Many entrepreneurs from all over Europe launch their technology businesses in Barcelona due to the usual factors, such as the availability of qualified labor or municipal aid, but in this case also because of its green spaces. It was in one of them, the Carretera de les Aigües, where Benjamin Daudignac, Louis Roblin and Baptiste Villain – three Frenchmen living in the Catalan capital – came up with an idea while doing their morning runs in the summer of 2022: create an application that would pay its users to walk. Launched at the end of that year, it is called Macadam and, in just three years, the business not only made a profit but also had a turnover of more than five million euros last year, double the previous year. “We were not particularly athletic, we wanted to motivate anyone to play sports,” says Daudignac, currently CEO of the company, in a phone call from his native Paris, where he is visiting for work. Macadam pays based on the number of steps. To give an example: a person with about 8,600 steps a day, which is equivalent to just under an hour and a half at a walking pace, will accumulate after two months about 20 euros, withdrawable by instant direct transfer. In exchange (there is always something in exchange) the user must enter the application to validate their steps. A day without doing it is a day in which steps count only for the love of health. “We remind users through notifications and reward them for their streaks with badges or collectibles,” says Daudignac. The goal is to make walking similar to playing a video game: ‘It’s like Duolingo to languages, but for walking.’ Macadam is free and, therefore, its 15 million registered users – double what it was a year ago and mostly in Europe, especially France, Spain and Italy – only generate business if they access the platform. Its main source of income is advertising: more than 500 companies advertise on Macadam, with promotions accessible only from the application. These include large stores such as Decathlon, Amazon or Temu, as well as sportswear brands and even companies unrelated to physical activity, such as a health insurer for animals.
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Daudignac (36 years old) knows well how to attract brands thanks to his training in advertising and 15 years in the business world. He has already run an advertising agency, an e-commerce store and, in his latest initiative, he also founded a microcredit platform in Barcelona, Bling. There he met Roblin and Villain, one a business manager and the other an engineer, whom he had hired to lead the advertising and technology teams respectively. The current CEO of Macadam decided to leave his old business and convinced Roblin and Villain to join his new initiative. They were going to do it without any type of financing, only with about 200,000 euros that Daudignac had saved throughout his career. “We are independent, the three of us completely control the company,” the CEO proudly points out. The first challenge was to hire staff in full competition with large Barcelona phone game studios such as Socialpoint, a company valued at 250 million and whose video game “Dragon City” is known as “the Catalan Pokémon.” “They have many more resources and can offer exorbitant salaries; it is difficult to compete,” says Daudignac. Today, the company has 30 employees (25 in Barcelona and five in Paris). One of the main obstacles that Macadam now faces is retaining an ever-growing user base. To achieve this, the company allocates just over 50% of its revenue to investment in technology: from improvements in the application to personalize the experience (for example, adapting advertising to each user) to the adoption of AI to manage accounts. New payment functions within the platform are also in the testing phase, adds the CEO, with the aim of increasing its profitability. In addition, Macadam has detected a growth in users in the US and Brazil, markets in which they plan to invest over the next two or three years. One step at a time.
