StepSetGo: Healthy is wealthy

India is a nudge society. Not many will undertake a task unless there is a push or an incentive tagged to it. This applies a lot to fitness. We all love a healthy body but not many are ready to hit the treadmill or the gym without a nudge. And that’s a fact StepSetGo wants to cash in on. Winner of the AtmaNirbhar Bharat App Innovation Challenge in the health and fitness category, the mobile application rewards its users for walking. The users can earn points that they accrue to use later to buy stuff online or get discounts on products and services.

“The whole idea came up during a chat between us founders when one of us said “I should be paid” to go to the gym,” says Shivjeet Ghatge, CEO and Co-Founder, StepSetGo. “Surveys have found that in India, most people are aware of the need for fitness but are not undertaking fitness tasks just because they don’t find enough incentives to continue their fitness journey.”

Ghatge says research has revealed that there are 40 crore people in the country who know of fitness, but just 4.5 crore people are engaged in fitness activities. Clearly, there is a lack of motivation to start and lack of discipline to continue in fitness. We wanted to interfere here and make the whole fitness regime more rewarding and competitive, says Ghatge who co-founded the startup in January 2019 along with Misaal Turakhia (Chief Product Officer) and Abhay Pai (Chief Technology Officer). It seems the rewards have found takers. The app has so far clocked in a registered user base of nearly 60 lakh and the numbers are only growing.

What’s up?

The fitness platform encourages users to walk more and earn coins that they can use for shopping in-app, at the bazaar section of the app. StepSetGo counts the steps one takes during walks and assigns SSG coins to them. StepSetGo is available for Android and iOS devices. Installing the app is easy. Users can sign up using their Google or Facebook accounts, or giving their email.

The mobile number can be attached to the app via OTP. You can set the profile by adding your age, gender, weight and height. There are various levels users can cover, based on which they can collect SSG coins. The app integrated your Google Fit data for better tracking.

The app mainly targets outdoor walkers, but due to Covid-19 lockdown which forced most people to shift their regular walks indoors, the app’s makers tweaked the algorithm to reflect the new social realities to calculate indoor steps. Now, 1,000 steps walked indoor fetches 1.5 SSG coins, and 1,000 steps walked outdoor rewards the user with 1 SSG coin. To keep users hooked to fitness activities indoors, the app offers a few ‘challenges’ users can perform and earn rewards.

StepSetGo has tied up with leading brands such as Bajaj Avenger, Apple, Puma, and Decathlon for its bazaar The rewards users can enjoy include iPhones and other gadgets. StepSetGo ranks second after the Centre’s Aarogya Setu app in terms of user engagement under the free apps category in India, according to an analysis by Similarweb.

The app enjoys a daily download count of more than 10,000. So far, users have claimed more than 800,000 rewards. “We are planning to add more activities and focus away from mere walking,” says Ghatge. He adds that the startup earns enough from the in-app ads and is planning to introduce more monetising methods as the subscriber numbers are shooting up.