Got a LeBron – now I want your mom

For nearly a decade, Whoop has been marketed as the secret weapon for serious athletes. LeBron James was convinced he’d be hitting up the company’s fitness band during Whoop’s first year. Michael Phelps soon appeared. Other Whoop wearers include Cristiano Ronaldo, Patrick Mahomes and Rory McIlroy. A message to the public? The world’s best performers are using these devices to track their bodies, and you can too.

It worked. Whoop, a Boston-based health wearables company founded by Will Ahmed during his senior year at Harvard, now operates in more than 200 countries and, according to Ahmed, not only grew sales by more than 100% last year, but also reached positive cash flow. The hardware, a band worn around the wrist, biceps or torso, measures sleep, recovery, heart rate variability and a growing list of biomarkers. The subscription model, which bundles hardware and software for $200 to $360 per year (including the device itself without the need for a separate purchase), has proven to be very sticky. 83% of monthly active users open an app on a specific day. Ahmed says this rate lags behind WhatsApp.

The next chapter is a harder sell.

Ahmed, 36, wants Whoop to be a life-saving tool rather than a performance tool. It’s a continuous health monitor that not only helps you recover from a tough workout, but also alerts you that one day you’ll have a heart attack and need to go to the hospital.

The company has already rolled out medically proven features, including electrocardiogram monitoring, atrial fibrillation detection (a feature that flags irregular heartbeats that can lead to strokes), and blood pressure “insights.” According to Ahmed, Whoop is the first wearable product to offer this feature.

The FDA disputed the last feature in a warning letter last summer, arguing that it constituted a medical diagnosis, not health monitoring. Whoop said the FDA “exceeded its authority” and continued to build.

Our blood testing partnership with Quest Diagnostics, which currently has more than 2,000 locations in the U.S., allows members to take blood tests and upload biomarkers directly to the app, where clinicians can review the results alongside Whoop data. A feature called Health Span calculates biological age. Ahmed says this feature has become the company’s most popular feature since its launch in May last year.

The device itself has no screen, notifications, or pedometer. The decision was strategic from the beginning. “If it has a screen, it’s a watch,” he told TechCrunch over a Zoom call. “And if you are a watch, you will be competing with many other watches, because people will never wear two watches.”

Whoop suggests that not only can you wear it with a watch you already own, but it can also be completely hidden, putting the sensor in your bicep sleeve, sports bra, or shorts to disappear under your clothes. It’s probably safe to say that the overwhelming majority of Whoop customers want to wear their bands as a fashion statement. However, when asked directly, Ahmed suggested that the company’s clothing line, launched in 2021, grew 70% last year.

But Whoop is not alone in wanting to get beyond its roots and bring everyone into the tent. Oura, the Finnish company that developed the smart ring that has become Whoop’s most direct rival, has built a large and loyal following among high-performance professionals who approach their bodies with the same rigor they apply to their own work.

Oura’s model works differently. Customers purchase a ring for about $350 and then pay about $70 per year to access the platform. When I spoke with Oura’s Chief Product Officer Dorothy Kilroy last fall, she told me that their 12-month retention rates were in the low 80s. That’s a surprising number for any wearable product, and most of them will quickly end up in the drawer.

Now both companies say women are their fastest-growing segment, and they announced a blood testing partnership within a day of each other last fall. This was a coincidence that neither side wanted to discuss.

Whoop’s numbers still reflect where it originated. Ahmed is cautious about sharing too many numbers publicly, but says Whoop skews more toward men than women. He also says the business is currently split roughly evenly between the U.S. and the rest of the world. This is a change from just a few years ago. Whoop officially ships to 60 countries.

At least the thing about Whoop is that its most popular users don’t need to be persuaded. Earlier this year, the Australian Open ordered players, including Carlos Alcaraz, to remove their Whoop bands mid-tournament despite the devices being approved by the International Tennis Federation. The players stepped back. Although Whoop has brand ambassadors (Aryna Sabalenka is one of them), others like Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner have also been wearing Whoops under their wristbands, but they simply don’t want to take off their brand ambassadorship.

Ahmed spoke rather cheerfully about the report’s findings. “It sparked a media furore and further highlighted the fact that all these talented people were organically wearing Whoop because of the value it offered.”

Ahmed takes care to protect it. The company has a long-standing policy of not offering players equity in exchange for wearing the band. His reasoning? If you like a product, you’ll wear it regardless. Official partnerships with Ferrari, the PGA Tour and UCI Mountain Biking work differently. It’s about getting your brand out there to a wider audience that shares the same sensibilities.

But Oura is making the same calculations. The company, founded just a year after Whoop, is widely believed to be exploring an IPO. Once Oura goes public first, it will set financial benchmarks (revenue multiples, growth rates, retention metrics) against which Whoop will be measured. Whoop currently employs about 750 people and is hiring 600 more.

Ahmed says little about this topic. “If we’re focused on building great technology and growing our business, we’ll be happy with Whoop as a public company, regardless of who goes public first,” he says.

He speaks the way someone does throughout a conversation when they think carefully about what they should and should not say. Ahmed was captain of the Harvard squash team, and his former teammates included Ali Farag, who went on to become world number one. But he was quick to realize that proximity to greatness should not be mistaken for greatness itself.

“You might have the wrong impression about how good I am at squash because I’m his team-mate,” he jokes.

He started building what would become Whoop in 2011. While studying economics and government, he read hundreds of medical papers and tried to solve a problem he had experienced firsthand: overtraining, with no reliable way to measure its effects on the body.

Whoop isn’t Ahmed’s first company. It was his only full-time job. When I asked him whether he would recommend that path to a founder sitting where he was in 2012, this was the question he most freely answered.

Starting a company is “without a doubt the most special thing you can do in your career” for the right person with the right intentions. However, he adds, “Being an entrepreneur and trying to build something from scratch is a very painful experience, and you have to have a fairly high pain threshold to the point where you often get lost in the allure of fundraising announcements and milestones.” “You have to be more obsessed with the problem you are solving than with the idea of ​​becoming an entrepreneur,” he says.

He doesn’t seem to have much doubt about which side of the line he stands on.