How Superpower is Reinventing Healthcare

We started with the short-term belief that we wanted to democratize access to the world's best concierge medicine. I remember when we launched, we had this manifesto and it opened with something like healthcare is broken. 80% of Americans are metabolically unhealthy. There are thousands of toxins in the natural environment. Male fertility is declining. Women's fertility is is declining. Our longevity is going down. Chronic disease is going up. And that emotional narrative in a postco world was really resonant. There shouldn't be a question of whether I go to a human doctor or an AI doctor. Everyone will have to go to an AI doctor because it will be far better than any human can ever be. Welcome to Subversive, a podcast dedicated to sharing stories from the best consumer subscription apps in the world. We'll bring you lessons for how to grow your consumer subscription business, including insights and inflection points that led

to exponential growth from leaders at category defining companies and innovative startups. Let's get into the show. My guest today is Matt Marion, the co-founder and president of Superpower, a startup that is reinventing digital health to help people live longer and better lives. In this episode, I talked to Max about how his personal health struggles as a teenager later inspired him to start Superpower in 2023, about how the company managed to build a weight list of over 100,000 people before launching publicly, and about the many ways that Max expects AI to improve the quality and reduce the cost of healthcare in the coming years. All right, welcome Max to the Subversive podcast. Super excited to have you on today to talk about Superpower, uh, which is a relatively new startup in the digital health space. It's a product that I've used and very much enjoyed over the last year or so. And so excited

to get into the story today. But before we go too far, would love to just hear a little bit more about your background and your path to launching Superpower and then maybe you can tell us a little bit more about what Superpower is for those who don't already know. Yeah. So the I I I find this question interesting because the premise of these kinds of questions is that there has to be a path and we look for linearity and stories and typically what happens is people therefore either retroactively feed a story to solve for what they're trying to persuade someone about or they pretend that there has to be steps in a path and you do this step and then this thing and then eventually you can do the thing you want to do. So the thing I'd instead suggest as as a more like meta thing is what happens if we enter a world where people can just choose to do the thing without actually having to take the steps to do the thing. Now

that's not the point of the question. So I I I will answer it. I have been starting all sorts of things since I was um quite young uh around eight just small companies. Um I've always liked having opinions on the world and trying to make them come to life through the act of creation which is starting a company. I around 3 years ago I was thinking about what do I want to spend the next um 30 40 50 years of my life on and I just quit my job at Goldman Sachs.

I was running two small companies at the time and I realized that three things had to be true. One is that I had to work on something that was deeply personally meaningful. Um and for me health is one of those things. I went through a long period of misdiagnosis surgery told to medicate for life. No one really knew what was wrong with me and so I had to take matters into my own hands. basically from age 8 to 18 that happened. So health was deeply personally meaningful. The second thing that had to be true is what was globally meaningful. What matters for the world?

There are very few ideas or companies that progress human life or push humanity forward. And health is one of those things. And then the final thing is um uh what can support at least a 100 plus billion dollar company. If you're going to work on something for 30, 40, 50 years and you want it to be important, I think that this is a really great guiding and framing question, right? It forces you to think for the long term and think about what can compound. And there were two things I was thinking through. Do I start a new city or do I start a new healthare system? And I I thought that the healthare system um comes first, at least for the the first um 50 years. And I moved to the US and and uh and here we are a couple of years later.

Yeah. Well, first of all, I really love the creativity and nonlinearity of that answer. I think I'm certainly somebody who at various points in my career has been guilty of being overly linear in how I think about things. And so, appreciate you breaking the mold there. It sounds like while maybe professionally you've done a number of different things and there hasn't been a clear A to B to C path, you had very personal experience with misdiagnosed health issues between the ages of 8 and 18 that inspired you uh to come up with this vision for superpower. So I'd love

to hear a little bit more about that story just the origin story behind superpower and what inspired you to do it in the first place. So yeah, the linearity thing is interesting because if I look at the way people are trained in the US, it's in fabrication. It's tell your story to get into college, right? When you start a company, you're also taught fabrication. Tell the story that explains exactly why you started this company. And the way I see founders do that, they're like, "Oh, cool. I'm working on this thing. Cool.

Let's work out the story now." Like, is that actually how it came about? I want to hear how you actually thought about things. What was the actual reasoning? And now the set of all your prior experiences probably informed what you build today. And that's where I think the story can be interesting. And if I look at that for me, um, part of why I've been really really obsessed with health and believe that something has to change is what you're saying, which is the the challenging health experiences.

Um, basically from age 8 to 18, I had a host of health problems. Um, chronic migraines. It would take me 3 hours to get to sleep every night. I slept through half of my high school classes. I used to sprint and play um soccer semi-professionally. I'd be asleep like 10 minutes before a race. Um had chronic sinusitis, had surgery, was told to medicate for life, saw over a dozen doctors, and no one knew what was wrong with me. And when that happens, you start to be like, well, I have to do something. So, you start to research.

That's what I did. I remember wearing a big Gen One Aura ring back in 2016. People thought, there we go. And people thought that was crazy back in 2016 to track sleep. They used to make fun of me and then I pulled out the blue light block and glasses and mouth tape and they thought I was full psychopathic by that point. And because I was trying so many things and testing so many things, I became interested in investing in those companies. So I'd keep a long list of all the companies that I was seeing and I'd try to invest in them all. I invested in my first one. It was a longevity biosciences company um when I was 17 years old. And again, I didn't really know what I was doing. I was like, "This seems cool and interesting."

And I think those that set of experiences exposed me to the world of self-learning, of health, and of the gap between mainstream health, what your doctor says, and the best of health, right? The the kind of healthcare Jeff Bases might have. And I ended up solving my health problem by finding a genius doctor um who connected all the dots, who tested my whole body, and made me realize that there's a big gap between the best of healthcare, what most people have, and um one articulation of superpower is is in response to that gap, right? We fundamentally believe that gap should not exist. And for as long as it exists, it's on us to to close it.

And so you all came together, it was you and uh and uh your co-founders in 2023 and and launched Superpower. And my understanding is that there was this weight list that got built up in part because sounds like you've had experiences with the shortcomings of the medical system. I've certainly had experiences with that. I think many of

us have. Um so what did those early days look like in terms of developing the MDP and when did you know that you were ready for public launch? We um started with the short-term belief that we wanted to democratize access to the world's best concurge medicine. And in the early days, the manifestation of that belief was let's start with a $10,000 membership and then a 2,000 and then a $799 to take highquality medicine and then productize it bit by bit more and more over time.

That sounded sensible. I guess like the Tesla approach. I think it was actually a bad decision. The reality is that if you start at a $10,000 price point, you end up making decisions for that price point rather than for the democratic $4.99 or $1.99 or $99 solution. Mhm. So the mistake was launching that which was too serviceled, too high touch, set too many expectations and the correction was actually scoping down to closer to where we want to be in the limit which is a $499 membership which forces us to make decisions commensurate to building something which the majority of people can own. Um and uh we launched uh several months ago. I guess we announced the company uh mid last year and then properly launched um several months ago and um with that price point and and with that offering and for us uh launch was defined by having a product that we really loved that we were happy with that we would want for our friends or

family. Um, and to get there takes a lot of testing, bringing a lot of people through early, a lot of learnings, um, a lot of hacking away and and and, uh, that we eventually got there. Yeah. And you mentioned that obviously you had friends and family members as early adopters, but there's so much testing that goes into the crucible of building an MVP and getting it ready for launch. How did you identify and recruit some of your other early adopters? I know you built this ultimately you had a weight list of over 100,000 people who are excited to use this product. How did you identify those people and how did you get them excited about superpower?

Initially it started as people we knew. Um the very first customers were friends, acquaintances, family members, people who would give us lots of feedback, who would test with us and then we started growing by word of mouth. most of the almost 200,000 person weight list but the end of it was uh word of mouth people posting on Twitter organically we did a few different viral marketing drops um that tried to define and create culture and create awareness um I think having really strong and stable brand foundations helped primarily the level of our beliefs that underpin the religion our strategic identity as a synonym for beliefs and then also at the level of um how do we book, how do we show up? Uh we are an orange healthcare company that didn't exist. Every health company was blue.

Whereas who were distinct at the level of the visual identity uh as well. So um the way this was organic, build a good product, word of mouth, have a very resonant, strategic and visual brand, and then do interesting marketing drops to capture attent attention on the internet. Was there I mean that that approach makes a lot of sense. much easier said than done, but you guys managed to be very successful with it. Did you mentioned some of these marketing drops?

Were there any particular points that really resonated with people? We talked a little bit earlier about the frustration people have with the medical

system particularly in the United States. Uh what were the key messages that were really resonating with people? There was strong disenfranchisement with the health system postco. There was this sense that the health system had failed people. I remember when we launched, we had this manifesto and it opened with something like healthcare is broken. 80% of Americans are metabolically unhealthy. There are thousands of toxins in the natural environment. Uh male fertility is declining. Women's fertility is is declining. Longevity is going down.

Chronic disease is going up. We made this statement that here is the brokenness of the system. a system that misses red flags and reacts too late and and doesn't see the full picture. And that emotional narrative in a postco world um was really resonant and when we initially announced the company we had hundreds of people who messaged us saying this is this is so like special and meaningful. I wish that more companies like this existed. They messaged us with stories and we have like a big notion page of like hundreds of stories that people sent us um emphasizing why they believed this had to exist in the world. So that that some of that messaging resonated. Are there one or two stories obviously anonymously but one or two stories you could share and this has you know it has personal relevance for me because I've had friends family members go through some of this stuff recently and it can be

very painful. So I'm just curious some of the more interesting stories you heard in the process of launching the company. There were many stories of misdiagnosis. People who had who had things that were missed. There were many of our members who discovered things that were missed. I discovered I had pre-diabetes. I discovered I had mold toxicity. And I wasn't a lone story. Many of our members discovered very similar things with mold or plastic exposure or hormones that were out of balance or a high genetic risk of heart disease as seen throughout like LPA. So there there were many of those things that um were quite common across many members because there's a one-off is a story and then in the aggregate it's like well this is actually like really interesting data and starts to suggest that having access to this information about your body via a blood test as a starting point um is actually really helpful for a lot of

people. Yeah. Well and as somebody who started using product at the beginning of this year I can attest to some of this. I mean, I'm somebody who runs four or five days a week, generally tries to eat healthy, considers myself to be a fairly healthy person and, you know, and my results were solid, but there were certainly opportunities for improvement. And so, I found it really compelling to have all your health data in a single place and to be able to diagnose where where you

might be able to do a little bit better, whether it's on sleep or nutrition or fitness. So why don't we take this opportunity to talk a little bit about what Superpower is today, the online health platform, the access to clinicians, the marketplace for purchasing supplements and other services. And then I'm curious to hear to the extent you're open to sharing where you see the company going over the next 3 to 5 years and that and we can talk a bit more about the strategy for how you get there.

Today we're an annual membership 42 a month, 499 a year. There few parts. One is we'll give someone twice annual 100 plus blood biomarker tests. We'll pull all of someone's data into one place pulling in their past medical records integrating their wearables allowing for data upload. We'll connect the dots across all of this data and build someone this big report which make people like someone gets the report and they're typically like wo this is like really special and like really gamechanging. I hadn't realized a lot of this stuff about my health. Um, and then we make it easy for someone to take action. So, at any time someone can pull out their phone and send a text message to their medical team. They have a concierge team in their pocket that will also proactively reach out. Um, they will understand their data and they can order all sorts of follow-up things. So, if you need follow-up diagnostics,

that's through us. Um, it's not within the five the $4.99. It like some of those diagnostics can get expensive. um if you need uh health products, pharmaceuticals, supplements, referrals, that can be done through us. All cheaper than anywhere else and higher quality and more convenient. The belief is that care within the ecosystem with when you're a superpower member is better, cheaper, and more um accessible than anywhere else. Um that's like that's that's the fundamental belief. So that's where we are today. Annual health membership focused on prevention and and uh human performance. And uh our belief is let's keep over in the future let's just keep adding to that membership similar to how Amazon Prime um has made Amazon Prime more and more valuable over time. How can we make this membership so valuable that the majority of people should own it? How do we reduce costs?

How do we add services? How do we add software? How do we do more on the AI side such that we get to a point where just as 150 million Americans own an Amazon Prime membership, 150 million Americans own a Superpower membership. And this is like what you do if you if you want to be healthy. Um so that that's uh and in that world um I believe everyone is a super app on their phone with an AI doctor on it and that actually becomes the first place people turn to access care before going to Google Chhatubt or their primary care doctor. I will say speaking from personal experience both for myself and my two daughters. I have an eight and a 5-year-old. My wife and I are more and more turning to chatbt or other AI tools as our first line of defense for just diagnosing things that crop up daytoday week to week. Um, and so, you know, drawing the trend line of where that could go over the next three to five

years, I can easily see a world where, yes, you're still going to see a human

doctor at some point, but more and more an AI doctor could solve a lot of your problems. How do you see this evolving say by 2030? Like what what could a superpower user be experiencing 5 years from now if your vision comes to fruition? There shouldn't be a question of whether I go to a human doctor or an AI doctor. Everyone will have to go to an AI doctor because it will be far better than any human can ever be. It will predict things far in advance. It will connect the dots. It will tell you exactly what to do. We'll no longer be in a world of asking, should I trust this? It should be like, well, no, obviously I trust this. It knows so much about me and so much about medicine. It knows all of my preferences and knows exactly what I'm like that we kind of have to trust the algorithm. And that's where we get to. A member should be able to come to us first and know that for any health question, we can solve that in the

highest quality way with the holistic clinical model um and in the lowest price way, right? We should be able to navigate someone across the health ecosystem. Um someone should come to us and want to research and explore and have all their data in one place. Um, and then hopefully, and this is this is a little bit more farfetched, like hopefully where we get to when we start uh when we have all this data in one place is that we can realize things that no human ever has. We can actually start to say there's actually a whole another world of medicine out there. Um, that that we've kind of overlooked in a in a human-led paradigm, but now in a technology paradigm, we can discover.

Um, and that's on the diagnostic side and also on the therapeutic side. Um, so there some of the things that that I don't think are actually that far-fetched despite what some people might think today. Yeah. I'm going to go off script a bit here because I have this framework I've been thinking about recently just in terms of my own medical experience and I'm curious if it resonates with you. Let's say as as recently as 30 or 40 years ago, the majority of people at least in the United States, I won't speak for the rest of the world, were living in smaller towns. They typically had a doctor who was taking care of them for most of their lives starting in many cases from the time they were a child.

And so they had a lot of context on who this individual was, what their living environment looked like, what their prior medical history looked like. And what that meant was they could more easily diagnose issues that fell one to two standard deviations or more outside of the mean. I think more and more doctors have gotten better and better at diagnosing people who fall within a certain band of what's quote normal. But if you have an issue that falls too far outside of the norm, then because doctors are so hurried these days and they have so little time to really deeply understand patients and their medical histories, it can be really hard to diagnose one of these corner cases.

And this is where I found AI to be so powerful because it can pattern match across all of the information available on the internet in order to get it these needles in a hay stack that sometimes crop up with human health. Uh and so my hope is that over the next 3 to 5 years we continue to have the benefits of advancing medical technology and advancing medical expertise in the form of human doctors but then we also get all the breadth that we used to have with family doctors through AI. Does that does that resonate? Is that sort of where you see things going?

Yeah, 100%. I think that what I'm hearing is like context helps with diagnosis and medical knowledge helps with diagnosis. And humans have limited context. They don't know everything about you, all of your data, all of your medical history, all of your preferences, what's happening at any point in time. Like a doctor spends 5 to 10 minutes with you, right? And um humans have limited medical knowledge. Now, doctors lag the research by 17 years. So known stat um so when we solve for and what what AI does is it solves for context it knows about you and it solves for medical knowledge knows about all the latest medicine a new paper is published and the AI has access to that.

So I think the implication of that is that AI becomes far better at humans at computation between the database of the patient and the database of medicine. In other words, it becomes far better at diagnosis and far better at determining the optimal treatment plan. Yeah, I can certainly believe that. Well, I want to go back to we talked about vision. Let's talk about the strategy for realizing this vision. And I guess a place I would love to start. I I really celebrate your desire to democratize this platform for as many people as possible. Right. Obviously, a $10,000 a year price point is going to be inaccessible to the vast majority of people. Even a $500 a year price point is only accessible to so many people.

And so, how have you managed to so quickly, and I know there's only so much you'll be able to share here, be able to

offer a lot of these services at such a low cost? You mentioned that a lot of these supplements and other services are available at a lower cost than you could find anywhere else. And and do you think that over time, whether due to advances in AI or other technology or for other reasons, Superpower will be able to offer these services even more cheaply than you do today? The way we get there is three things. One is partnerships that um result in us having a lower price or lower cost. The second is choosing to charge less and make less money.

Like we believe that healthcare is overpriced. And the third is by bundling um selling a membership alongside access to everything else. We can under the charge similar to how Costco can own the price and anything because they have the membership or Amazon Prime charges less because there's this Amazon Prime. The combination of these things allows us to potentially change the structure of how healthcare is priced. Um where today HIMS makes an 80% gross margin selling a commodity.

In what industry do companies make 80% gross margin selling commodities? It doesn't happen except in healthcare and they earn that margin because they have to spend it all on customer acquisition every time. Now in the world where we have people coming to us first, we don't have to spend on customer acquisition every time. And the implication is what him sells 80% can be sold lower. And that's what the structure of healthcare should look like. Things priced the way they should be priced as commodities, not priced at exorbitant prices because there are companies pretending that these things are not commodities.

Yeah, that's interesting. Well, and I feel like we don't have to get into your unit economics or trade-offs you're making in terms of growth versus short-term profitability, but I would imagine that because you have this platform that as more and more people use it, you become the centralized point of personal health data that unlocks all sorts of adjacent opportunities to sell products and services. You're already doing it a bit with Superpower Marketplace selling supplements, but there's all sorts of additional things that you could serve to your customers if that core platform really starts to work. And so, one of the trade-offs that a lot of you're a very unusual atypical consumer subscription business, but ultimately you're a consumer subscription platform for health. And one of the trade-offs that companies often face is do we keep our prices low and try to grow primarily through organic word of mouth or other non-paid

channels or do we increase our prices and then just go spend the extra money

on Facebook and Google to acquire users. I would imagine you're more aiming to be on the former versus the latter end of that spectrum. But how do you think about balancing short-term profitability versus just maximizing growth? Because you know if you get to that tipping point then this is a very valuable business in the long run. right now we don't want to be losing money by being in the negative things we sell. Um we also believe that great consumer businesses are not built on Facebook and Google um or Meta and Google. The implication is we need to think about not how to drive growth through getting better at ads but how do we drive growth through having a business model or a product which is conducive to growing. For an example this is like a free business model. Like we don't have any plans to go to free.

we're not going to do it at least for the foreseeable future. Um, but free products have growth baked into the business model which is you're free, right? Things grow exponentially far and then the the risk they're taking on is can you monetize, right? But I think that and then there are some companies at the opposite opposite end of the spectrum which like we're going to take zero we're going to not use the business model to grow. Instead, we're going to do what you said which is actually just use the the gross margin with a higher priced business model to grow. Um, we're probably somewhere in between. I don't think we skew too far in either direction.

Got it. Okay. Um and well, and you're selling a service that's valuable enough that your LTVs, I imagine, are still going to be very, very high. It's probably too early to even know in many cases because if your retention is high, then it's going to be years before you know your lifetime value. Um yeah, and for that reason, you can afford to spin into acquisition, but you're also doing the best you can to grow organically.

And it sounds like because this resonates so deeply with your customers, you are getting a lot of organic word of mouth. Has that continued since the launch? Yes. Um, a little bit less so now. And I think the reason for that is honestly probably that we've just done a worse job of educating our members and how they can sign others up. In the early days, we had clinicians in the loops. There was this like human touch point. And that makes it possible to say, "Oh, like do you do you think other people should sign up? Are your parents members? Do you want to add them in? uh you ask the children me whereas now we don't really have that touch point and it's also not not a focus at the moment like we don't have yes we have the referral motions again we still have a reasonable word of mouth but I think to drive that really effectively um yes you need product but it also has to be a focus there like things you can do at

the level of a product by focusing on it to make word of mouth reality higher um and we have limited resources and limited places to invest and our job is working out how to spend limited resources on on the most important things. Yeah, makes sense. So, I think that's actually a good segue into the next section that I wanted to talk to you about, and that that's sort of where you focus your limited resources in the

short term to really get this flywheel going. Um, so you only launched you launched the company in 2023. I believe you launched publicly about a year ago, maybe a little bit more. Which customers have you found are your strongest early adopters? Is there sort of a a particular archetype or a description of your ideal customer profile right now and how do you think that expands over time? We have been amazed by how broad and varied the people have signed up are across geographies, ages, uh demographics, income brackets. It's been way more varied than we expected. M our focus is on targeting taste makers because we believe that if you want to define culture and create a religion and a brand that people love and relate to, you need to start with the taste makers and taste makers tend to be media and wellness in LA finance and fashion in New York and technology and SF.

That makes sense. And so you and so you're specifically targeting people in those pools because they just have outsized influence and and your expectation is you actually already have a pretty broad cross-section of people interested in using your product, but you need a conduit to access those people and these taste makers can be that connection. Yeah. Look, I think if we looked at short-term payoff curve, so I think there's always like what's the short-term payoff? What's the long? If we looked at a short-term payoff curve, the best decision would be B2B. If we looked at a short to medium-term payoff curve, the best decision is going to be women between the age of probably 40 and 55. Um, and if we looked at a slightly longerterm payoff curve, we'd probably say men of that age. And then if we looked at a longerterm payoff curve, we'd say taste makers, right? Like taste makers, there aren't many of them.

They're not they're not you're not going to bring as much money in in the short term as targeting the women between 45 40 and 55. But our belief is that by targeting taste makers, you create a brand and a movement and define a culture and become emotionally resonant and lay the foundations to reach many more people and you create an identity and that's the bet we're making. Got it. I know one thing that I wanted to talk about was competition. This is on the one hand a relatively new category within health broadly defined.

Having said that, there is at least one other player in function health doing something somewhat similar. And I imagine given how successful function health has been and that you will likely be that there are just going to be more and more copycats. And so how do you you've talked a lot about brand and culture, but are there any other particular vectors you think about in terms of building a long-term competitive mode?

So no company in the space has been successful yet. No company in consumer health has been successful. Um, a company's successful when you're Apple or Nvidia or Amazon. Maybe a company's on the path to success when you're OpenAI or Figma or Canva. Right? I I contend that there's been no successful companies in consumer health yet. And as a result, there's no playbook. There's nothing to copy. There's not that much to learn from. And instead there's only really strong understanding of customers, really strong understanding of the market and really strong first principles reasoning around where the world is going. And um if we want to actually be the first successful company in consumer health, um that we we can't get there by looking at what others have done, we need to get there by realizing that it actually starts with us. And that's a very empowering and liberating place to be because now we have the

freedom to like create and think and and and and and uh think and understand like customers varied there very deeply versus just copying. Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. Um okay, so zooming out, we started with the launch and the initial product vision. We've then talked a little bit about sort of highle medium to long-term strategy. I'd love to wrap up before we

get to our lightning round talking a little bit more around more tactical and specific growth initiatives that you've been focused on to really drive the early adoption of this product. And so you talked a little bit before around you started with this much higher price point. You worked your way down to a $500 annual membership. What was the process for getting to that price point? Was it just talking to customers? Did you run any sort of specific pricing studies that informed that that price point?

Uh it felt right like like there's other learnings like at $7.99 or a,000 it's a serious expense. People think about it. It's hard to charge up front. You start to sometimes need to split payments up. Um $4.99 kind of just like feels right. I think part of it is understanding the the the like forcing function or the implication of different business models. At $4.99 we're forced to have a great membership at $4.99. The second we're at 2,000, it's like let's add, let's add doctors. People want to chat with chat with the human. No, we don't want that forcing function. It's not the company we're trying to build. So, it's like which price point actually sets us up for where we're going in the limits as well. I think there's something to be said about just like picking a price in the short term and sticking to it, particularly in consumer, less so in B2B, but particularly in consumer. And the reason why is that consumers start

anchoring to a price. You can start to establish a category around the price. It's actually can be surprisingly complex to change pricing all the time from an engineering perspective. What happens to to legacy users? How do you do renewals? Are the inclusions in the membership changing? How do you how like so I I think all of the effort we would otherwise spend into just obsessing over micro optimizations around price. At this stage, we can instead focus on product and understanding customers and building something people love. And that's the trade-off I've decided to make.

I think that makes a lot of sense at your stage. I mean, I I actually see too often consumer subscription businesses in particular making the opposite mistake, which is they'll set a price and then they won't change it for a decade. But in your case, you know, to an extent, the next year or two is binary around you're either going to find really deep product market fit or you're not. And whether you're at a $500 $500 versus 2,000 is a very big qualitative difference to a customer, but 500 versus 600 probably less of a

difference maker. How are you acquiring your customers today? So, I know there was a lot of virality in the early days. You talked about that and you have these taste makers who I imagine are continuing to drive a good amount of word of mouth, but are you spending a decent amount of money on paid advertising yet? Um, and if not, how else are you acquiring customers? Uh, not yet on paid ads. We'll we'll ramp our media buying up. I think there are very few consumer companies that grow without some media buying. Our fundamental belief though is every dollar that would otherwise go to Meta or Google, like I said before, should go into something that's emotional and interesting and creative with similar ROI. To date, there has been some of these like viral drop style marketing initiatives. Um, for example, we launched the world's healthiest hoodie.

We made this statement that most clothing is harmful for health. Polyester is endocrine disrupting. It can result in microplastics entering your body. We have studies around the impact of that on cardiovascular health and fertility. So, let's launch the world's healthiest hoodie, fully organic cotton, algae based screen printing. We dropped it with a lot of our kind of like celebrity insiders. They sold out in 10 minutes. People relist them and grad eBay for $2,000 and we have thousands of billboards in the US and sometimes around the world walking around with superpower on their chest, right? With a very distinct and like that's cool. That's like marketing that isn't actually that expensive for us.

It's fun. is emotional, actually tells a story, a narrative around the fact that we care for health. Um, and it's not Facebook and Meta. And we've done several like marketing drops of that sort. Um, we have uh a lot of people on Instagram and Twitter as well who are always amplifying what we're doing,

talking about it. Sometimes organic, sometimes they're their advisers, sometimes their investors, sometimes they're their influencers. The Twitter channel and the Instagram channel are definitely big um sources for us. I guess one last question I want to ask around business model before we get to our lightning round which is how we wrap up every episode is the synergy between your online health platform and the marketplace where people are purchasing additional goods or services and so at this point I imagine the majority of the business are these subscription memberships but are you already seeing high attachment rates to the marketplace and how do you think the marketplace expands over time?

So the problem we used to always hear from our members was I join and like you look you might tell me I need vitamin D but there's so much out there and I don't know what to trust, right? It's like a nightmare finding things. So what we said is cool let's just like create a team that vets and finds all of the best products and brings them into a marketplace lower for a lower price than members than anywhere else. we basically won't make money on it and we like let's just do this for you as a member of superpower low price only the best we'll show the research we'll show show the supporting studies we'll show the criteria you put everything through and then anything you take is connected like the the AI knows you've taken the thing our doctors know you've taken that thing um uh it's part of now the ecosystem this connected experience so that's really how we think about the marketplace and quite uh we haven't done

a good job of educating members on it Um, and that's something we have to improve. But when someone starts using it, they tend to keep using it because like look, it's high quality and cheap and like you can go to I don't care if you go to Amazon like again we're not making money making trivial amounts of money from it. It's like you can go to Amazon but you're going to lose more money than just doing the same thing through a superpower. So that's kind of how we think about it.

Yeah. Well, as somebody who's turning 40 later this year, I, you know, haven't been a big supplement user for most of my life. I generally believe you don't need a lot of that stuff, but I'm getting to the age where I've started to do a couple of those things. But you want to you want to know that the stuff you're putting in your body is going to be net positive, not net negative. And so the process of starting with all of

the labs, talking to the clinician, understanding which supplements are going to be most impactful, and then choosing the two or three that are actually going to move the needle was personally a very positive experience for me. Um, so let's get to our lightning round. I'm going to wrap up by just w asking you a handful of rapid fire questions. We can keep the responses relatively short. Um the first one I always like to ask is just what is the best part about working at Superpower and what's one thing you would change or wish were different?

Uh for me or for the team? Uh why don't we do both? Let's start with you and then we can go to the team. I wake up every day being able to say this matters to the world and it's energizing. Like there are times when I'm in the nitty-gritty of being like oh this sucks and it's boring. I'm like, hold up. Let's take a step back and think about what we're actually trying to do in the long term. Yeah. In the short term, we're like, what's the price? What's the CAC? But what? Like, let's think about the long term. We're genuinely building this company because we had health challenges and we've seen the world have health challenges. We're like, we can maybe hopefully one day have a big role on changing that. So, that's exciting personally. Uh, and then for the team, I think it's really fun.

Like, I think our culture is really fun. Every single person is brilliant on the team. We have a small team um where u largely of founders um and what we hear from everyone is I've never worked with people this brilliant right like four of our founding engineers are exited by combinator founders um that's pretty rare our partnerships one of our partnerships people just sold his company for $60 million our um marketing team member he um uh his last two companies he scaled to billion dollar companies in under three years each like that is pretty rare And um it's quite special for everyone and also for myself to be working with such great people.

Anything you would change? You mentioned positives there for both you and the team, but no company is perfect. What what could be better? I think there have been a couple of times where we have compromised on in person or compromise on the talent bar. And I think the reality is we shouldn't do those things. Even though it can be easier expedient or like short-term good, I think it tends to be long-term bad. I think that we can be a little bit more focused still. Uh, one of the challenges with having lots of founders in the team is that there are lots of ideas. That's also a benefit, but it's also a challenge. So, I think we can be a little bit more focused. They're the main things that come to mind. Got it. I I love that you mentioned culture and I find that many of the best startups start with a culture that is somewhat contrarian or provocative. They're sort of the canonical Amazon story where

everybody assembled their own desk in the early days. Is there anything unique or different about superpowers culture that you would point to and be like, "Wow, that's really different than most companies." Um like I guess tomorrow morning before all hands where and everyone's going to be injecting themselves with NAD. um when someone's getting sick um they'll inject themselves with an immune regulating peptide. Um we have three team members with superpower tattoos. We have a blood oath fingerprint on the wall and everyone chose to to do that.

We even said no blood. You have to use the red ink pad and everyone did blood anyway. Um there's no no snacks allowed in the office. We only have a supplement drawer instead of a snack drawer. Um uh so yeah, maybe a couple things like that. Yeah, I would say that fits the bill and very very on brand. Um, what's your number one health tip that most people don't know about? And if you have more than one, that's fine. It sounds like you've accumulated quite a few over the years.

Just choose to be healthy. Like if you want to drink wine, sure, drink a tiny amount of wine and just like choose to be healthy and not let that affect you. I think we've rotated way too far in the direction of micro monitoring everything of getting really anxious of getting concerned of being like damn this thing's going to really harm my health and the reality is if we look at epidemiology a lot of the things which people are saying harm your health like empirically don't and they might mechanistically slightly harm your health but they empirically don't right and the fact that there's enough empirical evidence they don't means that they can't be too harmful if you there's dozens of people if you go to the blue zones nicely that live to a hundred and they drink wine every Well, it can't be can't be too. So, I think we've rotated too far in the direction of like micro monitoring everything. It decreases happiness. We

tell ourselves that how we are and how we feel is a product of our environment rather than just like owning it oursel. For example, I know people like, "Oh, damn. My aura ring said I was 65 out of 100. I'm going to feel today." I think the better approach is I didn't use an aura ring and I got four hours sleep last night and I'm so energized today. I feel amazing. Great. Like I I I have so much meaning and purpose and energy and who cares what the ring and I'm not saying don't sleep. Like it's useful to have that data, but I think we've gone too far in the direction of of just focusing on on that.

Yeah. I mean, there's certainly a world where the data can become a little bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy and the stories we tell ourselves around, oh, I didn't sleep well last night, so I'm not going to have any energy today. It can become a little bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. And I think it could be helpful to a degree. It's all a m matter of moderation. As somebody who has helped found a company in a relatively nent category, obviously health has been around since the beginning of humanity, but online digital healthcare and particularly digital healthcare at the cutting edge where you all are is is relatively nayent. And so you had this very successful, very viral product launch. Any advice for founders in in health or other categories who are trying to launch products that are very innovative or unusual and and define new categories around.

It's very risky listening to experts because experts will tell you everything that can go wrong, the challenges, the problems, the dogma rather than thinking about what if it goes right. Experts reason from the past whereas the nature of founding something is thinking about the future. So that's the first thing. The second thing is start small and narrow. Pick one thing and use that as a wedge into the next thing. You can have the big grand ambition and you should, but that should be married with the reality of a hypothesis around what works today.

Right? I think part of creating the future is not necessarily creating it directly today. Creating the future is knowing how to do the thing that kind of works today as a stepping stone to creating the future that you think will exist. Yeah, I particularly like the point you made around experts tend to overindex on the past and founders by necessity are always thinking about the future and what rules can be broken. I had never thought about it in those terms or at least not articulated quite that way, but I think that makes a lot of sense. Uh, a couple more here. So, you alluded to this before. What's a frustrating experience you've had with the medical system and how do you think a digital health platform like Superpower would have made it better had it existed when you went through it? I mean, you talked about your own experience as a teenager. Can you maybe talk about the hypothetical of what it

would have looked like had you been going through that today? How might it have played out differently with Super? Yeah, totally. So, my doctors didn't test any of the things I asked. I would have discovered that I was pre-diabetic. I would have discovered that I had mercury toxicity. When I brought data to them, my Aura Ring gut microbiome test, it was dismissed. This isn't a real thing. Now, several years later, we realize the gut microbiome is a real thing. I was told that being out of range slightly was okay. I was a 12year-old, out of range, my liver enzymes, meaning I was worse than 97.5% of the entire population at 12 years old. And I was told I was okay.

Superpower would never say that's okay, right? like that's not optimal to be a to and the second you realize something's not okay, you can start taking actions, you can start exploring, you can start getting to the root of what is really going on. Um, and when I used to ask doctors about interventions or things I could do, I was often met with a blank face. I had done more research than they had done. And again, it wasn't really that fault.

The medical system is structured that way. The medical education system is structured that way. And there's too much information out there. But with the tools I have today, I would have been able to research, would have been able to chat with the AI, I would have been able to chat with doctors who are more holistic. So I think it fundamentally changes the way that people can understand, engage with their health access, both diagnostics and therapeutics.

Love it. Last question. We've already talked a little bit about how AI is going to change the medical system over the next 3 to 5 years. So let's instead go to as a consumer who is interested in optimizing their own health. What decisions should regular consumers be making differently to prepare for all of this new technology that's coming online? AI is going to square most curves. It's going to square the talent curve. It's going to square an inequality curve.

It's going to square an access. It's going to square everything. And the implication is we want to be in a 10 x's become 100 x's and 1 x's stay 1 x's. And if we believe this is true, and I think there's sufficiently high probability, it is, we need to be 10 x's ASAP. So my general advice is actually is that the next two years matter more than maybe any other year in history. And the implication is that work really really damn hard these next two years.

Like they could really really matter. and you want to be the 10xer who goes to 100x, not the 1xer who goes to 1x. So, the next few years matter. Um, all of the micro optimizations around health probably don't matter. We're going to have all sorts of biotech. It completely changes the game with health. And the important thing is being in a position to access them when they come out. Got it. And it sounds like that advice applies both professionally as a founder or anybody else working on technology, but also as a consumer, make sure that you're educating yourself on how to take health into your own hands as opposed to relying on a system that has become not even that like that. It's like a local optima. I think that my my point is that AI is going to know so much that it's going to solve all of these things for us. M um but the point where it solves it, we need to be in a really good position to

capitalize off the off the back of it, right? And um to be in that position and I I would prioritize performance and working hard and like success in the conventional sense a lot over the next 2 years even as a consumer even if you want to be healthy even if it comes as at a short-term hit to your health because the implication is any short-term hit over the next 2 years is going to be solvable through biotech through the remaining several hundred years. all that matters is like can we be in a really good position two years from now. Um so um that's that that's something I I believe quite strongly. I think people massively underestimate the the effect of AI and um uh there are some like dystopian or utopian outcomes and we want to we want to minimize risk against that by by maximizing the the amount of effort we're putting in over the coming years.

Well, that's a great note to end on. In many cases, it brings us full circle to your original point, which is things tend to be nonlinear more than humans would like to believe. And this is perhaps one of the greatest nonlinearities in human history. So, thank you so much for taking the time today, Max. It was a pleasure talking to you. Any anything you want to say to the audience as we wrap up here? Take more risk. The next few years really matter. Don't listen to experts.

Um, enjoy the ride. Awesome. Thanks, Max.