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Comment by harscoat | Hacker News Reader

Why I think they are onto sthg: think of it as "behavior programming" (like Mydunktank we had put a short post on this http://blog.quantter.com/post/874726318/getupanmove-me-mydun...) It seems simple and stupid and may be overlooked as such but this what great ideas are made of. As pg said http://www.paulgraham.com/organic.html: "if what you produce initially is something other people dismiss as a toy. In fact, that's a good sign."

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It's interesting that you say "behavior programming" because that is exactly how some would define marketing. This startup, in its current state, is basically just an outsourced marketing campaign for Cabot (that might be a bit reductive of the concept, but in terms of where the revenue is coming from, that's what this boils down to). It will be interesting to see if other companies sign on to the concept and adopt the same type of campaign. It will also be interesting to see how they deal with reinventing themselves when companies tire of issuing the "I Move You" challenge.

You're right. I compare the Cabot campaign to a glorified Facebook fan page with the added engagement of people doing things in real life around the Cabot brand. Lots more to move on from there.

As I mention in another thread, we're working on building in Nike+ and other sensors so you can actually verify you did something. That's our next big step.

... to become "paypal for verified healthy actions" rather than '"evite" for healthy activities' http://blog.imoveyou.com/announcing-our-new-name-getupandmov...

1/ "behavior programming": it is what you do with it that determines if it is "marketing" or not. I think of the Gamepocalypse of Jesse Schell: games&reward mechanics are there (like mattmaroon just said). But now who will win? Big selfish shortsighted corporations driven by profit, maximizing shareholders wealth? or more open types of organizations driven by value to people first and money later.

2/ think of all the health pb in general. Huge. Now isn't it important for insurance companies or the government to get more healthy behaviors from us? The possibilities are numerous. And nobody has nailed this yet.

Therefore I agree it is interesting to see how they'll be reinventing themselves along the way.

You're absolutely right about our initial business model. We marketed 'activity campaigns' as an adjunct to traditional online 'ad campaigns.'

Instead of providing CPMS, we sold to Cabot based on a "CPA" model (clicks per activity).

We saw early that this pseudo-ad model would provide us with a nice small chunk of change, but would be mostly a biz-dev company and challenging to scale.

As a result, we're pivoting and moving towards a CPA2 model, where CPA = completions per action (this is where verifying the user has completed an action becomes vital).

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