From Sports to Healthcare: Inside Figur8’s Successful Pivot During COVID

Imagine being on the verge of a major Olympics deployment when the world suddenly shuts down. That’s exactly where Figur8 found itself in early 2020.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, founder Nan-Wei Gong shared the inside story of how her company executed one of the most challenging pivots a tech company can face – moving from professional sports to healthcare during a global pandemic.

The Pre-Pivot Position

Before COVID, Figur8 was gaining significant traction in professional sports. Their technology solved a crucial problem: traditional biomechanics labs, costing around a quarter million dollars, were impractical for real-world sports scenarios. As Nan-Wei explains, “Can you imagine? You ask a pitcher to pitch indoors, it’s just impossible.”

The company had developed a wearable solution to capture biomechanics movement outside the lab. They were “successful at engaging many professional teams” and were “set up to be in the Olympics as the assessment tool in the olympian village.”

Then COVID hit.

The Pivot Decision

Instead of waiting out the pandemic, Figur8 made a decisive move. “We did a hard pivot into healthcare, which is a long term target that we know is always there,” Nan-Wei shares. But this wasn’t a random choice or a desperate grab at any available market.

Healthcare had always been on their radar. The challenge wasn’t whether to enter healthcare, but when and how. As Nan-Wei notes, “There is a lot of complexity in going to market in healthcare, especially in the US.”

Personal Experience Validates Market Need

Sometimes the best market research comes from unexpected places. For Nan-Wei, it was developing a frozen shoulder during COVID. This personal experience highlighted a crucial gap in physical therapy: “If you go to a clinic, that is when you don’t have a broken bone, the only thing that they can do for you is through experience, through manual tests on how much you can move… you just don’t know if you’re making progress.”

This insight helped shape Figur8’s healthcare offering. They weren’t just bringing sports technology to healthcare – they were solving a fundamental measurement problem that affected millions of patients.

Executing the Pivot

The transition required more than just targeting new customers. Figur8 had to rethink their entire approach. “What we do really is to provide tools for physical therapists to quantify and to assess the severity and progress of the patient, and to be able to show that progress to the patient and to the payers to really demonstrate the value of these treatments.”

This meant developing new capabilities beyond their core technology. They created solutions for insurance communication, reporting systems, and workflow tools. As Nan-Wei puts it, “We definitely did not stop at the hardware sales level.”

Results and Lessons

Two years after the pivot, Figur8 has established itself in healthcare, operating in 15 states with multiple physical therapy clinics. Their solution now includes hardware, software, apps, and data analytics.

The key lesson for founders? Having a “Plan B” market isn’t enough – you need to understand its complexities before you need it. As Nan-Wei’s experience shows, successfully pivoting into healthcare required more than just repurposing existing technology. It meant building a complete solution that addressed the market’s unique workflows, stakeholders, and business models.

Today, Figur8 is “on track to disrupt it in this space of having a standard of measurement for musculoskeletal health.” Their pivot didn’t just save the company – it positioned them to potentially achieve an even greater impact than their original sports market focus.

For tech founders facing their own pivot decisions, Figur8’s story offers a crucial lesson: sometimes the best pivot isn’t to a new market, but to one you’ve been watching all along. The key is understanding its complexities before you need to make the jump.