On The Hunt: Sweatcoin
I’m an alien-unicorn from planet Glitter — can you explain to me what your company does?
We pay humans to walk.
No, literally — we want to make people more physically active and do it by rewarding every step they make. By giving people extra motivation to be physically active, we are directly addressing the trillion-dollar obesity problem.
There is a strong consensus that the global pandemic of physical inactivity and obesity is one of the most serious challenges that the human race faces today. According to McKinsey & Company, obesity is one of the top-three biggest worldwide challenges as defined by the amount of economic value destruction, adding up to $2tn in direct annual costs. There is a strong link between physical inactivity and a host of other conditions, such as hypertension, other cardiovascular diseases, mental health and general wellbeing.
Sweatcoin started as a fitness app that converts steps into a virtual currency (“sweatcoins”) and has an internal marketplace that allows users to buy real goods and services with their sweatcoins. As of May 2018, there were more than 500 vendors globally accepting Sweatcoin as a means of payment. Currently, Sweatcoin has over 35M downloads of which more than 6 million are active on a monthly basis.
“The vision for Sweatcoin is to become a global,
nation-state independent digital currently.”
Describe your company culture.
It is extremely entrepreneurial — we select people who not only demonstrate exceptional ability in tech and business but have either already tried founding own business in the past or are confident that they will end up creating their own company as the right idea comes along. We hire people who have “founders mentality” because they are the ones who always take extreme ownership and are able to operate independently — qualities we value a lot.
We want Sweatcoin to be known as an “alma mater” for dozens of future successful tech founders. We hire entrepreneurs and we give them an opportunity to grow along with the business.
What are your main focuses at the moment?
Adding as much value to our users as we can had always been our core priority and our focus. This is why one of the key teams in our company is called Value team — they are the ones responsible for filling our marketplace with the coolest products on earth and ensuring happiness of our users.
We are also constantly iterating our product and working on features that can further add value to our users. One of of the cool things about our company is that the entire team is involved in ideation and is contributing product ideas. We have a weekly open session where all of our team members present product ideas around specific themes like improving virality, adding social features, improving onboarding, etc. Around 60% of the team participates in these sessions on weekly basis and many of these ideas eventually go into production.
How did you hear about Unicorn Hunt and what do you like about it?
We were looking for job boards focused specifically on recruitment for startups as we always knew that we want people who are extremely entrepreneurial and interested to pursue a career in tech. We have found a number of them and ended up selecting 3 that are the most efficient with the best ratio of volume/quality of applicants and Unicorn Hunt was on the list.
What advice would you give other startups that are hiring?
- Make sure the first 100 people you hire are absolute rockstars and you will have a strong foundation for your business.
- Do not hire for experience, hire for values and potential.
- Always collect references — even on your junior hires.
- And the last one: get an in-house recruitment executive as early as you humanly can — this will save you a ton of money and nerves.
What advice would you give people applying to work at Sweatcoin?
Research about our business, download the app, check LinkedIn profiles of your interviewers — shows us that you have done your homework.
Be hungry, show your passion, tell an interesting story — demonstrate how you stand out from the crowd.
Is Sweatcoin makin’ you wanna take a step forward? Check out the roles available on Unicorn Hunt!
