Your trail companion now notices when you stop walking

Most step challenges do not fail in week one. They fail on an ordinary Tuesday, when the day fills itself and nobody remembers the walk until it is already dark. The usual fix is a reminder that says open the app — which is exactly the kind of message people mute first.

We built nudges so the reminder comes from inside your story instead of from a marketing calendar.

What it does

Every hour, STEPathON quietly checks where you actually stand. When something is genuinely at risk, the companion from your challenge sends one short message — and it opens the exact screen that fixes it:

• Your streak is about to break and you have not walked today
• A milestone in your challenge is within the last stretch
• A teammate passed you, or you slipped down the leaderboard
• A raffle target is close with the draw approaching
• A cause you joined has been waiting a couple of days

If nothing is at risk, nothing is sent. That is the whole design: a nudge has to earn its place.

One message, at an hour that makes sense

A reminder that lands at midnight is not urgency — it is noise. So each kind of nudge has its own hour:

• Streak saves arrive at 18:00 your local time. Late enough to be a deadline, early enough that a walk still fits before the day ends.
• Competition, milestone, and cause nudges stay inside working hours, 09:00 to 18:00.
• The gentler daily nudge follows the hour you usually walk — learned from your own last two weeks, not a company-wide default.
• Nothing arrives between 21:00 and 08:00. Ever.

Built to stay quiet

A nudge that repeats itself stops being a nudge. The limits are deliberately strict:

• At most one gentle and one urgent message a day, at least four hours apart
• Ignore two in a row and we go quiet for three days
• It never doubles up with the competition and raffle reminders you already receive
• 42 different lines rotate by how recently you last saw them, so you do not get the same sentence twice in a row
• Written in ten languages, in the voice of your challenge companion — not a system alert

You are in control

Nudges are on by default, and one tap turns them off: Profile → Notifications → Nudges. Your quiet hours and timezone travel with you, so the schedule follows you rather than the server.

Why this matters for teams

Participation curves in step challenges are decided by the people who go quiet in week two — not by the ones already at the top of the leaderboard. A nudge that arrives at 18:00, on the day a streak is actually about to break, brings those people back without an HR reminder in the group chat. Nobody has to chase anyone.

The best reminder is not the loudest one. It is the one that shows up when it actually matters, from someone you have been walking with.

Questions or feedback on nudges? Write to us at support@stepathon.io.