aroc

In the early days of Amazon they kept an empty seat in meetings to represent “the voice of the customer”, that’s how hardcore they were about it.

We created this course to help people understand how to do it right, so they can start to have more confidence in their data and leverage it more often when making product and business decisions.

We’d love to answer any questions and hear any feedback, including what you’ve found to be the hardest part of instrumenting product analytics on your team.

Thanks so much!

A way to motivate people (including myself) to exercise with a chat bot that tracks your progress.

Originally built it to track how often I worked out, and if I didn't, what the reason was and have that reported back to me regularly. Now I have a bunch of people using it, but as you can imagine, makes me zero dollars. Well, technically it costs me money so it makes me negative dollars.

If anyone has seen a service that does this, I'd love for you to share it here!

One one hand, the bot is easy to get started with: Almost everyone already has the software (assuming Jumper works on multiple chat platforms) to get started right away with very little friction or commitment (no "signup" required).

On the other hand, once you are started - the chatbot interface is certainly higher friction than a traditional app would be (say, with two big buttons as you suggest).

But the while the app approach is lower friction once you've started, getting people to download and install an app is quite tough. Have you seen the latest data on how many apps the average American downloads in a month? It's zero!!! Crazy eh? So that barrier is one I wanted to avoid.

In the end though, the reason I chose the chat platform and the reason it is the final implementation for Jumper is that I've been super interested in the power of conversational interfaces and their ability to change human perception. Don't get me wrong - the "chatbot" craze is pretty exhausting to me too and I feel most chatbot products/services could have been built in a more traditional interface and have been far more successful. In fact, I built a failed chatbot for analytics not long ago. But when it comes to motivating people to exercise, I think having a conversation with an "exercise buddy" is more likely to get people to exercise. I mean, if I didn't believe that, I would have just used one of the currently available fitness apps and set up simple reminders. Of course, I may be very wrong here haha. But so far it's working!

Maybe another SMS service offers that? If so, I'd certainly consider SMS again.

Ultimately there are no magic bullets, you have to do the exercise. And that's the idea with Jumper - motivating you to get out there every single day and get some exercise.

Is there another chat platform you'd prefer to use? Slack? Google Hangouts? Telegram?

I actually started out on SMS with Twilio! I switched to Facebook Messenger simply because it was starting to get expensive and I really started to miss the niceties of using a proper chat platform: thing like predictable message delivery, getting someone's first name without asking, and easy/free image embedding.

I'm going to try and do Google Hangouts and Slack next - unless someone has other good ideas for platforms to support?

Example: My girlfriend joked recently, after starting to exercise a lot more after a short hiatus, that she was "rekindling her relationship with Jumper." I found that statement pretty deep - that's not something she would have said about a standard exercise app (I think?).

Having "robots", whether chat bots or something else, look at your data and make suggestions on how to improve is something I find super interesting. One for your finances certainly is a n interesting idea.

I know, it's pretty basic. With the amazing exercise apps and services out there, what use is a silly little bot like this? I can't really give you a solid answer - but I will say it's absolutely helped me exercise significantly more than I had before. The daily reminder in the morning gets me in the mindset of wanting to do something active each day.

Let me know what you think. :)