(obviously given my prior stance on private data, I think any such ranking
if you were to create one should be opt-outable and preferably opted out by
default)
On 16 July 2014 08:49, David MacIver david@drmaciver.com wrote:
Heh. Actually… there is one metric that it’s just occurred to me
would be an interesting thing to add as a ranking, but you probably
shouldn’t do it because it will hurt your bottom line!You could add a “hall of shame” ranking for total amount of pledges paid.
On 16 July 2014 06:30, Daniel Reeves dreeves@beeminder.com wrote:
Brian, thanks for this idea, even though I’m tentatively siding with
David and Jeff. We’re being super slow on social features because
Bethany and I mostly hate that stuff.We finally added the
Supporters feature a while back though –
New Feature: Supporters | Beeminder Blog – and next we’ll probably at least add
an easy way to share progress on facebook or something. After we have
basic stuff like that in place we’ll revisit ideas like leaderboards.
Oh, group goals is another thing that we’re tempted to add sooner
rather than later. (Just a dirt simple version where multiple people
can add datapoints to a single graph and they all get charged if it
derails.) We’d love to get a sense of how many people are clamoring
for that. Upvoting and adding thoughts uservoice would be a good way
to do that:
Group goals on user page by user defined categories – Customer Feedback for BeeminderOn Tue, Jul 15, 2014 at 1:12 PM, Jeff Alexander
analyticphilosophy@gmail.com wrote:I agree with David MacIver. My suggestion of a metric should not be
taken as
an endorsement of the existence of such metrics.On Tue, Jul 15, 2014 at 4:11 PM, David MacIver david@drmaciver.com
wrote:I’m not super keen on the idea of rankings. The problem is that
beeminder
is only really useful relative to how hard it is for you to stick to
the
goals on your own. If you make a game of it then it just provides
incentives
to “cheat”. e.g. if you were to use days since derail as a metric of
“success” you’d just be providing people who cared about their social
ranking with an incentive against harder goals.(I mean, obviously to a certain degree, the pledges themselves already
count as that, but it feels like there’s something fundamentally
different
here)On 15 July 2014 21:53, Jeff Alexander analyticphilosophy@gmail.com
wrote:days_since_derail, maybe scaled against total number of beeminded
goals?On Tue, Jul 15, 2014 at 3:25 PM, Brian Ball ideabrian@gmail.com
wrote:Right. To rank people, you’d have to have rankings for an activity.
Steps taken with FitBit. Hours slept with Zeo? Number of YouTube
followers? BMI?Rather than having the whole social rank concept be overwhelming - we
could certainly start with a single, trackable thing that most
people can
engage with (walking, writing, tweeting).We won’t all care about all the trackables - so there should be
points
that could accumulate to an overall rank. Maybe somebody is #1 in
steps per
day - but they don’t BeeMind anything else - so they only get 1000
points
for that category. If they want more points (to rank in the global
distrubition) they would have to track more things (thus encouraging
more
use).Ideas?
On Tue, Jul 15, 2014 at 12:19 PM, David Ernst david@dsernst.com
wrote:Interesting. What’s the measure for ranking?
On Tue, Jul 15, 2014 at 3:18 PM, Brian Ball ideabrian@gmail.com
wrote:Re: Social Status
I’m not good at BeeMinding. I don’t know what. I’m akratic. Am I
apathetic? Am I just not conditioned to respond appropriately?However, I can think of a way that would be fun for me to
participate.
- Give BeeMinding a social status and rank.
If I see I’m 10,203 out of 10,300 - well, I can see I’ve got
10,000+
people I can “learn” from. That ability to connect and learn with
people
that are just a few steps ahead of me would be invaluable.It would give me motivation, social interaction, and data. Also,
the
nature of competition speaks to our lizard brain. We want to win
the
‘battle’ for survival and so it helps heighten our ‘focus’ (which
is
probably my biggest challenge with all this.)So, speak to my lizard brain directly - and you can have all my
money.-Brian
On Mon, Jul 14, 2014 at 2:15 PM, David Ernst david@ernsts.us
wrote:Hear you on the point that offering credit could soften the
stingy-ness of derailments. BUT what does that lead to? Maybe it
takes a $10
pledge to offer the same sting as $5 now. Thanks to
Intrafamily Bets and the Genius of the Exponential Pledge Schedule | Beeminder Blog &
New World Order: Goals No Longer Freeze | Beeminder Blog
that’s just one derailment awayThe automatically increasing nature of pledges would still adjust
to
Most Effective Sting.And in the process they get more opportunity to upgrade and y’all
get
more return for all your hard work.On Monday, July 14, 2014 4:24:31 PM UTC-4, Daniel Reeves wrote:
Alex and David E, thank you so much for this! Brilliant ideas
here.
This is going to hugely helpful as we put more love into premium
plans. I too am curious about others’ thoughts on the idea of
counting
pledges as credits toward premium. I actually mentioned that
possibility to Bethany the other day (I’m not sure who first had
the
idea but it’s been kicking around a long time – probably
originated
on this list) and she recoiled in horror. It is dangerous
because it
softens the stingy-ness of derailments.I agree about TagTime. Note that it’s open-source –
GitHub - tagtime/TagTime: Stochastic Time Tracking for Space Cadets – so we’d love to entice you to
help us
give it the love it desperately needs.On Mon, Jul 14, 2014 at 3:54 AM, David Ernst da...@ernsts.us
wrote:Hi all,
I was going to link to Patio11’s beloved
The Black Arts of SaaS Pricing.
Glad you
guys are already thinking along those lines.Reviewing Patrick’s post again, and looking at the
plans/pricing
as they are
now, I can’t help but notice a major gap: It’s unclear to me
what
“Bee
Lite”, “Plan B”, “Beemium”, and “Beekeeper” translate to.
Seriously, I’m
baffled.Patrick’s over there trying to make the point: Segment your
customers! Who
are they and how do they get value from you? What did they
come to
you for
and what do they want??And all I see from these plans is Plan A, B, C, & D. So they’re
ordered,
sure, but who are they for? I certainly don’t know which of
these
categories
I fit into. In the current scheme or the new one you propose.
And note,
I’ve been a user for months, & read nearly all your blog posts,
discussions
here, FAQs, etc, and still this leaves me confused.Just throwing this out there, I would imagine segmentation more
along the
lines of:New Bee: “Dip your toes into world of Beeminder”. (No
subscription
cost)The core Beeminder experience. The free plan that new users
start
off on.
Basic commitment pledges, a few private goals, & less (than
now,
even)
things to distract one with.Worker Bee: “Be even more productive, with less work”.
($10/mo?
$20? idk,
test it!)“Pro” things like unlimited private Beeminds, custom goals,
auto-ratcheting,
configurable ratcheting, SMS integration, weaselproofing, tips
of
the day.Super Bee: “All the things.” ($35/mo? Dunno)
The fun toys for the true lover of quantified-self. Free
short-circuiting,
unlimited free-bees (for more experimentation), change goal
URLs,
"fancy
data nerd features like turquoise swath and moving average line
(HT Paul
Fenwick) ", “expose more advanced settings”, early access to
test
out new
features.What you currently list as Beekeeper, separate out into a more
distinct
product. Don’t confuse it with the plans. Because it’s not
really
the same,
right? A human beeing (ha). Fundamentally different from any of
the plans.
Maybe joining the Beekeeper program could include a 30-day
trial
of Super
Bee as an additional perk, and then half price on all plans
after
that. But
I would try to separate it otherwise from the subscription
plans.
Because
you know, one is increased software options, and one is a
person
that gives
their time to you. And I’m not sure the two are so directly
related. E.g. I
could see more Free Plan users buying coaching, even though
they
don’t need
more software features, but the current ascending list confuses
them away.Also, I would make it clearer that you’re getting a Beekeeper.
The
way it’s
currently written on the Premium Plans page suggests the user
is
the
Beekeeper. I think it would be more compelling to say “A
beekeeper
to take
care of you”. Maybe this is just semantics, yet right now I
default to
reading the listing not as “want someone to look after you?”
but
“want to
make bees your occupation?”. Subconsciously, it feels like more
work.On a different note, I’m very curious how these premium plans
intersect with
pledge revenue. My hunch is that signing up for premium would
cause a user
to Beemind more things (thank you sunk cost fallacy). Thus more
pledge’d
money at stake, and (thus?) more pledged revenue. Does raising
the
price of
these plans cause less people to take their relationship to the
next stage,
and then also hurt pledge revenue? In other words, does
optimizing
subscription revenue come at a cost of pledge revenue? Of
course,
I’m making
too many uninformed assumptions…Thinking more on this theme, what about using money delivered
from
pledges
as credit to spend on the premium plans? Thus avoiding the
potential
zero-sum dilemma above. And the user feels a bit less bad
financially when
they fall off the road, because they can still “use” those
credits
towards
premium. Maybe they’ll put more money on the line, because
“hey,
if I fail,
then at least I can still use it for a premium subscription!”
And
then more
New Bees convert to premium status, great! And all the while,
Beeminder Inc
doesn’t lose revenue from this arrangement because the money
still
gets
charged, and for the most part those premium features have
trivial
marginal
cost. It’s just letting the pledged money go farther (get
double
“spent”).
Is this too radical? Maybe. Would love to hear others’
opinions on
it.One last thing. Without changing the subject too much, if we’re
still
talking about finding more sources of revenue, I would strongly
suggest
giving TagTime some love. It seems like there is a seriously
great product
there. And such a perfect complement to what Beeminder already
offers. Why
not bring it into the family more tightly? It clear from
reading
your blogs
etc that you guys make such heavy usage of it, but I wonder how
many users
do too? I don’t know! I haven’t even ever been able to get it
working
(Windows & iOS – ugh, I know). Yet it seems to hold such
promise.
If it was
more of a 1-click install (“Beeminder Desktop”), and offered a
no-bullshit
GUI decoupled from cmd, it could be much more accessible for
the
average
Beeminder. And seriously improve the value of the whole package
for the
user.— My 02¢. Hope this helps.
On Saturday, July 12, 2014 2:43:26 PM UTC-4, Alex Schell wrote:
In my view you could bundle retroratchet, configurable
retroratchet, and
auto-trimming of safety buffer at the same premium level, or
maybe just move
retroratchet to Bee Lite. These all feel like advanced tools
that
are nice
to have but aren’t essential to beeminding. (My guess is that
retroratchet
is relatively rarely used to non-premium users, and that the
advanced
retroratchet features wouldn’t be used much by the non-premium
user
population even if they could use them.)Re: private graphs, why not treat these like you do freebees?
2-4
free
secret goals would be reasonable IMO, and this takes care of
the
concern
that enforced public goals are a barrier to initial
beeminding.
If you do
this, consider not displaying mystery goals in people’s
galleries.Have you thought about offering free trials of premium plans?
On Thursday, July 10, 2014 4:52:02 PM UTC-4, Daniel Reeves
wrote:This is super valuable feedback! Let me quote ourselves from
Announcing Beeminder Premium Plans: Bee Lite, Plan Bee, Beemium, and Beekeeper | Beeminder Blog (under “No Carrots For You”):Seriously, we are all about the stick. We do not intend to
hold
important features as dangling carrots. Premium plans are
still
an
experiment but we’re committed to keeping the non-premium
Beeminder a
highly functional tool for maximizing the awesomeness of
humans
prone
to procrastination and other forms of akrasia. In fact, the
only
things that we’re going to charge for are:
- Features that directly thwart our revenue model, i.e.,
unlimited
freebees and free short-circuiting (or in the future:
choosing
the
beneficiary of your commitment contract [1])- Things that may confuse newbees (we’re not sure yet
whether
customizable retroratcheting and auto-ratcheting fall in this
category)- Goodies that are incidental to the process of beeminding,
like fitness
tips- Things that cost us money to provide (we may make the SMS
bot
a
premium feature for this reason)I hope I didn’t overcommit us with that. I no longer think
that
“the
free version of Beeminder must be a fully functional
anti-akrasia
tool” is an important principle. I might like the idea that
anyone
who’s at all serious about Beeminder should be premium,
which is
obviously not the case now. In any case, here’s a list of
possible
current features to make premium:
- SMS bot (HT dyang)
- Retroratchet
- Take A Break
- fancy data nerd features like turquoise swath and moving
average
line (HT Paul Fenwick)- private graphs
- widgets – beeminder
- weaselproofing
- no-mercy recommit
- auto-quit
- fine print
- supporters
- panic threshold
- goal unit rescaling
And here are potential future premium features:
- choose a beneficiary or at least charity percentage
- zeno SMS (could also think about international SMS, which
costs
more and has to be set up for each country in twilio)- super exclusive google group (maybe akratics anonymous
could
become that after moving to discourse?)- expose more advanced settings
- weasel-immunity (opposite of weaselproofing, where you
can
self-service cancel charges and undo recommit)- expose more advanced settings
- profile badges? (HT dyang)
- early access to new features? (HT dyang)
[1] Announcing Beeminder Premium Plans: Bee Lite, Plan Bee, Beemium, and Beekeeper | Beeminder Blog
On Thu, Jul 10, 2014 at 12:48 PM, David MacIver
da...@drmaciver.com
wrote:On 10 July 2014 21:36, Daniel Reeves <dre...@beeminder.com
wrote:
One more item for consideration: What if we added a Fuzzy
Buzzy plan
at $2/mo (less than 7 cents a day!) with the only perk
being
the warm
fuzzy feeling of supporting Beeminder (maybe also tips of
the
day)?So one problem I think is that honestly the premium plans
all
mostly
feel
like this anyway.You’ve built a really good service that I like a lot… the
problem is
that
basically all the things I like are present in the free
plan,
and
everything
added by the premium plans is pretty uninteresting on top
of
that.(OTOH you’ve reminded me that I do like the service enough
to
support
it
more than the measly $5/month I was paying, so I’ve
upgraded
my account
anyway)Obviously this is massive backseat driving and you should
feel
free to
ignore everything I say, especially as I have literally no
idea what
your
user patterns look like, but I rather feel like you might
be
better off
removing functionality from the free plan into the bee lite
plan than
raising the prices on the premium ones.–
You received this message because you are subscribed to the
Groups
“Akratics Anonymous” group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails
from
it, send
an
email to akratics+u...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout
.–
http://dreev.es – search://“Daniel Reeves”
Goal tracking + Commitment contracts == http://beeminder.com–
You received this message because you are subscribed to the
Groups
“Akratics Anonymous” group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from
it,
send an
email to akratics+u...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.–
http://dreev.es – search://“Daniel Reeves”
Goal tracking + Commitment contracts == http://beeminder.com–
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google
Groups “Akratics Anonymous” group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it,
send an email to akratics+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
–
You received this message because you are subscribed to a topic in
the
Google Groups “Akratics Anonymous” group.
To unsubscribe from this topic, visit
https://groups.google.com/d/topic/akratics/QnzWuaM441M/unsubscribe
.
To unsubscribe from this group and all its topics, send an email to
akratics+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
–
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google
Groups “Akratics Anonymous” group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it,
send
an email to akratics+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.–
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google
Groups “Akratics Anonymous” group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it,
send
an email to akratics+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.–
What’s in your hands, I think and hope, is intelligence: the ability
to
see the machine as more than when you were first led up to it, that
you can
make it more. (Alan J. Perlis)–
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google
Groups
“Akratics Anonymous” group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it,
send an
email to akratics+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.–
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google
Groups
“Akratics Anonymous” group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send
an
email to akratics+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.–
What’s in your hands, I think and hope, is intelligence: the ability to
see
the machine as more than when you were first led up to it, that you can
make
it more. (Alan J. Perlis)–
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google
Groups
“Akratics Anonymous” group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send
an
email to akratics+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.–
http://dreev.es – search://“Daniel Reeves”
Goal tracking + Commitment contracts == http://beeminder.com–
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
“Akratics Anonymous” group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an
email to akratics+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
–
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups “Akratics Anonymous” group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to akratics+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
!