Dear friends, 

In JC’s Newsletter, I share the articles, documentaries, and books that I enjoyed the most in the last week, with some comments on how we relate to them at Alan. I do not endorse all the articles I share, they are up for debate. 

I’m doing it because a) I love reading, it is the way that I get most of my ideas, b) I’m already sharing those ideas with my team, and c) I would love to get your perspective on those. 

If you are not subscribed yet, it's right here! 

If you like it, please share about it on social networks!

Share 💡JC's Newsletter

💡 Must-read

👉 Will Ahmed (CEO @ Whoop) - Optimizing Human Performance (JoinColossus)

• Whenever I asked coaches and athletes what they would want to be able to measure, they got very focused on being able to measure more about exercise. It could be video analysis, it could be sweat analysis,

• And yet when I asked them what their problems they always came back to availability, some notion of an athlete being injured or not prepared for the game.

• So I thought there was a mismatch between the solutions that these potential customers were telling me and the problems that they were describing,

• Prospective customers are very good at describing their problems. I think that it's the entrepreneur's role to figure out the solutions to those problems.

➡️ I liked the way he framed this about problem discovery vs. finding solutions.

• WHOOP has always had a very clear point of view on what we do.

• It doesn't have a high-resolution screen. It doesn't have a microphone. It doesn't have a speakerphone. It certainly doesn't have apps on it.

• And I think that WHOOP has been successful in the wearable space because we had a very narrow and very strong perspective on why we were building hardware.

➡️ Interesting take as well on how to build a narrow product.

• If you can authentically get the best athletes in the world to wear your product, you can in turn build a real brand.

➡️ What would you do if you were us? What could we do for athletes with our core product? Offer them access to a dedicated virtual clinic? Mental health for athletes?

• There's one major difference which was that we refused to sponsor athletes. We did not want to pay athletes to wear WHOOP.

• How did you get to those athletes in the beginning? 

• The secret to getting to anyone high profile is to figure who in their life has a big influence over them that other people don't know. So in the case of professional athletes, that is certainly not their agent or their coach, family members.

• The secret to getting to anyone high profile is to figure who in their life has a big influence over them that other people don't know.

• And it turned out that the personal trainers for people like Lebron James and Michael Phelps spent way more time with them than almost anyone else in their life. And so the path to getting to athletes of that caliber was to get their trainers interested in WHOOP.

➡️ How can it inspire us in terms of marketing? 

• When we were selling WHOOP for $500, it cost is between $250 and $300 to make the hardware.

• Over time that started to come down. And we saw people were wearing it for long. And we wanted to be more of a subscription business. And so in May of 2018, we transitioned the whole business to be a subscription and essentially said, "We're going to bet on our technology and our product and our analytics and give people the ability to try WHOOP for a dramatically lower price.

• The hardware comes free with the subscription.

• What if you could sign up for only $30 but commit to six months?" And that in itself became a huge inflection.

➡️ Should we compare Alan's fee to whoop? We are economical compared to it!

• We describe this phenomenon as you can only really manage what you measure. And the reason that people dramatically decrease alcohol consumption is one example, is that they quickly realize just how much it affects their WHOOP data.

• So, looking at your phone before you go to bed, people track that quite regularly with WHOOP, and not surprisingly we see that if you're staring at your phone right until the minute you go to sleep, it tends to disrupt your sleep quite dramatically.

➡️ Aligned with both :) 

• One very popular early venture capital perspective I remember getting from skeptical investors was, "Oh, you should just build the software and it pulls data from all the different hardware places."

• What's so empowering about controlling the whole end to end equation, everything from the sensors to the rate at which they sample data to the rate at which they transfer that data, to the algorithms that then turn that data into something like a raw metric, let's say heart rate or heart rate variability, or slow-wave sleep.

• There are just so many layers within that that by controlling all the layers, you have so many different places where you can be innovating. From where I sit that's a really empowering technology stack to get to interact with. I can't quite imagine how you could build very innovative technology without controlling that entire stack.

➡️ About vertical control. Very important for Better Life in my opinion (such as Alan Clear).

🏯 Building a company

👉 Alex Rampell - Visa: The Original Protocol Business (Join Colossus)

• A lot of times businesses that get to a network effect, they start off with some comically small example. Facebook started off with the comically small example of Harvard students.

• Visa did the same thing in a very non-traditional way, but it's like, "Okay, Bank of America, we got Fresno, we got Florsheim Shoes and everybody else, we're dominating commerce there, then go to Fremont, then go out, go out, go out, go out. I think it's the story of honestly, every network effect business, but it's also starting off with the right constituents, because if you start too broad, you never get that network effect.

• It's just not fun if you're a big company to do a narrow-down scope, why would you ever do that? So I think it's narrow your scope and expand concentrically is the lesson for me.

➡️ How do we narrow down Geographies, for example? I think for new countries it is particularly important to first nail one city (especially if you need a network) and then expand to other cities. 

👉 Between Sales and Product: Building Out Self-Serve and Customer Experience at Notion & Dropbox (Review First Round)

• In addition to templates, Notion is making use of its powerful community to help users find value in the product. “One of the biggest things I've seen at Notion that's different is the power of community. We have an amazing network of folks who preach how to use Notion and do all of this viral marketing for us,” says Taylor. 

• “And these people are running their own business as a consultant, teaching how Notion works on YouTube and holding meetups and seminars in their own communities. 

• They're actually creating templates and selling them themselves. 

• And out of that we spun up this “ambassador program”. Unlocking this professional-level service community outside of Notion has enabled the team to tackle product onboarding at scale, says Taylor. 

• It’s really powerful. I’m actually even using some of our amazing ambassadors and consultants to help with training and onboarding for new Notion employees — there are some very passionate and expert-level folks in our community who we can leverage more, even internally.

➡️ How do we create a bigger community around Alan? 

👉 How to work with influencers (Sifted)

• Liisa Ennuste is influencer marketing manager, Bolt’s 130+ ‘ambassadors’ in 40+ markets around the world. she works in a two-person team.

• We use a tool called Modash to find influencers in every market, get their contact details and do outreach. Get solid benchmarks on costs, so you know when approaching an influencer what would be a fair cost of the collaboration for you — and them. You need to be able to estimate what you’d get from it in terms of reach and cost per impression — and figure out if it’s worth it. Once you have that overview, it’s much easier to compare influencer costs really fast.

• Make sure you can compare your influencer marketing activity to other marketing channels.

• We want to see how much we’d stand out or whether there’s a promotion every day.

🗞 In the news

📱Technology

👉 An Interview with Eric Seufert about the Impact of ATT (Stratechery)

• Gaming’s more difficult before there’s a precedent for Apple not allowing that. The patient zero of this was an app called AppGratis, and if you’ve never heard of this it’s an interesting story. They had an arcade app and it was free, AppGratis was free, French company. They were doing really well and what they did was the way that you did games marketing in the early days of the App Store. This app was like an arcade, it was a collection of games you could download. You could buy the top promoted spot for that day in that app, and that was how you did user acquisition early on in the early days at the App Store. One day Apple just said, “Nope. That’s an apps store within an apps store,” they blocked the app update. They said, “This app can’t exist. It violates our terms,” because the App Store clearly says, the developer guidelines say, “No apps store within the Apps Store”. So that was the end of the company, basically, they raised quite a bit of money. They pivoted but that was the end of that incarnation of the company. So there’s precedent for them doing that and I think they’ve held that line since then.

➡️ That will be the major challenge of a Mini-App Store for health.

• I’m not very optimistic that SKAdNetwork is going to improve.

• But Apple just historically, has not been very good at improving their developer App Store analytics tools over time.

• Apple just wanted more control over apps, they resented and didn’t like the fact that Facebook actually controlled what apps got installed, and this was much more about control and that almost makes more sense because if this was really about being anti-competitive, they would actually have more shame.

• The sort of biggest motivation here was just to control discovery, to control which apps got installed on devices and how.

➡️ Interesting about ATT and the impacts on FB.

• One thing that’s really exciting about the opportunity to open up a web shop that services the in-app content environment, is that the App Store really sucks as a storefront. It’s just clunky. There’s not a lot of options for it, there’s not a lot of tools, you can’t A/B test stuff. If you have a web shop, you could do anything. The web is super easy to just quickly make changes and deploy them, you don’t have to do an app update that requires a manual review. You can do everything on the backend, you can A/B test to your heart’s desire. It’s just much more dynamic than what you can do in this very restrained environment, which is the App Store.

➡️ Should we become web first at some point for some health services?

👉 Twitter Has a New CEO; What About a New Business Model? (Stratechery)

• Twitter makes an average of $22.75 per monetizable daily active user per year.

• That’s just under $2/month, an absolutely paltry sum.

👉 Why Subscription Twitter is a Terrible Idea, Twitter Bans Sharing Private Photos and Videos, Twitter and Free Speech (Stratchery)

• This is one of the reasons why advertising is such a powerful business model: one way to increase advertising revenue is by bringing on new users, which is easier when the product is free. 

• Another way, though, is by increasing usage, and thus inventory. 

• A third is increasing the effectiveness of advertising, which results in higher prices for advertisers without the risk of increased churn that would come from raising subscription prices. 

• There simply are far more points of leverage for an advertising model than a subscription model.

🏥 Healthcare

👉 HTN Weekly Health Tech Reads 2/20 (Health Tech Nerds)

• Weight loss app Noom is paying $62 million to settle a lawsuit brought by customers who claimed it was hard to cancel the services. Link.

• Cerebral joins Noom this week in facing issues with misleading customers. Cerebral, of course, has become a lightning rod of criticism for recent behaviour related to advertising and management of its clinical workforce. This latest article highlights how it is also confusing its customers. Link.

• A new study from Headspace shows its meditation app has a positive impact on mental health outcomes, similar to drug treatment and cognitive behavioural therapy. Link.

• Ro announced it has raised another $150 million. Link.

• Business Insider got its hands on the slides Teladoc is using to pitch the Primary360 initiative. It makes for an interesting read - a lot of it sounds like what you'd expect from a virtual primary care offering. Very little data was shared in the slides, but one thing that stuck out to me: Teladoc is apparently averaging 50+ minutes per patient onboarding visit, which is shocking to me... I would assume that is roughly 50x as long as a standard Teladoc urgent care style visit with a provider. Link (Paywalled).

It’s already over! Please share JC’s Newsletter with your friends, and subscribe👇

Let’s talk about this together on LinkedIn or on Twitter. Have a good week!