Will Ahmed turned a frustrating gap in fitness technology into a 3.6 billion dollar company by doing the opposite of what most founders do - removing features instead of adding them. His story reveals a counterintuitive truth about UX strategy: sometimes the best design decision is deciding what NOT to build.

The Secret Superpower of UX Strategy: Will Ahmed WHOOP Story

In 2012, a Harvard squash player named Will Ahmed got frustrated. He was overtraining, undersleeping, and had no idea whether his body was recovering or breaking down. The coaches could not tell him. The existing fitness trackers could not either. They were either too medical, too bulky, or too focused on vanity metrics that did not answer the question that actually mattered: Am I ready to perform?

That frustration became WHOOP - a company now valued at 3.6 billion dollars that has fundamentally changed how we think about wearable technology and UX design.

But here is what makes Ahmed story worth studying: he did not build WHOOP by adding more features than the competition. He built it by removing them.

The Design Decision That Defined a Billion-Dollar Brand

When Ahmed and his co-founders John Capodilupo and Aurelian Nicolae started building WHOOP, they made a decision that seemed insane at the time. They removed the screen.

Think about that. In a market where Apple, Fitbit, and Garmin were battling to pack more features onto your wrist - more apps, more notifications, more distractions - WHOOP went the opposite direction. No screen. No buttons. No notifications buzzing every few minutes.

According to Ahmed, the reasoning was simple but counterintuitive: If we put a screen on the product, it might actually make it less likely for you to want to wear it while sleeping, or when you are already wearing another watch.

This is UX strategy at its purest. Ahmed was not asking what features can we add? He was asking what job is the user actually hiring this product to do?

The answer: decode recovery, sleep, and strain so athletes could make better training decisions. A screen did not help that job. It actively hurt it.

Cool or Invisible: The Design Philosophy That Killed the Middle Ground

WHOOP design team developed a framework that is worth stealing. They decided that wearable technology should be either cool or invisible - and they oriented all their resources around those two poles.

The cool side meant premium materials, sleek bands, and partnerships with elite athletes. The invisible side meant 24/7 wearability, a form factor you forget you are wearing, and data that is there when you want it but never intrusive.

What they deliberately avoided was the middle ground. The mediocre zone where products are neither beautiful nor unobtrusive. Where they have screens but not good screens. Where they track health but also try to be smartphones.

This is a lesson most product teams miss. They try to be everything to everyone and end up being nothing special to anyone. WHOOP constraint - no screen, no compromises - forced clarity in every subsequent design decision.

The Go-to-Market Strategy That Built Credibility Before Scale

Most startups would look at a 3.6 billion dollar wearables company and assume the path was: launch product, run ads, scale fast. Ahmed did something different.

Before marketing to consumers, he pursued a strategy of selling to top sports teams and elite athletes first. Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps and NBA star LeBron James were among the first users.

The logic was elegant: if WHOOP could get the world best athletes to wear and authentically get value from the product, they could build a brand around performance that would eventually pull them into the consumer market.

This was not about paying millions for celebrity endorsements. It was about product-market fit at the highest level. When Patrick Mahomes wears a WHOOP because it actually helps his recovery, that credibility is worth more than any ad campaign.

The UX lesson here is subtle but important: your earliest users define your brand meaning. WHOOP chose users who would demand the highest standards and would not tolerate gimmicks. That constraint shaped every product decision that followed.

The Subscription Pivot That Changed Everything

By 2018, WHOOP had a problem. They were trying to sell 500 dollar devices on a Shopify site, and nobody was buying. The hardware was good. The data was valuable. But the price point was a barrier that marketing could not overcome.

So they made another counterintuitive decision. They stopped selling the device entirely.

Instead, they launched a membership model: the device is free, but you pay 18-30 dollars monthly for access to the data and insights. This was not just a pricing change. It was a complete reframing of the value proposition.

You are not buying a tracker. You are buying a membership to understand your body.

The results were immediate. Growth in recurring revenue. Steady cash flow. Increased customer retention. By making the hardware free, WHOOP removed the biggest friction point in their funnel and shifted the relationship from a one-time transaction to an ongoing partnership.

This is a lesson in UX economics that many product leaders miss. The business model IS part of the user experience. How you charge shapes how users perceive value, how often they engage, and how long they stick around.

Designing for Retention: The Daily Utility Framework

WHOOP business only works if members stick around. Their entire experience is designed to make that happen.

The company defines highly engaged users as those wearing the device 28 out of 28 days, using the app 28 out of 28 days, and utilizing specific features at least 7 of those days. They chose these metrics because they correlate directly to retention.

But correlation is not enough. WHOOP product team focuses on features that create causal engagement - features that make users genuinely dependent on the insights.

Their health monitor feature, launched with WHOOP 4.0, is a good example. It alerts users when biometrics fall outside normal ranges. This is not a vanity metric. It is actionable intelligence that changes behavior. Users start making different decisions about sleep, training, and recovery because they have data they trust.

Over 50 percent of members were using WHOOP daily even 18 plus months after purchase. That is not normal in consumer tech. That is a product that has embedded itself into daily routines.

The Simplicity Paradox: Complex Data, Simple Scores

WHOOP collects more data per user than most competitors. Heart rate variability, respiratory rate, skin temperature, blood oxygen, resting heart rate - all tracked continuously, 24 hours a day.

But the interface does not show you all that data. It shows you three numbers: Recovery (0-100), Strain (0-21), and Sleep (hours plus quality).

This is the simplicity paradox that most product teams fail to understand. Complexity in the backend enables simplicity in the frontend. Users do not want more data. They want better decisions.

The Recovery score answers one question: should I push hard today or take it easy? Green means go. Yellow means proceed with caution. Red means rest. You do not need to understand heart rate variability to use that insight.

WHOOP design team calls this being an interpreter rather than a recorder. Traditional smartwatches record data and leave interpretation to the user. WHOOP interprets data and delivers recommendations.

This distinction explains why users engage more deeply despite having fewer features on their wrists. The value is not in the data - it is in what the data means for today choices.

Community as a Product Feature

WHOOP released a Teams feature where users form groups and share stats. Within months, over 85000 teams had been created.

This is not just a social feature. It is a retention mechanism disguised as community.

Recovery, Strain, and Sleep scores are deliberately simple and color-coded because they are designed to be shared. Screenshot-friendly. Easy to compare. When your training partner posts a 94 percent Recovery and you are at 62 percent, you do not need explanation. You understand immediately.

The network effects compound over time. Users who join teams engage more. Users who engage more retain longer. Users who retain longer refer friends. Referral campaigns now drive more than 10 percent of new subscription sign-ups.

This is UX strategy that goes beyond screens and interfaces. It is designing the entire ecosystem around behaviors that compound value.

The AI Evolution: WHOOP Coach

In 2024, WHOOP launched Coach - a personalized health assistant powered by OpenAI that translates complex biometrics into conversational guidance.

Instead of just showing you a Recovery score, you can ask: Why is my recovery low today? or Should I do the marathon training run tomorrow? The system analyzes your sleep, strain, and historical patterns to provide specific recommendations.

This is the next frontier of UX design: interfaces that understand context and communicate in natural language. The constraint of screenless hardware actually prepared WHOOP for this evolution. They had already built a company around delivering insights through the phone, not the wrist. AI coaching is a natural extension.

What Product Leaders Can Learn from Will Ahmed

WHOOP story offers several principles for anyone building products or leading UX strategy:

Subtraction creates differentiation. In markets crowded with feature-bloated competitors, removing capabilities can be more powerful than adding them. The screenless decision was not a limitation - it was WHOOP defining advantage.

Your earliest users define your brand. Ahmed chose elite athletes as first customers not because they were the biggest market, but because they would demand the highest standards. That choice shaped every product decision that followed.

Business model is part of UX. The shift from 500 dollar hardware to 30 dollar monthly membership was not just a pricing change. It reframed the entire relationship and removed the biggest friction point in the funnel.

Design for retention, not just acquisition. WHOOP features are not built to look good in demos. They are built to create daily habits that make users genuinely dependent on the insights.

Interpret, do not just record. Complex data in the backend should enable simple decisions in the frontend. Users do not want more data. They want better outcomes.

The Bigger Lesson for Digital Transformation

Will Ahmed built a 3.6 billion dollar company by asking a question most founders ignore: What should we NOT build?

In enterprise digital transformation, this question is equally powerful. Teams often fail not because they lack capabilities, but because they are building the wrong things. They are adding features nobody asked for while ignoring the core job users are hiring the product to do.

At Bonanza Studios, we see this pattern constantly. Companies come to us with roadmaps packed with features, but when we run a 2-Week Design Sprint, the breakthrough often comes from cutting scope, not expanding it.

The lesson from WHOOP is not about wearables or fitness. It is about the discipline to stay focused on the job your users actually need done - and the courage to remove everything else.

That is the secret superpower of UX strategy. Not adding more. Subtracting until only the essential remains.

About the Author

Behrad Mirafshar is Founder and CEO of Bonanza Studios, where he turns ideas into functional MVPs in 4-12 weeks. With 13 years in Berlin startup scene, he was part of the founding teams at Grover (unicorn) and Kenjo (top DACH HR platform). CEOs bring him in for projects their teams cannot or will not touch - because he builds products, not PowerPoints.

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