The Ideas We Carry From Other People

Some ideas stay with you long after the conversation that produced them has ended.

Years ago, one of the smartest people I have ever met was also one of my closest friends.

His name is Chiemerie Nnamani.

We eventually fell out. The fallout was entirely my fault.

But before that happened, Chiemerie once shared an idea with me that I never forgot.

What if there was a gym that paid you to show up?

The idea was simple.

You paid the gym upfront.

Then, every day you actually showed up to work out, the gym paid some of that money back to you.

At first, it sounds almost backwards.

Gyms are supposed to make money when you pay them. Why would one pay you for coming?

But hidden inside Chiemerie's idea was something much more interesting.

The gym wouldn't really be paying you to exercise.

It would be rewarding you for consistency.

That idea stayed somewhere in my head for years.

Then my relationship with health changed

Years later, my own health forced me to start making different decisions.

I began eating differently. I became more physically active. I started exercising and paying attention to things I had previously taken for granted.

And as those small decisions accumulated, something changed.

I started seeing results.

That experience eventually contributed to the thinking behind Fitness Space.

I kept wondering:

If some of what worked for me could work for someone else, what would need to change?

The answer, I thought, was personalisation.

People don't live identical lives.

We don't eat the same foods.

We don't have the same schedules.

Our bodies aren't identical.

Our circumstances aren't identical.

So the system couldn't simply tell everybody to do exactly what I had done.

But the underlying principle could travel.

Make healthier decisions.

Repeat them.

Adapt them to the person.

Keep going.

Then I realised information wasn't the real problem

As Fitness Space grew, another idea became increasingly difficult for me to ignore.

Most people already know that certain things are bad for their health.

You don't need an app to tell you that sitting around all day probably isn't better than moving.

You don't need artificial intelligence to discover that consistently overeating isn't helping you lose weight.

People have access to more health information than perhaps any generation before them.

Yet people still struggle.

Why?

I kept coming back to one word:

Consistency.

The problem wasn't simply knowing what to do.

The problem was doing enough of the right things, often enough, for long enough.

And suddenly, that old conversation with Chiemerie started making sense again.

What if we rewarded people for showing up?

Then Emmanuel gave it a name

I shared the idea with another very smart friend of mine, Emmanuel Chukwu, who now works for Uber in the Netherlands.

The concept was becoming clearer.

Instead of Fitness Space judging someone's progress only by what happened on a weighing scale, what if we could measure the behaviours that happened before the result?

Did you show up?

Did you complete the things you committed to doing?

Were you consistent?

And could that consistency itself become valuable?

Emmanuel listened to the idea and gave it a name.

Health Score.

The name stuck.

Now we had an idea.

But I have a particular relationship with ideas.

I don't trust them simply because they sound good.

I want to see what happens when real people encounter them.

So we tested it on WhatsApp

Fitness Space was still heavily operated through our WhatsApp community.

That made WhatsApp the obvious place to test Health Score.

We didn't need to build an elaborate piece of software first.

We introduced the system into the community and started measuring members' consistency around the healthy activities we were already encouraging.

Then we connected something tangible to it.

Their Health Score could earn them a discount.

The more consistently they showed up and completed the behaviours in the system, the better their score could become.

And that score could reduce what they paid.

In a strange way, I had returned to Chiemerie's gym.

Years earlier, he had asked:

What if a gym paid you to show up?

Now we were asking:

What if Fitness Space rewarded you for showing up for your health?

Something changed

People participated more.

The score gave everyday actions a different meaning.

Instead of waiting for one distant outcome to tell them whether they were succeeding, members had something that reflected the things they were doing along the way.

And they wanted to know their scores.

At the end of the period, people looked forward to seeing what their Health Score had been over the previous 30 days.

The score wasn't just a number anymore.

It affected what they paid.

And from what we observed in the WhatsApp programme, participation increased and members were reaching their goals faster.

That was the point where Health Score stopped being an interesting idea to me.

It had survived contact with real people.

Now it deserved to be built.

Then Kingsley turned the system into software

This is where Kingsley Kelechi Onuorah, my co-founder and CTO at Fitness Space, came in.

I had direction from what we had learned.

Chiemerie's original thought had given me the seed.

My own health journey had changed how I thought about behaviour.

Emmanuel had helped crystallise the concept and given it a name.

Our WhatsApp community had helped us test whether people would actually respond to it.

Now Kingsley helped turn that direction into technology.

Health Score became part of Bibi by Fitness Space.

The behaviours that once had to be followed manually could now become part of a structured product experience.

Users could complete healthy activities.

Those activities could contribute to their score.

Their consistency could become visible.

And the reward system we had tested manually could become part of the product itself.

The scale is late

There is a reason I still think Health Score matters.

A weighing scale tells you something important.

But it tells you late.

The decisions that eventually move the scale happen before the scale acknowledges them.

You got up and exercised.

You walked.

You made a better decision about food.

You drank your water.

You showed up again the next day.

None of those moments feels particularly dramatic.

That's the problem.

We tend to celebrate outcomes because outcomes are visible.

But outcomes are usually built quietly by behaviours nobody applauds.

Health Score was our attempt to make those behaviours visible.

To tell someone:

Before the result arrives, showing up already counts.

Ideas have histories

I sometimes think about how products are described after they become products.

We make their creation sound very clean.

There was a problem.

Someone had an idea.

Then somebody built it.

That isn't how Health Score happened.

Its history stretches across years.

It contains an old friendship and a mistake I made.

It contains an idea about a gym that never existed.

It contains my own decision to become healthier.

It contains thousands of ordinary decisions made by people trying to lose weight.

It contains a conversation with Emmanuel.

It contains an experiment inside a WhatsApp group.

And it contains Kingsley taking something we had learned manually and helping turn it into technology.

No single moment created Health Score.

One idea met another.

Then another.

Life happened between them.

Eventually, they became a product.

And maybe that's one of the things I love most about building.

You never really know which conversation you're having today will become something years from now.