Do you take the money, or do your users split it between their friends and you take a cut?
The take the money one has been done (Beeminder, and others probably), but sure different flavours are welcome.
The split with friends I haven't seen. That would be pretty cool, especially if you can do it without needing to pay banks a txn fee, or perhaps a tiny one (maybe you take a 5% of profits fee from participents, or similar). Crypto is the other option (!).
The split with friends is great becuase
* People less likely to lie to friends than a SaaS. Which is good for both parties.
* Social motivation and financial motivation.
* If you lose it's like losing a game of poker with mates, not a big deal (as long as you kept the stakes reasonable).
Interesting idea. At first, I thought you could only lose money if you didn't accomplish your goals. But then I realized that money was being shared among the people who joined the same challenge. This mechanism not only disincentivizes not accomplishing your goals but also incentivizes accomplishing your goals.
Also curious about whether there is any form of verification of whether someone accomplished their goal. If not, this could result in bad actors trying to exploit the system by always checking their goals as completed. One potential way of getting rid of exploiters would be to remove the positive reward factor of the game, for example, the money lost by the participants could be sent into verified charity funds instead of being shared among the people who joined the pot.
I also have some doubts about the efficiency of mixing external motivations (in this case losing money or increasing a bit) with internal motivations (the goal itself). But this is another topic for discussion.
Anyway, this is a very interesting idea nonetheless. Good job! :)
Show HN: an app that takes your knee caps if you don’t pay for protection
Sorry, completely unrelated, I know. I just wanted to say it.
I guess it could be entertaining for people who have so much money they don’t know what to do with it.
I file it under “gambling” category.
What if you get injured? What if something comes up and you won’t have time to achieve a goal? The list goes on and on and on…
I can only see wealthy people with not enough things to worry about in their lives wanting to use it.
I feel like charging fee for it is unethical and borderline scam.
Also, it gives me “solution in search of a problem” vibes.
Sounds like a potential candidate for consensus secret sharing. This one springs to mind: https://pmg.csail.mit.edu/papers/a34-schultz.pdf
This concept of possibly get money for doing fitness activity, lose money if you don't has been tried a couple times but nobody has cracked it that I know of. One used location to see if you had visited the gym that you are a member of.
This seems set as specific individual money pots you can buy into instead of monthly goals as at least one previous app was set on.
Money is the best universal motivator, there are others could be more motivating but to a lot fewer people.
I hope this succeeds and more people accomplish the goals they set.
Great idea and great way to position the incentive. One question, what happens if no one reaches the goal? Where does the money go?
This is an healthy mix of insane and fun. I love it
Does that mean you can buy your way out of the nonsense that is constantly preached about goals in life?
I am tempted.
I literally thought about such an app today, but with a pot that would go to either (1) to a charity I support or (2) some cause I really despise (more evil)
Doing it with friends in probably much better for accountability.
slucaskim: It made us realize there's really no better motivator than money
Gyms: LOL
How can anyone verify the others actually did the thing?
Are all challenges public? Can anyone join them?
I read a research paper recently that basically suggested this approach is even less likely to have you succeed.
Essentially, when you externalize a reward, people are less likely to want to continue doing the thing. I suspect this is similar, but it’s externalizing the loss. If you’re not already invested in succeeding, this isn’t going to change that.