Great Dieting Biz Model: Lose The Weight or Pay Up | Hacker News Reader

Great Dieting Biz Model: Lose The Weight or Pay Up

loseitorloseit.com

10 pointsjeremyw8 comments

This is a poor business model. (This is true of most attempts at changing the tried-and-true "Pay for the stuff you get" system, which nearly invariably work better on paper than in real life.)

For one, your credit card processor is going to hate your bones, because your entire business model is based on holding money which is not yours for your customers, and then not allowing some customers to receive it. This exposes your credit card processor to about a million different flavors of risk: for example, if you charge $100,000 and then just vanish into the ether, they're now on the hook for $100k. Even if you're an upstanding businessman, and you certainly don't look like it because you're operating a scam, your scam ^H^H^H^H innovative business model is going to have customer support costs far out of line with their good customers because you will attract disproportionate refund and chargeback requests.

Also, the "diet industry" is a hive of scum, villainy, and Tim Ferris.

Edit: On reading their terms of service, I think I was far too polite above. Look at the timing and photographic evidence requirements for weekly weigh-ins, which are clearly designed so that the typical user does not succeed.

The biggest problem, which you touch on briefly but which I want to emphasize, is that they win if you fail. Their interests are in opposition to your own. This is not the type of company you want to be doing business with.

While their interests are in opposition to yours, I don't see any way they can affect the outcome. From their "how it works" page:

Lose It or Lose It does not provide any diet, exercise or weight loss advice, suggestions or program of any type.

What you are risking money for is a way to commit your future self to unpleasant actions (putting down the chips). The only thing that looks shady to me is this:

No penalties will be deducted from your investment if you can't weigh in because of a reported technical problem or outage unless we determine that the site was up and running for at least 12 hours during your 24-hour weigh-in window.

Good points. An alternative model might be competing for money with your friends, and the system simply is an escrow service and fun web site. Complaining about the results would involve direct social pressure and unlikely to cause grief to the payment system.

This is a copy of stickk.com. However, stickk.com gives the money to charity, whereas this site just pockets the cash.

I envisioned a system like this while prepping for the MCAT. Put in terms of the SAT: Up front I pay $x dollars into an account, where $x is some amount that I find appropriate for break-even given an SAT practice test, your GPA, and some demographic info. For every 10 points below 2400 that you score on the real thing, my obligation to you is reduced by $y. If you score too low, you owe me.

This would only really be effective if the student had the ability and time to do extra prep for the test, etc. And it would do nothing to resolve the underlying flaws of the exam itself.

They allow you to cancel for $50, so you're never going to lose more than that much money. What's the point?

This reminds me of an idea I had for a gym membership fee - pay $200/week, get back $40 for every hour workout up to 5 times weekly (plus some unimplemented mechanism to prevent your gym from being overrun by gym rats who actually do work out 5 times weekly).

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