Robert Allison, Co-founder and CEO, PEAR Health Labs Center

We understand that the company’s mission is to provide hyper-personalized coaching solutions to the marketplace. Could you give us a brief introduction to the company?

Yeah, certainly. As you stated, PEAR’s mission has always been to deliver incredible content personalized to somebody around body movement, specifically under the belief that exercise is medicine. Our primary focus is on trying to deliver something to somebody that’s actually quite engaging and behaviorally creative so it makes people actually continue to use it on a regular basis.

We do that through video and audio-based content assembled specifically for somebody’s goal, objective and place in their journey and delivered to them in digital form as well as other accessible means.

Understood. And what would you say have been so far the keys to the success of the company?

I think that the company sort of embarked on the mission with a few things that we wanted to focus on. One was we wanted to make sure that people really did get a personalized program that was really geared for them and that it was progressive in nature so that people were not being asked to bite off too much too early in terms of their exercise behaviors that they were trying to do. 

Second, we wanted to make sure that we delivered it in a very easy-to-consume format of mobile being available. No real connection to wi-fi is needed. It was applicable both indoors and outdoors. Those are things that we thought were important hallmarks of what we were trying to deliver.

Because we’d be able to combine that with a fitness network as another part of our product category, we can now give people physical places to work out, not just digital environments. I think that’s been a real success point for the company.

Let’s discuss the different products a little bit. I believe the flagship will be Aaptiv, but you also have the mobile app Fit Warrior Mom. Could you tell us a little bit more about the different products?

Yeah. The company’s application of exercise and movement is obviously not just tied to a single brand. We really wanted to have a B2B environment for our technologies. We felt that we were building compelling platform technologies that could be used by other people who had a distribution of consumers or members who needed to be affected. So we developed our business model with the idea that we could do white-label software for people, which is under the PEAR umbrella.

Then, our direct-to-consumer businesses are under the Aaptiv side of the business model. They are very similar in terms of the products. There are some features that we allow inside the PEAR environment to allow someone to customize the experience for their members. On the Aaptiv side, it’s a single-brand environment.

I also found it interesting that your approach to prevention, population health and the military allows you to adapt to different degrees of proficiency. Could you tell us a little bit more about those approaches?

Yeah, we recognize that there’s obviously an exploding population and persistence of chronic illnesses. So we’ve really been focused on trying to build specific solutions that actually help people prevent them. A good example would be muscular skeletal issues, where people are starting to develop problems with their mechanics. We’re doing a lot of work to try to help people correct things early in their situation rather than late after the fact when they’re going to physical therapy. 

Our focus has been on delivering preventative programming to people as part of the delivery system. This is not just about a physical goal but about recognizing that somebody has a condition that they want to either improve substantially or avoid escalation of the chronic illness. 

One other potential example, Victor, could be someone with hypertension. They know that they really need to undertake an exercise program to eliminate their need for hypertensive drugs to help manage their blood pressure and potentially other arrhythmia that might be there. We’ve got a curriculum in the form of exercise programming that could be very specific to helping those outcomes.

We’re starting to build out more of those as we move along. The first ones that we’re being asked to focus on are lean muscle mass management around GLP-1 and the other peptides that are being developed for obesity management. Ozempic would be those kinds of things.

So, the first focus is to help people keep their lean muscle mass at optimum or with less deterioration. The second is hypertension, and the third is our muscular-skeletal prevention programs.

This is quite interesting. Most companies focus simply on muscle growth, but you have a completely different approach.

Yeah, right. I mean, we do think it’s for those people who want to become athletes. We think that’s great if they want to focus on strength and muscle growth. But the reality is that a lot of people can live very good lives with a lot of suppleness and flexibility by just moving their bodies on a regular basis. It doesn’t have to be a giant undertaking. 

You know, an exercise is quite complicated. It’s not easy to get people to get into a mode where they do it every day. We might like to go outside for a lot of exercise because we want to enjoy nature and the sunshine. Sitting in with a weight stack inside of the gym doesn’t really look that exciting to us. So we think it’s important to build habits. You’ve got to have multiple ways to engage people and things that are interesting to them as well.

Could you tell us a little bit more about the role of innovation at PEAR?

Yes, we think about the intersection of health and technology as acceleration around innovation. We know that innovation is allowing. These include things like AI, text-to-speech, and generative AI. These are all important things that can impact delivering compelling content at the right moment with the right amount of familiarity. It was part of it to make it really feel hyper-personalized. 

So, innovation is the first thing we think about every single day as part of our plan and our roadmap. We’re looking 15 to 18 months out at the types of innovation that we think we’re going to need to deliver to really continue our journey in this hyper-personalized mobility environment.

And what would you say are your competitiveness strengths?

I think our competitive strengths are that we’ve done a great job of integrating a very fluid solution. Our product is a really good product that adds a lot of features that others have potentially chosen not to build on their own, but they’ve chosen to partner with others who might do that. 

I think we’re a leader in dynamic content, which is very hard to do. It’s hard to build content that is specific to somebody in the cloud, so to speak. That’s the true delivery of hyper-personalized. So I think that the big differentiation for us has been really delivering on hyper-personalization and access ubiquity, which are the big features that we have.

And maybe one last one is that we have a real, what I’ll call, health equality perspective. We really want our products to be low-cost and high-value, and we want them to be easy for anyone to use and afford. I think so we’ve taken a very low-cost approach, which means we have to focus on innovation and technology to deliver that at scale. That’s been a big driver behind our ability to compete in the marketplace at a price point.

What will be your message to potential partners who want to partner up with you?

We look for companies and partners that are mission-driven. As you can probably hear from my enthusiasm, we’re a mission-driven organization. But we want to partner with folks who are also enthusiastic and mission-driven. 

You brought up earlier our program with the Air Force around the Fit Warrior Mom. The Department of Defense was really serious about making women warfighters capable of getting in great shape to have babies. And then they wanted them to get back in shape as soon as possible postpartum. That was a key driver mission for them. I think we really embraced that and found a way to build a product that was very specific to that target that they were trying to do. 

Those are the kinds of partnerships that we go after. So when we talk to partners, we say to them, “As long as what we’re doing together is impacting and improving lives, we’re all for it.” We’re not land grabbers. We’re glad to partner with folks that allow a better experience to do it. But it’s got to add value.

Understood. And is there anything I haven’t asked you about that you would like to mention?

I honestly could go on for a long time, but I would just say that delivering high-quality, great digital products, driving engagement and achieving great outcomes are all we think about as a team every day. 

The meeting that I’m going to go to next is all about making sure that our quality assurance is at the highest level in terms of listening to what our customers are telling us, what was great about their experience with us, and what was not. So we take that not as a product to sell and make money from but as an experience to deliver. We get to reap long-term financial rewards from that, hopefully. But in the interim, we’re going to keep investing ahead of that marketplace to make sure that we deliver on that, which is that great product that delivers great outcomes first and foremost.

Understood. And my last question, Robert: What is your vision for the company in the next three to five years?

It’s a big world. There are a lot of people who need help. So, I feel like we’re in a fantastic market opportunity where people are becoming increasingly sensitive to metabolic health and body movement. Our plan is to focus on international and domestic growth.

I could easily see us partnering with other large data-centric companies, like Google, and others that are very interested in ensuring that they deliver goods and services that help this mission of better health for people. 

So, I think we’ve got a great organization. We have access to capital. So I think we’re going to stay on this train and this path for three to five years. We have no plans outside of that except delivering on the mission.