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Inside Blackstone · 3 min · Sep 15, 2026

WHOOP’s membership pivot turned engagement into recurring revenue

After 143 investor meetings and weak sales, WHOOP shifted toward a membership model and focused on retention. That brought a new growth spurt and recurring revenue that appealed to investors.

Will Ahmed

Will Ahmed is founder and CEO of WHOOP.

Founded WHOOP as a Harvard student; the health wearable tracks strain, recovery and sleep.

About this segment

After 143 investor meetings and weak sales, WHOOP shifted toward a membership model and focused on retention. That brought a new growth spurt and recurring revenue that appealed to investors.

From “WHOOP Founder Will Ahmed: The Body as Data, Sleep Science & the Future of Healthcare”, Sep 15, 2026. Watch the full episode

“Sometimes when things are really broken, it allows you to just reinvent it. And so that's when we came up with this idea of WHOOP as a membership.”
Will Ahmedat 13:11 · Inside Blackstone13:11

Takeaways

  1. The company had strong engagement but too few buyers.
  2. The membership model made retention and serving members central.
  3. Recurring revenue helped WHOOP attract investors.

In this episode

Full episode
  1. 8:47Ahmed saw wearables bringing computers onto the body2:43

  2. 11:31WHOOP’s membership pivot turned engagement into recurring revenue2:39

  3. 16:47Ahmed says health AI’s advantage depends on access to data3:38Up next
  4. One more moment in the full episode

Transcript

From the transcript Inside Blackstone publishes with the episode.

  1. 11:44

    And where is that going to take us from a technology standpoint. Coming back to a little bit your early days of the company and you start to try to raise money? Yeah. I've read you did 143 meetings and no one's saying yes, and you're getting on the brink of bankruptcy because you're trying to sell this sort of screenless device, of which there are major competitors, and yet you somehow prevail. Was there a turning point moment for you when all of a sudden it started to click and investors started to be more receptive?

  2. 12:11

    Well, I'll say this. I do think fundraising is a skill and like any skill, you have to get better at it. And so it's easy to get, I think, kind of down on yourself over a lot of rejection. Now, to be fair, it was probably part I wasn't that good at raising capital, and it was also part that the business was pretty immature. And it was also part that we had these huge, gargantuan competitors, the likes of Nike and Apple and Google and so on.

  3. 12:37

    And then it was also like I was a kid, you know, all of those things, for varying reasons, may have made investors less confident in the opportunity. But fundraising is a game of finding believers. It's a game of picking yourself back up. The only thing you can do as an entrepreneur is just keep moving forwards and keep going. There were a couple of moments in the journey that I think were important inflections for the company.

  4. 13:02

    One was in 2018, so the company is now six years old. We had now moved into the consumer market and people were buying it and they were wearing it for a long time. So we had great engagement, but we had a huge problem, which was not enough people were buying it, so our sales were still low. Investors were wondering if this thing's a dead end. Is it a flop? Sometimes when things are really broken, it allows you to just reinvent it.

  5. 13:28

    And so that's when we came up with this idea of WHOOP as a membership. We now became obsessed with retention and engagement and really serving the member. And it created a whole new growth spurt. And it gave us recurring revenue, which was more attractive to investors too. And so for all those reasons, we were able to get to sort of the next chapter in the company's history. So you had some big news out where Medicare is now going to cover WHOOP subscriptions for older Americans.