Show HN: WorkOrPay – Set goals, form contracts, pay a penalty if you fail
workorpay.com
workorpay.com
[links] https://www.beeminder.com/home https://blog.beeminder.com/ https://forum.beeminder.com/
WorkOrPay tries to add more human interactions. We text users daily to make sure they aren't starting slack off. We help them form reasonable goals. Do verifications manually, so the goals can really be anything.
We are a mix between beeminder and a life coach.
That isn't true. You can track progress on a goal manually, as well as automatically. For example, I used to use Beeminder to track how many push ups I did.
This sounds like a great product idea. Screw automated follow ups. I have tried it abs it doesn’t work. I would prefer a personal touch anyday!
According to my observations, people usually start working towards a goal following a temporary spike in motivation. It lasts a few days at most. Usually, it is not enough for people to move past the hurdle that is the first 2 weeks. In the first 2 weeks of starting anything new, you are garbage at everything. It’s hard work, and not very rewarding because you are constantly getting things wrong and not being able to get in flow.
However, after 2 weeks so, People start appreciating the task. They finally see hints of progression in their abilities. Are able to work for longer stretches at a time before running into something frustrating. This allows them to get into flow. Together this starts to produce consistent internal motivation that allows the person to actually stick with the new habit long term. But 99% of the time people give up before getting here.
To address this issue, I created WorkOrPay
WorkOrPay: Set goals. Form contracts. Pay the penalty if you fail.
We let you form contracts in which you agree to reach a goal before a deadline. You then deposit some money. If you fail to accomplish your goal before the deadline, your deposit is lost and donated to a charity of your choice.
Basically, we provide you with external motivation (by holding your deposit hostage), so you get stuff done even when you don't feel like it. In addition, we text you daily to keep tabs and make sure you stay on track.
WorkOrPay's mission is to bridge the gap in motivation from the initial spike and the more consistent motivation that appears a while later. The idea is that if you make a contract for the frustrating 2 weeks where you want to quit. The pressure of potentially losing your deposit will provide enough external motivation for you to continue until you reach the promised land of consistent internal motivation.
I hope others who have the same problem I had, can use this service to break out of the loop. Without wasting years of their life.
Promo Code for HN members: hackernews
Half joking, but you could have simplified these entire sections to "you have ADHD".
Speaking as someone who is diagnosed with it, you more or less described the dopamine ride of a person with ADHD.
The "deadlines give you superpowers" bit definitely reminded me of this video: https://www.instagram.com/reel/CcHQDI8NYzF/
But then I get worried I'm trying to make my square peg/round hole fit the the diagnose.
Are you medicated or having any other treatment? Did it have any meaningful impact/change to your adult life?
I would say as an adult, I have built coping mechanisms and excuses for what were clearly symptoms of undiagnosed ADHD. Hyperfocus was just "being really passionate about a project", I had a million unfinished projects, both software and physical (not that I've finished most of them, but I have gotten better at it!), and I still chase the dopamine like there's no tomorrow.
What really had sealed the deal was one of my good friends getting their diagnosis and talking about it, combined with a really well timed Twitter post that said something like "an ADHD person's worst nightmare -- a 4PM meeting". Coming out of a late afternoon meeting where I physically could do nothing the entire day except think about that one meeting really pushed it home.
I am on Adderall, and it helps to an extent. It definitely plateaus, and while I'm on a low dose I'm also not keen to increase it unless needed. Another piece of it is just learning more about what ADHD is, and figuring out what's happening and what you can do about it.
One surprisingly helpful resource has been a person on social media, Connor DeWolfe (https://www.instagram.com/connor.dewolfe/) who posts comical videos that both resonate and are just eye opening because they made me second guess things I've done all my life. Things like "out of sight, out of mind" and why people with ADHD tend to leave cabinet doors open, "chasing the dopamine", the intense amount of focus you get when you are right up against a deadline, etc. It really helped me to start pointing these out in my day to day life when before they'd just be things I did.
> People start appreciating the task. They finally see hints of progression in their abilities. Are able to work for longer stretches at a time before running into something frustrating.
This part hits the nail on the head. Appreciating the task and enjoying the progression.
To me, trying to make this experience happen earlier is the solution to the problem, not creating artificial constraints that dance around the problem.
We make money through a subscription model. We do not make anything from the contracts because it seemed wrong to profit from our users failing. We want our incentives to be aligned correctly!
I assumed that the monthly fee was on top of a percentage fee on lost bets, which other platforms charge. You should make this more prominent on the site — aligned incentives are great!
This is how naive good-meaning founders start evil parasitic businesses that don't realize their true potential until the buyout...
Beeminder is obviously amazing, but it really "loses its sting" when you can't set a penalty higher than $25 (give or take -- I don't know what the current limit is).
Beeminder's model is a bit different, in that the payment amount keeps going up if you keep falling off track. The current upper amount you can pay is $7290 (as in once you hit $7290, it will keep charging you that amount).
1) Theres no option to have a referee that isn't friends or family
2) Its automated, and no human actually checks up to see if you are staying on track.
3) You can't really set huge stakes
Has stickk changed? When it was new you could set anyone to be your referee.
> Its automated, and no human actually checks up to see if you are staying on track.
With stickk, isn't the human referee the one who checks up on your progress?
Here is Kommit's Show HN thread for anyone interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29726228
> Choose a deadline as short as 3 days or as long as a month!
Why the 3 days? Is it to lessen the burden on the support staff who do the daily check ups? If I'm eager to subscribe to a service like this it means I want to use it to get stuff done I need to do starting right now, today, not something I need to get done in three days.
I like the idea of adding financial incentive to stick to habits etc, but i would be uncomfortable with having to deposit money, why not just take a CC and charge it if I break the contract?
also: what prevents me from just lying about whether I did the thing I promised to do?
The verification system is not fool proof. If you put some effort into forging proof you will succeed. However, I do not believe most people who willingly sign up for this would do that.
We try to offer much more human support. Such as daily texts and manual verification of goals instead of just pulling data from an API.
If people value this at $12/mo, that's great. It has no use for me, and will likely detract many from joining. When Beeminder raised their rates from $4/mo to $8/mo, they put in all kinds of mitigations for the customer:
1. Not charged if you don't have any active goals.
2. If you fall off track and have to pay an amount, they deduct that from the monthly cost.
The key is to make it easy for people to sign up.
Also, anecdotally, the majority of people will fail the first time round. My first stint with Beeminder was mostly a failure and I stopped using it for a few years. Then I came back to it with the lessons learned and use it much better now. If it cost me $20/mo, I'd probably never have returned to it.
I bet many people failed trying services like beeminder. The stakes are high. If it works, the upside is huge. If If doesn't, just a couple dozen dollars lost. Experimenting is a no brainer.
If it works, 12 or 20 dollars/mo is ridiculously cheap.
I'd pay $200/mo if it works and helps me achieve more in less time. Many would be able to recoup this investment in one or two productive days...
Think of fitness programs. Many would pay $200 per month for one that works. But are they willing to pay that much for each one they try till they find the one that works? The data is clear that they don't.
There is little innovation in this particular offering. Why go with this service vs other ones?
- Suppose you have a project worth $10,000 to you in some intangible form if successful, with a 20% chance of success. You use a penalty site to pay $2,000 if you make no progress. You set this high enough to put some non-productive entertainment out of your budget. Your hope is that when evaluating what you want to do, entertainment goes from being "$20" to "$20 plus $2,000 penalty". In your thinking, this promotes work on the project! You will not actually have to pay the penalty, since you intend to work on the project. You hope to influence yourself to increase your happiness by an intangible $2,000 (expected value of $10k * 20%) for free, by manually pricing entertainment out of your budget.
- What happens if another project is worth $500 billion to you in some intangible non-monetary form, for sure? You definitely need to do that now. You are out the $2,000 if you don't also do something toward the first project, though. Thus, the penalty which had been intended to keep you from goofing off becomes an extra burden also on something worth an intangible $500 billion to your happiness. The "here's your incentive to be happy and productive" becomes: "here's your penalty for being hyper happy and productive" (on a new, temporarily very valuable project.) Clearly a misalignment of incentives: an unintended consequence.
- Note that if you are independently rich this contract could still help you make some progress! Suppose you committed to pay $2,000 as a penalty for stopping work, but stopped work since you have something guaranteed to give you $500b in intangible happiness. Now it is strictly better to hire someone such as an intern or assistant and pay them anything less than $2,000 as long as this counts as progress and avoids tripping the penalty. i.e. a loss of $1900 paid to an assistant (counting as some marginal progress) is strictly better than a penalty of $2000 (and zero progress).
- Could this explain why rich people hire personal assistants and project managers? It is an automatic penalty: once the assistant / project manager is on staff their salary goes out the window. You might as well use them to do what you, as a rich person who can hire personal assistants and project managers, want to get done.
Is their behavior of hiring assistants and project managers why rich people get so much done?
If so, the moral of the story may be to set aside $2000 to be handed over to project managers you deploy strategically on any project you want done.
If it works for wealthy people, it could work for you - if you pay the cash for it. While disincentives could be nice, as the saying goes, you have to spend money to make money.
A lot of times people start working on something new and for the first few days they have enough motivation to stick with it. But when that disappears a lot of people just quit. They don't stick with the new activity long enough for the next surge of internal motivation.
We believe this service can help people grind it out for a week or two until they get a surge of internal motivation and no longer need us.
I don't have that muscle when it comes to "internal motivation", and decades of floundering have not particularly succeeded in developing it.
The right external motivation - for me, most typically, something along the lines of not wanting to let down the people who are depending upon me in a reasonable manner - means I can absolutely slay it when it comes to getting things done in a 9-5 work environment, and rather than being soul crushing, it's a relief that I can contribute value. I might grumble a bit at the start of my mornings, but getting into the grove of work quickly distracts me from said grumbling. johnthewise's experience is far from universal.
Precommitment in the form of money laden goalposts and checkpoints alone aren't super effective for me, but they do accomplish something.
> Why would you grind out something you found you don't want to do
Because it will be valuable enough to have it done, to be worth it in the long run. My natural internal motivation is terribly shortsighted - to the point that I'll procrastinate on getting myself food when I'm only a little hungry, because cooking, walking, driving, or even ordering sounds like a bother and a chore. Does spending an extra hour or three hungry improve my day overall? It does not.
It's 10AM, I've skipped breakfast, and I'm rather hungry for lunch. My natural instinct is to spend another few hours doomscrolling reddit or HN or otherwise making not particularly good use of my time, even when it comes to the explicit goal of leisure or relaxation. But, instead, I'm going to hunt down some socks, shoes, keys, wallet, sunglasses, mask, jacket, and go out into the beautiful sunny day that I've been hiding away from, and go grab some delicious food I've been looking forward to all week, and improve my day in the process.
And I will grumble slightly along the way, because among other injustices, I will have to "get up".
Motivation is the why of what you are doing, inspiration is the Eye of the Tiger montage when you are doing something that seems to go well.
Your motivation for brushing your teeth may for example be to avoid a trip to the dentist.
I've been down this rabbit role trying to find my inner motivation for half a decade already. I've tried everything, from recreational to prescription drugs, routine, exercise, nutrition changes, therapy, even became a parent. Nothing works consistently.
So when I find myself unable to be motivated, I just stack techniques as much as I can. I have a whole toolbox of maneuvers and mechanisms to achieve whatever I have to without any inner motivation.
It's the best way of coping with life I've found up until this point.
Maybe highly internally motivated people won’t understand this, but others will benefit?
That attitude probably works if it’s some sort of leisure activity, but someone who struggles to do routine, necessary tasks might not want to just give up on them.
The sketch from the mentioned movie is a dark satire. It lampoons the kind of pseudo-logical thinking which simplifies problems by externalizing responsibility for our actions to external entities. Yet it is only when that external entity reflects the consequences of our action back on us that there is a chance we alter our behavior. However, once externalized we lose control of the process and in some sense become a slave to it.
I feel that dystopian sketch is a satire directly aimed at this kind of application.