Building WHOOP with Will Ahmed: Fitness Wearable Redefined

Summary

Building WHOOP with Will Ahmed: Fitness Wearable Redefined

Hosted by Tomer Cohen, Chief Product Officer of LinkedIn

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Introduction

In this episode of Building One, Tomer Cohen engages in an insightful conversation with Will Ahmed, the founder and CEO of WHOOP, a cutting-edge fitness wearable tailored primarily for professional athletes. The discussion delves into the inception of WHOOP, its unique approach to product development, the importance of focused design, and the future of health monitoring technology.

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Will Ahmed's Background and Motivation

Will Ahmed shares his journey from being a Harvard squash player to founding WHOOP. His passion for sports and a personal struggle with overtraining ignited his interest in understanding and optimizing athletic performance through data.

Will Ahmed [03:04]: "I was always into sports and exercise throughout my life... I asked simple questions like, what does it mean to train optimally? What does it mean to peak on a given day?"

Key Points:

• Early Passion for Sports: Growing up on Long Island, Will played squash at Harvard, which ingrained a deep appreciation for athletic training.
• Personal Challenge: His tendency to overtrain led him to seek measurable insights into his body's performance and recovery.
• Academic Exploration: Will leveraged his academic environment to conduct extensive physiology research, identifying key measurements like heart rate variability (HRV) and sleep patterns.

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Focusing on a Narrow Product

One of WHOOP's distinguishing features is its narrow and deep focus on health monitoring without the distractions of broader smartwatch functionalities.

Will Ahmed [08:45]: "Whoop is great at all the things that we do for all the things that we don't do. Right? It’s not a watch... we could be really great at health monitoring."

Key Points:

• Avoiding Scope Creep: Unlike many wearables that try to incorporate multiple features (e.g., step counting, notifications), WHOOP concentrates solely on accurate health and performance tracking.
• Targeted Audience: Initially targeting professional and college athletes, as well as high-end military personnel, ensured that WHOOP remained focused on what truly mattered—accuracy, comfort, and reliability.
• Design Philosophy: By not including features like push notifications or GPS, WHOOP maintains a lightweight and unobtrusive design, appealing to users who prioritize performance data over additional functionalities.

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Building Original Hardware vs. Integrating Existing Technology

Will faced significant skepticism from investors who advised against building proprietary hardware. However, his commitment to vertical integration became a cornerstone of WHOOP's success.

Will Ahmed [26:06]: "Investors told me I shouldn't build hardware and that I should leverage all these different existing hardwares that were out there... but I felt like there weren't hardwares in the market that would allow us to do the type of sensing and algorithm work that we needed to do."

Key Points:

• Vertical Integration: Owning every layer of the product experience—from sensors to signal processing to the app—allows WHOOP to ensure consistency and high quality across all components.
• Competitive Advantage: By controlling the hardware, WHOOP can optimize data accuracy and reliability, differentiating itself from competitors that rely on third-party components.
• Long-Term Vision: Building original hardware, despite higher initial costs and longer development times, positions WHOOP as a leader in health tracking rather than just another fitness gadget.

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Data Collection and Presentation

WHOOP excels in its ability to collect vast amounts of health data while presenting it in a user-friendly manner that avoids overwhelming the user.

Will Ahmed [20:21]: "Instead of flooding users with numbers, it layers insights. You only have three seconds. Great. Let's check if you're red, yellow or green for the day."

Key Points:

• Heart Rate Variability (HRV): A central metric that provides insights into the autonomic nervous system, indicating stress levels and recovery status.
• Layered Information: WHOOP employs a progressive disclosure approach—offering simple, actionable insights upfront and allowing users to delve deeper as needed.
  • Immediate Insights: Quick indicators like "red, yellow, or green" status.
  • Detailed Metrics: Users can explore underlying data such as sleep quality, respiration rates, and HRV scores for a comprehensive understanding.
• Restraint in Data Display: By limiting the amount of information shown at once, WHOOP ensures that users remain engaged without feeling overwhelmed, fostering better user retention and satisfaction.

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Behavior Change and Community Building

Will emphasizes the importance of motivation and discipline in fostering long-term behavioral changes through WHOOP's platform.

Will Ahmed [22:16]: "Behavior change requires often some form of motivation. It's much easier to drive behavior change for a motivated customer or audience."

Key Points:

• Motivated Users: WHOOP attracts users who are already committed to improving their health and performance, making behavior change initiatives more effective.
• In-App Features: Features like team-based data sharing and competitive elements foster a sense of community and accountability among users.
• Organizational Culture: Will's approach of incentivizing health metrics within his own company (e.g., bonuses for high sleep scores) demonstrates the powerful role of community and accountability in habit formation.
  • Example: Offering monthly bonuses for employees who achieve specific sleep performance targets encourages sustained engagement with the app.

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Future Vision for WHOOP

Looking ahead, Will envisions WHOOP evolving into a comprehensive 24/7 health coach, leveraging advances in technology and data analytics to revolutionize personal and preventive healthcare.

Will Ahmed [37:08]: "At its core, we're building a 247 health coach. What that means is if there's anything you want to improve or there's anything wrong, WHOOP is going to tell you how to do it or tell you what's wrong."

Key Points:

• Expanded Sensing Capabilities: Incorporating new sensors to gather a broader range of health data, enhancing the platform's predictive and preventive capabilities.
• Generative AI Integration: Utilizing AI to interact conversationally with users, providing personalized insights and recommendations based on collected data.
• Preventive Healthcare: Transitioning from reactive to proactive health measures, such as predicting and preventing heart attacks or other medical conditions before they occur.
• Societal Impact: Addressing critical health challenges like declining life expectancy, rising healthcare costs, and obesity through continuous health monitoring and personalized interventions.

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Rapid Fire Questions

To conclude the episode, Tomer poses a series of rapid-fire questions to Will, providing personal insights into his habits and perspectives on health technology.

1. Average Sleep Score:

   Will Ahmed [39:19]: "It's about seven hours. I'm not a hero. And then I'm getting eight or nine hours, but I'm getting like the optimal amount for a CEO who's trying to run a company."

2. Unhealthy Habit:

   Will Ahmed [39:39]: "I still drink alcohol from time to time... Alcohol consumption has a negative 12% on average impact on recovery."

3. Desired Future Technology:

   Will Ahmed [40:27]: "Having an alerting system and a leading indicator around cardiovascular disease would have a massive impact."

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Conclusion and Takeaways

Tomer Cohen summarizes the key lessons from the conversation, highlighting WHOOP's strategic focus and innovative approach to product development.

1. Avoiding Scope Creep:

   • Maintaining a narrow focus allows WHOOP to excel in health monitoring without diluting its core functionalities.

2. Vertical Integration as a Competitive Edge:

   • Controlling both hardware and software ensures unparalleled accuracy and user experience, setting WHOOP apart in the wearable market.

3. Effective Data Presentation:

   • Utilizing a layered approach to data presentation ensures users receive actionable insights without being overwhelmed by complexity.

4. Community and Accountability:

   • Building a sense of community and accountability through features like team-based data sharing enhances user engagement and fosters long-term habit formation.

5. Aspiration-Driven Design:

   • Designing for professional athletes while ensuring the principles apply to everyday consumers creates an aspirational yet accessible brand identity.

Final Thoughts: The episode underscores the importance of focus, control over the product ecosystem, and intelligent data presentation in building a successful and impactful health wearable. As WHOOP continues to innovate, it stands as a testament to how specialized, user-centered design can lead to transformative products in the health and fitness industry.

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Thank you for reading this summary of "Building WHOOP with Will Ahmed: Fitness Wearable Redefined." To gain deeper insights and explore the full conversation, consider listening to the episode on LinkedIn Podcasts or your preferred podcast platform.

Transcript

[Will Ahmed]

LinkedIn news innovation ultimately is solving problems.

[Tomer Coyne]

It came back from my own personal pain point. It just takes a while to build that trust.

[Will Ahmed]

The problem that I was trying to solve, it was all I was thinking about.

[Tomer Coyne]

You have to be obsessed with the human condition. I'm Tomer Coyne, Chief product officer of LinkedIn and this is building one.

[Will Ahmed]

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.

[Tomer Coyne]

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. We're going to get into that and so much more. So stick around. From LinkedIn News I'm Leah Smart, host of Everyday Better, an award winning podcast dedicated to personal development. Join me every week for captivating stories and research to find more fulfillment in.

[Will Ahmed]

Your work and personal life.

[Tomer Coyne]

Listen to Everyday better on the LinkedIn.

[Will Ahmed]

Podcast network, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts from.

[Tomer Coyne]

LinkedIn News.

[Will Ahmed]

I'm Jessi Hempel, host of the hello Monday Podcast. Start your week with the hello Monday Podcast. We'll navigate career pivots. We'll learn where happiness fits in. Listen to hello Monday with me, Jessi Hempel on the LinkedIn podcast network or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Tomer Coyne]

Not 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 for 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 originally 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 band 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 Whoops, and how restraint is a key principle when showing users their data so let's get into it. I 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?

[Will Ahmed]

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. So 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. And 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. You 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.

[Tomer Coyne]

And this all happened while you were in college?

[Will Ahmed]

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? And 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, you know, every mistake along the way and had to figure it out.

[Tomer Coyne]

What was the leap of faith? Did you have a solution in mind or you just felt you needed to solve this problem?

[Will Ahmed]

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, and 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 ex like. I felt like there was a confluence of things that could make the timing for the technology right as well. But beyond that, I also just didn't know and I was obsessed with it and I was going to do it.

[Tomer Coyne]

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. And 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 realize 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. And I wonder for you, how would you index on what made you and Whoop unique?

[Will Ahmed]

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 2014-2020 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, like you know, sort of no man's land from a, from like a strength of functionality.

[Tomer Coyne]

You mean like trying to do too.

[Will Ahmed]

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, 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, your heart rate in real time 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. Because 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 focused on what matters. So accuracy really mattered, 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, you know, a lot of products because they weren't that focused on health or fitness. They 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 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. You 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.

[Tomer Coyne]

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 saw 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.

[Will Ahmed]

Yeah, 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. The 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. So 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.

[Tomer Coyne]

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 way. And we had the chief designer officer for Air Jordan and he said that first and foremost, they design for emotion.

[Will Ahmed]

Oh, that's cool.

[Tomer Coyne]

That's what they design for. So 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, like, what 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?

[Will Ahmed]

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? You got to use color coding to, you know, 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 is 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. And so we actually designed a wearable that kind of, it 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 attribute able to live in different locations throughout the body. And 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 esthetic or it disappears and no one knows it's there, including you.

[Tomer Coyne]

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, it's just very different. Right. In fact, they complement each other in many ways versus kind of compete with each other, you 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 strength should I aim for today? When you introduce something like that and you actually invest 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? Is there a trade off conversation for you there?

[Will Ahmed]

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. That, like, makes you nervous about something, okay, you're gonna have a sympathetic response. Parasympathetic's all the opposite. Heart rate down, blood pressure down, respiration down. It'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's more relaxed, maybe more calm, more balanced. If you're. If your heart rate variability were in a lower state, that'd be a sign that your body's under stress. And it's a very sensitive metric. Even right now, for 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. Powerlifters 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. And 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. Now, 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, everyday whoop gives you a recovery score from 0 to 100%, 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? Well, 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 could 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 and then what are the 10 third order of business sort of things. And depending on who you are on whoopari, 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.

[Tomer Coyne]

I love the point about restraint. I think this will resonate a lot with people. Like, there's this great kind of law in products in general that every system have a level of complexity. And the question is, how much is the system observing the product absorb the complexity on behalf of the user, or how much are you pushing the complexity to the user? And 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. I'm sure it's a sophisticated product, I'm going to move on.

[Will Ahmed]

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.

[Tomer Coyne]

Love that.

[Will Ahmed]

I think it's more common than it is specific.

[Tomer Coyne]

Let's see if this is different for athletes versus the mass population behavior change. There'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 what I call the candy versus the veggies paradigm, where veggies, you have to kind of start building a habit candy, you have 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 that are based around productivity on helping you become better. It's much easier to build addictive apps that are built on entertainment than you're trying to check out. I'm sure you spent a lot of time thinking through how do you incentivize behavioral change? I'm curious, what did you find there?

[Will Ahmed]

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, 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. Now, that lane might be a little different than. Than your average consumer. Maybe it's. It's more focused on fitness or it's more focused on over training 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.

[Tomer Coyne]

And how do you think about building discipline for them? Like, that's not easy. When 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 discipline to bring. To bring it back. What did you do there to kind of build that Discipline into the system.

[Will Ahmed]

Well, there's some functionality, for example, that you immediately are enjoying and feeling. So 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. There'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 explain 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. But if you have a week of continuous data on that individual, you actually have a very good sense for how recovered they are. So some of these things are based on data and some of them are based on more of a behavioral analysis.

[Tomer Coyne]

What I love that about the product. So when I first signed up, you know, some of it was research and insight I can play with, but there was also, it kind of felt like a promise that was like, hey, hold on, query this for 10 days and then I'll show you what I can do. And I thought it was a very smart way to keep me excited and waiting and at the same time helping me delay gratification, which in many times in consumer products we're just trying to give them something right off the bat. But the idea of like we're working every day, we're counting, like there's almost, I think there was like a day one, day two, and like you're waiting for day seven or day 10. And it just got me back. And I was really excited to see what I would get back in the end. And that I felt was like a really smart way to bring it in. We're going to take a quick break, but don't go anywhere. When we come back, Will is going to dive into why it's important for WHOOP to build its own hardware instead of leveraging existing technology.

[Will Ahmed]

I got rejected by a lot of investors, somewhere between 70 and 90% of the people who were rejected. It was around the idea that we were building hardware.

[Tomer Coyne]

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[Will Ahmed]

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[Will Ahmed]

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[Tomer Coyne]

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[Will Ahmed]

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[Will Ahmed]

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[Tomer Coyne]

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[Will Ahmed]

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[Tomer Coyne]

We'll even give you a $100 credit on your next campaign. Get started [e-mail] marketer terms and conditions apply. All right, we're back, and I'm speaking with Will Ahmed, founder of vooop, a fitness tracker. Community is massive in building habits. Like, you know, I was also deep into sports when I was young, love everything with a ball, but hated running as a kid and as an adult. So to get myself into running, I joined a running group that basically forced myself to run with a group that was in a sense of accountability, dependability. We used to meet, like, early in the morning, and that kind of got me through it. So today I love running. I run very frequently. Curious how you think about community, because I know it's a whole separate experience in the app. It's all connected, but it's something that you spend time on. Is this something that you are experimenting with? Do you feel like this is a big part of the motivation component, discipline component? How do you think about community when it comes to health and fitness products?

[Will Ahmed]

It's an area that I certainly think whoop is early to. I mean, in the app, you can join different teams, you can have conversations with people, you can share your data. There's a lot of things to think about. One is, how much data do you want to have people sharing with one another? And we learned this from working with sports teams. But it's not binary. A lot of people think about it in terms of let's pick a college athlete. How much data do I want? You know, I wouldn't want my coach to see this. Like, when I go to bed, I don't want to share anything, Right? And from the coach's vantage point, like, maybe they don't want to see everything. Maybe they want to see the right things, like your recovery today and how hard your workout was. Like, that might be enough. So we quickly realized that we had to think about our data in layers as well from a sharing standpoint. And that became one of the principles around the social networking features that we've built. So a team, for example, can have these different tiers of data sharing, and a lot of teams end up somewhere in the middle where you're sharing things like your strain and your workouts and today's recovery score. But you're missing a lot of the context for why that recovery score might be, say, red today. You know, you could have a red recovery because you've been training really hard, because you're sick, because you were out drinking all night, you know, because you're stressed. And so we don't need the data to answer that question necessarily, because the coach and the athlete might feel most comfortable with a relationship where now the coach just knows that a member of their team's rundown and that, you know, informs practice or anything else. And I just give you that sports team example because I think it permeates broader than that. As you start thinking about a social network where you may have an individual who's sharing a lot of information with a small group of people, like their family, and then they might be sharing a different set of information with the whole network. That is. Woop. And. And so over time, I do think that you'll see us build out a lot more functionality in this space. I mean, obviously you oversee a massive social network, so you know something about it.

[Tomer Coyne]

Yeah, I think in many ways it depends on what are you trying to solve for. So, for example, I think the idea of almost like accountability, people sharing their streaks. Streaks is a massive thing in productivity apps and habit building. And it's actually quite remarkable what people would do to keep their streak going on. And I think that's in many ways, if it's just me and myself running a streak, I think it's one thing. But when I have my buddies and we have a streak going on, they would maybe not drink that night so they can keep that streak going on for them. There's a lot going on in that psychology of streaks. And when it's used in a productive way, it's phenomenal. When it's used in unproductive ways, it could go the other side as well, because it's all about kind of the dopamine rush you get. It feels like one of those areas where, like, in fitness and I love the work you're doing in whoop to kind of push on that. But there's so much gain from having dependability. And I agree with you, by the way, like, sharing everything probably too much, but there's a level of, like, how well I'm doing or if there's a challenge together or there's a race together or actually, I think you did something with your workplace and tell me if I'm correct. You gave your employees bonuses if their sleep score was going up?

[Will Ahmed]

Yeah.

[Tomer Coyne]

See, that's amazing.

[Will Ahmed]

Yeah. Various teams at woop, we're kind of always sharing data. We've got a culture around it. But we give a hundred dollar bonus every month to every person who gets over 85% sleep performance on Whoop. And like 60% or 70% of the organization gets that bonus every month.

[Tomer Coyne]

That's amazing. By the way, signaling from the tops. I don't know if you share your sleep score with them. That is also a really powerful way to inspire community to work.

[Will Ahmed]

Tolloy.

[Tomer Coyne]

Well, curious about building versus Buying. I believe I heard that like WHOOP tries to invent most of its technology or build it in house.

[Will Ahmed]

No, that's right.

[Tomer Coyne]

I'm assuming that's costly, that's time consuming. I'm sure there's a feature you want to bring in mind to the market. Is this kind of the brand. Like everything you see, we build so you can trust it that we're not using somebody else components. How do you think about build versus Buy or integrate?

[Will Ahmed]

Well, in the early days of building whoop, an enormous number of investors told me I shouldn't build hardware and that I should leverage all these different existing hardwares that were out there. And I felt like there weren't hardwares in the market that would allow us to do the type of sensing and algorithm work that we needed to do. But it was a question that I deeply explored because it was such resounding feedback. I mean, I got rejected by a lot of investors in the course of building loop, somewhere between 70 and 90% of the people who rejected me or rejected whoop. It was around the idea that we were building hardware. Like there's people just scared of hardware. And so there's a bit of a long answer to your question, but the process of really doing a deep dive on why we were going to build hardware made me pretty convinced about this idea of being a vertically integrated company, which is to say if you can control every piece of the member experience and there's a certain quality bar at every level, the intersection points can be where a lot of magic happens. And actually when you don't control those intersection points, that's where a lot goes wrong. So the hardware example is somewhat obvious, but in a world in which we didn't control our hardware, there would be all sorts of data compliance issues. Our algorithms would would be looking at one data set differently than another data set. So you couldn't really match things Apples to apples. But I'll go further than that. Like, in the process of developing an industrial design or a hardware that had bands and materials, there was a question of whether we should outsource that and whether, like, should we have a band maker for loop? And again, we realized, like, well, if we could really control that piece of the experience, that could be a really magical experience. And oh, by the way, if we don't control it, we're going to have problems with how the sensor is attached to your arm and how different materials might affect the data quality and how sweat and other things are going to therefore influence the wearability. And so every time that I looked at this sort of question of should we be outsourcing something versus doing it ourselves, I kept coming back to that integration point. And so while it's more expensive and, and probably takes longer from a sort of a company evolution standpoint, when you have these different pillars, like when you have your own hardware and you have your own signal processing algorithms and you have your own accessories and apparel and you have your own software and like you have your own brand positioning, the way you can have those things play off of each other and the way that you can isolate a problem in the market and the way that you can solve a problem, you know, if we have a problem with accuracy on a certain population for a certain metric, we can solve that at the hardware level, we can solve that at the signal processing and algorithm level, we can solve that at the band level. And the way it's connected to your body, we can solve that at the design level in terms of how we show you the information. So all of a sudden, like, we have this massive set of capabilities and problem solving. And so I do think it's like a harder path. But if you're successful at it, I think it makes the value of your business much greater. And I also think it can create for ultimately the best member experience.

[Tomer Coyne]

I think this brings back full circle to where you started this conversation about focus. Like, I think you're not trying to be everything for everybody. And you reminded me of that famous saying by Alan Kay that people who are serious about building great software should make their own hardware. And I think you know what you're trying to build.

[Will Ahmed]

Yeah, there's definitely an element of that.

[Tomer Coyne]

So fast forward, I think we're just getting started with the category that your help pioneered. When it comes to measuring the body, it just feels like there's going to be so much incredible technology ability experiences that are going to come to mind. The days of counting steps. We're well beyond that. Every year or so. I wear a cgm, but CGM for folks listening is a continuous glucose monitoring. Helps you track your glucose levels and how they fluctuate throughout the day to the point about heart rate variability. It's very personalized. You learn a lot about yourself and your own habits, from nutrition to fitness, and it actually materially changed my habits. I try kind of every year or so to do it, and I'm actually wearing one right now. I'm curious for you, when you think about the future, and not too far, because I think the future feels like it's happening in increments of 2, 3 years all the time right now, what do you want Whoop to be like? I think there's a notion around expansion into medical devices. But even beyond that, where do you see WHOOP playing? Like, if I am a consumer of whoop, what am I able to do three, five years from now? That is potentially unthinkable today?

[Will Ahmed]

I mean, at its core, we're building a 247 health coach. What that means is if there's anything you want to improve or there's anything wrong, Whoop is going to tell you how to do it or tell you what's wrong. And it's going to kind of isolate behavior change and problems in your life. And part of that means it's going to be able to look at a vast variety of health data. And so from our standpoint, that'll be adding additional sensing capabilities. But you can also imagine other categories of data that we might collect, and having all of that under one roof to tell you what matters and what needs to change. The medical headline of that is you won't go to see a doctor on some random day of the year for an annual checkup. You'll go see a doctor 30 minutes before you're going to have a heart attack, or because you've got some disease state detected, or because you're a pregnant woman and you're about to deliver early and there's a reading that signals it. I think it's just going to get super predictive and preventative. We've never really had a stage like this in the history of humanity where we have this much powerful technology worn continuously at what's becoming a fairly accessible cost, coupled now with this boom in generative AI and the ability to interact conversationally with information, to deeply understand it. I mean, that is a collection of sort of data points about the moment that we live in has me super optimistic. I mean, I think we're right on the cusp of a massive health transformation. And by the way, society needs it. Life expectancy in the United States declined for the first time in decades this past year. We've got healthcare costs that are too high and obesity surging. Like there's just a lot of good that can come from continuous health monitoring.

[Tomer Coyne]

I'm for one, could not be more excited for it feels like we're on the cusp of a transformation and it's awesome to see that you're already thinking about how WHOOP can pioneer that. Will, I'd love to end on a quick, rapid fire. Questions so quick. One, what's your average sleep score?

[Will Ahmed]

It's about seven hours. I'm not a hero. And then I'm getting eight or nine hours, but I'm getting like the optimal amount for a CEO who's trying to run a company.

[Tomer Coyne]

Do you get the bonus you give.

[Will Ahmed]

Your employees on and off? Let's put it that way.

[Tomer Coyne]

Okay. And what's one unhealthy or suboptimal habit that you have no intention of giving up?

[Will Ahmed]

Hmm, that's a good question. I don't know if I have no intention of giving it up, but I still drink alcohol from time to time. And I will say that it's super obvious in WHOOP data that alcohol is bad for you. And to put it in perspective, when we looked at our whole population, we measure all these different behaviors on whoop. Alcohol consumption has a negative 12% on average impact on recovery. And the second worst is being sick, which has a negative 5%. So literally, alcohol consumption is worse than being sick from just an impact on recovery on average.

[Tomer Coyne]

Incredible.

[Will Ahmed]

Pretty wild.

[Tomer Coyne]

Lastly, what's one technology that doesn't exist yet but you think would make the biggest leap in changing people's health behavior or health habit?

[Will Ahmed]

Well, I mean, cardiovascular disease is the biggest killer and so I think having an alerting system and a leading indicator around cardiovascular disease would have a massive impact.

[Tomer Coyne]

Awesome. Will, thank you so much for joining me. I felt this was a super nuanced, insightful conversation. So I really appreciate your insights learnings and I think people are going to take away a lot from this one, so thank you.

[Will Ahmed]

All right, thanks for having me. Tomer as always.

[Tomer Coyne]

Let's get into my takeaways. First, product Scope creep is a silent killer for builders. There are always compelling reasons to add more features, but they can often dilute the original vision. Whoop's prominence is proof that focusing on a narrow purpose almost religiously can be a superpower. Whoop isn't a smartwatch. It doesn't have a screen. There are no push notifications, no phone calls. It simply and accurately tracks your body's data. This radical separation of the physical and digital experiences is key. The physical device is just a band, simple and lightweight. The digital experience is where the richness of insight lives. By intentionally managing down feature creep, Roop perfected its hardware for one health monitoring. It's a case study in why doing fewer things exceptionally well beats doing many things just okay. Second, it was extremely important for Will to control the product experience end to end. Investors told will over 70 times that building hardware was a mistake. They pushed him to use off the shelf solutions instead. But Will saw building hardware as one of the biggest competitive advantages he could have. It enables him to control every layer, from sensors to signal processing to the Whoop app and therefore optimize accuracy, reliability and user experience better than anybody else. Many wearables suffer from inconsistencies at the intersection points between hardware and software, and Whoop solved this by owning the entire stack. While it is expensive and time consuming, this approach made Whoop a category leader in health tracking instead of just another fitness gadget. Third, collecting data is easy. Making it useful is the hard part. Many products overwhelm users with too much information, assuming that showing more data equals providing more value. Woop takes a different approach restraint, hiding complexity, and only revealing deeper insights when users actually need them. Instead of flooding users with numbers, it layers insights. You only have three seconds. Great. Let's check if you're red, yellow or green for the day. You have 10 seconds. Let's show you the exact recovery percentages you had. You have 30 seconds and more. We can dive into detailed trends and markers such as heart rate variability and sleep recovery. This philosophy isn't just for casual users. Everyone, even pro athletes, wants simplicity. They need quick, actionable takeaways, not just raw data dumps. Lastly, Whoop designs for pro athletes in exactly the same way designs for everyday consumers like me and you. Their focus on professional athletes wasn't just driven by the need for product validation. It is a brand building strategy inspired by Nike's aspirational branding. It is another way to differentiate themselves in a very crowded space by focusing on emotion. We'll be back in two weeks with Justin McLeod, the founder and CEO of Hinge. If you liked this episode, don't forget to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts. It'll help people discover the show.

[Will Ahmed]

Building one is a production of LinkedIn News.

[Tomer Coyne]

Our host is Tomer Cohen LinkedIn's chief product officer. This episode was produced by Max Miller. Our associate producer is Rachel Karp. This episode was mixed by John Partham.

[Will Ahmed]

And engineered by Asaf Gadrone.

[Tomer Coyne]

Our editorial associate is Allie McPherson. We get additional production support from Alicia Mann at LinkedIn News. Sarah Storm is senior producer and Enrique Montalvo is our executive producer. Dave Pond is head of productions and creative operations. Maya Pope Chapelle is director of content and audience development. Courtney Koop is head of original programming.

[Will Ahmed]

Dan Roth is the editor in chief of LinkedIn.

[Tomer Coyne]

If you know a product leader we can all learn from, send us a [e-mail].