Show HN: An app that takes your money if you don't reach your goals | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: An app that takes your money if you don't reach your goals

goaliemvmt.com

50 pointsslucaskim40 comments

My wife and I just launched this app because we had so much fun with a fitness challenge we did we some friends recently where everyone put in $100 and defined their goals, then only the people who met their goals split the pot. It made us realize there's really no better motivator than money.

It's better on mobile screens right now as we just designed for mobile screens for now. And we did manage to put it up on both app stores - it's low in the ranks but you should be able to search it by "Goalie challenges".

We built it using the leanest tech stack - Ruby on Rails, server-side HTML (no JS), tailwindcss, then packaging it for iOS and Android using pwabuilder!

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I read a research paper recently that basically suggested this approach is even less likely to have you succeed.

Essentially, when you externalize a reward, people are less likely to want to continue doing the thing. I suspect this is similar, but it’s externalizing the loss. If you’re not already invested in succeeding, this isn’t going to change that.

The way I see it, this is not about money but about group validation. By communicating a goal to your peers, one creates external reasons to persevere. I think the money is secondary, just the clientele of this app is easy to reach that way, because they think "no better motivator than money".

The problem is extrinsic motivators (which includes group validation), not money specifically. Extrinsic motivators destroy intrinsic motivation, even when the recipient is highly motivated. I remember reading about a study in Alfie Kohn’s “Punished by Rewards” which describes kindergartners losing interest in coloring (!) after being offered a reward for coloring.

Do you have any recommendations on how to achieve your goals?

This depends on what your specific problems are that are holding you back.

General advice is to start with common techniques .. getting things done, pomodoro, etc.

Building good habits is the best thing you can do, because you no longer need motivation once you have a habit.

Charles Duhigg's "The Power of Habit" is a good place to start with that concept.

Also the people that have the hardest time completing their goals tend to be people with ADD/ADHD and basically every study shows that these people are not motivated by rewards.

Also with an app like this, there are no good controls. The only motivation is not losing your money, so you just fake a victory to prevent any loss.

In fact, if there is anyone not meeting their goals and losing money .. the motivation for many people will be to buy into many challenges and collect free money by faking victories.

I'd be interested in reading more about the studies done on that group! Any particularly interesting ones or places to check?

I've challenged myself to a subscription that'll waste my money if I don't commit to it. Just to see if money can get me off my ass.

After 3 years wasting it, I can confirm that my ass is heavier than money.

Isn't that the gym subscription for a New Year resolution problem?

Do you take the money, or do your users split it between their friends and you take a cut?

The take the money one has been done (Beeminder, and others probably), but sure different flavours are welcome.

The split with friends I haven't seen. That would be pretty cool, especially if you can do it without needing to pay banks a txn fee, or perhaps a tiny one (maybe you take a 5% of profits fee from participents, or similar). Crypto is the other option (!).

The split with friends is great becuase

* People less likely to lie to friends than a SaaS. Which is good for both parties.

* Social motivation and financial motivation.

* If you lose it's like losing a game of poker with mates, not a big deal (as long as you kept the stakes reasonable).

The users split it between them! We do charge a small transaction fee, but we'll never take the buy-in amount itself. So for example, if a challenge is $100 to join, and 5 people join ($500 pot) but only 2 people survive, then the users will get $250 each (everyone will pay $5 participation fee to join).

We purposefully limited the group size to max 5 people, as we wanted to keep it small so that real connections are made and people are less likely to lie (just like you said).

And there's the option of letting anyone join (people you don't know), but since the group size is small we're counting on people actually building that genuine connection through a common mission.

A really cool outcome that we envision is that a bunch local people meet through this app on a challenge, then once complete, they meet up for drinks and hang out.

The group size might be too small. This is something that fits well with a 15/20 person office.

You might be right. But for now, I think we want to intentionally leave it constrained, and only add bigger groups later down the line when there's more demand. We want to instill that small group vibe as much as possible for now

Interesting idea. At first, I thought you could only lose money if you didn't accomplish your goals. But then I realized that money was being shared among the people who joined the same challenge. This mechanism not only disincentivizes not accomplishing your goals but also incentivizes accomplishing your goals.

Also curious about whether there is any form of verification of whether someone accomplished their goal. If not, this could result in bad actors trying to exploit the system by always checking their goals as completed. One potential way of getting rid of exploiters would be to remove the positive reward factor of the game, for example, the money lost by the participants could be sent into verified charity funds instead of being shared among the people who joined the pot.

I also have some doubts about the efficiency of mixing external motivations (in this case losing money or increasing a bit) with internal motivations (the goal itself). But this is another topic for discussion.

Anyway, this is a very interesting idea nonetheless. Good job! :)

People are less motivated by these sorts of systems if they know the money will go to charity because giving to charity feels good. See https://blog.beeminder.com/anticharity

Really interesting point. But so true

I think you are right. In this case, knowing that money will go to a neutral actor instead of a charity might be a better solution. Interesting.

Good essay by the way.

What if the money went to a charity or organization you disagreed with, ex: neo-nazis, etc?

... then the system behind this will be organizing funding for neo-nazis.

That's one of the problems with the concept of "anticharity" conveyed in the essay that costco shared.

Using positive/negative punishment (a thing being taken from you or a bad thing happening to you) can cause more harm than good especially if the harm caused exceeds the benefits obtained from achieving the goal.

Show HN: an app that takes your knee caps if you don’t pay for protection

Sorry, completely unrelated, I know. I just wanted to say it.

Bigger risk, bigger reward

I guess it could be entertaining for people who have so much money they don’t know what to do with it.

I file it under “gambling” category.

What if you get injured? What if something comes up and you won’t have time to achieve a goal? The list goes on and on and on…

I can only see wealthy people with not enough things to worry about in their lives wanting to use it.

I feel like charging fee for it is unethical and borderline scam.

Also, it gives me “solution in search of a problem” vibes.

> What if you get injured? What if something comes up and you won’t have time to achieve a goal? The list goes on and on and on…

This is between friends (maximum 5) so I’m sure the answer is: work it out with your friends.

If I was using this with friends for say, exercising each day, and one guy was in a car accident, I’m confident we’d all give him a pass and return his money.

Sounds like a potential candidate for consensus secret sharing. This one springs to mind: https://pmg.csail.mit.edu/papers/a34-schultz.pdf

This concept of possibly get money for doing fitness activity, lose money if you don't has been tried a couple times but nobody has cracked it that I know of. One used location to see if you had visited the gym that you are a member of.

This seems set as specific individual money pots you can buy into instead of monthly goals as at least one previous app was set on.

Money is the best universal motivator, there are others could be more motivating but to a lot fewer people.

I hope this succeeds and more people accomplish the goals they set.

Great idea and great way to position the incentive. One question, what happens if no one reaches the goal? Where does the money go?

Great question! We thought hard about this and decided that the best way is to split it evenly if everyone loses. So, basically the same outcome as if everyone won. It seems a bit backwards, but this makes sure incentives are as balanced as possible - the creator of the challenge should avoid making the challenge impossible

This is an healthy mix of insane and fun. I love it

I love that summary! I might use that later in some marketing material ;)

Does that mean you can buy your way out of the nonsense that is constantly preached about goals in life?

I am tempted.

I literally thought about such an app today, but with a pot that would go to either (1) to a charity I support or (2) some cause I really despise (more evil)

Doing it with friends in probably much better for accountability.

So your idea is perfect if you want to do a challenge by yourself, and is something we're definitely considering adding in the future! Because in our model, a challenge needs at least 2 people. So if we want to support a single person challenge in the future, we'd want to implement something like giving away to charity or something else, exactly like you said!

I'll probably build this eventually. Let me know if this is open source, I'd be down to implement it. It looks like you're using PHP/Symfony, so this is right down my alley.

I think sending the money lost on funds to charities makes more sense as sharing the money on the pot among the ones who succeed could result in bad actors trying to exploit the system by always checking their goals as completed.

By sending lost money to charities you eliminate the positive reward factor of the game (which is the main incentive for exploiters).

slucaskim: It made us realize there's really no better motivator than money

Gyms: LOL

How can anyone verify the others actually did the thing?

The daily check ins require a photo upload. Of course people can cheat by uploading non-legitimate photos, or just lie, but for now we are maintaining the honor-system approach. We think this will work (and its working in the challenges we're currently running with people we don't know!) because the challenges are with small groups of people. If the groups were huge then it'd be way easier to blend in and cheat, but with smaller groups where you're building the connections, we hope that people find it less motivating to cheat.

Also, if we keep getting users, we will definitely keep improving the cheating detection mechanisms (using AI and other logic), and also adding features like reporting users, reputation scores, etc.!

Are all challenges public? Can anyone join them?

Yes! It's up to the creator of the challenge to make it public or private.

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