How We Built Alan Walk in Less Than 6 Months (Part I)

In April 2024, we tried to make health more engaging and accessible, with Alan Walk, our first gamified experience, transforming daily steps into rewards. We were guided by a simple yet powerful motto: "Taking care of your health should be rewarding and fun."

We assembled a lean team of three — a product manager, a designer, and an engineer — and gave ourselves three months to build and test an MVP with some of our members. The goal was to explore how gamification could transform daily health habits into engaging experiences.

As of today, Alan Walk has exceeded our expectations. This exploration has grown into a success story, with members walking an average of 1,000 additional steps per day, and showing higher engagement with our health services. The initial team of three has expanded to eight, and we are now working on applying gamification to the other parts of the Alan experience.

Across this series, we will walk you (pun intended) through the whole 0-to-1 process. We will introduce Alan Walk, and share the first designs and iterations, the challenges we faced, and the key learnings that brought us where we are today.

Part I explores the whys behind building Alan Walk. Part II will cover our technical journey from concept to launch and initial results. Lastly, Part III will reveal how we scaled to hundreds of companies, expanded our feature set, what we learned along the way, and what’s coming ahead.

Make every walk an adventure, and every step counts not just for your health, but to unlock a treasure trove of rewards.

We all know the famous '10,000 steps a day' goal, making walking perhaps the most universally understood form of exercise. Walking is one of those rare activities accessible to (almost) anyone. It has proven benefits for both physical and mental well-being — particularly relevant when we consider that 80% of Alan's members spend more than three hours sitting daily, with 55% sitting for over five hours.

What makes walking especially appealing is its simplicity. Unlike complex fitness programs that require extensive surveys or personalization, walking is beautifully simple. This simplicity extends to the technical side too — tracking steps through phones or wearables is straightforward, allowing us to focus our energy on creating an engaging rewards system.

Perhaps most importantly, walking has a natural social element. It becomes more enjoyable and motivating when done with friends or colleagues. Nothing is better than a walk as a break to disconnect and relax. At Alan, we're also fans of walking 1:1s.

This combination of accessibility, health benefits, simplicity, and social potential makes walking the perfect foundation for our first gamification initiative: it’s good for you, it’s good for all of us, so you deserve to be rewarded!

For HR leaders, walking transforms daily workplace routines into opportunities for stronger connections and enhanced productivity.

When employees step away from their desks for even a few minutes of movement, they return with sharper focus, improved problem-solving abilities, and renewed energy levels.

Picture colleagues taking rejuvenating walking breaks throughout the day, enjoying the same stress-reduction benefits that practices like Tai Chi provide. Or consider walking meetings that spark creativity and deepen collaboration while keeping everyone active — a practice dating back to Aristotle and his peripatetic school, where philosophy was taught while walking through the Lyceum.

Now that you have the why, in Part II we will dive into how we built Alan Walk, sharing our journey from concept to launch with the first results.