With major VC backed companies like Forward, Parsley Health, Next, Bulletproof, and Whoop in the mix, there’s a fun race occurring for how the future should be in the health and wellness space. With many of the major players becoming more seasoned, the big picture for the next evolution is becoming clearer.
While major players like HCA and Cedars Sinai take up the brunt of the space and PE is tackling acquisitions, the startup players in the space have identified key aspects to focus on, including consumables, wearables, centralized and easy to access data, and community building between traditional and lifestyle approaches
So what’s the future look like in the space?
Walking through Century City Mall is a mini hub of what the future can be. From biohacking labs and sleek and sexy doctor offices to more traditional yet minimal and luxurious feeling locations, it’s easy to see the desire to make health sexy and have the appeal and allure as any trendy retail location can be in a mall situated right next to Beverly Hills and many major talent agencies.
Beneath all the glamor of IV drips, full wall applications and chic design, what is the true long term value of these places? One minor one is to provide a premium option to the wealthy who are now bucketed in similar health insurance plans with the rest of Americans with the removal of “Cadillac” plans. A beautiful play to provide additional benefits as a recruitment and retention tool for Blue Chip Corporations and serve the needs of the 1%. Another minor angle is to fuel continued lifestyles of the upper echelon of millenials and corporate employees with their chronic dehydration, adrenal fatigue and inflammation through short bursts of intense corrective approaches like IVs, cryotherapy and whatever injectibles are proven least toxic.
Outside the confines of the luxury market, how far can these technologies and efforts go? What is the lasting value being provided beyond simply putting a new glossy layer of paint on the same product? What are the barriers to entry and competitive advantages being built?
Data
Data is the only play here that has any lasting value–that is, if it’s useful data and not just data for data’s sake. Yes building communities of people around healthy lifestyles to help reduce overall burden on healthcare is important. Yes bringing the licensed western medicine together with lifestyle practitioners and eastern medicine is critical to the success of society in the future. And yes, having a cool app with all our info being able to talk to all our devices and doctors is certainly the future. But none of those are uniquely defensible approaches that prevent new entrants into the space.
The play here is creating a platform of those that need health with those that give health. This includes doctors and practitioners. This includes community building, insuring there is stickiness, and all the other fixings of your platform.
But what will be unique and the critical component to success here is being able to capture and integrate data of patients/clients that are currently unmonitored or are previously not integrated into a collective dataset with actionable insights. From what the client watches, hears, talks, eats, drinks, and does, the ability to increase the frequency and range of measuring a person’s life and integrate it into a dataset that is currently being protected through HIPPA compliance is going to be the winner.
Two of the major areas include:
- What did the client actually eat and drink and when
- How well did the client do in a particular workout/stretch
Mobility/range of motion and timing of nutrient intake and hydration are critical components that biometrics and wearables are currently searching for solutions to. And there will always be more and more things to monitor, track and record. So the critical component is building a platform that allows this to happen as well as enable as many on each side of the platform to join–be they tech savvy or laggards, be they doctors or energy healers.
Data aggregation and data integrity onto a platform with active users is critical. Not just the “I go in for a yearly checkup” data, but the day in and day out data that is reliable.
I predict the winner in this space to be Amazon and its Alexa. The Alexa is inside the home already. It monitors food being purchased, and with smart home technology, will be able to monitor times of cooking, drinking and eating through contextual clues. The integration on the practitioner side to order products for the client is seamless and Amazon already has a leg up on building platforms for producers and consumers. It’s sometimes too easy to pick the 500 pound guerilla so I provide additional thoughts below.
One area in the wellness space that is not being addressed effectively by the mainstream leaders of tech is the spirit. We do body and mind very well. There currently is no consciousness or spiritual building app outside of Muse and other meditation startups which is more the mind than spirit. When Alexa cracks the spirit, that’s when the clear winner will be present. As Alexa’s voice recognition improves, the interfaces and interactions will deepen to a point where the voice of Alexa can easily become the most trusted sound coming from inside a person’s home as it relates to the mind, body and spirit.
In the meantime, Forward with its incredibly sexy app should work on extending its users of “those who help heal” by providing interfaces and metrics for the yoga practitioners, massage therapists, accupuncturists and others focusing on the eastern and non-traditional modalities. Start with personal training and team up with another equally “sexy” brand Equinox to cross train their trainers and build an official partnership. Ensure quality data is being inputted on the personal training side and use Equinox as further customer acquisition for their brick and mortar strategies. They share similar clientelle and locations and provide the perfect blend of sexy health that extends beyond the doctor’s office. If that happens, Forward’s got a step forward from the competition, all be it a much more masculine energy approach to establishing itself in the market — through doubling down on the pure tech play. If it executes well to establish itself as a desirable place to attract top physicians and increase the switching cost of the app for its users, then the tech play will make it the dominant player in the space and primed for an exit.
Parsley Health can focus on doubling down on the community aspect and utilize that to attract a community from which more organic partnerships and collaborations can flourish. Utilizing more of the feminine energy qualities like community building, sharing and one-on-one connections, Parsley has a much more natural positioning to establish a solid market share in the health and wellness space and will need to find ways to mobilize that community for stickiness and exponential growth. Teaming up with other lifestyle businesses that already have a large practitioner and client database will be critical to its success. Teaming up with laboratories like DHA Labs, community wellness spaces like yoga studio chains, mind/body healing centers like Human Garage, and biohacking spaces like Bulletproof Labs will be of keen importance.
Through it all, the future landscape looks like a beautiful, dressed up mouse trap to collect more quality data from more people on both sides of the platform, be it through community events, technology expansion or leveraging already existing consumers and shifting their behaviors.