More push-ups, fewer hospital days: HeiaHeia social network starts in the UK

HeiaHeia is a new project that went unnoticed outside of Finland, where it was developed. However, this should soon change due to the official launch of the project in the UK.

The site was founded by Jussi Raisanen, co-founder of the Smarter mobile mail project (purchased by SEVEN Networks), Olli Oksanen and Ivan Kuznetsov (previously working for Nokia). He enjoys great success in his home country and the number of its users already accounts for 5% of the country's population (about 175,000). Probably, the site’s success is due to the fact that HeiaHeia’s strategy is customer-oriented and B2B (business to business), i.e. it’s based on the fact that the employer is interested in his employees having a more active lifestyle, which in turn reduces the number of expensive hospital.

The HeiaHeia platform is based on helping motivate users to do more physical exercises, making it easier for them to track their achievements in various types of physical activities and share them with other users. The user can choose from 400 proposed activities - from football to ultimate Frisbee and dog walking or running jogging - and creates a personalized plan with specified goals. All this has good visualization, including the timeline, although personally the user interface and the initial stage seemed to me a bit complicated.

However, the focus is on the social component. Users can comment on each other's training plans and performance reports, as well as create groups where they can compare plans and share tips on training. In addition, by analogy with the “I like” Facebook button, HeiaHeia has a “praise” option that allows users to virtually approve and support each other’s successes.
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In general, although not completely, the offer and functions of HeiaHeia reminded me of the British project TribeSports, which is a social platform that helps people to do more sports and physical activities in general and has recently attracted A series investments of $ 2.8 million. (HeiaHeia is a more advanced system and is already making a profit.)

However, unlike TribeSports, HeiaHeia has an ace up its sleeve. In addition to the user-focused site, the company offers a version designed for companies that want to help their employees become more active physically, and is already being used by both small and medium-sized businesses and large multinational corporations. These include GE healthcare Finland, and the Finnish chain of stores Tokmani used HeiaHeia in 140 of its stores, organizing competitions between them.

In essence, this is an opportunity for companies to use this platform to promote a healthy lifestyle, while combining a practical approach, fun (I dare to use the term “gamification”) and data management, which is probably the main advantage of this project. As a result, a business-oriented strategy will bring serious income in the future. This is the highlight of this platform: users can combine their personal and corporate data to get an overall picture of their activity on HeiaHeia.
Another feature that HeiaHeia did not fail to use was the presence of an API, so that third parties can create applications for this platform. Now everyone wants to create platforms (in the true sense of the word), but in such a way as to create it and do nothing else, but this does not always work. But in the case of HeiaHeia, this seems to work. Thanks to the API, there are already mobile applications for iOS, Android, Symbian and Windows Phone .