Show HN: Texmote helps people quit bad habits with fun motivational messages | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Texmote helps people quit bad habits with fun motivational messages

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www.texmote.com This is a fun experiment that Karunjay and I have started for people who have trouble quitting bad habits (including us :P). Quite often, the only thing we need is a little bit of motivation & frequent pep talks. So this is exactly what we've done, allowing people to enroll themselves & receive motovational emails/smses to quit their bad habits & also allowing people to enroll their loved ones to quit their bad habits. Right now, we only plan crowd source all motivation messages, but soon we might have some experts on board. What do you guys think? Also, please do share & comment! Cheers! (P.S. This service is currently available only in India)

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Hi Chethan,

Here's some hopefully constructive feedback for you:

- The alturl link under "news" leads to a broken page.

- An example "fun motiviational message" might be helpul. As it stands the reader doesn't really know what they are signing up to recieve.

- There are an intimdating number of form elements (text input boxes, etc.) on the home page.

- Your page forces horizontal scrolling on my 1024-pixel-wide netbook (few other sites do).

- You have a lot of blue text that is styled like links but aren't links.

- There is no privacy policy on the site. You're asking people to give a name/email/phone-number, possibly two, and then to associate that information with "bad habits" and in at least one case, possibly illegal activity. I'm not sure why anyone would give that kind of data to a one-page web site in the first place, but I certainly wouldn't want to do that on a one-page web site with no identifiying information or legal/TOU/privacy information beyond "Copyright 2012 <domain-name>".

- For what it is worth the spelling "Enrol" (as opposed to "Enroll") looks odd to this America-English speaker, but the dictionary assures me that's a perfectly acceptable spelling. I did see that you are targeting India, maybe "enroll" seems just as odd to that audience as "enrol" does to me.

Also, I'll second the notion that encouraging folks to sign someone else up for this service is a terrible idea, especially this early in your product development cycle.

@rodw: This is exactly the kind of feedback that we needed. Thanks for that! We will definitely try to work on most of points that you've raised & try to address that. Build Iterate Build Iterate it isss! :)

My initial reaction is that very little good can come of allowing someone to sign someone else up for these reminders. The potential for abuse is high, and even in the intended use-case I don't see folks being all that pleased.

noahth: Im assuming people love suspense. A message like this "Hello X, Someone close to you wants you to quit smoking. You'll know who it is after 1 week of you quitting you habit!" should only make them curious rather than being displeased. Worse case, they could simply unsubscribe & forget ALL ABOUT IT! fair enough?

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