Building sustainable growth loops and lasting habits — Anton Derlyatka, Sweatcoin

2025 is now in full swing, and if you’re like most people, you probably made a New Year’s Resolution two months ago to exercise more. And if you’re like most people, that resolution (which you made with the best of intentions) has now fallen by the wayside. But it’s not your fault! (For more on reducing New Year churn, read this article.)

According to Anton Derlyatka, co-founder and CEO of the fitness app Sweatcoin, it’s very human to have trouble exercising regularly. “We’re not born to be active — we’re born to be lazy,” he says. “Mother Nature didn’t think that we would have excess calories, so it didn’t build in any kind of behavioral mechanisms to encourage you to be active.”

To help solve this problem, Anton created an app that helps users build long-lasting fitness habits. Sweatcoin awards users in-app currency (“sweat coins”) for walking, and these coins can be spent on real-world rewards or donated to charity. This week on the Sub Club podcast, we talked to Anton about the origins and evolution of this revolutionary fitness app and what lessons app developers can learn from its success.

Controlled virality

Over the years, Sweatcoin has experienced spikes of viral interest when tens of thousands of users downloaded the app per day. But while viral moments can be a great way to generate interest in an app, these short bursts of downloads just aren’t a sustainable growth model. As Anton points out, “Virality is uncontrollable — it’s basically a nuclear reaction. You can have an explosion, but how do you create a nuclear power station where you can control the nuclear reaction?”

Instead of leaving these one-off moments to chance, Anton and his team created a positive feedback loop based on the building blocks of virality: generating groundswell and increasing the velocity of downloads. By working with influencers to create and promote viral content, the Sweatcoin team saw increased downloads, which led to increased organic traffic through Google and the app stores.

The power of positive reinforcement

Gamified apps often try to retain users with streaks and daily reminders to log in, but many do this with harsh language that make users feel guilty. Sweatcoin does no such thing. Instead, they rely on the principles of behavioral economics and positive reinforcement to nudge users to change their habits. As Anton puts it, “The moment you reframe and you say, ‘These are not steps, these are coins. And here’s your balance. And your balance keeps on growing, and you’re actually quite rich’ … I think that reframing is a very powerful thing.” Interestingly, Anton and his team recently asked users how much they value their sweatcoins by asking two questions: 1) “How much would you pay for someone else’s sweatcoins?” and 2) “How much would you sell your own sweatcoins for?” On average, users valued others’ sweatcoins at $0.01 to $0.05, while they valued their own Sweatcoins at $0.50 to $1.00. “Which means that basically your own steps are going to be far more important to you than, say, my steps or somebody else’s that you don’t even know,” Anton said.

By reframing steps as currency, Sweatcoin has helped users become deeply invested in their own progress — which encourages users to keep using the app and stick to their new healthy habits in the long term.

Scaling to subscriptions

Like many app businesses, Sweatcoin started out as a free app, generating revenue through strategic brand partnerships and ads. But as Anton points out, “it was very, very clear that the advertising model would only take us so far.” So in addition to their value-packed free product, they’ve recently decided to add a premium tier via subscriptions. The new premium offering includes an ad-free experience and advanced fitness tools, which highly-motivated users may be inclined to pay for. By building up a dedicated base of free users, Sweatcoin has dodged high customer acquisition costs and evolved from a free app to a paid app without alienating users.