Designing a more flexible pledge progression

Bugabee
16

I strongly agree with this. (For end total in particular, that has a pre-req of having “open-ended” be the default. As soon as we have that, then we can have the best of all worlds and ask for the end total (if any) as part of goal creation.)

Holy cow that is a gorgeous graph. :heart_eyes: :chart_with_upwards_trend:

(And, ha, you’re an amazing Beeminder user on every dimension!)

Thanks for all the feedback and conversations here! It’s gradually crystalizing for me, even if I don’t know the answer yet. Part of it is reconciling these two tricky constraints:

  1. Don’t let anyone’s pledge go beyond where they need it capped (very bad for both user awesomeness and revenue!)
  2. Don’t ask newbees for a pledge cap in a way that they’re liable to confuse with the pledge itself, or ask for it before they can appreciate that pledge caps should be higher than one would think when first starting out.

Or, more pithily:

  1. Don’t let anyone’s pledge get too high
  2. Don’t let anyone’s pledge max out too low

Both, I contend, are very bad for the user (though the feedback I’m hearing here is that #2 isn’t as much of a concern). #1 means making pledge caps easy to set and hard to forget to set. #2 means not asking a newbee for a pledge cap when they don’t know how to think about that yet.

(Ironically, failing at #2 feels more money-grubbing to me, like tricking a newbee into capping their pledge below their Motivation Point so they just keep derailing and paying instead of staying on track on their goal! :grin: I’m not sure how serious I am here but the real point is that we want to succeed at both these things and get everyone to the right pledge!)

It has a catch-22 feel to it but we’ll find the answer! Here’s some copy brainstorming:

A powerful feature of Beeminder is that in the process of beeminding you figure out the optimal amount of money to have at risk for maximal motivation. This amount is sometimes much lower and sometimes much higher than you might think at the beginning! Every goal starts out with a nominal amount at risk and increases each time you derail. We recommend leaving that open-ended (you can always cap it or drop it back down if you find it’s gotten too high) but if you know ahead of time where you’d like to cap it, just click the dollar amount on the goal page as soon as the goal’s created.