Basically, you’re asking me to possibly give you money, in a way and an amount that helps me. The point is that there’s no supply/demand curve here, so I have no way of knowing that this money is being effectively used once I give it to you. I will sign up if:
You include a charity option, where some significant % (probably 10%-50%) of the money I give you goes to a charity of my choice. If the charity happened to be tax-deductible, it would be a deduction for you, not for me. But things like political donations should be allowed, I think. I think you should start with a low-but-significant number like 10%, and plan to increase that until you find the right number.
You be a little bit up-front about your financials. Not in terms of reporting absolute numbers, just things like “We spend about half of what we make on programmers, a quarter on advertising, etc.”
Obviously, as a start-up, you get a good deal of latitude on both of these issues if you show you’re trying.
I believe that both of these could have a place in your FAQ.
Isn’t it better if we blow the money on cocaine and hookers, to maximize the pain of giving it to us? :) (Seriously though, this is highly valuable feedback; really appreciate it!)
StickK.com originally envisioned being the beneficiary of people’s commitment contracts but found that people would not go for that. That should certainly give us pause, but here’s why we think it could make more sense in our case:
The exponential fee schedule [http://beeminder.com/money] makes a big difference. In addition to removing the difficult choice about how much to risk, it makes it feel more reasonable for Beeminder to be the beneficiary. You’re starting with a small amount at risk after you’ve already gotten value out of Beeminder. (That could change if you climb up the fee schedule very far though so we need to keep thinking about options for specifying other beneficiaries.)
I think we’re fundamentally providing more value than StickK because of the pretty graphs and storing your data.
As for where the money is going, well, it’s still on the early side to say much about that, as you can see from these dogfood graphs:
We’d love to hear more thoughts on this, like are we in fantasyland with the above rationalizations for being the beneficiary?
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:
“I expect to fail a lot”, and/or
“I do not think your service is valuable to me”
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.
That’s a good point and a valuable datapoint. :) It seems like a funny thing for a rationalist to care about though… (Not the donating to charity part, of course, just that it seems orthogonal—you should should donate to charity independently of your use of commitment devices.)
I do see what you mean though. The use of self-binding is an admission of a fundamental irrationality (akrasia) so it may be valuable to have some plausible deniability.
Side note: You probably typed a “3.” instead of a “1.” and the markdown editor thing “fixed” it for you. That’s a big pet peeve of mine about markdown, which I otherwise love. Blatant violation of the anti-magic principle.
Yes, exactly. Obviously, the strategy involved for not looking/feeling like a masochist is to cover up with philanthropy. And of course the motivation behind philanthropy is not at all feigned; philanthropy is a stance of hope, and despair is one primary cause of my akrasia. But as you say, the only reason to connect that philanthropy to self-binding is to cover up the essential irrationality.
I thought of a good way to express another reason for this desire: I also want to assert that I still have some “consumer-like” power over you, akin to an upward-sloping demand curve. As pjeby said, this is a question of status. But insofar as I’m addressing an “unjust” status relationship, where your fees are unrelated to your value provided, my refusal to buy without a charity option is (in some sense) a common human meta-rational bias to devote resources to punishing injustice. Anyway, as a startup business, status doesn’t concern you in this sense, as much as growth.
Note that both of these reasons—not looking like a masochist, and addressing the “unjust” (or at least, unconventional in your favor) commercial status imbalance—are essentially status concerns, so even while they are logically separate, they are emotionally related.
(Of course, the status concerns in our commercial relationship are unrelated to our personal status relationship here, where you’re the guy who actually did something useful, and I’m the guy who’s bikeshedding it.)
ps. I fixed the numbering above with an initial “####”. Yes, it’s annoying to have to do that. I actually like it when markdown changes 1,2,2,3 to 1,2,3,4; but 3,4,4 should at worst become 3,4,5 not 1,2,3
In short, we (the founders) are reciprocating with our own commitment contracts, pledging $1395 to Beeminder users to force ourselves to stay on our own yellow brick roads. Maybe it’s more in the category of a nice little gesture that most users won’t even know about. It certainly doesn’t address fundamentally the issue you raised. (Of course, that wasn’t the point of it—we just really needed to raise the stakes on our own commitment contracts since paying ourselves wasn’t cutting it!)
(PS: Not bikeshedding by any means! You can’t imagine how helpful all this has been. Especially the further consultation we’ve been having with pjeby offline, but this whole comment thread as well.)
Not really. I mean, I guess it helps with the general status differential, but it doesn’t resolve the general “ick” I get from the idea of a transaction where one of two things will happen:
I will get value, and you will not get paid.
I will get negative value, and you will get paid.
Basically, someone always loses; it pattern-matches a negative-sum game, even though it’s not one. But you’re binding me to give to charity, then there’s a way to see it as win/win from my perspective, and win/win from your perspective (success story, or charity story plus money; either of which is helpful for your marketing).
...
This is about the 3rd or 4th rationalization I’ve given for why this is important to me. I honestly can’t give a good external reason for why you should believe any of them, since they’re probably not all truly necessary factors in why I’m making an issue of this. But I can sincerely attest that despite the shifting rationalizations, this feels to me like a good line for me to hold, and like something that will honestly help you get customers if you do it.
As to the cocaine and hookers: I know you’re joking, but when I used a personal beeminder-like anti-akrasia strategy, which was 100% charity, I worried about this issue, and found that it was not a problem in practice.
I think your rationalizations for being the main beneficiary are reasonable. I do not think that they justify you being the only beneficiary.
How about this: allow people to add a “charity tip percentage” on top of their BeeMinder money. For instance, if I chose 100%, and I was due to pay $5, you’d charge me $10 and give half to charity. That way, you get the same money (except for the extra deterrent of the higher total), and I get to choose what percentage goes to charity. You also get interesting data about how much people value the idea of some of their money going to charity.
You could start with limited options for the charities—a diverse menu of a dozen good charities would have something for anyone.
I suspect I’d set my percentage somewhere in the 100-200% range. That is, of the total, I would want 50-67% to go to charity.
Once you had data on what numbers people tended to choose, you could experiment with defaults.
I suspect that this would really help you grow. You’d really rather be saying “we’ve helped raise $XXXX for charity” than trying not to talk about it. And since you are in a market where price is not a problem, you can afford to be somewhat generous.
ps. the “paid” graph is plenty of info for me on how you spend your money :)
pps. I admit that the idea that I’d be willing to have the money be about 50⁄50 between you and charity may be strongly subject to anchoring effect. Having now looked at stickk.com, I feel a tendency to want to reduce your share. It is entirely possible that you’d make more money overall with a stickk.com-like model. Above all, you need data, and you can’t get data unless you somehow provide options.
I’d like to weigh in on this, agreeing with pjeby. I joined beeminder, am enjoying it and expect it to be of great use to me. I don’t care even a little where the money goes. The amount is a penalty to me, and I like the way it is automatically set. If the money allows you to focus more on improving beeminder, that’s great. If it ends up making you rich, that’s just evidence you’re providing a valuable service.
And here’s what I just added to the FAQ yesterday: (Do you think it addresses it sufficiently?)
Q: You make money from people failing at their goals?
A: Yes, but we make you fail less! We force you to toe the line at least for a while so that when/if you do fall off your yellow brick road then the motivation it provided up until that point still seems worth it. Everything we’ve worked on in building Beeminder has been with the objective of making people succeed and we’d have to be very myopic for it to be otherwise.
It’s very important to us that no one ever lose on a technicality. We want to make money by making you more awesome, and we’re convinced that’s what’s happening. But don’t take our word for it. Try it and see. The first attempt is free [http://beeminder.com/money].
I don’t mean to imply that you wouldn’t still be providing something of value, or would be operating in bad faith. What concerns me is that this kind of setup means you can’t afford to always have your users best interests at heart.
Consider one of your developers saying, “with this tweak, people will be 20% better at meeting their goals!” I’d love for you to add that feature, but it would be reducing the amount you take home. You very well may be high minded enough to add it anyway, but it’s never a good situation to be in.
“Pay if I meet my goal” makes no sense economically or motivationally. It only sounds good to people who don’t want to risk anything. If you want to do a non-punishing version, or let people use their own incentives when they fail, just charge a per-goal fee up front, or a time-based fee.
Hm, 50-to-1 is a bit of an exaggeration? It says “up to 50-to-1”, and in the same paragraph, “bettors lose 80 percent of the time”. Your point besides that stands, though.
What about some loose social pressure around that?
Like, a special donors list of “kept on track for 6 months and then donated”, or merch you can buy after so long without slipping, or something… Make it an achievement, and let people pay for extra recognition of it.
Better, for sure. But it’s hard to get those statistics without implementing it for a while, and it’s a tough PR job to move something that was free behind a paywall...
Make the default to give the money to you and have people able to opt out and give it to a charity. Make them opt out for each contract if they want to give it to charity.
Basically, you’re asking me to possibly give you money, in a way and an amount that helps me. The point is that there’s no supply/demand curve here, so I have no way of knowing that this money is being effectively used once I give it to you. I will sign up if:
You include a charity option, where some significant % (probably 10%-50%) of the money I give you goes to a charity of my choice. If the charity happened to be tax-deductible, it would be a deduction for you, not for me. But things like political donations should be allowed, I think. I think you should start with a low-but-significant number like 10%, and plan to increase that until you find the right number.
You be a little bit up-front about your financials. Not in terms of reporting absolute numbers, just things like “We spend about half of what we make on programmers, a quarter on advertising, etc.”
Obviously, as a start-up, you get a good deal of latitude on both of these issues if you show you’re trying.
I believe that both of these could have a place in your FAQ.
Isn’t it better if we blow the money on cocaine and hookers, to maximize the pain of giving it to us? :) (Seriously though, this is highly valuable feedback; really appreciate it!)
StickK.com originally envisioned being the beneficiary of people’s commitment contracts but found that people would not go for that. That should certainly give us pause, but here’s why we think it could make more sense in our case:
The exponential fee schedule [http://beeminder.com/money] makes a big difference. In addition to removing the difficult choice about how much to risk, it makes it feel more reasonable for Beeminder to be the beneficiary. You’re starting with a small amount at risk after you’ve already gotten value out of Beeminder. (That could change if you climb up the fee schedule very far though so we need to keep thinking about options for specifying other beneficiaries.)
I think we’re fundamentally providing more value than StickK because of the pretty graphs and storing your data.
As for where the money is going, well, it’s still on the early side to say much about that, as you can see from these dogfood graphs:
http://beeminder.com/meta/atrisk http://beeminder.com/meta/paid
We’d love to hear more thoughts on this, like are we in fantasyland with the above rationalizations for being the beneficiary?
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:
“I expect to fail a lot”, and/or
“I do not think your service is valuable to me”
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.
That’s a good point and a valuable datapoint. :) It seems like a funny thing for a rationalist to care about though… (Not the donating to charity part, of course, just that it seems orthogonal—you should should donate to charity independently of your use of commitment devices.)
I do see what you mean though. The use of self-binding is an admission of a fundamental irrationality (akrasia) so it may be valuable to have some plausible deniability.
Side note: You probably typed a “3.” instead of a “1.” and the markdown editor thing “fixed” it for you. That’s a big pet peeve of mine about markdown, which I otherwise love. Blatant violation of the anti-magic principle.
Yes, exactly. Obviously, the strategy involved for not looking/feeling like a masochist is to cover up with philanthropy. And of course the motivation behind philanthropy is not at all feigned; philanthropy is a stance of hope, and despair is one primary cause of my akrasia. But as you say, the only reason to connect that philanthropy to self-binding is to cover up the essential irrationality.
I thought of a good way to express another reason for this desire: I also want to assert that I still have some “consumer-like” power over you, akin to an upward-sloping demand curve. As pjeby said, this is a question of status. But insofar as I’m addressing an “unjust” status relationship, where your fees are unrelated to your value provided, my refusal to buy without a charity option is (in some sense) a common human meta-rational bias to devote resources to punishing injustice. Anyway, as a startup business, status doesn’t concern you in this sense, as much as growth.
Note that both of these reasons—not looking like a masochist, and addressing the “unjust” (or at least, unconventional in your favor) commercial status imbalance—are essentially status concerns, so even while they are logically separate, they are emotionally related.
(Of course, the status concerns in our commercial relationship are unrelated to our personal status relationship here, where you’re the guy who actually did something useful, and I’m the guy who’s bikeshedding it.)
ps. I fixed the numbering above with an initial “####”. Yes, it’s annoying to have to do that. I actually like it when markdown changes 1,2,2,3 to 1,2,3,4; but 3,4,4 should at worst become 3,4,5 not 1,2,3
Do you think this mitigates the problem at all: http://blog.beeminder.com/blogdog
In short, we (the founders) are reciprocating with our own commitment contracts, pledging $1395 to Beeminder users to force ourselves to stay on our own yellow brick roads. Maybe it’s more in the category of a nice little gesture that most users won’t even know about. It certainly doesn’t address fundamentally the issue you raised. (Of course, that wasn’t the point of it—we just really needed to raise the stakes on our own commitment contracts since paying ourselves wasn’t cutting it!)
(PS: Not bikeshedding by any means! You can’t imagine how helpful all this has been. Especially the further consultation we’ve been having with pjeby offline, but this whole comment thread as well.)
Not really. I mean, I guess it helps with the general status differential, but it doesn’t resolve the general “ick” I get from the idea of a transaction where one of two things will happen:
I will get value, and you will not get paid.
I will get negative value, and you will get paid.
Basically, someone always loses; it pattern-matches a negative-sum game, even though it’s not one. But you’re binding me to give to charity, then there’s a way to see it as win/win from my perspective, and win/win from your perspective (success story, or charity story plus money; either of which is helpful for your marketing).
...
This is about the 3rd or 4th rationalization I’ve given for why this is important to me. I honestly can’t give a good external reason for why you should believe any of them, since they’re probably not all truly necessary factors in why I’m making an issue of this. But I can sincerely attest that despite the shifting rationalizations, this feels to me like a good line for me to hold, and like something that will honestly help you get customers if you do it.
PJ, you’re our new best friend! Great stuff on dirtsimple.org btw.
I added homunq’s idea to our feedback forum—https://beeminder.uservoice.com/forums/3011-general/suggestions/2312939-add-a-charity-tip-percentage-to-the-amount-you-l—but you’ve convinced me that, although it might be a cool feature, we needn’t consider it to be on our critical path.
Thanks to both you and homunq. Contacting you offline now; very excited to talk more.
As to the cocaine and hookers: I know you’re joking, but when I used a personal beeminder-like anti-akrasia strategy, which was 100% charity, I worried about this issue, and found that it was not a problem in practice.
I think your rationalizations for being the main beneficiary are reasonable. I do not think that they justify you being the only beneficiary.
How about this: allow people to add a “charity tip percentage” on top of their BeeMinder money. For instance, if I chose 100%, and I was due to pay $5, you’d charge me $10 and give half to charity. That way, you get the same money (except for the extra deterrent of the higher total), and I get to choose what percentage goes to charity. You also get interesting data about how much people value the idea of some of their money going to charity.
You could start with limited options for the charities—a diverse menu of a dozen good charities would have something for anyone.
I suspect I’d set my percentage somewhere in the 100-200% range. That is, of the total, I would want 50-67% to go to charity.
Once you had data on what numbers people tended to choose, you could experiment with defaults.
I suspect that this would really help you grow. You’d really rather be saying “we’ve helped raise $XXXX for charity” than trying not to talk about it. And since you are in a market where price is not a problem, you can afford to be somewhat generous.
ps. the “paid” graph is plenty of info for me on how you spend your money :)
pps. I admit that the idea that I’d be willing to have the money be about 50⁄50 between you and charity may be strongly subject to anchoring effect. Having now looked at stickk.com, I feel a tendency to want to reduce your share. It is entirely possible that you’d make more money overall with a stickk.com-like model. Above all, you need data, and you can’t get data unless you somehow provide options.
This is really smart. Thanks! I’d like to get this recorded on our uservoice page: http://uservoice.beeminder.com
If you want to copy it there, by all means, otherwise I’ll do so in a couple days.
Thanks again!
I’d like to weigh in on this, agreeing with pjeby. I joined beeminder, am enjoying it and expect it to be of great use to me. I don’t care even a little where the money goes. The amount is a penalty to me, and I like the way it is automatically set. If the money allows you to focus more on improving beeminder, that’s great. If it ends up making you rich, that’s just evidence you’re providing a valuable service.
It seems like it could be a perverse incentive: you are selling help meeting our goals, but you’re getting paid when we fail to do so.
Here’s some discussion on google plus about that:
http://plus.google.com/100518216397474461708/posts/RkWR3LauY5X
And here’s what I just added to the FAQ yesterday: (Do you think it addresses it sufficiently?)
Q: You make money from people failing at their goals?
A: Yes, but we make you fail less! We force you to toe the line at least for a while so that when/if you do fall off your yellow brick road then the motivation it provided up until that point still seems worth it. Everything we’ve worked on in building Beeminder has been with the objective of making people succeed and we’d have to be very myopic for it to be otherwise.
It’s very important to us that no one ever lose on a technicality. We want to make money by making you more awesome, and we’re convinced that’s what’s happening. But don’t take our word for it. Try it and see. The first attempt is free [http://beeminder.com/money].
I don’t mean to imply that you wouldn’t still be providing something of value, or would be operating in bad faith. What concerns me is that this kind of setup means you can’t afford to always have your users best interests at heart.
Consider one of your developers saying, “with this tweak, people will be 20% better at meeting their goals!” I’d love for you to add that feature, but it would be reducing the amount you take home. You very well may be high minded enough to add it anyway, but it’s never a good situation to be in.
They could charge for access to the version with the tweak. “Premium Beeminder”. With statistics to back up how much more effective it is.
Wow, thanks, Alicorn! That just made my much more convoluted reply moot. :)
One more way to possibly mitigate the incentive problem:
http://beeminder.uservoice.com/forums/3011-general/suggestions/2281088-choose-your-own-incentives-have-an-option-to-pay-
...which is also crazy for a business. Bear in mind that there is a reason that bookies offer 50-to-1 odds on people meeting their weight loss goals.
“Pay if I meet my goal” makes no sense economically or motivationally. It only sounds good to people who don’t want to risk anything. If you want to do a non-punishing version, or let people use their own incentives when they fail, just charge a per-goal fee up front, or a time-based fee.
Hm, 50-to-1 is a bit of an exaggeration? It says “up to 50-to-1”, and in the same paragraph, “bettors lose 80 percent of the time”. Your point besides that stands, though.
What about some loose social pressure around that?
Like, a special donors list of “kept on track for 6 months and then donated”, or merch you can buy after so long without slipping, or something… Make it an achievement, and let people pay for extra recognition of it.
Better, for sure. But it’s hard to get those statistics without implementing it for a while, and it’s a tough PR job to move something that was free behind a paywall...
“Congratulations, you’ve been selected to try a new feature that we’re thinking of adding to Premium Beeminder, free for six months!”
Make the default to give the money to you and have people able to opt out and give it to a charity. Make them opt out for each contract if they want to give it to charity.