After recent announcements of their partnerships with adidas, Shell, Luxair, and Deliveroo, to name but a few, No Big Deal has now secured €465k in capital investment. In just one year, the Luxembourg-founded startup has inspired 40,000 people in Belgium and Luxembourg to walk over 1 billion steps.
How? By offering walking challenges that users undertake to achieve exclusive rewards from brands and to help the environment (find it in app stores). An innovative concept to begin with, this funding round will enable the team to build a wellbeing achievement app unlike any other on the market, to expand offer and user base.
“It’s amazing to see the impact the app has on people – not just by encouraging more steps, but by bringing purpose and achievement to everyday wellbeing; this investment will enable us to take that impact to another level” said Nigel Bergstra, co-founder of No Big Deal.
The funding round, led by LBAN and including Business Angels in Luxembourg and Ireland, will be used to revolutionize digital wellbeing and expand the market presence in other regions. Romain Hoffmann, LBAN Head of Investments, said of the announcement “This amazing team has brought to life a concept which supports wellbeing by creating real experiences in collaboration with brands. This unique approach enables both scalable health impact and commercial success, a real win-win situation for businesses and consumers”
“This amazing team has brought to life a concept which supports wellbeing by creating real experiences in collaboration with brands.”
No Big Deal have already started working on their plans: they’ve grown the development team, and are implementing a new, immersive user experience with branding to match. Whilst the focus will still be on daily or weekly challenges, they want to encourage people to interact with the app on a more long-term basis by adding gamification and an additional set of challenges. According to Nigel Bergstra, they want “to take users on a journey to feel good everyday”.
“It is crucial to offer a differentiated experience to our users in an era where hundreds of mobile applications pop up everyday. Leveraging new technologies and a brilliant in-house engineering capability, we have an opportunity to create an impactful product that will become a must have for our target market”, said Quentin Delforge, co-founder.
By adding diversity to the wellbeing challenges and bringing dynamic interactions to the user experience they hope to engage users in a more holistic way. As co-founder Daniel Klemetz explains, his hope is that it will be “the go-to app for people in the morning … you wake up, maybe you feel great, maybe you’re bored or you’re not feeling that great. Instead of getting you scrolling [on Social Media], it [No Big Deal] gets you to work towards an achievement that makes you feel good, whatever you are in the mood for.”
“We have an opportunity to create an impactful product that will become a must have for our target market.”
The decisions on which direction to take were made following feedback from extensive user discovery. They surveyed hundreds of users and had detailed conversations with numerous top users about why they use the app, and what they get out of taking part in the challenges.
As for the challenges you’ll see in the future, there are likely to be more experienced- and sustainability-based. Over the past months, it has been demonstrated that people seem to be motivated more altruistically than selfishly. One of the most popular challenges to date has been walking to plant a tree in chimpanzee territory. This opens up future opportunities for more community-wide initiatives that give people the feeling of being part of something bigger. An idea that fits into No Big Deal’s aims of supporting individual and community wellbeing.
With lots of changes in the pipeline, from both a product and brand perspective, No Big Deal next generation of app looks set to get even more people healthy, physically and emotionally.
