I tried SweatCoin, the app that pays you to walk here is what happened

Looking into the company that wants to fight sedentary life

As a Venture Investor, I am always looking at new exciting startups that are trying to do something different and impactful.

What is Sweatcoin?

I have recently come across Sweatcoin, a company that has developed an app where people get paid to walk. They do so by converting steps recorded on a smartphone or smartwatch pedometer into a currency that can be spent on products and services on the Sweatcoin marketplace.

They have currently converted over 12 billion steps and are the #1 app on Appstore of many European countries including Germany, Austria, Portugal, and Poland.

They offer different marketplaces in each country where people can buy audiobooks, yoga classes and get discounts for more expensive products including headphones or Apple Watches. Another way to use sweatcoins is to give them to charity. Once a community of people had donated enough sweatcoins to reach a target sum, the company donates them to their NGO partners including environmental, humanitarian, and animal preservation causes.

A sedentary lifestyle is the cause of several health conditions that could be prevented if people were to increase their activity level. This has recently worsened during Covid-19 with people working from home.

Traditional incentives are not appealing especially to a part of the population. Gym memberships are expensive and although working out is rewarding in the long term, in the short-term people can feel frustrated. Introducing immediate rewards, Sweatcoin creates positive and repeatable incentives for consumers.

My Experience with the app

As I was attempting to lose the 10+ kilos gained over the four months spent in Italy (if you saw the amount of food on the table on Sunday at my parent’s place, you’d think I have done pretty good by only gaining 10ish kilos), I decided to use Sweatcoin to incentivize me to walk more.

The experiment lasted four weeks and overall I have mixed feelings about the app.

Over the four weeks, I have walked an average of 14,000 steps per day and I currently have 89.47 Sweat coins in my wallet as shown in the picture below.

So far so good. The obvious question is: What can I buy with 89.47 Sweatcoins? Unfortunately, not much.

I spent quite a long time scrolling through the “marketplace” which is a newsfeed-eske page where all the offers and products are listed, but could not find anything I could afford other than discounts on overpriced products.

Intrigued about the value of a Sweat-coin, I did some research on how many steps you need to get $1000 worth of the steps-based currency. According to some calculations done on Quora, $1000 dollars correspond to 21,052,632 verified steps.

Assuming an average of 10,000 steps a day, it would take 2105 days of walking or 5.7 years.

I have to admit this slightly put me off the challenge, and since then I have used the app in the background without paying much attention to it.

Overall I think the idea is great but there is definitely some work to be done to improve the marketplace and the value of your steps to really incentivize people to walk more. However, I definitely suggest everyone to give it a try as you may find some good discounts or offers that are particularly relevant for you and lose some weight as well.