Dear WHOOP Members,
Today we announced raising $100M of new capital. I am writing to express my gratitude for all our WHOOP members around the world and explain how we’re going to invest these new funds.
Every day I have the pleasure of hearing from WHOOP members–what a diverse and exciting group of people. I’ve heard from a Navy SEAL who used WHOOP to help overcome PTSD. A soon-to-be mother learning how her body is changing during pregnancy. A director of rehabilitation using WHOOP as an accountability tool for his rehab clinic. A professional golfer who discovered that he had COVID-19 by seeing an elevation in his respiratory rate. A crossfitter who has finally balanced his training and prevented injury. A young woman who overcame her eating disorder because she saw the damage it did to her physiology. A busy executive who lost 60 pounds by reducing stress and improving sleep. A high school athlete who stopped playing video games late at night because they disrupted his recovery. Even a young man who discovered he had a heart attack by looking at his baseline data; WHOOP saved his life (his words, not mine). It never gets old hearing how WHOOP has helped change our members’ behavior or improve their health. And frankly I’ve never met a WHOOP member who I didn’t like.
If there’s one common trait amongst WHOOP members, it’s that you’re aspirational. WHOOP members are motivated. You want to improve sleep, train for a marathon, lose weight, understand lifestyle decisions, close deals… You want to find ways to win at life.
These life goals are different for different people and they evolve over time.
We raised capital to invest heavily in our product and membership experience. WHOOP is a subscription because we believe in delivering consistent value to our members, which includes rapidly releasing new features and analytics to you.
One area of feature development is coaching: WHOOP is becoming a 24/7 life coach to help you achieve your goals. You’ll see new features emerge that better tie your specific goals to the feedback that WHOOP is giving you. Over time you’ll find new more detailed and actionable recommendations personalized to you. This is a big area of investment.
Another area of development is community. The WHOOP community is completely unique and there’s a lot that members can learn from one another. Today you can join teams with like-minded people and friends. We’re going to add to these community features and they will be unique in that they won’t just allow for the sharing of performance data; they’ll facilitate learning and talking about it. What can you learn about your body or your lifestyle from people just like you? Or from the highest performing people in the world? That’s the promise of the WHOOP community that we’re investing in.
We’ve come to learn that the way you interact with Membership Services (ie customer support) is critically important to ensuring you have a great experience. There were times this year when growth caused our Membership Services to be too slow. We heard you and we’re addressing your feedback head-on. Membership Services over time will become an on-demand service. Whether it’s through chat in the app or over a call, you will be able to reach our Membership Services team in real time. This is yet another unique feature to the WHOOP membership.
WHOOP will become more visible and more available around the world. We get daily requests from almost every country across the globe to ship WHOOP. We’ll begin with a focus on English speaking countries and, over time, include non-English speaking countries with translation. Global expansion will not be an overnight endeavor but I can promise you we are working to make WHOOP available and accessible to you regardless of where you live in the world.
Feelings are overrated. That was one of our core principles in founding WHOOP. Feelings are overrated in that you can’t always feel what is happening to your body. This global pandemic from COVID-19 has underscored this point. You can get COVID-19 and not feel it and then unintentionally give it to others, who become really sick. That’s a profound example of not being able to feel what’s happening to your body.
Your body has secrets that it’s trying to tell you and a good health monitor can surface them. The promise of health monitoring is that it can change your life. It can make you understand things about your body that you never knew. WHOOP is going to dive deeper and deeper into coaching our members to improve their health.
I’m incredibly grateful to everyone who is part of the WHOOP community. And on behalf of the WHOOP team, thank you for believing in us. We’ve been building WHOOP for over 8 years and we’re just getting started.
Best, Will
Want to join the WHOOP team? We’re hiring!
