In 2009 I first described here on LessWrong a tool that Bethany Soule and I made to force ourselves to do things that otherwise fell victim to akrasia ("How a pathological procrastinator can lose weight"). We got an outpouring of encouragement and enthusiasm from the LessWrong community, which helped inspire us to quit our day jobs and turn this into a real startup: Beeminder (the me-binder!).
We've added everyone who got on the waitlist with invite code LESSWRONG and we're getting close to public launch so I wanted to invite any other LessWrong folks to get a beta account first: http://beeminder.com/secretsignup (no wait this time!)
(UPDATE: Beeminder is open to the public.)
It's definitely not for everyone since a big part of it is commitment contracts. But if you like the concept of stickK.com (forcing yourself to reach a goal via a monetary commitment contract) then we think you'll adore Beeminder.
StickK is just about the contracts -- Beeminder links it to your data. That has some big advantages:
1. You don't have to know what you're committing to when you commit, which sounds completely (oxy)moronic but what we mean is that you're committing to keeping your datapoints on a "yellow brick road" which you have control over as you go. You commit to something general like "work out more" or "lose weight" and then decide as you go what that means based on your data.
2. You have the flexibility to change your contract in light of new information (like, 40 hours of actual focused work per week is damn hard!). That also sounds like it defeats the point of a commitment contract, but the key is that you can only make changes starting a week in the future. (Details at blog.beeminder.com/dial which describes the interface of the "road dial" for adjusting the steepness of your yellow brick road.) The point is that akrasia (dynamic inconsistency, hyperbolic discounting) means over-weighting immediate consequences, so to beat akrasia you only need to bind yourself for whatever the horizon on "immediate" is. Based on a study of grocery-buying habits -- when buying groceries online for delivery tomorrow people buy a lot more ice cream and a lot fewer vegetables than when they're ordering for delivery next week -- and raw guesswork (so far), we're taking that Akrasia Horizon to be one week.
So Beeminder as an anti-akrasia tool means committing to keeping all your datapoints on a yellow brick road that you specify and can change the steepness of at any time, with a one-week delay.
You may be wondering how anyone could ever fail to stay on a yellow brick road that's this flexible. Here's how: if you're highly akratic. Such a person may well find it a daily struggle to stay on the road. Yeah, you can always choose to wuss out and flatten the road, but only starting in a week, which you don't want to do. You want to wuss out Right Now, dammit! I mean, just for now, while you eat this pie, and then you'll behave again. No such luck though.
The daily struggle to stay on the road does not induce you to touch that road dial. You always want to make it easier "just for today" -- which the road dial doesn't allow -- and you always think you'll get your act together by next week.
We'd love to hear people's thoughts on this! Perhaps surprisingly, it took a ridiculous number of iterations to get to this point. For the longest time we struggled with different ways to deal with the fact that it's so often hard to decide what to commit to. We tried many variations of having multiple yellow brick roads for a single goal, so that you could specify an ambitious goal as well as a bare minimum. It was always too messy, or would backfire altogether and be paralyzing. We think the road dial with an akrasia horizon is a big leap forward. And it seems so obvious in retrospect!
Nope. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that anybody telling you that you shouldn't get paid is full of.. it. Blow the money on whatever you want.
Even with exponential growth, people will spend a LOT more money to fail under normal circumstances. If you measure the actual value you're providing to people's lives, the amount of that value you'll actually be capturing is a negligible percentage, except for pathological Bruces (who will find a way to lose that money anyway).
If you want to give them a convenience option to also pay money to somebody else, then that's an additional service and should not reduce your fees.
More important: do not listen to people tell you how much you should be paid. Or more precisely, do not listen to people tell you how little you should be paid. That is a status conversation, nothing more. People do not tell the casino that they'll only bet money there if the casino gives the money to charity!
Anybody who makes this argument, you do not want as a customer. They are saying two things:
The correct answer to both statements is, "then our service is not for you."
You are giving people an awesome free tracking system. It can be manipulated in such a way that a person never pays a thin dime.
Frankly, you are giving your service away. I know marketers who would advise charging a monthly fee for this in addition to the penalties... and with appropriate collateral material, you could do just that.
Indeed, if you have not already patented the critical aspects of your system, be prepared to get ripped off by somebody who will market it better, and make more money than you... probably with a system that's not technically as good or mathematically correct as yours.
Packaged with appropriate training materials, a good internet marketer could and would charge an up-front fee of at least low-to-mid three figures, plus a two-figure monthly fee, plus the penalties on individual goals, and tell his customers in video format with a straight face that he planned to blow all their fees on drugs and hookers for use on his private jet... and still get people raving that it's the best thing since sliced bread.
Frankly, I personally know more than one marketer who could do that! (With variations as to what they'd say they were spending it on, though; I only know one person who could say "drugs and hookers" and not have it seem out of character to his audience.)
I also know far-less-evil marketers who would probably love to build your customer base like crazy (at zero cost to you), without you needing to change a blessed thing.
See, most of the internet marketers I know (that teach other people to do marketing) have a problem: most of the people they teach don't do anything.
And because the ones I hang out with are not as "evil" as they look, this actually frustrates the hell out of them. They actually want people to succeed, but that success usually involves things like sitting down and writing a certain amount of marketing literature, contacting people for joint ventures, etc. etc.
And a lot of people simply don't get around to doing what it takes.
So some marketers try to set up mastermind groups and "accountability partner" systems to get people to motivate each other. One group I was in for a while tried to pair people and do mini commitment contracts with each other. I didn't actually do any myself, but from what my wife told me about the group she was in, it was really awkward and didn't work well. (Most people didn't want to take the money.)
If the guy that ran that group (with several hundred members) had known about your program (and it existed three or four years ago), my guess is he'd have sent everybody there from the start.
So, in their eyes, you are going to be doing those people a tremendous service.
Really, there's potentially a business opportunity for you in private-branding your service and offering it to people who are coaches or who have coaching groups, and allowing a "show this goal to everyone in the group" (but not the general public). As a business of that sort myself, I'd probably pay $99 a month to have a service like that, provided it was private-labeled and let me integrate an API with single sign-on from my existing membership services. (edited to add: that'd be $99/month plus whatever my clients lose on their contracts, of course)
(Note that this isn't an attempt to spell out firm requirements, and I haven't actually used your system yet, so this isn't a firm offer to pay. And I personally may not be your best client for such a thing, because, for a sizable number of my customers, the anxiety of anticipated punishment is usually counterproductive. I do know marketers who believe in it for their markets, though, and who might spend more than me for the same thing, and have more people with more goals paying more penalties in.)
In short, you are not charging nearly enough, nor have you tapped the full potential of your business opportunities. Even if you don't go the private-label route, but just provide some sort of "group" feature (so coaches can monitor their clients' goals), there is still plenty of opportunity for the sort of folks I know to get you the right kind of clients. (i.e., ones who are already serious about opening their wallets to solve whatever problem they have.)
(If you want to talk to me about this some more, I suggest taking this off-line, though.)
[edit: changed "negative reinforcement" to "punishment" above, since technically, it's not negative reinforcement]
An optional charity tip percentage is consistent with all of the above, and it is a requirement for at least one otherwise-willing customer (me).
And I may be saying the two things pjeby says I am, but I'd claim that I'm also saying:
####3. I don't want to look or feel like a masochist.
That's probably a common goal, and I believe that including a charity option would allow me to use and promote your service while meeting that goal, whereas I can't do either without it.
Finally, to dreeves: pjeby has some plausible arguments, but data is more valuable than arguments.