Helping 3 million people Kwit smoking

In Series 2 Episode 9 of the Health Points podcast Ben and Pete welcome Geoffrey Kretz, an entrepreneur behind the digital pocket coach Kwit for smoking cessation. He shared his journey from software engineer to creating Kwit to help himself quit smoking, eventually turning it into a company. The app integrates cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and gamification, with a focus on user engagement through elements like points and levels. He discussed the challenges of quitting smoking and how Kwit evolved over time with a strong emphasis on gamification, combining CBT principles with engaging game mechanics for an enhanced user experience. The impact of gamification in health apps, user retention, and continuous improvement based on feedback and data analysis were examined.

Geoffrey also gave us more insights by discussing the development of another app called Sobero for alcohol cessation, emphasizing addressing high-pain point issues to drive usage, rather than minor lifestyle improvements. He also touched on future trends in health gamification, regulatory hurdles in evaluating digital therapeutics, and usability considerations versus intervention effectiveness assessments. The conversation underscored the significance of combining effective treatment interventions with engaging game mechanics in health apps while navigating regulatory challenges for better adoption and efficacy outcomes. The integration of gamification into health apps aims to enhance user engagement and provide more effective solutions for smoking and alcohol cessation.

You can listen to this episode below:

Outline:

Chapter 1: Creation of Quit App (01:00 – 05:08)Introduction to the background and journey of creating the Quit app.Incorporation of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) into the app as a key component.Initial focus on gamification to support smoking cessation.Chapter 2: Implementing Gamification in Quit App (06:04 – 08:11)Development of gamified features such as badges, goals, and unlocking levels.Integration of CBT processes with gamification elements.Iterative process of adding gamification to enhance user engagement.Chapter 3: User Experience and Feedback (10:27 – 11:01)Utilization of user interviews, feedback gathering, and data analysis for app improvement.Focus on enhancing user experience through tailored gamification features.Importance of continuous evaluation and enhancement based on user input.Chapter 4: App Engagement and Retention (11:38 – 13:09)Emphasis on retention features to enhance user engagement.Strategies to improve the initial user experience for long-term app usage.Consideration of habit formation timeline and impact on app usage.Chapter 5: Future of Health Gamification (26:36 – 27:16)Outlook on the role of gamification in driving user engagement.Importance of gamification in the future of health-related apps.Potential advancements in gamification for improved health outcomes.

Episode Transcript:

Ben
Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of Health Points where we talk about anything and everything. Gamification, health. I’m Ben and I have with me my co host, Pete.

Pete
Hi everyone.

Ben
And today we have with us Geoffrey, who is an entrepreneur, user experience guru and development expert who’s previously worked for banks, biotech companies and everything in between. He’s a technical mastermind with a strong human touch, which are key qualities in attracting and retaining the customers of tomorrow. He’s a CEO of Kwit, a digital pocket coach based on cognitive behavior therapy to support people quit smoking for good with more than 3 million users to date. Geoffrey, it’s fantastic to have you join us on the show today.

Geoffrey
Thank you for having me. And hello everybody.

Ben
It’ll be great to tell us a bit more about your background and the journey to how you got into creating Kwit.

Geoffrey
Yes, so my curriculum is I was a software engineer for many years and I was a smoker, unfortunately also, and in the early 2010, 2011, I wanted to quit smoking mainly because of my two daughters and to set a good example, because it’s not super good to show them that you smoke. And then I was starting how I could achieve that. And at the same time I was quite a little bit worried and not worried, annoyed and bored with my job because I was working on a website and database and it’s not super exciting. And so I was wondering, okay, I wanted to do a mobile app and I wanted to quit smoking, so why not do both at the same time? And so I’ll create digital solution to help me cope with the smoking session. And so that’s what I did.

Geoffrey
And at first it was mostly for me and the first feedback from the users were so good that I dig into it. And many years later I started from it. So that’s how I went from there to that. It takes me five years to get from the side project, weekend project to company.

Pete
So that sounds great. What effect did it have on your.

Geoffrey
Quitting smoking in the meantime? I try. Many times I relapse because it’s part of the process. And now it’s more than six years that I quit smoking, so that my last cigarette is six years and a few weeks ago. So it’s a success.

Ben
I guess sometimes you create a company.

Pete
To solve your own problems in life, right?

Ben
No. Fully appreciate the journey of weekend working evenings and any spare hour to turn the side project into a real organization.

Pete
That’s great.

Ben
And talking about kind of your motivation for Kwit, where did you come into contact with cognitive behavioral therapy and where did you realize that was a key component to creating Kwit.

Geoffrey
Okay. So I first started with gamification because it was something I liked. I was a gamer since a long time. I like all kind of gamer, not only mobile, online, also strategy game, board game, all playing games and so on. So I was a lot into games and gamification. So that’s why the first version of Kwit was heavily gamified. And then when we created the company, were looking to improve the scientific evidence around the app, because that was one of the main concern of the health professional we discussed with. It was, okay, your app looks like it’s working, but you don’t have really scientific proven evidence around it. And so I dig at this time around what possible to add, what kinds of science exists to help people quit smoking. And so I stumbled upon cognitive behavioral therapy.

Geoffrey
And so I look in the area, all the psychologists who were experts in the field in France, I try to find the opinion leader. And so I speak with a lot of them. And obviously I figured out that it was the way to go because it’s something that can be more or less easily integrated in apps, because it’s questionnaire, it’s tough to do, it’s a process. And so making process into something usable into an app was something we know how to do and we knew how to do. So that’s why it was an obvious choice to integrate CBT. And our first hire into the company was a CBT psychologist. So that’s because we not only just say, okay, we want to do CBT, we wanted to do it with someone who knew and would know how to do it. So that’s the first.

Geoffrey
Ir was a CBT psychologist. So were three co founders, and Luz Andrea, our first employee.

Ben
So in that case, talk us through where the games first started.

Geoffrey
I knew that when you quit smoking, the most difficult part is to stay motivated, because it’s easy to stay non smoker for one day, the second day is toughest, and then the third day and so on. So it’s a struggle and a fight in the first few weeks. And I knew also that when you are motivated with badges and goals and you can sometimes overcome the hardest moment of the smoking session. And so I knew that for me, having a goal like, okay, if I stay strong for a few more hours, I will unlock something new into the app. This will work for me. It’s the same as what I thought before. I make something super tailored for my needs. And hopefully it echoed in a lot of many other users. And so it comes from here.

Geoffrey
So the first version was super heavily gamified. It was all around gamification. And it’s only the more you stay on smoker and the more you gain points, like in a game and with the point you unlock new levels. So you say you started, you are a novice and then you are intermediate. And at the end the goal was to became the ultimate quitter.

Pete
It’s a great title, the ultimate quitter.

Geoffrey
Yeah. We remove it from the app.

Pete
Not one you’d go for in any other rain of life.

Geoffrey
We remove it, unfortunately, because we updated the app. But maybe we should bring it back.

Pete
It’s a special occasion.

Geoffrey
One.

Pete
Yeah, for anniversary or something. So I’m interested to know. So you’ve got some gamification, some game elements in there, and then you get your CBT expert on board. How easy was it to meld the two?

Geoffrey
That’s a tough question. I think it was easier than if we have did it in the other way because we integrated the CBT process and we gamified them the same way. We already have gamification into the app, so it was not like forced because sometimes you saw apps and you feel that they tried to add gamification later. And so it’s just, okay, don’t do it, do something else. But in this case, it was just increasing and adding new features. The features were built around CBC and then how can we gamify this feature? So it was done in this way.

Pete
In fact, I really like that, actually. But most of my clients, it’s the other way around. They’ve already got something and they want to add gamification to it. I like this idea of saying, start with the game and then we’ll add in the serious stuff if the game is fun.

Geoffrey
Yes. And gamification is not just a badge and achievement, and it’s far more than that. And sometimes people think that by adding, okay, I will put badges and everything will go fine and people will keep getting back to my app every day. And it doesn’t work like that. Not at all.

Ben
So in that case, clearly, when you started, the gamification was really focused around points and point skewers, unlocking levels. Has it evolved over that time?

Geoffrey
Hugely.

Ben
And it’d be great to understand what is your process for implementing game mechanics within the Kwit app?

Geoffrey
Yes. In the team, we have already many people who like games, so that’s something that helps for sure. Everybody plays on the side and so they bring back stuff they like when they see something. So that give us like an ID backlog which is really long. And sometimes we do backlog grooming. And so we review the items and say, okay, maybe we can focus on this one now or this one now. Sometimes also the request, the backlog is nurtured by a user. We take really a strong care of listening to everybody. And finally, sometimes it comes from the, let’s say a scientific expert. But it’s not so much for the gamification part, it’s really more for the other feature.

Geoffrey
And when we notice and then we try to evaluate the items in the backlog and if they have a big impact and not so much effort, we try to do it. So we have kind of, how can I say that? Idealized gamification in our mind. So it’s not already into the app, even if it’s an old app, we still have a lot of ideas on how to do better and to do more. For sure. The maker is the end of founders is always frustrated about how the app is because it’s always one that it’s the step after. But unfortunately it doesn’t go that way. We do sprint, like many tech company, and in the sprint we try to add always a new features and say, okay, then maybe we can.

Geoffrey
And depending on which area of the app we want to improve, we will focus also the gamification on the part we want to improve. And then we have a UX expert in the team who work on doing a user interview, gathering feedback. We have developed something into the app to make user survey, large scale survey into the app, asking user if they like it, what they want more, what they want less, and so on. So we mix that and we add data analysis. So it’s a mix of user interview data and kind of mix that with the backlog. And then we try to find the next feature to develop.

Pete
That’s a really great insight into your process, which I really like. Something that springs out to me from that is one thing players like in order to stay engaged for a long time is new features, new game elements, that sort of thing. And it makes me think actually, how long do your players play on the app for and what do you aim for?

Geoffrey
We struggle for a long time on trying to focus on the wrong thing. And the wrong thing was having a super long because we are addressing an addiction that people want to quit and at the end trying to keep them for years and years doesn’t make sense. But for the four years I discussed with investor, with other people and so on, and the key metrics for them was, okay, I want to look at retention. And so we tried to focus on retention features, and, okay, it works for a few weeks. We get super highly engaged people at first, but at the end, they don’t want to use the app anymore, because once you are done, after a few months and few years, there is no need to get back to the app. So that’s something we get.

Geoffrey
And so now we focus more on the first few weeks experience. But then, to answer the question, user and players usually stay into the app between three and maybe four and a half months. So it’s the time to have the brain get back to a normal state and then to feel confident enough to cope with the occasional cravings alone. And because we teach the user how to behave, so it’s a victory for us that they are autonomous. And it’s like, if were meditation app, I would be super happy to let people do meditation without my app. At the end, they should be educated enough to behave themselves. So we really strongly believe in that.

Pete
It’s cool. It’s one of those apps that is designed to go obsolete, shall we say? It’s done its job, let’s move on.

Geoffrey
Exactly. And in the meantime, we have changed lives. So that’s good. Yeah.

Pete
And what you were saying about four and a half months, it rings true, because I think the average number of days for someone to do a new habit and get it as a habit is 66. If I remember from some piece of.

Geoffrey
Research somewhere, I’ve read 21. But for the cigarette, it’s not like that, because the behavior of the nicotine is a little bit different. But what I read is 21 days to build that new habit. So maybe it’s to change a bad one, maybe it’s longer. It’s obviously longer because it’s harder to change something that you are deeply uncovered in your life.

Ben
One of the things I noticed by looking into Kwit as well, Geoffrey, is you’ve amassed a really impressive scientific panel as well as a panel of advisors. Did they have a view on, were they interested in the gamification side? Is it the more cognitive behavior side? Is it more the public health side? I guess it’s really important to have with any gamification app, with a health gamification, the scientific backing behind it. And what has that meant for you? Has it unlocked the ability to be prescribed at all or anything like that?

Geoffrey
So, first question. Yes, the scientific committee. So it’s a mix. We have one of the members which is really more connected to gamification. So it’s a neuroscientist which is a teacher in the ecolormal soup, which is a big school in Paris. And so he really likes the gamification part and he will study it. And beside this it’s more of psychiatrist and psychologist. So CBT and public health. So we try to cover all the spectre and the range of the topic, you say, and then for the being prescribed. So it’s something, it’s like a grall, if I could say. But the pass is really tough because first there is a lot of regulatory, if you speak in Europe, I think it’s more or less the same process in the US.

Geoffrey
So in the US it’s FDA, but in France, in Europe it’s something called Ce Mark. And so you need to be a software medical device to have the C mark. So that’s one step. And to have this, you need to respect a lot of isonorm, quality, security and so on. So to make a lot of documentation. And then you need a first clinical trial and then medical economic study. So to show that, okay, your solution is efficient, but it also cost less than what it is. And once you have all that, then you can hope that maybe you get prescribed. So the road is still long and the one who are the most advanced are the German, because they have a kind of a fast track. So you can go there and it’s a little bit easier.

Geoffrey
But still you need to check all the market I just told. So yes, it’s something we are working on, but unfortunately we can only do this because we still focus on the out of the pocket money that people are ready to pay to get the addiction addressed.

Pete
That’s also really useful insight. That’s a long journey into getting prescribed. But seeing as how you’re still aiming for that, it seems to me you’ve done really well, having reached 3 million users of the app. So if you’re not being prescribed, how did you manage to get that level of impact and reach?

Geoffrey
Sometimes I have explanation for everything. That’s the sad part. I don’t have a magic wand. We explain, but I think the timing was good because were quite early, so when there were not too many apps. So it’s something we have a kind of a head start. So for sure. And when I make Kwit, if I find at this time a good app, I wouldn’t have made Kwit because I didn’t find anything cool. So first there was nothing, so it was easy to fight against nothing. Then in the journey, I think there were some years where the mobile app was something trending and cool. And so it was easy to get press and to get press release press coverage on apps. So that’s something that helped us. And then later, were not partnering, but were in the Apple scope.

Geoffrey
And so we benefit from a lot of featuring. And so even if now there is less impact on being featured, it was a time where it was like insane. So when you get featured by Apple, it’s like tens of thousands of downloads per day or per month. And so it was something really helpful. And so it’s kind of a mix of all of this. And because we don’t have really strong social network presence, we struggle to have more than 5000 people on Instagram. So not everything is perfect. But then, so it’s more the organic way, and I guess word to mouse also, because if the apps is working, you can share it with your friends. And also, one last thing, and it’s related to gamification, so it’s useful.

Geoffrey
So we have a strong gamer community in France, professional gamer with a lot of audience being on Twitch or on Instagram or on YouTube. And they decided to quit smoking, a lot of them. And they were looking for a gamified app. And so they use Kwit. And each time they tweet or talk about us, it was like, what happened? Okay, one influencer was speaking about us, but organically and without us asking them to do something. Because each time we try to work with the influencer by paying them or something like that, it doesn’t work. Because I think the audience feels that it’s not authentic. And when it’s natural and it’s organic, in fact, it’s working super well. So it’s not something we can really replicate, unfortunately. But it’s linked to the gamification.

Ben
That’s been fantastic. Geoffrey, what’s been really interesting about looking into the Kwit app is, I say most of the guests that we’ve had historically at health points have been about creating new health behaviors to gain something new into it. Whether it’s kind of adding in physical activity, diet, strategies for mental health, within Kwit is about removing a behavior, taking away that cessation process. Do you think there’s a difference between taking away a behavior using gamification rather than adding in a behavior using gamification?

Geoffrey
I think removing behavior is harder than adding a new one because let’s say I want to exercise more. Okay. If I didn’t succeed, it won’t arm me so much. I will be sad, I will be peace about myself. But at the end of the day, my life won’t change so much. But if you need quit smoking, let’s say because you have a chronic disease or something like that, even people having those. So you need to quit smoking, but it’s still super hard. And then if you don’t achieve to do it, you will feel super depressed and you will feel bad. And if you succeed in quitting at the first day, you will feel also depressed and bad.

Geoffrey
And so it’s something the motivational level that you need to have is higher than to build a new habit, because the impact of failing is far heavier than the impact of failing to build a new behavior impact, except maybe for the diet. If you are overweight, you need obviously.

Ben
Agreed. In that case, it’d be great to know from your experience and insight, where do you think the magic is within gamification? What are the game mechanics you think are most important? Whether that’s within a cessation of a behavior or habit, or in the creation of a new health behavior, what are the things you’ve seen work best?

Geoffrey
So what I like is like when the user have a kind of an epic a moment when something happened into the app software forest is something else, quite stupid, but it has a huge impact. So I will tell the story. At one moment, we wanted to add some interaction design to the app, so more animation and something more lively. And we had a few resources, so we tried to find a kind of firework, and so we find a kind of firework animation. We didn’t even have the right color of Kwit, but were lazy. And so we integrate this. So when people gain experience points, we’re adding at the end the fireworks, and just that it has a super huge impact because we get a lot of feedback saying, okay, I like that so much. It’s super motivating.

Geoffrey
And so that’s sometimes just adding some emotion and animation into the app, make everything more lively so that it would kind of make it fun. And the best example is Durango. In fact, if you want the perfect gamification, you just look at Durango. And Durango is, I think, maybe the best gamified app at the moment that I use.

Pete
I think what you’ve said is really important, because apps are potentially quite flat and not that engaging, no matter what you’re doing on it. So any sort of movement within it, looking at the screen, is going to be useful and pleasing. And that’s what games do.

Geoffrey
Of course, you have to make people smile, and if they smile, they can overcome bad habits, in our case. And so when we build, because we didn’t say it. No, but we also build a new app which is called Sobero and which addressed alcohol cessation. And so with Sobero, we’re adding already a lot more animation everywhere. And so the fun part is even stronger. And the app tried to tell a story because in we, it’s something we put aside because it’s like a too old app and so on. But with sober, we started with a blank state, and so we tell a story in addition. So it’s also something. It can be gamification, because gamification, a game is a story also. So we tell a story.

Pete
It’s a really strong game element. Yeah, because it gets the user immersed.

Geoffrey
Exactly.

Pete
What sort of story are you building around for going sober?

Geoffrey
You are an explorer of new worlds, and so you take your starship and you go to the galaxy exploring new planets. And so we are, the people app is kind of the one who had the flight attendant and so on, and the pilot, and you are a passenger, and so you go in your new life, and so it’s fun. So you go to the new planet, and on the new planet you are sober. Something more or less like that.

Ben
Animations use UX UI design is incredibly important for people wanting to pick up an app. I always wonder, though, where is the balance that really engages users? Is it actually the game mechanic or is it a really pretty game mechanic?

Geoffrey
I don’t know, but sometimes there is super ugly games who works a lot and who works super well, so it can be both. You should take some silly casual games. Flappy birds. Okay, it’s an old one, but when it arrived, the design was old school. Even after that, everybody did the old school design, so it make a trends. But at this time, nobody was making app like that and it worked. And it’s not super beautiful. And on the opposite, if you take maybe the best universe in the mobile app, you take it space. I think in term of global universe and visual and UI, it’s even better than dual. And so they achieve, on the opposite, making something super beautiful used. I guess there is both.

Pete
One of the things I’ve really liked about headspace in the past is they’ve got a social proof thing. So you might log in and go like, there’s 64,000 other people meditating right.

Geoffrey
Now.

Pete
Especially with your size of audience. Have you toyed with this sort of game mechanic and tried it out, seen what effect it has?

Geoffrey
So it’s in the backlog. Obviously something we would like to do, we will do it first, I think in the alcohol app, because it’s like it’s stronger there to have this, but it’s something we have in mind since a long time, but just not the time and the resources to do it at the moment. But yes, I think also that it’s something that in our case would be super useful.

Ben
So thinking bigger than quick thinking about health gamification generally, where do you think the industry is going? Where do you think the future of health gamification is?

Geoffrey
I think it’s like if you take any drugs prescription, if you don’t take it when the doctors told you to take them, it won’t work. And so for digital product, it will be the same. So I think gamification will be used to have a high level of engagement. And if you are engaged and you take the kind of digital prescription, it will work. So I think the gamification is something super important in the future, for sure. In the digital health industry, I think they are more or less aware of that. Let’s hope that they build gamification first and not something. Okay, no, we can add gamification. And the main issue I see with that today as how apps and data, digital therapeutics are evaluated, is that if you want to make trial, you shouldn’t update your app. After that, you cannot add new elements.

Geoffrey
And when you update an app every 15 day, how do you do the mix between, okay, enough evidence, but okay, but if you don’t update your app, even if it’s the best app in the world, but then one year later, you have a new update of the OS, and then everybody want the new stuff that the OS allows. And okay, I can do that with iOS, I can do that with Android, but it’s not in the app. But what do we do? And software company cannot do one trial every year just to showcase. We don’t send anything. And so I think the regulatory need to evolve into taking that into account. And when it will be down, I think it will explode the gamification, because we will be able to a B test constantly to get the better engagement.

Geoffrey
Because today the key is also being able to test, because every product is different. And even sometimes it’s one thing that works, sometimes it’s another thing. But if you don’t test, you don’t know. And sometimes it’s just gaining 5% or 3%. But if at ten place in your app, you gain 5% or 3%, it’s huge at the end. And if you are not allowed to do that, it’s something bad. So I think the health industry and the regulatory need to evolve a little bit.

Ben
Really interesting. Also completely agree. How does that happen? I know that’s a huge question.

Geoffrey
I appreciate that, Geoffrey.

Ben
But the reality is of developing a digital therapeutic, unlike the years of development for a drug or pharmaceutical intervention, is that there is the flexibility and the teams and the resource and capacity to keep testing and ideating with new features, function and gamification. Ultimately, some of those may have incremental improvements of two, 3%. You don’t want to wait for another one to two year trial to be able to test them, to put them in, to still have the thumbs up from whatever regulatory approval. What could be a better way to do that?

Geoffrey
Maybe at one point we will trust enough, some of kind of. There will be an SDK, like, let’s say data analysis, but tailored to understand the behavior of the user into the app, not in a marketing way, but in a cure way or health way. And maybe this will make okay, you will have a green check or a red check on what you do. So maybe someone will have an idea of okay. If you use this SDK, I will guarantee that you will have easier clinical trial. Because we have so many data. We have real world evidence, real world data, but those real world data usually don’t comply to all the stuff you need to do clinical trial.

Geoffrey
And so let’s hope there is a kind of brick that is missing and somebody smart enough will make that brick, make it validated by the regulatory authority, and then it will be easier.

Ben
And how frustrating is it when arguably, I would say the real data is the best reflection of a population using a service and the impact it will have on their health and well being, and yet it can’t be submitted.

Geoffrey
All the time. I can speak to, let’s say, health road authority or big pharma. I told them, but they say, okay, I know, but still, I want the process.

Ben
Yeah, maybe we need some doctrine changes or some epistemological kind of thinking in terms of what is the right approach in terms of research. I also feel that there needs to be a real shift again, to look at, to put higher weight and value on qualitative feedback as well. It’s so much the numbers and it’s dinghy wrong for evaluating drugs, RCTs and the quantitative outcomes are best, but actually for complex interventions, for a complex lifestyle and behavior changes, I don’t think it’s the right approach. But hey, hopefully in years to come, the regulatory changes will happen.

Geoffrey
Yeah. And one thing you cannot use also is the people review. Because you can say that if 100,000 people write nice review, and you can, because you can analyze them, it’s worth. So you can do analysis on the warning and emotion and stuff, but it doesn’t wait for anything. Today.

Ben
It’s not about the intervention, but having a solution that people want to use and therefore will create the health benefit. But there is kind of usability. It’s just nowhere near as valued in terms of regulatory approval as the effectiveness of an intervention, even if it’s unusable and people don’t like engaging with it.

Pete
I wanted to go back a bit and find out a bit more about your Kwit drinking app, because I got a feeling it’s pretty new. Is that right?

Geoffrey
Yeah, we released it in the mid December, the first version, because we wanted to be ready for the dry January. So it was our last year project, even if it took a little bit less than one year. But we took about nine months from ideation to the release of the V one, and it was exhausting. It’s based more or less on the same principle. So it’s CBT, but it’s also psychosocial skills, which is linked anyway. It’s also cognitive science anyway. And so this time you can either choose to quit totally or to quit drinking, or just to reduce our control, because at this time we think that the user will be most. And no, I can say that it’s more people willing to quit totally that come to the app, the one who just want to control.

Geoffrey
I think they don’t really want an app or need an app because the pain point is not strong enough. But when you have a real drinking issue, then the pain point is super high, and then you came to the app. And so that’s the typology of user we have today is the kind of heavy drinker.

Pete
Okay, so what you’re saying there is that this sort of thing potentially only works if the pain point is high enough and people aren’t necessarily interested in an app that would slightly improve their life as opposed to massively deal with it.

Geoffrey
Exactly. They came when. Because if you take Kwit to the cigarette smoking, we have a free version, and to have more of some feature, you have to pay. And for the sober, it’s only. You have to pay. There is no free tire, so you have a free trial. You can try the app for a seven day, but then you have to pay. And so to pay, you also need to have the pain need to be strong enough. So it’s more the same people that probably would go to a clinic to make a rehab or something like that. And the stuff which is insane is that we already achieved to make some people who used to drink up to two bottles per day to quit drinking for weeks and for months. And so that’s already a big success.

Geoffrey
So we are already super happy with the efficacy and the impact that we have in a few people life for the moment.

Pete
And now I’m going to be really interested in this is one of your target audiences for the sobering up app, the Kwit app audience as well. Now that they’ve quit smoking, are you like, hey, do you want to quit drinking?

Geoffrey
Unfortunately, no. Because if you take today also in the US, it’s for sure, and it’s getting the same in Europe, is that the one who are still smoking are the lower class and the one who want to quit drinking are more upper class. And so that’s what, even if the lower class don’t want to quit drinking today, they want to quit smoking, maybe, and for sure, because it costs money. But the one who are okay to take their health in charge concerning alcohol, it’s not really the same person. So we have a few overlaps, but it’s really totally different people.

Ben
Thank you for that, Geoffrey. And it’s been great today to talk about how your motivation to stop smoking led to developing a digital health gamification product. Some of the steps in terms of the future prescription of medical technology, but yet the challenges of regulatory approval and future feature development within an existing gamified health products, and how we need to see shifts in the future to make it easier for regulators, developers and users to benefit from healthcare notification. Thank you so much for your time on the show today.

Pete
It’s been great having you on the show. Geoffrey.

Geoffrey
Thank you, Ben. Thank you, Pete.

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