Losing weight may become the best financial gain.

Recently Gympact has launched a new website and a new iPhone app dedicating money to helping people get in shape. The company has raised 850K from contributions from the TEEC Angel Fund, Mike Dornbrook and Alex Rigopolous, the COO and co-founder of Harmonix (the creators of Rock Band and Guitar Hero), Brightcove CTO Bob Mason, and others.

Harvard classmate founders Zhang and Geoff Oberhofer realized that since financial incentives often influences much of our decision making (no surprise there), it was time to incentive fitness. So they created a program whereby consumers can dedicate certain times a week to exercise and earn cash for fitness. In other words, you make a Pact – a “gympact”- which solidifies your dedication to setting goals and losing weight. From there, you contribute cash to a community pot. If the amount of exercise matches the goal you were trying to meet, you earn cash back. If not, well, you lose it.

And it’s worked.

Zhang and Oberhofer have incentivized over 250,000 workouts and dished out $100K in rewards. Their hard work has yielded an 86 percent success rate.

But what if you decided to, oh, out maneuver the system?

No way. According to Tech Crunch, people are closely monitored, “Users meet their obligations by checking in at their fitness center of choice, but obviously this introduces the potential for people to game the system with drive-by check-ins. To avoid this, the startup requires people to stay at their workout locations for at least 30 minutes and employs GPS screening that auto-checks users out when they leave the gym. At the end of each week, the startup tallies user attendance and hands out rewards.”

Check out Gympact here.

Would you do it?

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3 Comments

  1. I would definitely do this but I’m not really a gym person. I like gym visits for my strength training but currently I’m really focused on cardio, which I do in my house! Yet, on second thought, the “inconvenience” of a few extra gym visits a week wouldn’t outweigh a nice paycheck 🙂

  2. This is such a gimmick to get people in gyms. Learning how to workout outside is a lost art. Sign of the times

  3. I agree. Working out outside is a lost art. I’m one of the ones who has forgotten the value and fun in it. But I’ve started to remember how great it can be. As for this app, I considered it because at my old job the gym was right across the street and I went almost every day. Now, I only go for classes, most of the time I go right downstairs and “home gyms” don’t count with this app. Which makes sense.

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