AchieveMint Gives You Cash for Doing Healthy Activities

A startup has designed a platform that aggregates data from select fitness, health and social networking apps you're already using and rewards you with points for healthy behavior.

San Francisco-based AchieveMint currently integrates with platforms like Twitter, Facebook,Foursquare, Meetup, RunKeeper, MapMyFitness and Fitbit. Go for a run, tweet something "healthy," check-in to a health food store or do anything vaguely related to health that's tracked and you'll be rewarded with points on the free service. Once you achieve enough points, you can convert them into merchandise or cash. One thousand points is equivalent to $1.

Even checking in on Foursquare if you go to church or when you visit a beach could earn points.

"We sort of looked at the world and went: okay, if we take a totally non-judgmental view of the planet, what would we consider good?" CEO Mikki Nasch told Mashable. "Let's not judge what we think is right. Let's just go [with] what everybody thinks is right and add all of those as activities that can be registered that would be considered either healthy or good for wellness in general."

With this broad, egalitarian approach to health, Nasch says AchieveMint is really looking at four quadrants: mindfulness, soulfulness, fitness and nutrition.

"We don't think that health is just fitness or just diet," she said. "[We] sort of look at health as a much more holistic thing."

AchieveMint is also a community-driven platform, since Nasch said users can share data and get insights back to help manage fitness goals or chronic conditions.

If you crowdsource a huge amount of information about behaviors, effectively the crowd itself becomes the instructor, the coach — to help me help myself," Nasch said.

The startup, which launched to the public in January, already has about 82,000 users from all over the United States. Nasch hopes with the right amount of data and influence, AchieveMint could even convince people to do something as simple as take the stairs over the elevator.

"You're sort of trying to take the health process — which is really a background process, it's not something we think of everyday — and just occasionally bring it to the foreground so that people are little more conscious about their health and well-being and just reminded to do something good for themselves every single day," she said.

Where Does the Reward Money Come From?

AchieveMint's rewards sound appealing from the consumer standpoint; but how can giving away cash be sustainable for a young company? Nasch told Mashable that since this health data they're gathering hasn't really existed before in aggregate, AchieveMint can sell the aggregate data.

Sponsors — think sports teams and corporations — who want to motivate people to be healthy can fund some of the rewards, too.

AchieveMint previously partnered with the Brooklyn Nets basketball team to encourage users in Brooklyn and 75 miles around it to earn special rewards, such as VIP tickets to the draft or signed merchandise.

Nasch, who has a background in marketing, said throughout her career she has used data in marketing campaigns.

"What I realized is that we've spent an inordinate amount of science and technology on convincing people to buy consumer goods they don't necessarily need or aren't necessarily good for them. And we've spent absolutely no time and energy on trying to convince people to do what's good for them," she said.

Trying AchieveMint Out

I signed up for AchieveMint and linked my own Twitter, Facebook and RunKeeper accounts to the platform.

In the last couple weeks, I've earned points 248 points from my Twitter activity and 66 points for a haphazard two-mile jog with RunKeeper. Rewards for my running made sense, but I wasn't sure why most of my Tweets earned me healthy points. Most of my tweets were not about anything particularly healthy (like this). I reached out to AchieveMint on Thursday and they said it was a "bug that has recently been fixed."

For someone like me who opts not to regularly use geolocation apps, like Foursquare, I wish I could have manually added details about my daily life. But understandably, verifying whether users do what they actually say could open up a whole new can of worms. I also hope AchieveMint starts to partner with more and more apps, like Nike+ — my personal go-to running app. But from my limited time with the platform, I'm impressed by its premise; and as CEO Nasch indicated, these incentives might get some of us more motivated to get active and live a more healthy life.