01/16/22

Alms App Helps Users Better Themselves With Creator-led Challenges

The social network eschews chasing clout online, and focuses instead on “feeling good through doing good” by making a positive impact and empowering its users’ well-being with guided activities.

Upon signing up, Alms users choose which area of self improvement or community impact they’d like to focus on, including areas like personal growth, sustainability, activism and volunteering, mental health, lifestyle, and more. Their user profile is then matched with the platform’s hosted creators, who post productivity and impact challenges relevant to the selected interests and goals. The creator-led exercises are incremental and meant to build confidence and capability along the user’s journey.

In order to increase stickyness and reduce user abandon, the social platform hopes to build out a corresponding community that increases accountability around the specific steps and actions that must be taken, and support further participation in the real-world challenges. As part of the marketing strategy, when users participate in a challenge, they are prompted to post stories about the step they’ve completed in each challenge’s feed to inspire others. Users viewing community stories are able to post encouraging comments and leave feedback, although the founders stress that gathering engagement from other users is not the goal of the platform and should not be the goal of users.

In fact, it is the detrimental effects, dark patterns, and toxicity of other popular social sites, like TIkTok, Snpachat, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and more, that Alms was founded to counteract. The app’s UX was designed to guide users to a happier and more meaningful life when they use it, with a mission that stands apart from the gathering of online views, shares, and likes underpinning the attention-economy engines of many modern social platforms and sites. As of its recent launch, Alms counted around 30 creators sharing their challenge and skill-transfer content and the platform hopes to build out a robust network of over 300 in the near future.

Alms was co-founded by and incubated within the health and well-being technology company Palta, and has no further outside investment. Other apps co-founded by Palta’s mission-positive startup studio include Flo.Health, Simple Fasting and Zing Fitness Coach

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This article originally appeared in the PSFK report, Marketing to Gen Z.