We left a message for Amazon etc on every 4.0 circuit board. Plus every engineers’ initials who built it. Competitors love to take hardware apart and look at various components. Figure this both saves them some time and celebrates our great WHOOP team :)
whoop is great not because of its hardware but because of its software (i.e. the proprietary formula to calculate strain/recovery) and community building (i.e. its community feature, where you can see each other's strain/recovery, it creates a unique "cool factor" with effective marketing). Using these 2 strengths plus some smart ways to collect the data, whoop can then build a wide data moat and use those data to do things that other competitors can't, widening its comparative advantage (e.g. whoop asks the user what they did each day such as smoking/meditating/fasting....whoop can then build some models to infer what each action's impact on the recovery using all the data it has. It then provides such unique/customized insights to its users, improving its engagement/retention). Being able to detect HRV (heart rate variability) is great but with a large enough R&D investment, any tech giant can replicate it. But what we can learn from whoop is this - knowing and acknowledging that the giants can basically replicate all your ideas, the real question is what unique value we are providing to the users (even a niche market is fine) and how to use the proprietary data to refuel that growth.
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