Hapi, Ladders, Beachbody
Whatever happened to Tony Horton?
Hapi and other mental health offerings
I’ve written a bit about mental healthcare apps. I’ve generally bucketed them as follows
Marketplaces
Fully-integrated offerings
Attempts to lower cost by text/AI
Another intriguing alternative: replace the higher-cost trained human with a lower-cost human. Hapi is an attempt to do just that. It pairs you with trained listeners (crisis hotline volunteers, psych grad students, etc.) and allow you to vent. The business model is directly providing this service (unlike 7 cups below) – after a brief trial, you pay $12 for a half hour or $18 for an hour (paid by the minute). This is distinctly NOT attempting to replace situations where trained medical care is needed.
In some ways, this resembles Clayton Christensen’s innovators dilemma. $175/hour mental health care is an overfit for many speed bumps in life. Additionally, this expands the pool of supply. I don’t see this replacing therapy and certainly not psychiatry. Certainly, there is a demand for some mental support these days, and Chamath Palihapitiya is a smart investor.
Similar models that I don’t get as excited about are 7 Cups and TalkLife. 7 Cups offers a similar service to Hapi. 7 Cups is actually free to be heard, which is appreciated during COVID. They are ultimately using this offering as a funnel to push paid, Talkspace-style text therapy and mindfulness exercises. It is an interesting lead-gen idea but gives away the plot: they aren’t really trying to disrupt the industry.
I am troubled by a company called TalkLife, which is an anonymous, online peer to peer support network for mental health. If Hapi and 7 Cups expand the pool of qualified supply, TalkLife turns everyone into a potential helper. I’m all for trying the concept, but the execution terrifies me. Companies Whisper, Secret and YikYak attempted anonymous posting products in the past few years. They became about as toxic as you’d expect. This company needs massive (read: costly) moderation. Twitter is a $40 billion company that hasn’t solved harassment in an automated manner. This is not a pool of users that can emotionally deal with the worst parts of human behavior enabled by the internet.
Ladders, Playbook, Beachbody
I previously wrote about my skepticism of a company called Future: premium 1:1 access to personal training. Coincidentally, my former trainer Andre Crews was recently promoting a service called Ladders. Ladders is exactly what I expected: a less personalized service, yet substantially cheaper. Ladders has assembled an ‘Instagram-all-stars’ roster of trainers to drive some buzz. Instead of paying $150/month for allegedly customized programming and coaching, Ladders charges $60 a month to join a team. Each team, led by a trainer, has weekly programming with audio cues and encouragement. You can still message your trainer, though the training is one-size-fits-all.
Even that model is not as cheap as it will get. Playbook strips the communication out and drops the price to $15 per month. For that monthly price, you have access to every trainer on their app. I expect trainer quality to be lowest here (but relatively high), since it is company-centric not trainer-centric. This strikes me as the winning, mass-market approach, frankly because of price. There is room for several models here. One could think of Future as the Equinox of the market (I actually like Equinox). Playbook is taking the Blink/Planet Fitness path. Ladders middle-ground business model is more challenging to see. $60/month is still premium for most, though their trainers have massive Instagram followings to attract.
One fitness company that hadn’t made a ton of noise in 2020 is Beachbody. Future, Ladders and Playbook are moving into an opportunity seemingly being vacated by Beachbody. You may remember the endless commercials for P90X or Insanity. Beachbody has a roster of celebrity trainers who make 90-day training programs, now available to stream online. Compared to the upstarts, Beachbody has some brand/cultural relevance already built-in. Tony Horton had his moment. Beachbody was home fitness more than a decade ahead of these companies.
It was revealing, then, that Beachbody’s recent move was to acquire Lebron and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s supplement company. Beachbody is an unusual company, and it is not unfair to describe them as a Multi-Level Marketing organization. Beachbody pays coaches to train customers using their products, as well as recruit new coaches. A MLM salesforce needs to sell a TON of $9.99 a month subscriptions to earn a living, but protein powders and supplements are easier. Their organization doesn’t seem to be designed to capture this current COVID opportunity, which is why Beachbody now runs a second company Openfit – identical content but no MLM. Beachbody could be quite compelling as fitness comes online.