We live in a world where if an app is free, it’s most likely tied to a subscription. Everything costs money, and in the App Store this expression is very clear. Any app that promises to give you money is generally suspicious, but there are a few exceptions.
Macadam, an application that wants to give you money to walk, is one of these exceptions. You might raise an eyebrow reading this, but they found a way to do it while finding a way to hold on.
Solve the way of life and, by the way, that of whoever wants
Benjamin Daudignac, co-founder of Macadam.
Macadam’s objective, as we read on its official website, is to put an end to sedentary lifestyle. A lofty goal, which Apple also pursues with its Fitness apps and all activities on the Apple Watch, but the incentive to give you money is always what grabs attention.
Benjamin Daudignac, one of the company’s three founders, says the idea came to them when they were working in a start which forced them to have a very high work rate. This led to a very sedentary life:
“We didn’t play sports, we traveled on scooters and they brought us food every day. Our way of life was clearly sedentary and we felt there had to be a technological approach to help people adopt a more active lifestyle.”
This led them to create Macadam to promote an exercise accessible to all: walking. And with the best motivator: money. This led them to grow to one million registered users, with 200,000 logging on multiple times a day and some of them “very addicted” according to Benjamin.
The general operation of Macadam is simple. After registration (you can do this via Sign in with Apple to anonymize your account), the app saves your steps which you can exchange for virtual currencies, or “coins”. These coins are redeemable for various “prizes”:
- Cash transferred to your bank account
- Discounts at select app partner stores
- A donation in your name to a charitable project, such as planting trees.
Some options increase the number of points you can earn, like watching a 30-second ad or turning on app notifications. There’s also some level of gamification: you earn extra coins if you trade stages three days in a row, if you follow Macadam’s Instagram account, or if you do so after a certain amount of time. There is also the function to communicate with friends and compete to see who walks the most.
You are not going to become a millionaire by walking, but over time you will be able to contribute something to the health of the application
Anyway don’t expect to earn a salary with this: My own tests had walking 40 minutes a day earning me about 50 coins. In order to receive the minimum money transfer (which I haven’t reached yet), you need to accumulate 30,000 coins. For what I am doing, it would take me between 30 and 40 days to achieve this.
However, let’s not underestimate these transfers either: in a month, you might be walking enough to earn money for dining out. It’s something. And if you’re ambitious, you can always rack up the 300,000 coins needed to get refurbished AirPods 3.
Where does Macadam get the money to do this? GOOD dedicate part of their advertising revenue to this, thanks to the advertisements that appear in the application. Advertisements which, by the way, are not intrusive or interrupt the use of the interface unless you specifically ask for it to redeem additional coins.
Benjamin assures us that they would not mind if competing applications appeared, because this business model is not hurt by rivals. If another app pops up that gives you money for walking, users will use both Macadam and that other app in order to earn more money. And the same with Apple, which might launch a similar feature but offer free months of its subscription services as a prize. The more, the better.
The future of Macadam involves talking about more integrations, as Benjamin tells us:
We hope to have a larger user base, but hope to work with insurance companies and governments by 2024. […] Over time, we want to become the first social app that gets its users off the couch.
They are not lacking in ambition: they want to go beyond the million subscribers they have today to 10 million before 2024. And in a period of five years, they still want to multiply by 10 to reach 100 million registered users. Making those numbers is frankly difficult and there are reasons not to be optimistic, but who knows if money as an attraction can do that.
In my experience, Macadam is one of those apps that you can install out of the way, in an apps folder. With a simple daily consultation to redeem your steps, you can accumulate money, and even if it’s small amounts, they can still end up becoming a small prize for maintaining a good step routine. In other words: get the virtual medals from the Apple Fitness app to taste little. You can download Macadam for free from the App Store.
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