Will Ahmed

The move

Will Ahmed is captain of the Harvard squash team in 2011 when he starts building a heart-rate monitor in his dorm. He was overtraining and didn't know it. Fitness wearables back then were chasing step counts and notifications. He wanted to know what was going on inside the body. Strain. Recovery. Sleep.

WHOOP launches in 2015 as a $500 wearable. It struggles. The hardware's good but the model's wrong. $500 for a band with no screen, up against an Apple Watch, is a tough sell. In 2018 Ahmed makes the call that defines the company. Give the hardware away and charge a monthly membership.

Nobody in consumer hardware is doing this. Nobody wants subscription wearables, and the numbers scare investors. Ahmed sticks with it and goes further. Signs the NBA, NFL, PGA and dozens of pro leagues to put WHOOP on their athletes. The data company starts outrunning the hardware company.

WHOOP raises at a $3.6B valuation in 2021. The strap is now standard kit across a whole layer of pro sport. Selling a relationship instead of a device is the model every fitness wearable has copied since.

Why it was risky

Subscription hardware messes with how customers think. The maths messes with founders too. Free hardware means you lose money on every new user and only make it back after years of them sticking around. Investors were used to selling a device once. Ahmed swapped short-term margin for a long relationship and a deeper product, betting that if the data was good enough, people would stay long enough to pay it back.

The numbers

From a $500 niche wearable to the standard for recovery in elite sport. The membership switch rebuilt the maths by treating the customer as a relationship.

The lesson

The wearable wasn't the bet. Giving the hardware away when nobody else would was. Ahmed turned a device company into a data and relationship company, and took three years of ugly numbers to build the moat. R.I.S.K. is for founders ready to break the assumption the whole category is still pricing in.