Most of us want to cut back on our screen time, and squeeze in more exercise.
Serial entrepreneur Paul English has come up with an app aimed at accomplishing both goals — at the same time.
English plans to launch this new app, Steppin, next week, through his Boston Venture Studio startup; interested consumers can visit the app site at steppin.net now to sign up for updates. It’s the first project that he’s worked on at BVS with his son Mike English, a designer there.
With Steppin, you pick the apps you find most addictive or distracting — the ones you would like to spend less time visiting — and the software limits your access to one minute of screen time for every 100 steps you take in any given day. (The numbers reset at midnight.) To get access to your group of selected apps for 60 minutes in one day, for example, you would need to take at least 6,000 steps that day. That’s the default setting; Steppin users can customize the number of steps they need to take.
“There are a lot of apps available to control your screen time,” Mike English said. “What we felt was unique about this was tying it to something outside your phone.”
The average American takes nearly 5,000 steps a day (according to an old survey). Typical 25- to 34-year-olds spend at least two-and-a-half hours a day on social media; to use social media for even half that time, they would need to record at least 7,500 steps per day with Steppin’s default setting.
Paul English said the app will be free for now, but he expects to eventually charge money for it, maybe around $20 a year. (He hasn’t decided on a price yet.) “We think there’s a big market of people who are worried about their social media [use] and they’re already tracking their steps,” he said. “We’re just tying them together.”
They’ve both tried the app, of course. Paul says he checks TikTok much less frequently now, while Mike says he’s visiting X and Instagram less often as a result; they’ve each gone from spending more than an hour on social media to 10 minutes or less a day.
Steppin is the latest app to be launched at BVS, which English started three years ago as a place to brainstorm, design, and distribute a variety of apps. English is perhaps best known for his leadership at Kayak, and he made most of his wealth with the $1.8 billion sale of that online travel-booking business to Priceline (now Booking Holdings) in 2013. After that, English launched a corporate travel company called Lola that essentially folded into Capital One after the COVID-19 pandemic briefly halted corporate trips.
BVS, meanwhile, focuses on consumer software, such as a dating app (also called Lola), and a scheduling app called Supercal. English sold podcasting startup Moonbeam to Audacy in 2022, and is in negotiations now to sell Deets, a restaurant recommendation app. His firm employs nearly 10 people in Boston and New York, and another 25 in Pakistan.
“I’m having the most fun of my career,” English said, “because I get to work on multiple things at once.”
This is an installment of our weekly Bold Types column about the movers and shakers on Boston’s business scene.
Jon Chesto can be reached at jon.chesto@globe.com. Follow him @jonchesto.