Distribution Channels
Our product will be sold through our own website initially. This is because our GTM strategy involves a referral system where you can only purchase a device if you have been invited by another user. As our user base grows, we may expand to specialized athletic stores and some other online retail businesses such as Amazon. This creates a scarcity and a desire to be one of the lucky “insiders” who have been invited to use the band one of the first.
Other channels do not allow for referral systems to work.
Sales Strategy
- We are choosing to have a direct-to-consumer approach rather than channel partners, self-service, or freemium.
- The benefits of a direct-to-consumer approach are that 1) we own the customer relationship (data and insights), 2) we get higher margins (no retailers are taking a cut of our profits), 3) we control the brand story, which is very important for us, as we envision our brand conveying a very strong, exclusive identity, 4) and a better post-sale experience – we will control onboarding, device setup, warranties, etc.
- This is better than channel partners because it doesn’t cut into our margins and gives us ownership over our product’s sales data. Also, with a direct-to-consumer model, we can iterate quickly, which would be harder with a channel partner model.
- This is better than self-service because our wearable hardware requires setup and instructions – a self-service model has no guided onboarding or coaching, which is integral to our product.
- This is better than a freemium model because we would like to cover the price it takes to build the hardware with an up front payment. We also believe a commitment up front would encourage longer term retention.
- Our sales model is specifically an up-front payment of $99 dollars which covers the cost of building the hardware, and then a subscription to use the software at either $100 a year or $15 a month.
- We chose this model because the $99 dollar entry point feels premium but attainable maintaining our brands exclusive feel but being far more affordable up front than the Oura ring or an Apple Watch. Additionally, our subscription model balances affordability with solid recurring revenue. This is where we expect to make the large majority of our profits. The two commitment options provide users accessibility while rewarding longer commitments. Also, the longer you have a subscription, the more our AI coach gets to know you and the better and more personalized your insights will be over time.
- This model fits our product and target user because athletes who will buy our product regularly invest in their health with things like shoes and supplements, so they would certainly be willing to invest $99 up front for our product which promises to optimize their athletic life. Additionally, a direct to consumer model aligns with our vision of a tight knit Endure community.
Marketing and Promotion
- How will you create awareness with limited/no budget?
- Connections (talking with investors, pitching ideas, collaborating with celebrities and athletes that would appeal to our target audience)
- We will market our product as the first 50,000 bands we sell will be a unique color, like purple, to reward our beta users. After 50,000 we will switch to our original white color for the rest of our users.
- Why: It would not be wise to spend money on paid advertisement on an idea we have not solidified into a real prototype with real testing and experiments prior to going public
- What channels will you use? (Social, content, partnerships, word-of-mouth, etc.)
- Social content like Instagram, partnerships with athletes on social media (ideally David Goggins at some point)
- Why: Content on social media is free and can also gain a lot of traction if done correctly. Partnerships with social media creators who are athletes will also attract their viewers, who would be a part of our target audience
- Why will your target users pay attention?
- WellWave Endure will be a social badge, similar to Whoop. We will market our product as something that users can be proud to wear and separate them from non-users.
- Our product will also use community to attract users so that they can share results with each other, similar to Strava
- Why: The market for fitness bands is already pretty saturated. We noted that one of the major reasons why Whoop and Strava were so successful because they appeal to the human nature of looking at nice things and wanting community. Our users will also pay attention to our band at the beginning because of the reward of getting it early (unique color).
Customer Service Strategy
WellWave Endure provides tiered, premium support designed for endurance athletes who train at non-traditional hours and need immediate assistance to avoid losing training days.
Our live phone hotline operates 6 AM – 10 PM ET, seven days a week, staffed by specialists who understand endurance training terminology and can troubleshoot both technical issues and training plan questions. We chose phone support because athletes often need real-time guidance mid-workout or right before a training session when waiting hours for email responses isn’t viable.
In-app live chat provides 24/7 coverage with human agents during peak training hours (5 AM – 11 PM ET) and AI-assisted responses with escalation paths during off-hours, complemented by email support with a 4-hour response guarantee.
Self-service resources include a comprehensive FAQ organized by common issues i.e. syncing, workout adjustments, metric interpretation, video tutorials for onboarding and feature navigation, and a community support forum where athletes troubleshoot together with daily moderation and immediate staff response for flagged urgent issues. We prioritize self-service because our needfinding showed athletes spend 20+ minutes daily managing fitness tools, so empowering them to solve common problems in under 2 minutes respects their limited time.
For hardware sync failures, we’ve implemented auto-diagnostics that run after two failed syncs and display fix steps, offline mode that prevents data loss, and monthly sync health checks.
We continuously improve through systematic feedback collection including NPS surveys at 30, 90, and 180 days, one-tap in-app feedback buttons on every screen, post-support interaction surveys, and a monthly user advisory board of 10-15 power users. Weekly support ticket analysis identifies any issue appearing 20+ times for immediate engineering prioritization, while feature usage tracking flags sub-10% adoption rates for either improved onboarding or deprecation. This is because we believe in data-driven iteration where user pain points directly shape our product roadmap rather than building in isolation.
