Show HN: Never ask someone more than once to do something - iPrompted | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Never ask someone more than once to do something - iPrompted

iprompted.com

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- Hopefully, the app provides the recipient of the message a way to opt out of all future messages (and deletes their personal information immediately upon receipt of such a request).

- I'd consider it to be a violation of my privacy if someone who wanted to remind me of something shared my contact details with a third party service without getting my permission first.

- I'd consider it to be insulting if someone asked me to do something by sending me automatically generated messages. If it's important enough to remind me about, it's important enough for them to spend the time to send me a personal message. I'd only ever use an app like this to send reminders to myself, and there are already dozens of ways for me to do that (e.g., calendar reminders).

There's a mechanism to permanently opt out of messages, but I think we should call that out on the privacy page. It's done at the twilio level, https://support.twilio.com/hc/en-us/articles/223134027-Twili..., but we should reinforce that.

We've thought a lot about how, in the future, we create the ability to accept a prompt, so not just anyone can assign one.

The tool's sweet spot seems to be for people that need to be reminded. We had some interesting anecdotal research that said that the more I have to remind <person that I care about> to do something, the more frustrated I got. By the time the task was completed, it was hard to be appreciative or grateful.

Thanks for your feedback!

This is literally nagware!

No judgement here, I just chuckled and had to say it. (I have had similar thoughts)

Good luck.

Aw shit, I should not say this, but... I once thought up a service where people would sign up to make calls and or send texts. Use cases were:

Get the word out. Politics, fund raisers, events, that sort of thing.

Public service. Warnings, availability of resources.

Deliver short message. Advertising. Think 5 seconds, or a very targeted "tweet" in the form of SMS.

Bounty, info request. Get contact info for X. Or, what system do you use? Who does hiring? Whatever. (Controversial, I know)

The distributed nature of it made blocks hard.

Users, in a short alpha simulation, liked some use cases, hated others. It was difficult to arrive at what activities were worth it.

Since you are entering this space, I will just leave it all here. (Was not for me, for personal reasons)

At least we put a smile on one person's face, jk :)

We want users to view the tool as a virtual assistant, and not as the enemy. Over time we hope to add features like daily summaries, more conversational / nlp understanding and, eventually, the ability to understand what the tasks are about so we can offer positive feedback/encouragement.

Good luck. I think it is valid and all that. No worries, and yeah, I grinned.

I understand how you feel. We don't look at it like Nagware, nor for the use cases you're describing. My co-founder and I tend to need reminders to do the things we want to do - I shared more details on our blog. Things along the line of drop this off at the post office, pick up prescriptions, don't forget <child> has basketball practice. This isn't a tool to let campaigns nag you until you get to the voting booth.

We're heading the direction of allowing people to determine who they'll accept tasks from, to keep it from being openly naggy. There's no reason I should be able to task Mark Cuban, just because I have his number (I don't).

Thanks for your feedback!

The distinction is clear. I think it's an interesting space, and again good luck.

Have not tested it but curious as to the target audience. The home page feels like a "Mom reminding kids to take out the garbage" front-end (ie, very personal: nothing wrong with that).

As you look ahead and folks request more features it could eventually look like (searching... searching... Ok. Found something):

https://codecanyon.net/item/activity-board-activity-manager/... (see screenshots)

At this point, it stops feeling like "nagware" as someone mentioned but a more polished/friendly business/GTD tool. I've used similar to the linked sample in the years past (email notifications only) and it's been very effective for tracking virtually everything.

A response by recipient (person responsible for the task) to the email gets added to the database and keeping track of the progress is available to admin(s), team members or all.

I mention the above only because in it's present state (have not kicked the tires, basing it on the front page, do not want to provide actual cell numbers now) it just seems much easier to directly send a SMS.

It's truly geared more towards husband / wife, parents / kids. We think that having a system that provides prompts at the right time, for the tasks that matter, can be very powerful.

Personally, we're focused on a post UI world, where sms / voice + push mechanisms manage you...as opposed to tools that you have to manage yourself. It's really important that we build a relationship between the person designated to do the task and iPrompted.

More to come. Thanks for the feedback!

It is potentially a human Denial of Service attack. Enough SMS nags and phone life becomes impossible. I give it a couple days before it's abused enough for their Twillio account to get flagged. There isn't any validation. I could just start having two strangers screw with each other. You could make a circle of annoyance or use your own Twillio to kind of botnet some large scale annoyance.

I accidentally human DDoSd my boss once by submitting multiple Azure support requests at level A and put in his cell phone number. Several support people started responding but they put them all on the same Exchange list so they kept responding to each other and it sent him an email and text. It took hours to clear it up, his phone was so buzzy he had to turn it off all afternoon while I attempted to stop the helper train with more texts, calls, and emails.

I'm really sorry about your previous experience. The product is for people that otherwise get distracted and need a prompt to help them get on task.

I'm just trying to point out how people are going to use your product. Please blog in a few weeks about the fun things you get to mitigate!

Will do. We had to institute an exponential backoff, to stop from being too annoying. However, we're seeing ~80 of the tasks assigned get completed AND there are power task creators that create a whole lot of tasks. It seems to be a good tool for type A personalities to manage those around them - but, it's still early.

It's sort of a free, automated, harassment robot. It's also pretty useful if you want to phish someone.

Sounds like #2 Replace Email[0]. Has any product come close to solving this yet?

[0] http://www.paulgraham.com/ambitious.html

I don't think this replaces email in the way PG intends. In a way it's the opposite, this is a way of saying "I've got your number so I am going to force my way to priority 1 in your queue over all the other email/messages you have".

I think that is fine if you are wife/husband/mother/daughter/best friend etc. but not something I'd expect a coworker to do to me. Maybe a boss (a bit like a manual pagerduty scenario).

I agree. We envision some availability for the Assigned to allow people to prompt them.

Thanks for your feedback.

I'd forgotten about that post, but it's very interesting.

The vision is to filter all the noise through iPrompted and give the Assigned, the right info, at the right time, to make sure they accomplish as much as possible.

As we continue to generalize our design, what channels and functionality we support, it seems reasonable we'll land on a protocol that manages "tasks", for lack of a better term, in a post email client world / UI world.

But, we're still validating the MVP. Thank you for your feedback.

"Never ask someone more than once to do something" -- that's a big promise. Will it work on my son when I tell him to put on his shoes because it's time to go to school?

That's the exact type of problem we're trying to solve. For me, I can't tell you how many times I need to remind my son to do chores, homework, take meds, etc. Not to mention how many times my wife has to remind me to drop off clothes for donation, take this to the post office or what have you.

> > Will it work on my son when I tell him to put on his shoes because it's time to go to school?

> That's the exact type of problem we're trying to solve.

I can't imagine a more wrong solution to that problem.

I’m just not brave enough to stick my number in there.

if this was an email based service that might encourage me to test drive it... not sure why sms was the chosen option?

That's a great point. We picked one to demonstrate an MVP. SMS seemed more relevant to targeting someone 'in the moment's communication' and is more widely used among teens.

But, we'll add it to our backlog. When I look at traffic, referrals from HN successfully complete prompts way less than through channels that target people with children. Which, as you can see from your and other comments, isn't at all surprising.

Currently, the site only supports prompts to people with US-based, mobile phone numbers. Sorry for the inconvenience.

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