Healthy Living with Michael Antaran of CARROT

VFH Episode 44

In this episode, Teri welcomes Michael Antaran, the founder and CEO of CARROT, a wellness mobile app that allows people to be rewarded for active healthy living by walking.

CARROT is a mobile wellness program that rewards people financially for walking and meeting personal activity goals. CARROT successfully “gamified” health and wellness, delivering three times the engagement at less than one-sixth the cost of traditional programs. Unlike anything in the marketplace, CARROT’s “set-it-and-forget-it” approach uses individualized goals and instant gratification to motivate even the most sedentary users, making CARROT an attractive corporate wellness program for companies of all sizes.

Key points from Michael!

Providing people with “instant gratification” for achieving personalized activity goals, and how voice technology can help to facilitate that.

Coming Up with CARROT

The startup is based in Detroit.
Michael’s life always revolved around health, hospitality and marketing based on what members of his family did for a living.
He was in the automotive industry for 15 years and wanted to do something different that would enable him to raise his kids at the same, so he started a mobile gaming company.
He was one of the first 20,000 developers on the Apple iPhone SDK platform. He released an app that was one of the first 500 apps on the Apple app store.
Due to his own personal concerns about the impact of his company’s games, he shifted from a pay-to-play model to a walk-to-play model which brought about the development of CARROT.

How CARROT Works

CARROT taps into the pedometer features of a user’s phone to learn how many steps they take on a daily basis. They have a built-in AI that’s on the device that understands the characteristics of a user’s activity habits.
From there, they define a personalized goal that makes sense to the user.
Based on how active a person is, the app creates a goal that will make them walk a little bit more every day so as to establish a healthier new normal of walking each day.
Once a user has achieved their personal goal; they get a green carrot coin. They also get a yellow reward point for every step they take. With those two forms of currency, they can play different games, participate in different challenges, or get a digital gift card instantly on their phone through the app.
Now that they are moving to voice, a user can instantly get a gift card by saying, “Buy that gift card.”
The fact about this kind of gamification is that the way users can earn something and spend it, gets them very engaged with CARROT.

Healthy Living with Michael Antaran of CARROT

Going into Voice

Voice can help in engaging individuals daily just with their voice. It will work in ensuring a minute or less engagement every day to get users motivated to stay active every day and make healthier decisions.
Voice helps make the app more intuitive.

Future Plans

Voice technology will enable CARROT to expand in terms of rewarding users for healthy behaviors.

The Current Stats

CARROT was launched in January 2016 as a corporate wellness program for organizations.
3 years later, they released CARROT for individual users, but they needed to create a different game so they came up with Auctions.
They have over 165,000 accounts in 39 countries.
They have other fun games that people will start to see, like CARROT Verses, which is their take on fantasy football. They will be releasing it for Alexa where users will select their fantasy team in about a minute using their voice. However a user performs on the leader board, they will be able to win $250 a week in prizes.