🦴 The New Posture Pandemic

GM. This is Work "After" Work, the newsletter you lean on for early trends and business ideas.

What we got for ya today:

• 🤝 Having people's backs

• 😂 Memes of the day

THE POSTURE PANDEMIC

What's one thing we probably all have in common? If you said 'bad posture', ding ding ding - you're the winner.

This may not surprise you. Phones have been the culprit of bad posture for years due to us constantly looking down at them all day.

There was a professional study published in 2016 that linked extended phone usage to faulty posture such as forward neck posture, slouched posture, or rounded shoulders, which can cause injury to the structure of the cervical and lumbar spine, as well as ligaments. Did that make you just fix your posture? Cause same. 😂 

In addition, it can also affect your breathing ability.

Point is, this is no bueno for your neck, shoulders, back, or health.

With years of phone usage increasing over time, so has bad posture. People are now waking up to the fact that their backs may be hurting solely because of their phones and are looking for ways to fix this.

If you've ever tweaked that L5, you know how serious back problems are - you can't even get up to walk.

No walking means no doing the things you love to do (basketball, gymnastics, swimming, you name it)

With younger generations growing up with phones as a part of their everyday lives we will only see a larger portion of the population with worsened posture and this trend to fix posture will only grow... until phones go away, and that might be a while.

Here are two businesses you can go after to capitalize of the growing consciousness of bad posture:

1. The Posture App

When people have back pain what's their initial reaction? It's probably, "I need to see the chiropractor."

On average, a chiropractor appointment costs $65 in the US and people usually go weekly to monthly.

These expenses rack up and creating an app that can help people maintain better posture can eliminate them from ever having to go to the chiropractor in the first place.

What the app would doSimilar to a workout app, it would come with an instructor that runs you through a circuit of exercises and stretches you can do every day that slowly improves your posture.

Think of it as a personal trainer but only for your spine and at 1/10th of the cost.

How to make money with your appYou can either make this app cost money upfront.. say $5. This is the harder route because it will deter customers and lead to fewer downloads.

Or have a free app with specialty offers such as "pro versions", which come with exclusive access to more classes and stretches inside the app. This approach is much easier to grow revenues and is usually what companies opt for.

An example of an app that does stretching is called Down Dog. From the name you probably guessed it's a Yoga app. It's free to download but comes with upgrades that cost $9.99/mo and $59.99/mo.

Get this 👀 they had 30k downloads last month and made $400k.

2. Specialty Mobility Gym

Skip the weights, and create a gym for only flexibility and mobility.

For the people who don't want an app but want a trainer actually stretching them out or want a group setting, this is the way to go.

Back pain affects 80% of people at one point or another in their lives and a lot of the time, it's simply due to tight muscles (not stretching). Tight hamstrings = problems with your back.

A company that's currently doing this "mobility only" approach is called stretchlab. They started in 2015 and already have hundreds of locations across the US and rake in $372M a year.

They're also a franchise and online it says each one averages around $1 million in sales per year so check out a franchise if you're thinking about opening up a store.

In my opinion, this industry is only growing. Back pain searches are still on the rise after 15 years.

MEMES OF THE DAY

Not a bad strategy 😂😂

That's all I got for ya today folks!!

DISCLAIMER: None of this is financial advice. This newsletter is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. Please be careful and do your own research.