To refuse the customer access to the raw measurements from the device they own is really a horrible practice. However, the ring itself that a customer has paid $299 for upfront as a separate purchase (which it explicitly is in the checkout on the Oura website) is a measurement device which the customer owns. That's totally reasonable, an app can very easily be argued to be a service. I'm not upset about there being a subscription to access all the features of the Oura App. I think you're misunderstanding at least my own outrage. I can’t lament Oura trying different business models to see which one can keep the doors open long enough till Amazon acquires them. Either a company is in business or its not. ![]() Oura’s problem is it should have had subscriptions from Day 1 so loyal customers like you wouldn’t feel duped later down the (inevitable) line.Īll I can offer you in consolation that it’s capitalism. I don’t know what Oura’s data selling policies are but even if they’re selling your data I know that they don’t have enough customers for that data to be valuable.Įvery single health tracking hardware company (except Withings) eventually moved to a subscription model, including Fitbit after it acquired Fitstar to offer content subscriptions. And in that model, a company will need hundreds of millions of customers generating data for that data to be worth over a billion dollars. ![]() You are the product when your data is sold (e.g. Or the service itself could be the product, where you pay to use it. You can have zero customers, but still spend 100% of your venture funding to invent a technology that is valuable to a bigger buyer. The technology itself could be the product ie. In some businesses the customer is not necessarily the product. Venture capital will only get you to the point where you can sell to one of the bigger players at a profit within that timeframe - and, sadly, most fail to capture enough customers and sell at a loss or go out of business.Īs someone who’s followed these health tracking companies closely over the last 10 years, I’m countering your disappointment with the perspective that these companies resort to subscription-based services when they have no other way to grow and/or stay in business.Īnd no, that’s not how venture capital works. It’s a given that if you’re not Apple, Amazon, Samsung or Google (or perhaps Fossil) with decades of existing technologies and owning the majority of your own supply chain, starting-up a health tracking hardware business is an enormously capital intensive endeavor requiring hundreds of millions of dollars to sustain beyond 3-5 years. Even Microsoft shut down its money losing tracker. Same thing happened to Jawbone (shut down), Fitbit (acquired by Google), Pebble (acquired by Fitbit), Withings (acquired by Nokia then sold back). Without funding, they will continue to burn through cash till they run out and need to shut down, or sell the IP for far less value to a bigger player (though I can’t see a Google or Samsung making the purchase, perhaps Amazon as they’ve invested in the ring form factor already). Now they need to get existing customers to pay more, and the only viable options are to upgrade to new models (with some trade-in offer, just as phone companies do every year) or offer subscription services.Īs they continue to lose money and continue to spend more money to gamble on ways to attract more buyers while doing R&D on their tech and pay manufacturing costs, they’re not going to get further venture funding unless investors want to double down on their risk. Not enough people have purchased, or will purchase, an Oura ring to sustain their current burn rate. ![]() Their only alternative is to go out of business or the sell the company.
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