Meet The Disruptors: Anton Derlyatka Of Sweat Economy On The Five Things You Need To Shake Up Your Industry
An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis
On a practical level, someone told me when I was in secondary school: drink, but don’t get drunk. Can’t say I followed it to the t, but it worked for me most of the time 😉
As a part of our series about business leaders who are shaking things up in their industry, I had the pleasure of interviewing Anton Derlyatka, the CEO and Co-Founder of Sweat Economy.
Anton Derlyatka is the CEO and Co-Founder of global health and wellness company Sweat Economy. Sweat Economy incentivises people to become more physically active by rewarding users for the number of steps they take each day through in-app loyalty points (Sweatcoins) and crypto tokens (SWEAT). In September 2022, the company expanded upon its Sweatcoin app, which now has 120M users and is the #1 health and fitness app globally, with the launch of a new crypto app, the Sweat Wallet, and a cryptocurrency offering, SWEAT.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit more. Can you tell us a bit about your “backstory”? What led you to this particular career path?
Of course! I am the founder and CEO of Sweat Economy. Our mission is to get the world more active through incentivizing steps with both in-app loyalty points (Sweatcoins) and crypto tokens (SWEAT). Our ultimate vision is to create a financial economy around movement, an economy that enables a direct link between health and wealth — one that not just users can enjoy the fruit of, but is used by global governments, healthcare providers like the NHS, insurance companies and brands worldwide for people to embrace more active, healthy lifestyles.
Even though I have been active most of my life, there were moments when I’d find it hard to keep going. In one of those spells about 7 or 8 years ago I found myself thinking about what makes it so hard to be physically active. One thing led to another, I started reading on behavioral economics with ‘Thinking Fast and Slow’ being a pivotal point. That book gave me plenty of ideas as to why we tend to be sedentary (although I prefer ‘lazy’!) and what can be done about it. In behavioral economics lingo, our inactivity stems from ‘present bias,’ a behavioral heuristic resulting in us underestimating the importance of future events and overestimating the here and now. In other words, when you exercise, you sweat, suffer, you are in pain, and this is now. But the benefit of you working out is removed into the relatively distant future and therefore less tangible.
Anyway, one of the really effective ways of fighting that present bias is instant gratification. So, if you have a way of bringing the value that your behavior creates in the future into the present moment this will be a really powerful way to tackle the present bias. Fast forward a year, together with my co-founders Oleg and Egor we came up with a concept and a prototype mobile app, which was doing exactly that — it used instant gratification by rewarding people with loyalty points through a mobile app. And we spent the next few years turning the prototype into the biggest health & fitness app in the world with more than 100M+ happy users.
Can you tell our readers what it is about the work you’re doing that’s disruptive?
No other health or fitness company has assigned a financial or economic value to movement before. I believe that the Sweat Economy will play a major global role in preventative health, using the power of incentives to help everyone to improve their health. Doing so will reduce the burden on the healthcare systems and increase productivity in the workplace. It provides the behavioral nudge that sees people make the choice to walk up, rather than stand, on an ascending escalator; to take the stairs as opposed to the lift; or to get off the bus at an earlier stop
On a slightly less serious note, I always liked wacky things. And what can be more wacky than a promise of being paid for being active? 😉
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
Originally we launched in the UK and the US. When it was time to start scaling globally, we went about it in a pretty well thought-out (we thought!) manner. We picked a test market (Ireland), put in quite a lot of effort in preparation, creating lots of hypotheses, overthinking that stuff as you do. After a few weeks of meticulous planning we were ready to go. We ‘pressed the button’ and sat there waiting for a huge success, because previously we were pretty successful both in the UK and the US. Guess how many users we got in the first 24 hours in Ireland?
One.
I am not joking!
Lesson learnt: do plan ahead, but be ready for the fact that reality will be very different, especially if you are dealing with a pretty novel product, market, or message. Be ready to iterate quickly and never think that any launch is the finish line. It is a start line in fact.
We all need a little help along the journey. Who have been some of your mentors? Can you share a story about how they made an impact?
I am not very good at finding mentors, I actually think of it as one of my weaknesses. But I do take lots of energy and value from speaking with people who are very different to me in the way they are, the way they think, the lifestyle they are from. I love talking about all sorts of crazy stuff because every now and then it ignites an idea or thought, or lets me improve things I am working on. At the very beginning of Sweatcoin, even before it was Sweatcoin, I started discussing my idea with a few friends who were very good at throwing some wacky ideas at me and challenging my thinking. In fact, Sweatcoin was created at the moment when I started discussing my idea called Fitcoin, a ‘loyalty programme for fitness’, with my now co-founder Oleg. He said “You know what? This should not be a loyalty program, it should be a currency. And BTW Fitcoin sucks as a name.”
In today’s parlance, being disruptive is usually a positive adjective. But is disrupting always good? When do we say the converse, that a system or structure has ‘withstood the test of time’? Can you articulate to our readers when disrupting an industry is positive, and when disrupting an industry is ‘not so positive’? Can you share some examples of what you mean?
Of course disrupting something is not always good. Two things come to mind immediately, off the back of current affairs. Disrupting the business of conventional war by inventing a nuclear bomb was arguably one of the most dangerous things that’s ever happend to mankind (although some would argue it prevented the ‘conventional’ World War III from happening through the nuclear deterrence doctrine). The other example is the way that social media disrupted the traditional media and distribution of information. On paper, it all looked fine — breaking down barriers, letting everyone be their own media and getting billions of people around the world to decide what information they consume from millions of different sources rather than from a handful of incumbent newspapers and TV channels. The reality proved to be starkly different. The world of newsfeed algorithms optimizes for user eyeballs, or engagement, not for objectivity of information. So modern social media has created an echochamber of extremely subjective views accelerated through people’s inherent confirmation bias. As a result, the media has completed its transition from an information business to an entertainment business, which I do not think is healthy for the world of growing complexity, where reliable information matters more than ever before.
Can you share five of the best words of advice you’ve gotten along your journey? Please give a story or example for each.
One of the most elegant and yet powerful truths I learnt when I was a kid was the Occam’s razor, which goes something like this: ‘The best of all the possible explanations usually relies on the fewest possible assumptions’ or, in even simpler terms, the simplest explanation tends to be the most likely one. This really helps prioritize and minimize anxiety.
Another one is Murphy’s law, ‘If sh*t can happen it will happen’. This one also makes your life easier because, for one, it makes you prepared for the worst and anything better than that is a free bonus, and two, it really puts your mind at ease as you realize there is only that much you can control, so you can just go on and ‘do what you must and come what may’
Finally, on a practical level, someone told me when I was in secondary school: drink, but don’t get drunk. Can’t say I followed it to the t, but it worked for me most of the time 😉
We are sure you aren’t done. How are you going to shake things up next?
That’s right! In September 2022, we expanded upon the Sweatcoin app, which has 120M users, with the launch of a new crypto app, the Sweat Wallet, and a cryptocurrency offering, SWEAT. The cryptocurrency is the first to be literally ‘minted by steps’ and effectively establishes a true economic unit of value for movement. Since this launch, we onboarded millions of new, everyday users to crypto in what was the largest Web3 on-ramp ever seen.
The Sweat Wallet quickly became the most downloaded Finance app in 51 countries. Over two million users downloaded and activated the Sweat Wallet app within 72 hours of the TGE (Token Generation Event) and was the second most used App across all chains since its launch.
In the next five years, Sweatcoin and SWEAT: the token, will redefine walking, turning it from an aimless activity to something directly associated with wealth. As people are motivated to walk more and invest in crypto, they will — by default — stimulate a new economy for health-conscious brands and organizations to offer their services to local communities. We’re so excited to have seen the incredible reception so far and to build on it’s huge potential to connect the concepts of health and wealth
Do you have a book, podcast, or talk that’s had a deep impact on your thinking? Can you share a story with us? Can you explain why it was so resonant with you?
“Thinking Fast and Slow.” It provides great insight into why we are who we are. Also, it firmed up my belief that every single action is rational, the question is what lense you are looking through and how deep you are prepared to dig into the person’s mind and psyche to understand that rationale.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
‘You certainly usually find something, if you look, but it is not always quite the something you were after’ J.R. Tolkien — this is not always true, because sometimes you indeed find what you were after, but I feel this is a really good summary of an entrepreneur’s life. It is full of surprises, for better or worse! 😉
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
At Sweat Economy, we want to make it easier to be healthier and happier. That is the essence of what we are working towards. I feel we are already making good progress ‘hacking’ the human psyche for the better, but we are only just getting started.
How can our readers follow you online?
Readers can follow me on LinkedIn and check out Sweatcoin on Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook.
This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!
Meet The Disruptors: Anton Derlyatka Of Sweat Economy On The Five Things You Need To Shake Up Your… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
