Rate My Startup: webapp Exercise-Motivation helps you get up and exercise

Disclaimer: I know there were concerns about RMS posts a few days ago, but I promise you this webapp is a legitimate startup: domain name bought about a week ago and was redirected to my server at Google App Engine yesterday. It took me at least half a year developing for it (more on that later) but never released before, and today I guess is its first day. It is at: http://www.exercise-motivation.com

So what does my new webapp do? It gives users more incentive to go and exercise by using peer pressures from their friends. It works like this: when a user signs up, the site asks the user a few of his friends' emails. Any time the user misses a scheduled workout, his chosen friends will be notified by email and are asked to talk to the user personally. On the other hand, when the user did workout according to schedule, his Facebook and Twitter status can be configured to reflect the fact, creating some kind of positive snow ball effect. The system judges whether or not the user works out by making them post a brief update every workout day.

This project started about a year ago when I was reading the book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini in which he talked about how some chronic smokers quit smoking by telling everyone they are quitting. That intrigues me and lead me make a preliminary site called http://www.plansticker.com that supposedly helps you accomplish any long term plans by using social pressure from Twitter and Facebook. I almost forget about this site after it is done for about half a year during which I learnt how to find niches, how to marketing and all that kind of business stuff. Recently after much thought, I decided to make plansticker.com into a webapp to specifically help people who have problems sticking to their long term exercising plans (me being one of them). So I did a ton of UI work and copywriting and some code modifications to make exercise-motivation.com.

Exercise-motivation.com has a private beta waiting list partly because I want to stay close to Google App Engine's quota before it could support itself. Also I'd like to hear suggestions from active users to improve the webapp before going public in order to deliver a truly useful product that really helps its users.

Hope you find my startup helpful, and again, here is its address: http://www.exercise-motivation.com

Best Regards, Angke