Well, thanks for having me, Tomer. You know, I certainly didn't expect to start a company right out of college or even during college. I grew up on the North Shore of Long Island. I ended up going to Harvard to play squash. And I was always into sports and exercise really throughout my life. And, you know, the process of training as an athlete was one that I was familiar with, but actually didn't really understand. You know, I was someone who just thought more was more and you train a lot and you get fitter and then eventually you win.

2:55So I used to overtrain and that got me interested in what I could measure about my own body. And I asked simple questions, you know, what does it mean to train optimally? What does it mean to peak on a given day? How does recovery fit into the equation? Why does no one talk about sleep? This was like 2010, let's call it. Maybe I was 20 years old. And so I just felt like there was a lack of information in the space. And I just did a bunch of physiology research. This wasn't really through the lens of wanting to start a company. It was more through the lens of why doesn't this technology exist? I've got a personal problem and I want to understand it.

3:32And I was able to structure a lot of my course load as a student around these questions that interested me. I did a lot of physiology research. I identified a few different categories of measurements. I looked at the technology space broadly, and there was kind of three categories of technology that I thought initially were quite powerful. The first was the electrocardiogram, which could measure something called heart rate variability, which turned out to be this fascinating lens into your autonomic nervous system and your body's recovery. The second was the PSG machine, which is really the gold standard for measuring sleep.

4:09You know, really deep analysis of sleep, all your cycles, disturbances, but required you go to a laboratory, get hooked up to all these different nodes on your body, very cumbersome. And this all happened while you were in college. Yeah. And the third piece of technology I was looking at was the chest strap, which was your sort of heart rate monitor, you know, existed since the 80s. Pretty uncomfortable to wear, but very accurate at measuring heart rate during exercise, which I learned was a pretty interesting and important metric. And so I was looking at those technologies and I was doing medical research and I was asking the naive question of why can't this technology all be in a much smaller form factor?

4:47And if it could be in a smaller form factor, what could that unlock? Not just about performance, but about health. So that whole concept really came to me my junior and senior year at Harvard. And I became really so obsessed with the idea, or maybe even more so obsessed with the problem that I was trying to solve. It wasn't even really like I had a choice to start the company. It was all I was thinking about. So it seemed like an inevitability. And look, I became an entrepreneur before I knew what an entrepreneur was. So I made every mistake along the way and had to figure it out. What was the leap of faith?

5:20Did you have a solution in mind or you just felt you needed to solve this problem? Well, it hit me really hard that there was an inevitability that was going to happen over the course of my life around health monitoring. And I was looking at it at the time a little bit more around computing, you know. So 15 years ago, this was right around when smartphones were in your pocket for the first time. iPhone was maybe three or four years before this. And so I had watched the evolution of the computer from being a kid to being on your desk, to being on your lap, to being in your pocket. And it felt really obvious that it was going to go from being in your pocket to being on your body.

6:00and that that should inevitably unlock a lot of interesting things around health. And I just sort of asked this question, well, what if you could wear a health monitor 24-7? What would that start to predict about your body? I just got really taken by that idea. And then at the same time, I felt like there was some things happening more broadly in the market around miniaturization of chips, some improvements to battery life, a whole iOS and Android ecosystem that didn't really exist before. Like I felt like there was a confluence of things that could make the timing for the technology right as well.

6:37But beyond that, I also just didn't know and I was obsessed with it and I was going to do it. You know, for folks listening, I think when you first launched your product, it was roughly around when Apple Watch and Garmin smartwatch came up Maybe Aura a little bit came up a little bit later, but you actually started well before, I think it was like early 2010, something like that, that you started thinking about it. It was before everybody realized you're going to have this smart tracking system on your wrist the whole time. I'm curious, usually for kind of product builders, they're usually over-index on a specific trait or like a superpower, if you call it this way.

7:14And I wonder for you, how would you index on what made you and Whoop unique? Well, I think one thing that helped us is we had a fairly focused mission. We wanted to build wearable technology to unlock human performance. And that was a clarifying mission because it meant we were really focused on the data and the health side of things. If you look at a lot of products that came out, let's call it in the era of 2014 to 2020, and there were a lot of wearable products. They all fell a little bit victim to a lack of product focus and unclear, like, what was the key use case for these products. And what ended up with is sort of bad health monitor, bad smartwatch.

8:02It was like, you know, sort of no man's land from like a strength of functionality. You mean like trying to do too much or? Trying to do too many things. For example, Whoop is great at all the things that we do for all the things that we don't do, right? Like it's not a watch. It doesn't do push notifications, phone calls. It doesn't even show you your data. I mean, I can't tell you how many people thought that that was crazy, that it wasn't going to have an interface and you weren't going to be able to look at your heart rate in real time or your stress or it wasn't going to do GPS. And so I watched a lot of products go down this rabbit hole of product scope creep where you keep adding these things and you dilute everything else in the process.

8:44Because we didn't do all those other things, we could be really great at health monitoring. So we were all about data collection and accuracy, and we could be very ambitious in a narrow area and chose not to do a lot of things. We also had a very focused target market initially. We were really focused on athletes. We were very focused on professional athletes, college athletes, high-end military, like the best of the best performance-wise. and it keeps you like focused on what matters so accuracy really matter and form factor really mattered comfort really mattered being able to manage a lot of different environments body types you know because we were working with athletes we had a very diverse population right out of the gates in terms of you know size of arms and muscles hairiness skin type uh you know a lot of products because they weren't that focused on health or fitness.

9:44They just trained their data on white males running on a treadmill indoors. Well, turns out that's the easiest thing to measure. Take someone with really dark skin outdoors in the sunlight doing something that has non-periodic motion. All of a sudden you got a lot of data problems. That's just a specific example, but it It goes back to if you can be more focused in your vision, I think you have a better chance. This is going to sound crazy, but I think I had a little bit of an advantage in that I wasn't an expert in any of this stuff. I just decided I need to find the best people in all these different categories.

10:21You know, I'm not a computer scientist. I'm not an engineer. I'm not a designer. I'm not a doctor. But I was fortunate in that I was able to find these people and create an environment in which they could work really successfully together. You know, when I saw the whoop for the first time, it looked to me like a great lifestyle wearable, right? Like no screens, no buttons. But then gradually, once you see the data, the data was actually really sophisticated and deep. That focus on athletes, was that a starting point for you? Or like, no, no, I need to unlock this audience first because if I unlock this audience, I know I have something deep.

10:55Yeah, I mean, look, I was really inspired by brands growing up, Nike in particular. Nike was the first moment I felt like as a kid I even understood what a brand was. It was like you have a white cotton t-shirt and you have a white cotton t-shirt with a big swoosh on it. And they're the same t-shirt, yet this one feels different when I wear it. Why is that? Okay, well, it's because the swoosh stands for something. It makes me feel something. Okay, that's a brand. And when I looked at the wearable space and even more broadly medical devices, it was like the opposite feeling. It was like, wow, if you wear that, all of a sudden there's a stigma associated with it.

11:36The medical device space I felt like was filled with almost a feeling of embarrassment to have to wear a product versus the product makes you feel cool and aspirational. And so a lot of the strategy of working with professional athletes was a brand strategy too. It was an idea that if we could get the world's best athletes to wear this product, we could authentically build a brand around performance. And what if wearing whoop was a positive signal? It wasn't a negative signal. You cared about your health. You're sick. It was a positive signal. You cared about your health. You want to be a better version of yourself.

12:13So that was really the long-term vision or arc of working with athletes. And even today, I mean, our population is mostly not athletes. But we still use, I would say, a fairly aspirational brand positioning with many of these heroic athletes because it's a little bit of a Nike playbook. Yeah, I love the point around, you know, in many ways, it's like you're optimizing for the upside of focusing on your health, not the mitigating health concerns in many ways. And we had the chief designer officer for Air Jordan, and he said that first and foremost, they design for emotion. That's cool. That's what they design for.

12:53So it's emotion. It's their number one principle. And from that, they work backwards. So what is the emotion they're trying to get you to feel? Then they work backwards from that. I'm curious. I think you probably have some pretty amazing principles around what does it mean to design for athletes? So you talked about the kind of the, they care about tremendously about the health side. It's not the watch. You mentioned the comfort, right? Like now I actually get it why Whoop is elastic as a wristband. I didn't get this before, but it was just in many ways, just a cool form factor. Any other thing that comes to mind to you?

13:21What does it mean if folks are like, hey, I'm building for athletes, not necessarily a wearable, but I'm building for athletes. What comes to mind? Well, I'll tell you what, actually. People ask me this question about building for pro athletes. And I think the surprising thing about building for pro athletes was how much it was building for consumers. Like there actually isn't that big of a difference between creating a wearable for LeBron James and creating a wearable for you or me. At the end of the day, the principles of you have a lot of data and you have to simplify it. You have to tell people, so what?

13:53You got to use color coding to signify what's important, what's not. you need a product that people are willing to wear. These are all things that seem to be consistent for everyone, not specific to a market. I would say that maybe the most like unique whoop design point of view was that we believe wearable technology should be cool or invisible. And what you find is a lot of wearable technology stuck somewhere in the middle, which is no man's land. And so the principle around cool is, okay, how do you make it customizable? How do you make it something that people want to wear? How do you make it something that says something about who they are?

14:29And so we actually designed a wearable that kind of removes a lot of the technology. These bands are actually interchangeable. So we have 75 ,000 different types of bands and materials and colors and looks and feels. It's an incredibly customizable wearable. And it gives people a lot of individual control. The second category is invisible. So at the end of the day, you want the data. You want to understand how you can improve your health or improve your life. And you may just want the sensor to disappear. And so we designed the sensor to actually be able to live in different locations throughout the body.

15:05And we even designed locations where people wouldn't know you're wearing Whoop at all. We think that's the best way to create a wearable experience. Either it's cool and it resonates for your aesthetic, or it disappears and no one knows it's there, including you. You know, so I'm wearing one right now, and I was pretty shocked to see how light this is versus my other Garmin, which is, you know, I can probably, I need to take it off when I'm weighting myself because it actually has an impact on my weight. And it's just very different, right? In fact, they complement each other in many ways versus kind of compete with each other.

15:41You know, something that you talked about releasing, I don't know if it's recently, but something which is important, which is heart rate variability, which is something that I think athletes would care a lot about. Like, I don't consider myself an athlete, But I look at it because I train every day. And before I do my cardio training, I want to see, like, what am I aiming for in terms of heart variability and so on. But I'm assuming the vast mass of people, I don't know if they couldn't care less, but maybe they just want a TLDR. You know, what strain should I aim for today? When you introduced me like that and you actually invested in the technology to build it correctly because it's not easy, do you go through, like, this will appeal to the masses or this will appeal to the athletes?

16:18Is there a trade-off conversation for you there? Well, heart rate variability, just for the audience that may not know what it is, is this lens into your autonomic nervous system. And your autonomic nervous system consists of sympathetic and parasympathetic activity. Sympathetics like activation, heart rate up, blood pressure up, respiration up. It's what's happening when you're stressed or you're about to exercise, or even if you have a thought that makes you nervous about something, okay, you're going to have a sympathetic response. Parasympathetic is all the opposite. Heart rate down, blood pressure down, respiration down.

16:49It's what helps you fall asleep. When you inhale, that's sympathetic. When you exhale, that's parasympathetic. And all of this is measured through heart rate variability. So if your heart rate variability is in a higher state, it would be a sign that your body is more relaxed, maybe more calm, more balanced. If your heart rate variability were in a lower state, that would be a sign that your body is under stress. And it's a very sensitive metric. Even right now, over the course of this conversation, our heart rate variabilities have probably changed considerably. And so I read about this statistic 15 years ago, and I was shocked that it wasn't a more mainstream statistic.

17:33Power lifters had been using heart rate variability to determine how much weight they should lift. The best cyclists in the world had been using heart rate variability to determine how much load they should take on in cycling. Cardiologists had used heart rate variability to determine if someone was going to have a heart attack. And so I said to myself, you know, why isn't this statistic more in the mainstream or something that people talk about? And a lot of it came back to this fact that it was just very hard to measure, and it required expensive hospital equipment. So that's why WHOOP measures heart rate variability, and we do it continuously.

18:07Now, to your point about people wanting to understand the metric I just explained versus, well, what does it mean? that's a little bit of the difference of a raw metric versus a score. So, you know, every day whoop gives you a recovery score from zero to a hundred percent and it's red, yellow, green. And so one way we think about data is in layers. Okay. If you have three seconds, you want to know whether you're red, yellow, or green. If you have 10 seconds, you want to know whether you're red, yellow, or green and what percentage it is. Great. I'm in the green 95%. You know, if you have 30 seconds, you might get into, okay, what are the four things that go into my recovery score.

18:45Well, it's how I slept last night. It's how I was breathing. It's my resting heart rate. And it's this thing called HRV, heart rate variability. What is that? And then if you want to go deeper, you can figure out what is HRV. So that's what I mean by layers of understanding. I think a challenge that a lot of companies in the space have had is because they collect a lot of data, they want to show you a lot of data. And, you know, in your role, you know this as well as anyone, but it takes some restraint actually. You have to really try to figure out, well, what's the big thing? And then what are the two or three sub things?

19:17And then what are the 10 third order of business sort of things? And depending on who you are on Wupari variability is probably in that second or third tier. And we have a stress score that uses it. We have a sleep score that uses it. We have a recovery score that uses it. I mean, it's such a powerful metric that it's powering a lot of our algorithms, but it only works because we can measure it as accurately as an electrocardiogram and measure it continuously. I love the point about restraint. I think this will resonate a lot with people. There's this great kind of law in products in general that every system has a level of complexity, and the question is how much is the system observing the product because of the complexity on behalf of the user or how much are you pushing the complexity to the user?

20:01And in many ways, your point about restraint for me almost talks to the idea of progressive disclosure. Like how much am I willing to expose to you depends on how much do you want to get. So I'm going to show you the basics. And if you want more, there's more for you to have. And I do agree that many products fall into the camp around. I'm going to show you a lot because I'm cool and we worked really hard. And I'm sure you'll appreciate that as a user. But most of the time you find yourself distancing yourself away. And usually you blame yourself, not the product. You're basically saying, hey, I just don't get it.

20:30I'm sure it's a sophisticated product. I'm going to move on. By the way, that whole point goes back to the pro athlete thing. Because people would say to me all the time, oh, those pro athletes, they probably want to see all the data. But I just want the simple stats. I'm like, the pro athletes want it simple too, you know. They want the simple headline and then sure, if they want to go deeper and they have time to go deeper, they'll do that. Love that. I think it's more common than it is specific. Let's see if this is different for athletes versus the kind of the mass population. Behavior change.

20:59There's a lot in the app, which is great about onboarding you into an experience that kind of teaches you about why this is important for you and starting to build, you know, what I call the candy versus the veggies paradigm where like veggies, you have to kind of start building a habit. Candy, you have like a quick mental response to that. And I don't need to do much, at least not with my kids. It's very hard actually to build habit apps based on productivity, on helping you become better. It's much easier to build addictive apps that are built in entertainment than you're trying to check out.

21:31I'm sure you spent a lot of time thinking through how do you incentivize behavioral change. I'm curious, like, what did you find there? Well, it's worth saying that behavior change requires often some form of motivation. Said differently, it's much easier to drive behavior change for a motivated customer or audience, right? If you have someone who signs up for something and they're like, I am committed to doing this. I'm going to do whatever it takes to get better. That's an easier person to work with than the person who says, I don't know, I'll give this a try. Right? And so I do think there's an element with athletes where they tend to have a motivated lane that they're trying to play in.

22:13Now, that lane might be a little different than your average consumer. Maybe it's more focused on fitness or it's more focused on overtraining versus, say, just pure recovery. But one thing I've found with Whoop is because we've maintained this aspirational brand positioning, we've attracted aspirational people in other walks of life. So, you know, we've got these unbelievable artists on Whoop and musicians and executives. And it's quite cool to see that that aspirational side of things permeates across all disciplines. And how do you think about building discipline for them? Like, that's not easy.

22:53When you join the app, it almost feels like there's the first 14 or 28 days trying to give me a little bit every day. I'm assuming there was a lot of iteration going into this one. How did you come up with the formula you have today around, hey, this is how I get you to understand? Because motivation lasts for a bit, but then it dissipates and you need the discipline to bring it back. What did you do there to kind of build that discipline into the system? Well, there's some functionality, for example, that you immediately are enjoying and feeling. So, you know, you can start an activity within seconds of signing up for WHOOP and immediately start seeing your heart rate and what your strain is over the course of a workout.

23:31There's then also things that, both for research reasons and from a standpoint of like sustained attention, take time to unlock. So your recovery score, I think, takes four days before you get a color. Your stress monitor, I think, takes a week to unlock. Certain trend views, certain weekly and monthly assessments take weeks and months. there's an evolution of information being unlocked for you and explained for you. And I think that's one useful lane. And by the way, it does tie to research. You know, it's hard to understand how recovered someone is if they've been on your product for 24 hours.