Beeminder vs StickK
In Beeminder's current pricing scheme -- http://bmndr.com/money -- Beeminder only gets paid if you fail. In other words, you create a commitment contract that causes you to automatically be charged if you deviate from your Yellow Brick Road.
StickK.com originally envisioned being the beneficiary of people's commitment contracts but found that people would not go for that. That should certainly give us pause. But we're a lot different than StickK. I think the exponential fee schedule makes a big difference, for example. In addition to removing the difficult choice about how much to risk, it makes it feel more reasonable for Beeminder to be the beneficiary. You're starting with a small amount at risk after you've already gotten value out of Beeminder. (That could change if you climb up the fee schedule very far though so we need to keep thinking about options for specifying other beneficiaries, like StickK does.)
Another difference: I think we're fundamentally providing more value than StickK because of the pretty graphs and storing your data -- another justification for us being the beneficiary of the contracts. Maybe the incentives still feel really screwy, but I don't think they actually are. Everything we've done has been with the objective of making people succeed and we'd have to be very myopic for it to be
otherwise.
PS: There's more on Beeminder vs StickK on the Beeminder blog: http://blog.beeminder.com/stickk
In Beeminder's current pricing scheme -- http://bmndr.com/money -- Beeminder only gets paid if you fail. In other words, you create a commitment contract that causes you to automatically be charged if you deviate from your Yellow Brick Road.
StickK.com originally envisioned being the beneficiary of people's commitment contracts but found that people would not go for that. That should certainly give us pause. But we're a lot different than StickK. I think the exponential fee schedule makes a big difference, for example. In addition to removing the difficult choice about how much to risk, it makes it feel more reasonable for Beeminder to be the beneficiary. You're starting with a small amount at risk after you've already gotten value out of Beeminder. (That could change if you climb up the fee schedule very far though so we need to keep thinking about options for specifying other beneficiaries, like StickK does.)
Another difference: I think we're fundamentally providing more value than StickK because of the pretty graphs and storing your data -- another justification for us being the beneficiary of the contracts. Maybe the incentives still feel really screwy, but I don't think they actually are. Everything we've done has been with the objective of making people succeed and we'd have to be very myopic for it to be
otherwise.
PS: There's more on Beeminder vs StickK on the Beeminder blog: http://blog.beeminder.com/stickk
View 5 previous comments
Thanks James! Another way to think of this is that, yes, the incentives are quite misaligned as far as purely rational people go. But akratics are purposely putting themselves into this seemingly-crazy position where we charge them money for failing at their goal.
We've been talking about widening the appeal and letting users choose: pay up if you go off the road, or pay up only if you stay on it. The latter might make a lot more sense for non-akratics. It's like a satisfaction guarantee: We'll get you to the end of your yellow brick road or your money back!Sep 7, 2011
I think the hard part is that when you give your credit card info (or other payment info) it feels like you're paying money, you're losing money, and this is before you've had the 2nd chance to succeed. People don't want to pay when they don't yet feel promising about their success. Perhaps there's a way the money could be more in limbo somehow, even how it's represented visually to the user. I think their impression of who has the money, where it is, when exactly it will be lost or gained back is important.Sep 9, 2011
AJ, but you've had the 1st chance to succeed! In theory that means getting value out of Beeminder before giving credit card info. But it sounds like you might prefer the opposite scheme to what we're currently doing, where you pay only if you actually make it to the end of your yellow brick road. It's like Choose The Incentives: do you want to incentivize your own future self or do you want Beeminder to be the one incentivized to coax you along that yellow brick road?Sep 9, 2011
I guess I'm more cynical about the sense of value that people will experience after their first failure. I could be misunderstanding, but I think there's very little about that first failure that will convince users that paying up will make a difference. It's like losing a new game and making the player want to play again, but with higher stakes. This payment structure asks people, after they've failed, to have the foresight that paying up will help them reach their goal, but we already know that people are, almost as a rule, pretty bad at having that insight. People normally don't set up these kind of contracts for themselves. Isn't that one part of what what could make Beeminder unique, that it understands that problem?
I think the question is, how do you make putting up money attractive to most people so they can go through with it and see how it works? If your goal is to get a lot of people to try the service (ultimately) then I think you'll need to find a way to make putting up your money feel promising. (I actually like imagining a version of Beeminder where you are given a tiny amount of money initially and it's yours to lose. But you don't lose it, cause you're driven to keep your loot, then you start putting up your own money once you see that it works. But I'm sure you have information about the difference between losing your own money versus losing money that's not yours, so maybe that's not as powerful as I'd imagine it would be.)
So I guess I prefer the latter in your Choose the Incentives, I want Beeminder to be incentivized to coax me along that road, however, to me that incentivization (is that a word?) means finding more attractive ways to ask me to put up money, persuading me, knowing that if that can be accomplished then I will reap the rewards.Sep 23, 2011
Jan 4, 2015
Fixed those links; thank you!Feb 4, 2015