From Onboarding to Healthy Habits, Noom's Growth is Powered by Psychology

We thought Noom was a weight loss company, but in this episode of The Breakout Growth Podcast, Sean Ellis and Ethan Garr discovered that weight management is actually just the gateway the company is using to meet much larger objectives. In-fact, as Artem Petakov, Co-Founder and President of Noom explains, Noom is the largest consumer-facing healthcare company in the world, and its goal is to help people make healthy choices and to change people’s lives. 

During the pandemic, Noom’s popularity exploded, but their journey actually began more than 12 years ago, when Artem and his co-founders began looking for the most meaningful ways they could make an impact in the world. Artem had studied behavioral science and knew that behavior change requires a big data set. He and his co-founders realized that using weight management as an entry point into people’s overall health could unlock the giant data set they sought. 

The company’s approach to solving weight problems is very different from other solutions as Sean realized when he recently began his own Noom customer journey. There are no point systems or physical locations, and the company’s mobile app focuses on intervention, not tracking. The system uses data and psychology to help change how people think about food. With this approach, breakout growth has come into focus, and Artem is intent on “building the machine to get things right.”  

Rigorous experimentation and a maniacal focus on people and process helped drive Noom’s 2020’s revenue to around $400 million dollars (nearly twice that of 2019), but throughout the conversation, it became clear that for Artem, this is just the beginning. The company measures success by Quality-Adjusted Life Years, which means success for them is not just about dollars, it is about helping people live longer, better and healthier lives.

So join us as we find out how sustainable growth is being built every day at Noom. 

We discussed:

* A mission much larger than weight management (3:18)

* How the question, “what would we be proud of having done on our deathbeds,” helped drive Noom’s founders (5:17)

* Why Noom chose to focus on the consumer as the ultimate decision-maker but has kept enterprise partnerships on its menu (8:46)

* How an early consultation with Sean helped bring a North Star Metric and a test/learn approach into Noom’s process (11:30)

* Leaning on psychology internally to drive a more effective organization (14:23)

* What drove Noom’s tremendous year over year revenue growth (21:23)

* Why Noom believes “brainpower is greater than willpower” (23:01)

* Building healthy relationships with customers to impact healthy changes (28:28)

* Why 60 or so steps to onboarding works for Noom in the context of its mission (33:21)

* Why Artem believes a maniacal focus on people and process is key for sustainable growth (38:18)

And much, much, more . . . 

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