Latest / Healthier: Building Health & Fitness Businesses / How Stride built an £800-a-year membership with 85% renewals | Andrew Steele | Healthier Ep 12

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How Stride built an £800-a-year membership with 85% renewals | Andrew Steele | Healthier Ep 12 · Healthier: Building Health & Fitness Businesses

• speaker-0: If you're building in healthcare, you need to listen up to Andrew Steele. Not only is he Olympian, but he's also taken Stride to amazing places. Stride has almost 16,000 paying customers. It's closing in on 6 million in revenue, and it has customers in 65 countries. Andrew is really, really candid here about the mistakes he made when he was bootstrapped to Reactive. speaker-1: I think the key thing for me is like I very much come from like a bootstrap background. What that means is that you are very reactive as to where like the the wind is leading you in terms of making some money. speaker-0: Also talks about funding, how he's managed to fund the business to where it is today, including some non dilutive options that they've done. speaker-1: We've raised a reasonable amount of capital now. We've just won a bunch of non-dilutive funding as well to build gold standard product pieces. The way I see this is like this is a really exciting sector, right? Consumer health. Capital inflow into this sector speaks to that. What it does mean is there's competition, but the competition is not what worries me. It's actually being able to accurately communicate and reach people to explain why what we do might be better than somebody else out there. speaker-0: And also talk about how Stride has industry leading retention. At almost eight hundred pounds a year, they're managing to keep renewals at above eighty-five percent. It's an amazing episode and I think you'll learn a lot. Welcome back to Healthier. Excited today to be joined by Andrew Steele, our first Olympian on the show and the founder of the Amazing Stride Health. Welcome, Andrew. speaker-1: Good to be here, Will. Thanks for having me. speaker-0: Do you wanna take us in twenty seconds what is stride health? How did you get here? And then we'll jump into some of these things I'm super excited to be chatting about with regards to your learnings along the way. speaker-1: Yeah, cool. So with Stride, we're basically democratizing access to elite level healthcare or proactive healthcare. So whether that's the type of experience you would get from a very expensive longevity clinic or health concierge, or even in my previous life, the type of experience you would get as an elite sports person where you've got team of experts and a trusted coach to help sort of triage and funnel all the information into making you better at something. So we basically democratise that at a consumer level and we do that with a single preventative health membership. which is a combination of multi omics personal health profile where we test your genomics, your microbiome, your blood, other omics and do that repeatedly over time. We add in human coaching. Every quarter you speak to a practitioner about your results and how they're working for you and what you can change. And then we also own the intervention, so whether that's the specific protocol that we give, or we also make key supplement SKUs to support the common biomarket deficiencies that we see. And we do that all in one place. More cheap chip so We do it all in one place cheaper and more convenient than you could get it done otherwise without a strike. So incredible yeah, exciting times. Yeah. speaker-0: Very, very cool. and d just to give an idea of where you're up to on the journey, is there any kind of number or way you talk about the shape of the business as it is now? speaker-1: Yeah, sure. So I mean we've done about almost sixteen thousand paying customers now today. You know, closing in on about six million pounds of of revenue so far. and we've amazingly won sort of customers in I think over sixty five countries now all over the place. So gone really well. You know, hit some great hit some great traction so far, but lots more to do, Lots more to speaker-0: There's a part of me that goes, Wow, si sixty countries, that's amazing and then there's a part of me that goes, Wow, that's a logistical headache to tr for you to try and deal with speaker-1: Yeah. So you've got different sample types that require different regulations for different shipping as well. Yeah, yeah, exactly. speaker-0: Perhaps perhaps we'll kind of dig into that. You it's fair to say that the the journey's not been completely straight. You you've kind of changed things along the way. You wrote a pretty interesting article, or is it called an essay when it's on Substack? Makes it sound a bit more cr a bit grander. About about the the the changes that you made in the business to get to the point now where you've got these sixteen thousand customers on stride one. could you talk to us a little bit about that and and how you change things, what changed, what the d decision point was, anything that you would extrapolate out from that for next time you're in you kind of need to make a big a big decision or you need to think about the the direction for the company. speaker-1: Look, I think I think the key thing for me is like I I very much come from like a bootstrap background. And what that means is that you are very reactive in a way as to where like the the wind is leading you in terms of making some money. Right. So so I when we started Stride, we're just just over two years ago we started shipping. So end of end of May two thousand twenty four. And we basically sold whatever we had ready as soon as we had it ready. 'Cause you needed to make revenue. And when you do that as a founder, in some cases you lose some core sort of strategic value, but you also gain a lot because you literally find out what people are willing to pay for. You can yeah, when you when you raise external or capital, you've got especially before launch, like pre-revenue, you've got the luxury of like I can do the right research and I can speak to potential customers. But when you hit the ground, someone's gonna pay you for that. Like you don't know until you actually try to charge the money for it. So In some ways that was really insightful. And what we found was that there was really good demand for a certain type of test which we could do. And that helped us like actually accelerate to a remarkable revenue run rate really quickly. So we hit like a four million pound run rate within three months of launch. And I was like, Wow, this this business thing's easy. You know, like I've got no problems here. There's no no challenge. I'm gonna be at ten million revenue very soon and and that's it. But actually, you know, when when you look sort of deeper into the market, one, we hadn't had time to build any recurring revenue into the business. Most of the sales are people buying a genomics test off us, which you can't do by default. There is no recurring part to that. Your DNA doesn't change. So, you know, you can't so sell someone a second DNA test. So you need to build out your product stack and you need to understand what job you're actually doing for somebody once they've done that initial test. And then you also need to understand like the signals in the market, like what was actually driving that. And you know what? We had such easy success that we didn't even really know here in those early days. We we had this sort of ignorance is bliss, but actually we we didn't do the sort of, you know, we we jumped and leapfrogged straight to the top of the mountain as opposed to like finding our path there. Yeah. And so now after that we had to do the hard work of going back as to the sort of the why and who those people were and why they were buying this from us and what they wanted to achieve. And that took longer than than you would have thought, you know? And some of them did you basically because speaker-0: Did you basically tap into a bunch of unmet demand for this genomics test and speaker-1: That's my thesis now looking back at it, right? Is like there was a kind of there was there was demand which had no outlet and there was companies that could do it but they looked kind of scammy and crappy and like, you know, the horrible old sort of WordPress site that was selling speaker-0: Along with a beautiful D to C layer and yeah. speaker-1: Yeah, and it's like the professionals have arrived to do this thing. Right. And and so it was just this wave. And of course there was a bunch of biohacker influencers out there talking about the thing which we were doing, which was driving it. And then but then that just made everybody's life harder once you had sort of captured that initial bubble of demand. And I'm so glad we did that quite early we thought about what else we could be. Because if we'd if we'd purely defined ourselves by that at the time, we would have been left with absolutely no business. At all later on, right? So yeah, it was interesting. speaker-0: That's so interesting. So then the process then becomes like, okay, d what do you do? Go out and speak to a a hundred a few hundred of these people and go, Why did you want this? And and you try and cluster them and work out which of those clusters is actually in line with your vision and which is likely to be a great recurring customer versus someone who just wanted to like kind of get it and run. Like how does how does that even work to then work out what the next thing is speaker-1: The first thing, and I'm quite guilty of this, and maybe this is actually I I I listen to different founders with different opinions on this. The first off is the textbook one on one. You need to talk to your customers and understand what they want. The other part is almost the Steve Jobs angle to say, like, you need to tell them what they need and what they want and you need to follow your instincts of that. So there's a bit of a my first instinct was what we we great traction selling genomics tests that would give people a certain insight that they were craving thanks to an influencer. My theory was They are only even reacting to that because they have a deeper need to proactively manage their health and take control of stuff. They often feel like there's kind of an unlock or a bottleneck that they're trying to get over in their own personal health life. And we could be the solution for that. And what I always wanted to build with Strive was this idea of a vertically integrated single operating system that didn't just sell you a lab test here and a lab test there and refer you out to buy a something drunk from somebody else and refer you out to another practitioner and hope they paid attention to your lab reports that you'd bought through these other suppliers and to go there's one place that can learn from this sort of network effect of all of your data longitudinally over time. So I just wanted to build that this that's that's that's the key piece is I really wanted that to exist. And that was influenced by of course being in this space for twelve plus years and seeing almost some of the stupidity of the things that even I did with my previous businesses, right? So firstly I wanted that. Secondly, then when we did speak to the customers, and by default we offer a consultation with every purchase. So we have incredible data. Right. And then and so we were able to just sort of query that. And basically we found that their goals were almost unanimously the the biggest priorities were very long term and non specific, which was actually really powerful in support of what I wanted to do. They didn't come to us because they wanted to lose weight or get fit now or Some of these sort of shorter and more aesthetic goals, they came to us because they were thinking about longevity or they were thinking about just feeling their best or being more productive at work. And so actually, I kind of with confirmation bias found a reason to believe in my own thesis of what we needed to build. And over time that has proven out to be true, albeit it's a it's not a bubble in the same way that we were able to just acquire this person to sugary. speaker-0: Hey, we'll hear from the future. If you've enjoyed this episode or you're enjoying it so far, then you will love our note. The note is a weekly email that we send out, which includes our learnings and playbooks from the people we're speaking to, includes any invites to future events as we're building Healthier, the place for founders in health, fitness, and well being, and it includes any new episodes. So go to healthierco.com and sign up and we'll see you there. Super interesting. So so What you're saying is your customer really is that kind of preventative, make sure I'm ticking all the boxes for my health, make sure I'm doing everything I can. Do you find that like they they do tend to have like a some kind of reason for coming in? Like do they do they tend to have you mentioned like they want to feel good. Are they feeling like a bit bad and want to feel better? Are they are they got some kind of a ailment or is it purely like I wanna I wanna this is a going from good to great? speaker-1: Yeah, so really interesting. The there's there's three main jobs to be done, right? We've just doing a bunch of research on this recently. One is they feel like dismissed patients. So they have gone to whatever other solution they have, whether it's the NHS, their parent physician, just gone to other companies or other brands and they feel like they've not been listened to and they've been dismissed to say, Nothing's wrong, you're fine, like, you know, the average is is this and you're here and you know, see you later. We we can't help you. That's quite a powerful motivator for people that maybe feel like there's something they could be better at or they could feel clearer at and nobody wants to give them any attention or that. That's a really powerful driver. The second one, which I thought was really interesting, is they don't want to end up like their mum and dad. And I think with people at my age are probably similar stage to you, Will, where you've got your own young kids and you're like, their grandparents, I love them interacting with them, but I wish they were more, you know, physically active or could be healthier or whatever. And that's a generational change. And there's basically a a case of people saying, you know what? I'm investing my health now, even though nothing's wrong, because I want to be the best version of myself for my kids and my grandkids in the future. It's like a it's like an external impetus as opposed to a an internal one. And that's really powerful. Like it's a very strong motivator. speaker-0: Just on that one quickly, the when I when I think about longevity as a motivator or as a a reason for purchasing something, I'm much more likely to purchase for that version, and I would say that's a version of longevity, right? Like like how how my life not just my lifespan, but my high quality lifespan than some woolly kind of longevity which is just like I'm gonna live forever. speaker-1: Yeah. Yeah. That's it. The live forever stuff is a complete farce, right, in my opinion. Like this whole thing, you you think you are so great that the world deserves more of of you for longer, right? You know, they can say longer. Yeah. Yeah, it's it's it's a it's an absolute sort of narcissistic tendency. And that's why the type of characters we see, you know, propo promoting this are those narcissistic alphas that think they are so good for the world that the world needs more of them. That's pointless to me. The the the impactful piece of longevity is not necessarily, you know, true length. We all talk about this. it's health span rather than lifespan. Of course it is. But what does health span really mean for you and what's important to you? And that means being useful and helpful and valuable to the people that you love and care about. And so th our customers that so many of them are coming to us because yeah, okay, they want to feel better and they want to look better and they wanna like, you know, be in control of stuff. But it's got a it's got a more altruistic need, like deep in their motivation for this, which is I am gonna be useful for my kids' kids in the future, or I'm just gonna be that aspirational old guy who my kids show off about look at him enjoying his life at this age, you know. speaker-0: And what's that th what's that third job to be done? Sorry, I cut you off. speaker-1: The third one was questioning is like it's almost like the fact of doing it itself is a brand signal, a personality signal about who they are. So this is generally in our younger demographic who meet their friends and their future partners through exercise and through fitness and through community in that respect. And it's almost as though the act the very act of doing this is a is a fashion choice, you know, is a is a choice of like what type of clothes you wear, what type of music you listen to. It's a definition of who you are. And health has become that in a great swath of the younger generation, which I think is really positive for the future health of society. And that's why I think like consumer health has such potential to change like societal health rather than like a top-down policy change from the NHS, for example. So that's that third job to be done is just like I am making this part of who I am, part of my identity. Being healthy, paying attention to this stuff is like a core. standard to which I hold myself to. And that might overlap with the other ones too, but it tend there is a definitely a group. Sorry gone. speaker-0: No, sorry, I've I I I cut you off. speaker-1: So there's definitely a group for whom that is the primary reason. They're you too young to even have kids, right? You know, they they don't have kids yet, they're not thinking about longevity. They're thinking about in the here and now, this makes me a better version of myself and I like to show that to the world and to my social group around me. speaker-0: And is that where something like the forgive me if this isn't something you offer to new customers, but when I went through stride one, I got my my little kind of cool metal card. Is that where something like that comes into because it shows the idea it shows the identity? speaker-1: Yeah, and I think we need to lean more into that stuff, right? You know, is that something you could wear externally, which is yeah, like, you know, a state a state of just as the way wearables, you know, smart watches, whatever has become, you know, that that in and of itself is a is something which we choose to signal. And it's and it but it but it's deeper than just aesthetics, right? It's not it's not just like a a trivial thing. It's actually like, you know, we all identify ourselves in some way to signal commonality with the community. What a powerful community if everybody cares about just being healthy and looking after themselves, right? speaker-0: There's probably something in there for like identity as well. You know, James Clear f in the ha all the habit stuff talks about how we kind of it's much easier f for us to start or continue a habit which is congruent with the p the identity that we have for ourselves or the identity that we aspire to have for ourselves. And so I guess you could say that for people whose identity is being healthy, taking their health seriously, taking their longevity seriously, what of course they should be doing as much as they can as well. Of course they should be trying to get access to the best that they can when it comes to understanding what's going on inside their body and what they should do about it. speaker-1: Yeah. Like health optimization as a phrase has kind of been hijacked to mean like everything has to be perfect and you sap all the joy out of being healthy and lose all the humanity. You can lose instinct around this stuff, right? And actually that's far from the definition of optimizing, like g impro is is improving. So wherever you are, it's contextual as to how what optimal means for you. Like you you've got young kids, every young kids. Our s our definition of optimal health is very different than a twenty eight year old, you know, single male who can do whatever he wants all the time, right? And so and I think it in that sort of jobs to be done context for those users, yeah, it may be that they want to track this stuff. Do they mind if you know a couple of blood markers? Maybe that's how you know. Yeah. Maybe it is and they know what they can do to work and get better. Right? Maybe it's a catch every day I can just get better. speaker-0: It's interesting thing, 'cause I feel healthier now with my nearly two year old and little sleep. I drink more than I used to, like not some huge amount, but I'm more likely to have like a a couple of glasses of wine with friends than I was four years ago when I was like totally neurotic about all things health. But I f I would say I feel healthier now because I'm kind of not as over the top of myself, not as like tracking absolutely everything, not as thinking it through, not as kind of Optimize, optimise, optimise, but actually forget that a a a life well lived is is is is healthiness. So having your stride one membership and then having knowing that you've kind of the tests happen, I react to the tests, but I don't then minute to minute need to be stressing about just the optimal thing to do for my body is quite a nice thing. speaker-1: Yeah. You know what I defined it as? I I I was on a run yesterday and this sort of definition of optimal sort of came to me is that you know, optimizing your health is about when you're faced with a decision that you can make at that point, with that set of circumstances or that environment, with some knowledge or evidence or data point, do you make a better decision than you would have made otherwise if you didn't have that knowledge? Or can you choose to make that better decision with that one piece of knowledge, that one data point that you wouldn't have had. Not that you're gonna like I will never make a non data informed decision. I will always do everything at the sort of end to it to the nth degree. And that's all the actually is, because imagine the com the compounding effects of doing that over time. It's like, you know what? I know I am prone to like have a higher predisposition for needing more of this particular nutrient. When I'm faced with this decision, I'm going to go to that thing when I want to. And that's that's going to have a long term effect on on you. And and and and that's all that's all you need to do. Like largely speaking, right? It's a it's that done very simply but compounded over time. speaker-0: Hey, Will here from the future. If you've enjoyed this episode or you're enjoying it so far, then you will love our note. The note is a weekly email that we send out, which includes our learnings and playbooks from the people we're speaking to, includes any invites to future events as we're building Healthier, the place for founders in health, fitness, and well being, and it includes any new episodes. So go to healthierco.com and sign up and we'll see you there. As you've been as you've been building the product and listening to people's feedback and If we talk about how you set the scene there, so you said at the beginning you said you want to bring like the very best to more more people. But the very best could draw on any number of things, right? You could be sending people off for the O two max testing, you could be going really deep on genomics, you could be going really, really deep on actually no, we want people having their blood tested monthly. That would be way overkill. But my point being the product mix could be a million different things. How have you managed to land on the current product mix for for Stride One and and how much of that has been go and listen to people versus the the kind of jobsian approach that you talked about. Yeah. speaker-1: You know what, there's probably like a let me think is it three maybe a three way of look. One is what are you actually capable of doing? There's loads of stuff we probably could do, but we just don't have the resource, the knowledge, the capability in house that allows us to do that without crazy speaker-0: It's a in the business model there as well, right? It's like, well if we wanted to start doing X then like suddenly we need locations or whatever, yeah. speaker-1: yeah, if we wanted to start doing full body MRI scans, okay, we've got we've got a very different business model, a very different capital outlay, etc. Right. So so there's a bit about who who are you and where are you at right now and what can you do to to still go for the same mission, right? Which is part of us. We're really good at at lab testing. We're really good at the bioinformatics layer of making sense of raw biology, applying different algorithms to that and getting to a accurate life value advice or interpretation for that. Like Turning lab reports into a user experience is what we're very good at. We really we had great capability on the human element of that so we could scale at very low cost the human practitioner interaction with users. And then we also had this you know you you quite unique ability to make these particularly absorbable, utilizable forms of supplementation which we could sort of hang our hat on. So it's like, well, if we knit together those three pieces, like health services, there's Lab testing two point there's a better version of doing labs than than is currently out there. And there's actually the intervention, that's the product we can offer, right? And that's the product we can offer at a unit economics that makes sense for us and for the user and that isn't geographically tied to a certain bricks and mortar location either. That was always like a a key part for me. I'm not I'm not a real estate guy, I didn't come from that background. I like to do this as as sort of remote as possible for our users. speaker-0: Really, really interesting. has there ever been anything where you've been really excited about potentially putting it in front of your customer base and it just hasn't taken? Like where you thought they'd value it more than they more than they did? speaker-1: We experimented and then maybe it was a timing thing. So I really wanted to do like the gold standard of GLP one prescription. Like two thousand twenty four. Because and I I believe I really believe in the the sort of societal changing effects of GLP one and I think it's a a r remarkable, you know, time in in science to have gotten to this point, right? so I'm a big I'm a big supporter of of that category of drum, generally speaking. And I I looked at this and I thought, well, you know, if you are obese, firstly you tend to be micronutrient deficient. If you are also on a GLP one, the risk of you being micronutrient deficient is very high. So therefore supplementation and testing alongside that is really helpful. Testing data itself increases adherence to dietary and lifestyle change. So that was an extra, you know, tick to integrating a GLP one program. Plus we have the human coaching by default in what we do too. So I was like, we could offer like the best possible GLP one program here where someone that needed to go on GLP one but didn't want to just get the drug at the cheapest price come in and get all this other support and supplementation, the human coaching, the regular testing to check they're doing well. And nobody wanted to buy it. We put a lot of effort into that. The infrastructure to have clinical governance, to have the prescribing ability, and nobody came to us for that speaker-0: Or was it just like it was it wasn't congruent with what people were coming to you from? speaker-1: Well I look back at it, most people probably and still today were trying to get the drug without any need to do the wraparound stuff, right? You know, it was like that was the comment. So they didn't want to pay three times the price for it as well at that point in order to to afford those other services. And also just who we are, right? It it it it wasn't congruent with who the brand had been reaching and how we looked. speaker-0: Super interesting. speaker-1: Potentially why you see you know, even bigger groups that have a GLP one, they do it under a different brand, you know? So everything when you land on them speaks to managing your way, et cetera, as opposed to going, choose this or choose this or choose this. And so that that's when I look back at it, that was probably it there was maybe a timing piece too. But but I'm I'm almost glad it didn't work because it you know, it was a distraction. If it had been successful it would have been more of a distraction. Maybe today would just be a GLP one round, you know. speaker-0: So yeah. Super interesting. I'd love to talk about distribution. Yeah. You you you've as you say managed to get up to this tens of thousands of of customers. Have you gone completely down the DTC route? Have you done anything interesting when it comes to channels? Like is it is it it feels to me that your product could be delivered as like a benefit for anyone above a certain pay grade in a company? It could be attached to super bougie gyms. It could be that you just want to go, no, we want to be absolutely incredible ads. You could go down the community. There's like a million different ways to do this. There's a bunch that probably make loads of sense on paper and then you go out and actually try them and it just it's it's not it's not the thing. I'd love to just chat about how you think about distribution, how you think about channel. speaker-1: Yes, I mean and this is not necessarily always data informed, it's more just this is what I've always done. I've done a certain playbook twice before in my two previous businesses. So what comes naturally to me is going consumer first. Yeah. So D to C is the quickest time from launch to getting somebody to pay you some money for something, right? So I I I automatically just my first thing whenever I've done any business, stand up a website and try to make people buy the thing. So we went D to C first. I think that has a number of benefits. One, as we discussed, you figure out what people are willing to pay for, how to talk to them in order to get them to pay for it. Two, you get feedback super quick. And that means feedback even if you make mistakes. So, you know, if you get something awfully wrong, you lose somebody's sample or whatever. That person, even if you lost a hundred user samples, each one of them thinks they were they were the only one they weren't wrong for, right? So your risk of of like harming the business's progress as lessened by figuring out that kind of short feedback cycle of what works and what doesn't work for a user. And you can make your mistakes with potentially less risk overall. If you go B2B first and then the first the first mistake you make is with a huge NHS trust or some other B2B enterprise customer, then that contract might be lost forever, right? So that there's a there's a a sort of experimentation piece which can happen really well in a D to C space. But it also then grows like bottom up procurement pressure on other channels. So you have incredible reviews, you have a great brand, you have a trusted brand that even a you know, a human sitting in the procurement team at an enterprise can go and look at and go, wow, they look credible. I like the way they show up. So that helps too. And then you kind of my goal in all with health is you you've got this sort of spectrum. The very far left is like luxurious purchase self paid by an individual. The very far right was like a government choosing to pay for it for all its citizens. And there's a kind of you've got to sort of l it sort of sidestep constantly to broaden your breadth and that say, well, first off, we went to practitioners. We got, you know, a couple of hundred practitioners who are dietitians, nutritionists, personal trainers, et cetera, who will buy testing products from us and use them, bundle them with their clients. That's really helpful because they get it through a trusted source. That client gets a direct consumer experience, probably refers direct consumers back to us and that trainer or that dietitian becomes an evangelist for us in the market. Secondly, then we go into like larger partnerships. So we're best with gyms, with wellness facilities, with longevity resorts, for example, all of these we've got great contracts with now where you take our product, we embed it into the membership for that customer, and their end members get something which they can see costs a number of whatever the price is directly with Stride, and they get it embedded into their membership fee already. But we also then bespoke the product experience. So the advice you give, the protocols, et cetera, are interlinked with that facility which they have access to. So we don't tell someone to use something which they don't have access to in that facility, for example. So it's that's quite powerful for for gyms and wellness facilities, hotels, et cetera. Yeah. and then lastly is probably like, you know, employers, insurers and maybe health systems downstream, which we're in early conversations with some of which are really excited about the impact we could have, but they are multi year things. And if we relied on them for our business today, we'd have to raise a ton of funding and not do any other activity. And maybe that comes off and maybe it doesn't. So I just think if you have consumer first, it unlocks the ability to do everything else. Whereas if you go the other way, it's very hard to become a consumer brand having Starfield doesn't speaker-0: B2B brand. Yeah, a hundred percent. And you also you have I guess you have more confidence in in in owning your product merry map, owning your positioning and not whilst sometimes when people ask for faster horses, you give them a faster horse and like you must have these businesses say, Hey, this is amazing. We'd just like it to do X, Y, and Z and like sometimes actually it makes sense to give them X and maybe give them Y as well and charge them a little extra. But if you've got this big group Of paying D to C members, you have confidence that you actually have that that that you don't need to just kind of bend over backwards for these B to B B to B clients as well. speaker-1: And can also we also help those B2B customers figure out what it is they should be offering because we can point to like, Hey, look, people really love interacting with this in this way, but they never seem to click on this, right? So they might have thought that a certain part of this experience would be important to them and thought that was what they needed to engage us for, but we've got data to you maybe support the opposite of that, right? So we're actually hi in some cases we're we're probably helpful to making their proposition better because of the strength of our D to C user base. Mm. speaker-0: So smart. Finally, funding. you as you say, you you you talked about coming from a bootstrap mentality and and having that mentality, but you have raised money through ventures together through through VCs, like some some great VCs. And in the future, I would assume now you're on the path, there will be more money to be raised. How do you think about funding? How do you how have you made those decisions so far on your journey? And there isn't anything kind of big learnings that you feel like you have From the funding journey thus far? speaker-1: Yes, I we we we we have this really sort of luxurious best of both worlds where we managed to make great revenue bootstraps so we could be sure of ourselves and who we were. But we also then were able to leverage that to raise our external capital. You know, and we've not raised a huge amount of capital in the business's history. Certainly when I look at some of our competitors, like it's you know, we we pale in comparison. But almost the traction we've gotten and the revenue we've gotten i is still is is by far away, you know, bigger than they've got to. So there's a There's there's no there's no right or wrong in this sense and we were just running our own capital. You almost got a more narrow lane and one path that you can follow. Extra capital allows you to to experiment. And I do I've really felt the value of that instrive, you know, today for some some great investor partners. speaker-0: Amazing. Yeah. There's an interesting point on the like there's a lot of kind of essentially commodity blood testing plus out there. And I've made the point on the podcast before where I feel like the the value of a commodity blood test has actually gone up in some ways with the with Chat GPT and with Claw, but I can now chuck it if if I if I wanted to, I could just get a whatever labs with a thin brand on top and chuck it in. Torn and Chat GPT and like get a lot more value than I would have got way back when if I if I'd just gone for a lab test and been emailed a PDF. But there's that now a bunch of people kind of squabbling over that layer and and then it becomes the the interesting part becomes well, how can you give something that's genuinely like significantly more valuable, which is exactly what you're up to? speaker-1: I mean, this is a very important point, right? The phrase I've used was that it's almost like the most the most ambitious research study in human health ever is actually happening live right now. But it's not happening in research lab. It's not happening under one brand. It's happening at individual consumers going into Chat GPT or Florida saying, I've got my wearable data here, I've got this PDF from this lab. I've got like this transcripts and this. You've inter put here's my Strava data. Yeah. Tell me what's going on in my health. That's super powerful, but no value like accrues to anybody but that user at that point in time in their own private like AI chat. That's great. And then maybe they're a really, you know, motivated user who will create that as a regular thing and will keep it going. But chances are it kind of is is ephemeral and it kind of just disperses into their own lives later on. By us doing all of this in one place, my goal is that we end up with this network effect on health impact, which is that nobody is quite really previously cracked. I'll could do truly personalized health advice that actually works. They've taken evidence and then gone, let's try this change, and then hopefully someone sticks to it. But they don't know because they don't do enough of the service in-house. So by being more ambitious about what we do, we're going to see these crossomic interactions between the different types of biomarkers that we see because we run our own bioinformatics to understand how we got to that conclusion rather than just buying a reported lab test as is the new growth. market in consumer health right now, we understand actually what moves the needle and why. Then because we own the practitioners and they're employed by us, the transcripts from those calls can go back into the product experience for the user and we can learn from the aggregated value of that. And then because we own the intervention, we can directly control and see if the advice we gave and the things that we give as that intervention do work because of the testing, because of the human, because of the supplementation. So my goal is that actually if we emerge from this business in three years time from now, We've got this unbelievable data set by which we can give better advice. And and that can't happen if everybody else is just sort of self servicing this through a ton of different brands. Plus we'll be a lot cheaper than than doing that from a ton of different places over over time as well, right? speaker-0: It's so interesting, isn't it? I mean, there's a couple of things that that jump out to me there. It's a really compelling additional value when you get a minute to explain it. Then I guess one of your challenges becomes how do you manage to explain that in five five seconds? Exactly, exactly. Like or or in a in a first few seconds of a reel or whatever you have to do. And then the second thing is, so how do you ra react to the fact that like myself, like I I have the Claude project, I have the the blood tests both from yourselves and like old ones that are just PDFs with no interpretation on whatsoever. I have the like I'm I'm you were speaking to me when you were talking about having the Strava C P and the aura stuff set up. Yeah. So do you then do you ignore that? Do you kind of compete against it where you say like look, that's all fun and games, but it y that's not how you're gonna actually improve your health? Or do you kind of treat that as a baseline and you go, Hey, Okay, cool, that's that's pretty helpful and we and we start to say, Well, can you give us some of that and we can consider it? Like or or is it some fourth option? speaker-1: So c well, pr pro a little bit of all of the above, but the first point maybe as a as one that we didn't quite allude to there is there has always been guys like you and there always will be that can and will self service whatever it is stride does, right? You know, you can be a super passive that's not all the way there. speaker-0: It's not all the way there, right? It's it's it like I don't really know what I'm talking about. speaker-1: So maybe yeah, maybe you're a bit closer to the target market, but there's a layer of like, let's say, truly biohacker enthusiast people that you know don't need us as such. They end up buying from us anyway, because it's easier. They don't need us as such, right? They they've got their own chosen lab that does this particular gut microbiome sequencing. Yeah, exactly right. Okay. So th then then there's the sort of biohacker curious or sort of longevity adjacent biomed, which sounds like where you are, all right. And The challenge for us is basically one, you know, finding people like you and then saying to them this will be cheaper and more convenient for you, but it will also give you better insight. And getting your attention long enough to explain why we'll give you better advice is a tr is a challenge for us, right? That's a that's actually the biggest bottleneck towards scaling now. How do we communicate the value I've just told you on every touch point? It's very hard, right? It's very, very hard. And then and and then and then fr from there it's like There's lots of companies in this space that will do a better job than us at acquiring new users, right? Whether because they've got more capital, they buy them at a loss first and then figure out how to monetize them later, VC subsidized, as it were. you know, that that that will we probably won't win that game unless we raise the colossal round, right? What we will win, and what seems to be where we're winning, is that we are keeping people engaged and retained, even on this relatively expensive product, right? Astonishing levels. We're just approaching the end of our first 12 months of of cohort on Stride One, which is 800 and something pounds a year, right? It's not a cheap product. It's still it's really good value, but it's not cheap. And it looks like we're, you know, approaching like over 85% renewal into years. Which speaker-0: Phenomenal, yeah. speaker-1: is remarkable, right? Like and and I'm almost surprised by how effective this this is as a product, too. Because it seems to be that the job we're doing for people is really effective. And that's really powerful. Because even if they're so healthy. That's keeping them. Yeah, if they're unhealthy, it's keeping them. If they're healthy, it's keeping them. The value we're giving is there. So all I can do is say we will give the best value to those users once we've got them. And over time I think that will also create a compounding effect to winning new users at the same way. But but just building the best products, some of the funding we've we've raised in this non dilutive part of the round was in order to build like the gold standard world leading products around this to give people the best insights from their own biomarkers, right? So So I think if we build the better product, eventually that will lead us to win against those that are just acquiring people and selling a you know, a layer on top of a commodity blood test. speaker-0: Amazing. And long may it continue. Long may the success continue. Thank you so much. Is there anything else that you feel like we've not crossed off any hard fought lessons, any ups, downs that we should have dug into that we that we haven't? speaker-1: Yeah, I mean I I would I think we've you know, we've we've moved away from the the biohackers op optimization d definition. We've we've we've we've pissed off enough people. Everyone speaker-0: Everyone's caught strays. Yeah. speaker-1: Yeah, yeah, that's it. No, no listen, and I've shared the thing which I'm not very good at doing yet, which is like how to how to consolidate the actual vision of the compelling thing that we're selling in this business. But no, no, I th I think that's good and You know, glad to glad to have the opportunity to share the the nitty gritty up. speaker-0: And if if y if you as a listener want to find out why those incredible incredibly high leading retention levels exist, then go and check out Stride One. That's the first port of call, right? That's where that's that's the way to speaker-1: So get get yourself over to get astride dot com is our URL. or yeah, find me find me on whichever social platform as well, d Andrew Steele.