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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
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