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Dog Food Renewed

Sunday, November 13, 2011
By bsoule

That's right, this is a dog dressed as a bee -- got a problem with that?

Half a year ago, with Beeminder in its infancy, we committed to averaging one User-Visible Improvement (UVI) to Beeminder every day for at least the next six months. That contract has been insanely valuable to us.

Beeminder guarantees one user-visible improvement per day

“Losing momentum is the most dangerous thing that can happen to a startup.”

Lately it’s been a no-brainer (though still really nice to log our progress publicly) but there was a period when we were scraping the bottom of the barrel for UVIs in order to stay on the yellow brick road. It’s clear they wouldn’t have happened without that kick in the pants and losing momentum like that is the most dangerous thing that can happen to a startup. In fact, we were inspired to make our UVI commitment by Paul Graham’s essay “How Not to Die” in which he suggests that if you could just fully commit yourself to not giving up, your chances of success would be 90%. “I’m not kidding,” he adds.

We’ll take those odds. So we’re hereby renewing that contract and making some others public as well…

New dog food! Now with more fiber for regularity!

Here’s how we’re bettering Beeminder. If we go off track on any of the following graphs, the first user to claim the prize in the comments of this blog post, will get the spoils. [1]

beeminder.com/meta/uvi ($1000)

See above. We do whatever Paul Graham says to do to eleven.

beeminder.com/meta/blog ($270)

We hope you like our blog, because you’re getting more of it. We think it keeps us honest, or at least it keeps us talking. Hopefully our commitment to publish (and our sparkling wit and literary genius) will keep you reading.

bmndr.com/b/meta ($30), bmndr.com/d/meta ($90), bmndr.com/mo/meta ($10)

D/meta, B/meta, and Mo/meta are our graphs of how much time each of us spend building Beeminder. We get a ton of value out of beeminding our Beeminder building, and now we’re getting even more(less) value out of it by promising the spoils to you (instead of to ourselves). We had an incentive problem there that this solves neatly.

UPDATE: Melanie paid $5 to Molybdenumblue on 2011 Dec 30 for beeminder.com/mo/meta. She now has $10 at risk on that goal.

Footnotes

[1] Fine print: The first person to leave a comment here outing us as officially off the yellow brick road, gets the money. If there’s a red dot below the road that means we have until midnight eastern that night to reach the bottom edge or we cough it up. The usual Beeminder rules apply: any changes are allowed as long as they are outside the Akrasia Horizon of one week. The money shown as “pledged” is the amount you’ll win. This varies among the above graphs.

UPDATE: After a ridiculous close call, we’re updating the fine print! We were in Portland on an emergency UVI day, did the UVI, then had to run off to various Important Things all day. We got back around 9pm, which OMG! is midnight eastern time! And we hadn’t yet tweeted the UVI! So there were some number of minutes when you totally could’ve called us out on that $1000. (And, for the record, we were absolutely ready to pay it if you had.) We like having stricter rules for these dog food contracts, but from now on let’s keep it more in line with the rules you all are subject to: you have to wait for the actual skull and crossbones on the graph to claim the money. And we have till midnight local time, wherever we happen to be, to actually get the work done. It’s too easy to forget about time zone differences otherwise.

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Posted 2011 Nov 13. RSS feed for comments on this post. Please leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

  • Satadru

    You’re off the road!

  • sat

    Just kidding.  I’m enjoying following your progress.

  • http://beeminder.com Daniel Reeves

    Ridiculously, my heart actually raced a little when I saw your first comment! As you can see from our revenue graphs, we’re not quite to the point where $1000 is pocket change. In fact, we’re just now about to cross $1000 as the total amount pledged on Beeminder. Not including from ourselves, of course. And not counting things like this from our private beta period: http://blog.beeminder.com/gym

  • http://blog.oddhead.com/?=crumb Dave

    are the beeminder revenue graphs public? (insatiably curious, but understood & no worries if not)

  • http://beeminder.com Daniel Reeves

    I guess we’re too shy to link to them here but if you click around you can find them. As you’ll see (if you’re sufficiently curious) it’s just a trickle, but the fact that it seems to be a *steady* trickle has us hopeful that it’s just a matter of time before we turn it into a stream.

    Per some famous advice from Paul Buchheit, we’re focusing first on making a small number of users insanely happy.

  • Anonymous

    Good strategy. I may have to start doing the “user visible improvements” thing with the games I make.

  • Melanie

    Point us to your graph if you make one!

  • jmccoh

    Update your Blog Post graph before someone else tries to claim your 270 bucks. Luckily I’m a nice guy and I’ll just donate it back to you for the use of your great site. Never mind

  • http://beeminder.com Daniel Reeves

    Donate it back? That defeats the whole point of a commitment device! (Imagine me yelling this in a german accent like Dr Strangelove explaining about doomsday devices.)

  • jmccoh

    Then get rid of that donate button. Well that’s really two totally different topics. Great site by the way – keep evolving it.

  • Molybdenumblue

    bmndr.com/mo/meta is off the road and I claim my $5.
     

  • http://beeminder.com Daniel Reeves

    Paid! (via paypal; let me know if something else is easier; I think WePay is quite good, for example)

  • http://beeminder.com Melanie Reeves Wicklow

    Good catch!  You probably noticed I was cutting it really close for a bit there.  Only 17 minutes would have put me on the road last night, but I literally couldn’t keep my eyes open to do it.  You earned my $5!

  • http://facebook.com/paul.fenwick Paul

    I’m not sure what timezone https://www.beeminder.com/mo/meta is in.  I expected NYC time, which means by my clock Melanie is off the road.  However if Melanie is in another timezone, or I’m reading the graph correctly, then there might be a few hours left. :)

  • http://beeminder.com Daniel Reeves

    Hmm, the fine print does say NYC time, though Melanie’s time zone is California (pacific), which would give her till 3am eastern.

    Wait, as I was typing that she showed up online and started responding to customer emails. :)

    I’m not sure what’s most fair given the fine print there. If anyone wants to chime in with an opinion, we’ll definitely listen.

    My inclination is to go with her own time zone and maybe even update the fine print such that the same rules apply to us as to Beeminder users: namely, we have at least till 3am in our own time zone to get the data entered. In other words, you wouldn’t be able to claim our money until there’s a skull and crossbones on the graph.

    To keep it nailed down in the meantime though, let’s say this: the current fine print stands (you can claim the money at midnight NYC) except for Melanie, who has till midnight pacific.

    That’s clearly what she thought the rule was and we have a policy of leniency in the case of legitimate confusion about the rules.

    Sound good? Now let’s see if Melanie comes in under the wire in 90 minutes…

  • http://facebook.com/paul.fenwick Paul

    Sounds fair to me!  Plus, it gives us a possible improvement for @beemuvi:twitter : Show the time in the user’s timezone on each beeminder graph.  :)

  • jmccoh

    Is she costing you guys money or is she paying her own way when she’s a slacker?

  • http://beeminder.com Daniel Reeves

    She coughs it up herself. Wouldn’t be much of a commitment device if Beeminder paid it for her! :) Melanie is my sister, btw.

  • jmccoh

    I guessed you could be related due to the similarity in the names. Further guessed probably your sister and because of which you could be guilted in to taking care of her – like coughing up the cash when she fails to live up to the commitments she makes. I have younger siblings.

  • http://beeminder.com Daniel Reeves

    Check out the update to the fine print. You better not have held back on calling us out that day out of some misguided sense of mercy! :)

  • Paul

    I had actually been checking carefully that day to see if you were going to miss the deadline.  I got busy with my own things, and when I went back to check twitter I realised there was a tiny window during which I could have called it, but figured that since you were back on the road, that window had passed.

    This, boys and girls, is why you should program bots to do all the important things for you. :)

  • Paul

    And no, no sense of mercy here.  I assume that if I don’t call you on the $1000 prize, then someone else will— the same end-result for you folks, but less personal benefit for me. :)

  • Tom loyal

    You appear to be off the road on UVI.

  • Tom L.

    Mea culpa,  I missed the fine print. look forward to seeing the new improvement

  • http://twitter.com/ccmclane ccmclane

    Melanie is off the yellow brick road

  • http://beeminder.com Melanie Reeves Wicklow

    Thanks for paying such close attention!  However, I have until the skull and crossbones actually appear, so I’m in the clear!  I have until midnight pacific (I’m on west coast) to complete my time for today.  Keep checking in case I fall asleep at the computer though, I *am* cutting it close. :-)

  • http://beeminder.com Daniel Reeves

    yeah, for anyone confused by this, note the update to the fine print. btw, the alluded to “day in Portland” and “Important Things all day” was when we came out to interview for Portland Seed Fund, which we just blogged about now that it’s official: http://blog.beeminder.com/beehive 

  • Linda Moss
  • Linda Moss

    (Ah, just read the updated fine print. So the first person to post AFTER MIDNIGHT, if you haven’t updated by then gets it, and mine doesn’t count? Ah, phooey.)

  • Linda Moss

    Oops, didn’t notice it was sorted oldest first, (and thus there were far more recent comments than what I was looking at when I posted.

    Slinking off to go back to working at my OWN job now… =^D

  • http://beeminder.com Daniel Reeves

    We’re delighted that people are paying such close attention! We’re fine with the false alarms. In fact, if you check out the comments from a few months ago you’ll notice that there was a brief window when we would’ve paid up the $1000 if someone had posted a comment.  I’d say at this point there’s less than a 1% chance that you’ll find us off the road at the stroke of midnight tonight. But 1% of $1000 might make it worth your while to make a habit of checking every night. :)

  • Linda Moss

    Looks like you’re still off the road? (But there’s a “-1″ instead of a skull). =^)

  • Linda Moss

    Oh, I see, it’s that you made yesterday’s in the nick of time, and are still under the wire for today. (the -1 thing is confusion. It seems “0″ should be off the road and need to update by midnight; “-1″ should mean you’re past that point. Or maybe that’s just me)

  • http://beeminder.com Daniel Reeves