Startups & Founding
Why doesn't Whoop pay athletes to wear its fitness tracker?
Answered independently in 2 episodes, by 2 different people. Every line below is verbatim from the transcript, timestamped to the moment it was said.
The short answer
What the archive says
01Refusing to pay athletes became the marketing strategy — Will points to the Nike FuelBand, whose paid endorsers didn't actually wear it, as proof paid endorsement can't fake product value. source →
02Whoop's rule was to never pay anyone to wear the product; if it truly delivered on recovery and performance, users would pay for it instead. source →
In their words
What 2 people actually said
One strong point of view I had around the product was that it needed to be able to be good enough such that a famous person and a professional athlete, someone who wanted to improve, would wear whoop and we weren't going to pay them.
And they can use whoop to find this balance to understand how much they're sleeping, how much they're recovering, what the strain is that they're putting on their body, how different behaviors in their life are affecting their body. And they can use that information to perform at a higher level. So we, we very authentically took a formula that made the best athletes in the world effective and have now been able to deliver it to a much wider market.
The episodes
2 episodes answer this
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