In 2016, I had to put a price on something with no proven market. Streaming workouts existed only in a very minor way — DailyBurn had been at it since 2007, and Peloton had been shipping bikes from its Kickstarter campaign for about a year and a half, with live classes. But a boutique studio’s own method, streamed as a premium subscription under the studio’s brand? No comparables, no category, nobody to undercut — at least nobody whose number meant anything for what we were building. That was my read then, and I’ll defend it now. The only anchor in sight was the $35 boutique class down the street, and I kept making the same argument to the team: that number is a New York bubble, and we are not selling to the bubble since there is a much larger world outside NYC.
The Price Was the Strategy
In 2016 we priced a digital platform no proven market had asked for. Substack, beehiiv, and Whoop are running the same play right now.
