Ahmed: WHOOP reached LeBron James by seeding devices with personal trainers
Will Ahmed · WHOOP: Will Ahmed · Jul 21, 2025 · at 40:57
WHOOP founder Will Ahmed discusses the startup's early go-to-market strategy to reach top athletes without paying millions of dollars in celebrity endorsement deals.
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“And the secret to getting to them, just to say it was to find people in their lives that had a big influence on them that no one else knew. It turned out in 2015, the personal trainer was a relatively unknown person in a professional athlete's life. And it also turned out that the personal trainers of the very best athletes essentially lived with them and spent more time with them than any other human on the planet. And so in the case of LeBron, like Mike Mencius was his longtime personal trainer, still is today, and he started wearing whoop. And he liked it enough to ask for another one to put on LeBron.”
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