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HOUSEKEEPING 📨

Very short housekeeping from me today. I just landed from 18 hours of flying (yes, this is normal for an Australian) and am absolutely ruined, so I leave you with this tweet from Ryan Petersen that I enjoyed.

As far as today’s piece goes, I’m excited for you to read it. Superpower is one of the companies I’ve been tracking most closely, and I'm stoked for them to spill the beans on racing to their Series A in a rapidly expanding market: health. Enjoy!

GUEST POST 💄

From 150k Waitlist To $30 Million Series A

Confucius said, “A healthy man wants a thousand things, a sick man only wants one." If we can all agree that this is true, why then do we founders, investors, and leaders in tech push our health to the side in order to work harder, close more deals, and raise that next round? Health—the only thing that really matters in life—is deprioritized for things that we shouldn’t really care about. It’s a crazy concept.

Who gives a hoot if a16z just wrote your new crypto project a blank check if you can’t walk up a flight of stairs without wheezing like you’re having a heart attack. The priority should be yourself, then everyone, and everything else. We are no good to anyone if we are not healthy. Luckily for us, it’s 2025, and everyone is trying to live forever.

The trend started with Rhonda Patrick, Tim Ferriss, and the Bulletproof Coffee guy. Now it’s Peter Attia, Huberman, that really pasty-looking guy who measures his erections at night (kidding Bryan, I actually love you), and loads more. Health and wellness influencers are here, and they are here to stay. And companies are popping up everywhere, companies like Superpower, which we’ll talk about today, that launched and then raced to its $30M Series A.

I’ll be handing the reins today to Co-Founder, Kevin Unkrich, who is going to walk through the steps they took to do just that. You’re in for an exciting ride. And hey, if you concentrate really hard, you might even extend your lifespan a little. Over to you, Kevin!

It began with a tragedy

Hey team, Kevin here! The origin of Superpower goes back to a defining moment in my life: my best friend's passing when I was a teenager. That event led me to intern in hospitals and study biomedical engineering while pursuing a pre-med degree. I found myself caught between two worlds: one, working in technology as a young entrepreneur launching businesses while building software at Fortune 50 companies, and two, doing hospital rotations in the ER and studying medicine. All before I turned 18.

I've always had a vision for merging technology and healthcare and for bringing talented technologists into this space. The more direct origin came when my co-founder, Jacob, and I reconnected.

We'd both worked through really intense venture-backed companies that negatively affected our health. We knew a bunch of people around us were experiencing the same thing. We started with this idea: The people who are building the future are not enabled to be healthy.

We need them to be in their most optimal, high-performance, longevity state because they are the ones building the future. We would call about 300 people and ask, ‘What do you consider your priorities in your life?’ The answer was almost always the same. Family and friends, business, community…And then, eventually, they would say 'health’. This was crazy to me.

Every single one of these people found it a struggle to be healthy, even though they were high performers in every other aspect of their lives. They might even have been high performers in health, but it was just really difficult for them to prioritize or even feel like they were making progress. So, how do we enable high performers to be healthier?

The early days: Service-based → product

We spent a lot of time trying to figure out what Superpower was. How do you solve this generalized problem where people are feeling the pain points of health and worrying about the potential effects of their actions? We did a lot of different things in those early days:

• Spending nights & weekends at the best hospitals and clinics.

• Working with and interviewing people running concierge medical practices.

• Interviewing customers, friends with these pain points, founders, and business executives.

• Delivering the health improvement services we wanted ourselves to others.

When it started, Superpower was not what you’d expect. We actually started making money the first month as a service-based business. We built very little product initially, seeking to understand our future customers’ pain points more directly. What we're going to do is model our approach after concierge care and this level of preventative care, operating it as a service business in the short term. Services offered:

• Getting someone for diagnostic testing.

• Setting up relationships with functional medicine doctors.

• Flying to their house and doing an environmental toxin analysis of all the products they use.

• Recommending and building supplement lists.

• Building nutrition and fitness plans.

At one point, we lived with one of our users for three days and tried to observe every single thing they did—just to figure out what points we could interject to provide health services. However, we wanted to scale the impact Superpower could have on our members. So we had to pivot…

One of the early learnings was that we didn't want to necessarily be a service business. We really wanted to build a scalable product so that we could get out and impact a lot of people's lives. We had started out very upmarket, offering high-end services and higher price points, but we knew that in the long run, we'd have a sustainable business if we could bring costs down to make it more accessible.

However, a high-end service business wasn’t going to make the impact we wanted to make—it didn’t align with our mission. A product was more repeatable—if we improved a product, we could improve the experience of thousands of users or more. So we changed direction and built a waitlist of over 150,000 people.

Building a 150k waitlist (without ads)

Most health companies spend millions on Meta and Google ads. We took a different approach: redirecting every dollar that would have gone to performance marketing into brand-building and creative stunts that foster emotional connections. The result? A 150,000-person waitlist, hundreds of organic press mentions, and a community so engaged that members share their health metrics like Robinhood users once shared their portfolios.

Waitlists matter in 2025. The startup playbook is shifting from ‘build first, market later’ to ‘distribution first, product second.’ Companies like Cluely—having raised $15M before launch—are proving that you can build massive demand before shipping. The benefit? Reduced risk, less dilution, and you start acquiring customers before you finish building. Here's the exact playbook we used across seven strategies.

_{*Note: If you want a really deep look at this strategy, you can see these two podcasts below with Kevin’s co-founders, Max and Jacob.}

1/ Brand as a strategy

Most companies treat branding as an afterthought or view it as merely aesthetic. That's a mistake. Your brand is essentially about your core beliefs and how those beliefs are reflected in everything you do. We approached this with three distinct components.

• Mission: We started by defining our mission and creating a clear manifesto. This wasn't just about explaining what we support – we also made it clear what we oppose. Having that contrast gave people something concrete to connect with.

• Design: From the beginning, we made bold design decisions. Take our color choice: we went with orange when everyone else in healthcare defaults to blue. That wasn't arbitrary—we wanted to stand out immediately. We also invested in custom photography with professional shoots in Los Angeles instead of relying on generic stock images.

• Copy: We purchased superpower.com right at launch. It was a significant investment, but the domain immediately communicated our positioning. Beyond that, we carefully consider every piece of copy we write to ensure it reinforces our overall message.

The design work paid off. Our website earned several design awards and is regularly featured by design communities without us having to push it. That organic amplification came from treating design as core to our strategy. The takeaway: Strong branding isn't superficial. It makes every other growth tactic more effective.

2/ Use human psychology

The tricky part was maintaining this system as we scaled. The incentives that worked with 10,000 people became less compelling at 50,000. We had to continuously monitor the data and recalibrate our thresholds to keep the referral engine effective. The underlying principle here is to give people a clear path to skip ahead, and they'll recruit for you.

3/ Create FOMO with something shareable

We noticed that showcasing peak health is becoming a status symbol, similar to how people share other achievements (think Strava Kudos). So we created shareable digital cards displaying health metrics—our ‘Bio Age cards.’ The design was crucial. These cards needed to look good enough that people would genuinely want to post them. We saw users treating them like the viral Robinhood portfolio screenshots that made rounds on social media.

Our launch strategy was deliberate: We had our investors post their cards first. This served two purposes—it created initial social proof, and it normalized the behavior for everyone else. Once our investors led the way, regular users felt comfortable sharing too.

The impact exceeded our wildest expectations. We received numerous direct inquiries from people who saw these cards and wanted to participate. It became one of our strongest acquisition channels without requiring any ad spend.

4/ Leverage others’ audiences

We acquired two companies in the digital health space, Base and Feminade. These deals expanded our waitlist through two mechanisms. First, their existing user bases got access to our platform. Since both companies were winding down, many users were actively looking for an alternative. We became their solution. Second, and this caught me off guard, the PR impact was enormous.

I significantly underestimated the amount of media attention acquisitions generate. Each deal got coverage across multiple publications, exposing us to completely new audiences and driving substantial waitlist growth. An interesting insight is that brand awareness and press coverage from acquisitions can outweigh the direct value of the users or technology being acquired.

5/ Be creative to stand out

We studied brands like Mschf, creators of the viral Big Red Boots, and startups like Antimetal (who converted pizza into major revenue). We adopted a similar approach: Launch unexpected, memorable products every few months.

Our ‘World's Healthiest Hoodie’ exemplifies this strategy. We designed a completely toxin-free, organic sweatshirt. It sold out in under 40 minutes and garnered millions of online views. Later, someone listed it on Grailed for $2,000.

Here's our thinking…take the budget you'd spend on Facebook or Google ads and put it toward something that actually creates an emotional response. Standard ads get scrolled past. A hoodie that sells out in 40 minutes generates conversations. These drops accomplish multiple goals simultaneously—revenue, buzz, brand reinforcement, and shareable moments.

6/ Build relationships with creators

We learned to skip traditional influencer marketing and instead build real relationships with creators who genuinely use and love what we're building. The numbers prove it works. One tweet from one of our users, Sean, generated over 7,000 waitlist sign-ups. From a single post.

One thing we do is occasionally provide products to select creators or offer them advisory board positions with small equity stakes. Better yet, we bring them in as investors. Shaan Puri invested early on, and every mention on his My First Million podcast drives a noticeable spike in registrations. In each funding round, we set aside several hundred thousand specifically for creator investments. We accept checks as small as $1,000 if they're committed to spreading awareness about what we're building. This transforms them from hired promoters to actual stakeholders.

There's a huge difference between sponsored content and authentic endorsement from someone who actually uses your product. Audiences instantly detect which is which.

7/ Encourage your team to build in public

We wrote an internal document outlining how to become a ‘platform brand.’ The concept is enabling everyone on the team to create content and build their personal brand, not just executives and founders.

My co-founder, Max, has LinkedIn content that regularly gets over 200,000 impressions. That's hundreds of thousands of people reached through owned channels at zero cost.

Most companies are missing this opportunity entirely. The potential of owned media, personal brands, and content creation as growth drivers is vastly underutilized. Looking back, I'd absolutely use a waitlist strategy again. It allows you to start customer acquisition before you've built anything.

But having a waitlist alone isn't enough—it's how you design and activate it that matters. Our ideas resonated because of how we positioned and presented them. The brand work made the difference in making it feel aspirational and worth sharing. Since we come from the venture and Silicon Valley world, we initially focused on becoming the go-to longevity company for that specific community. The strategy was to dominate one niche's mindshare first, then expand outward from there.

That focused approach is why we have strong recognition in tech circles despite being a Series A company. We focused on doing word-of-mouth marketing exceptionally well within one industry before expanding to others. That's the playbook.

One regret about the waitlist

One piece of advice I wish I'd received and internalized better would be to launch earlier, faster, and get it out the door. Get it in front of users and listen to their feedback as early as possible. This was ingrained in me from YC days, but something we could have done even faster at Superpower. Waitlists are time-sensitive, and people's attention is time-sensitive.

When you have people's attention, it's fleeting and valuable, so you should ensure you take advantage of it and get the product into people's hands as quickly as possible.

Our approach was to build demand first and then launch the product. While that was solid for proving market demand (don’t build a product nobody wants), following up on proving that demand was key. If I had to do it again, I would emphasize the importance of rolling out adoption much more rapidly, rather than being ‘careful’ about perfecting each pixel before launching publicly.

Basically: waitlist → look for feedback that there is value and have that conviction → launch fast → tweak on top to perfect and get to product-market fit. This learning about listening to user feedback partially informed the next big move for Superpower: Lowering our pricing.

Moving from $499 to $199

Moving from $499 to $199 was a pivotal moment for us, significantly changing the company and accelerating its growth. But it's important to root-cause analyze why we made this decision. We made a very early decision to start a high-end service business and realized that what we were passionate about was providing the same services at a much more accessible price—ideally, free.

Moving to a more accessible price was just a natural movement aligned with what we want: accessible care for everyone.

On a more practical, numbers level, dropping the price also made sense. There were three main reasons for it. First, philosophy. In the limit, we want a membership that the majority of Americans own, and that is far easier at $16 a month or $199 a year. That's roughly the price of Netflix, Spotify, a dating app, or Amazon Prime. At $199, we created the constraint to create what is true in the limit today. People are so used to healthcare spending being ridiculously high, and we found a way to bring that down.

Second, it was attractive from a metrics perspective. CAC dropped materially, and LTV didn't change much. Lastly, competitive dynamics in the market played a role. This was a strong counterposition to a key competitor, which allows us to grow.

There's a meta point here: just listen to your users. It will never not be true that users want something cheaper and faster—that's the classic Amazon Prime philosophy. To the degree that you can make something cheaper or faster, you should always hit the limit of physics as close as you can get it. This is just one way Superpower aims to stand out from competitors.

💡 Ready to optimize your health? Join 150k+ people who've already discovered Superpower at $199—less than what you pay for streaming.

The impact of AI on healthcare

It's never been a better time to build a healthcare company. My lived experience in building the company has been that many of the building blocks for creating a health tech company are just beginning to emerge. In many cases where we work with other vendors, companies, integrations, or infrastructure, we end up being one of their first five customers. They're very much looking to us to help inform what kind of infrastructure the health tech industry needs, like insurance billing and payments, APIs for different wearable connections, infrastructure powering more robust data pipelines and medical insights, and lastly, compliance and security software.

All of this stuff is uniquely available now and reshaping the industry. Growth is only going to accelerate with innovations in AI. Our fundamental belief is that consumers will continue to turn to an AI-based system that has all the context and data about their lives and health to make informed decisions and troubleshoot.

We already see this trend in the Internet 2.0 style with WebMD, where it's common for individuals to Google their symptoms, reach a conclusion, consult with a doctor, and then repeat the process. Consumers are really looking to take over and get more autonomy over their own health.

AI is going to be one of the more innovative ways to do that, especially coupled with information that wasn't available to Internet 2.0-style services. If you go to WebMD, it's not going to take into account all the biomarkers you've ever tested, previous conversations you've had, past medical records, conversations, and consults with doctors—all of this context is just going to make these systems even more effective. And this is exactly what Superpower is proud to be building.

Playbook / how you can apply this

• Build a mission-driven brand foundation: Craft a clear mission, manifesto, and visual identity that resonates deeply with your target audience. Make the brand aspirational and authentic to create an emotional connection and trust.

• Leverage viral referral mechanics: Design referral incentives that encourage users to invite friends and move up in waitlist priority. This fuels organic growth and taps into network effects early on.

• Create shareable, user-generated content: Launch content assets like ‘Bio Age Cards’ that your users and investors are excited to share. User-generated buzz accelerates brand awareness and demand.

• Launch strategic acquisitions and creative drops: Acquire complementary brands to boost user base and credibility. Use creative product drops or limited editions to build excitement and PR.

• Recruit creators and build in public: Involve creators as fans, advisors, or investors to amplify reach. Encourage employees to share your brand story and progress publicly to build community trust.

• Launch fast and iterate on feedback: Get your product into users’ hands quickly after building demand. Utilize early user feedback to refine and improve rapidly, achieving product-market fit.

The future = healthcare in your pocket

Imagine reaching into your pocket to access a health super app that provides you with the latest health information, along with context, nuance, and personalized data. Imagine seeing testing recommendations that evolve with you, based on your age, family history, environment, and goals. You'll also receive specific steps to prepare for different life stages, such as parenthood, menopause, and retirement. Additionally, you'll gain daily, data-driven insights to support your body in real time.

• Age 20-40: Build metabolic and reproductive resilience. Optimize vitamin status, iron, and omega balance; track stress and recovery; support performance with targeted peptides and lifestyle protocols.

• Age 40-60: Focus shifts toward hormone and cardiovascular health. Monitoring thyroid function, sex hormones, and inflammation, and considering early hormone optimization as part of proactive, regenerative care.

• Age 60 and above: Preserve strength, cognition, and vitality-tracking kidney and liver function, muscle and bone health, and nutrient absorption, and using targeted peptides and regenerative therapies to sustain performance and function.

That’s Superpower’s vision, and what I’m most excited for. Having one place to aggregate all of that information in a very native and straightforward way, then being able to take advantage of that data to draw insights, conclusions, and recommendations.

It could be through AI chats or action plans we build for you to follow day to day, week to week, or month to month throughout your life. We want to make taking action easy, efficient, and streamlined. You shouldn’t just have your health data at your fingertips; you should also know exactly what actions to take to improve your health.

When we combine each of these pieces together, it will effectively help solidify the vision of giving you full autonomy over your health.

Extra reading / learning

• Superpower wants to help people address health issues early - March, 2025

• How beehiiv Raised $50M (Fast) - April, 2025

• How Superpower built a 150k waitlist (in 6 months) - June, 2025

• Five Biomarkers Everyone Should Test - September, 2025

And that’s it! You can follow and connect with Kevin over on LinkedIn and Twitter, and don’t forget to check out Superpower’s website.

BRAIN FOOD 🧠 

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TOOLS WE RECOMMEND 🛠️

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