The Three Pillars of Noom

Observations from my first 3 months as Noom’s CEO

“What does your company do?” A simple question, yet one with a long history of befuddling CEOs, like Yahoo’s Carol Bartz & Jerry Yang.

Distilling the complexity of a large enterprise into a handful of memorable concepts is no easy task. At Noom, I approached the problem by engaging in a listening tour, speaking to more than 100 past and present employees, and inviting every current team member to tell me what they believe the pillars of Noom to be, while also seeking the feedback of countless members, who we call Noomers.

My goal was to internalize the mission, the mission that drew me to Noom in the first place: “to help people everywhere lead healthier lives through behavior change.”

As a statement, that mission surely is sound, but I found myself tinkering with it. While the “behavior change” part is so important to what Noom does, I noticed it did not resonate with everyone. It’s how Noom is successful, but not necessarily the highest aspiration that our members share.

What they want is to live better, healthier lives.

“Better” is a word that has extraordinary power. Its dictionary definition is “to improve in health or mental attitude” or “to make more complete or perfect.”

Yet the power of the word lies in the fact that it’s a challenge to all who speak it, no matter their current condition. I want to be a better father, husband, and innovator. We all want to be better.

“Better” had to be in the mission, and so I’ve distilled it further:

To empower everyone, everywhere to live a better, healthier life.

We aspire to this mission — we are not limited to only our subscribers or future subscribers, not only to our paying members — our ambition spans the whole world. It’s also grounded in results — what matters to us is sustainable outcomes.

Noom broke into the market — and the zeitgeist — by combining psychology with an innovative app-driven format that produces proven weight-loss outcomes. Since the launch of Noom Med in May, we now combine medicine, psychology, and innovation — all in the singular pursuit of our mission to empower everyone, everywhere to live a better, healthier life.

The 4-Cs of Noom

Now that the mission was so clear, I asked “In what areas must Noom be best in the world?” These areas get at “how” Noom can achieve its mission. As I dove deeper, I realized everything that mattered started with the letter “C.” How convenient and curious!

I call these the 4-Cs of Noom:

1. Clinicians
2. Coaching
3. Community
4. Content

Here’s how I think about the four Cs, and their critical role in our company’s success.

Clinicians

Clinicians are the newest part of Noom’s business — and one where I see enormous potential for growth. We are pairing clinical obesity treatment with behavioral change, while also seeking to create the ultimate companion app to a GLP-1 course of care.

GLP-1s are changing how people think about obesity. At Noom we are building a clinician force of obesity experts to take us beyond prevention to treatment of obesity as a chronic condition. Noom is not just another GLP-1 prescriber — our flagship, award-winning psychology-based program sets us apart.

Members with low-to-moderate health needs are paired with a lower-cost, but high-impact, psychology-based weight-management or diabetes-prevention program. Higher-risk members meanwhile, who have clinical obesity or who otherwise qualify, can now receive treatment from obesity specialists who design a tailored care plan, which could include prescribing and managing GLP-1s or other anti-obesity medications.

As effective as GLP-1s are, people don’t want to be on drugs forever. They’re expensive and come with side effects. Meanwhile, payers don’t want to pay for them forever. Complicating matters, studies show rapid weight gain on medication removal. Simply put, the drugs must be paired with behavior change to avoid a lifelong, expensive GLP-1 habit. Noom is uniquely situated to combine medicine with psychology to create sustainable outcomes without a lifelong dependency on medication.

And just in time. A tsunami of cost is about to swamp the US healthcare system, as 40% of adults struggle with obesity. Meanwhile, the supply of GLP-1s will increase to match the overwhelming demand, spiking costs. To help employers and plans ride this wave, we just announced Noom Med for enterprise.

Our obesity care team helps members access and manage the GLP-1s while our psychology-based program and coaching enables off-ramping and tapering of the medication. We see a future where Noom is the enterprise weight & obesity solution that employers and payers need, the center of excellence that will help contain weight-related costs.

Noom should be the entry point for GLP-1 access, as well as the companion app enabling eventual tapering. We see early signs that payers support this approach. Simply put, Noom Med is the right way to begin a GLP-1 journey, because it provides for more than just the medication.

Coaching

Why is coaching so important for Noom? It’s how we drive accountability and habit formation. It’s about the personal, human touch–including on days when someone struggles and needs to hear “it’s okay.” It’s about extending a helping, empathetic hand to guide people along their weight-loss journey.

So long as humans possess emotion, coaching will remain a high priority for Noom — one we will continue to strengthen and innovate. We can make better and better coach recommendations. We can evolve our coaching formats. We can further leverage AI to complement, assist, and empower the all-important human side of coaching.

Stanford Business School said it best:

“With more users seeking 1-to-1 coaching to reach their goals, companies delivering accountability-as-a-service by seamlessly pairing in-app content and health data with human touch points will become the gold standard for everything from fitness to nutrition, sleep, and mental health.”

We couldn’t agree more.

Community

Why is community such a critical element of Noom’s business?

The reason is easy to see. James Clear put it well in Atomic Habits:

Having built communities for the last 18 years, I agree with First Round Capital’s and A16Z’s assessments that “community is the new moat.” Community must be made a superpower.

Every category is ultimately dominated by the competitor who bakes community into their core. A strong community is the fertile soil where healthy habits take root. For Noom, community can also be a powerful tool to encourage word-of-mouth spread.

But it’s deeper than that. Noom cares about community because community itself is critical to our member’s wellness.

U.S. Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy, has said so authoritatively, writing:

General Murthy notes that community decreases the risk of developing and worsening heart disease, high blood pressure, dementia, and diabetes, among other physical ailments.

Community is itself a pillar of wellness, along with nutrition, fitness, sleep, and mental health. Noom has a unique opportunity to build the world’s leading health and wellness community … to become the leading vertical network for people dedicated to building better, healthier lives.

Content

Noom members rely on our content and tools to help them live better, healthier lives. We combine education with behavioral psychology to teach and reinforce healthy habits.

Over time, we’ll continue to expand our content offerings to other dimensions of wellness, while ensuring we embrace the transformative power of AI to make Noom ever simpler, ever more personalized, and ever more impactful.

Pairing in-app content and health data with humanity is the gold standard. AI is critical to that vision. By parsing all of the myriad inputs to make in-the-moment suggestions to the coach or clinician — helping them see around corners, we can infuse humanity into treatment and prevention.

The Three Pillars Supporting Noom’s Mission

With the mission and key areas of investment at hand, we must next speak to the future. The framework I’ve used in the past, following Bob Iger, is the three pillars, and they’re called pillars for a reason. The mission rests upon these pillars. They had better last for generations.

The three pillars of Noom are:

1. Brand: Build a world-class brand for betterment across all of the dimensions of health and wellness, so that we can serve and treat the whole person. This pillar, above all, is why Noom exists in the world. People want healthy habits, they want to improve; they want coaching; they want support, and they always will.

2. Innovation: Invest in innovative, high-quality products and services to become an indispensable part of our community’s lifelong health and wellness journey. We have an opportunity to leverage our brand to build a comprehensive suite of health and wellness solutions that help our members lead healthier, longer, more active, and joyful lives.

3. Partnership: Partner for and acquire new audiences, leveraging the strong consumer brand. We wish to weave Noom into the fabric of the healthcare system, making Noom available to members of major health plans. That means growing our enterprise product suite and expanding payer relationships.

These pillars are the foundation for Noom’s future growth. They will help to define what we will prioritize and what we won’t.

So … what is Noom?

Noom empowers everyone, everywhere to live a better, healthier life. We are a digital healthcare company that connects people to content, community, coaching, and clinicians to build healthy habits and promote better living.

Our success over the coming years depends on how well we execute against our three pillars: to build a world-class brand for betterment across all of the dimensions of health and wellness; to invest in innovative, high-quality products and services to become an indispensable part of our customers' lifelong wellness journey; and to partner for and acquire new audiences, weaving Noom deeply into the fabric of healthcare.

Of course, saying so is the easy part. The problems we tackle are among the most important ones of our time. We strive to infuse humanity, in the form of coaching & community, into healthcare to help people live longer, better lives. Nothing embodies that mission more than how we are working with GLP-1s to kickstart the health journey, while combining it with behavior change for lasting results, without the cost and side effects of a forever medication.

If these difficult challenges call to you as much as they do to us, we are always in need of good people. I’d love to hear from you.