Archive for 2012

Destroy All!

Sunday, September 30th, 2012
Destroy All!

Bethany and I woke up at 7am on March 7th to a text message from Jill that some graphs seemed to be fubar. Panic ensued as we hacked away nonstop till 5pm or so, never getting dressed or leaving the house. What was the problem? The night before we had run a seemingly innocuous... »

Gmail Zero: Beeminding Your Inbox

Saturday, September 22nd, 2012
Gmail Zero: Beeminding Your Inbox

UPDATE 2015: Big improvements to GmailZero! UPDATE 2019: More changes to GmailZero! Two years ago, when I still had a day job and Beeminder was just a »

Failing your Goals with Beeminder

Thursday, September 13th, 2012
Failing your Goals with Beeminder

This is a guest post by Paul Fenwick (@pjf), founder of Perl Training Australia and internationally acclaimed public speaker and expert on mindhacks. We’re exceedingly proud to have his endorsement, which, belying the title, really is an endorsement! In point of disclosure, Paul is a... »

Beeminder API

Wednesday, September 5th, 2012
Beeminder API

We’re delighted to announce that the Beeminder API is now open to the public! Before you dive into the full documentation, let’s start with a taste of this beeliciousness. First, grab your personal auth token from beeminder.com/api/v1/auth_token.json. Let’s pretend it’s TOOLEGIT. You can now add a data point to your graph... »

Beeminder is S.M.A.R.T., Overcomes Bias

Thursday, August 23rd, 2012
Beeminder is S.M.A.R.T., Overcomes Bias

Katja Grace, long praised by economists and now collaborating with one since joining Robin Hanson’s OvercomingBias blog, just wrote a pretty amazing article about how much Beeminder improves her life. She made several important points, one of which is particularly reblogworthy, especially if we take the liberty of rephrasing it like... »

Perverse Incentives and the Paradox of Beeminder’s Sting

Sunday, August 19th, 2012
Perverse Incentives and the Paradox of Beeminder’s Sting

People often complain about Beeminder’s perverse incentives. We started to address that at the end of our recent blog post comparing ourselves to GymPact: It seems that from the perspective of those paying us, Beeminder is providing a ton of value and a ton of motivation and the occasional cost of derailment... »

Beeminder: We Use That; or, WeUseThat: Beeminder

Thursday, August 9th, 2012
Beeminder: We Use That; or, WeUseThat: Beeminder

We were interviewed by WeUseThat today. Here’s what we said! We are Daniel Reeves and Bethany Soule, co-founders of Beeminder. We make people more awesome via the threat of taking their money. Specifically, we plot... »

GymPact vs Beeminder

Wednesday, August 1st, 2012
GymPact vs Beeminder

If we were nervous about our competitors — and we’re not — we might be most nervous about GymPact. GymPact is currently an iPhone app (UPDATE: Android as well now) that pays you money for going to the... »

Synonyms for Self-Binding

Saturday, July 21st, 2012
Synonyms for Self-Binding

We’ve been collecting a list of synonyms for the crazy lifehack that sites like Beeminder facilitate. In addition to us being shameless SEO-whores, it seems like this list could be genuinely useful for humans, especially the kind of humans who read the Beeminder Blog. Here’s how... »

Case Study: Triathlon Training

Monday, July 9th, 2012
Case Study: Triathlon Training

The Beeminder founders completed the NYC Triathlon yesterday. I was nearly twice as fast as Danny in the swim — 1.5 km down the Hudson — but he took those 15 minutes back out of me on the 40 km bike course. Danny was hilariously lopsided. There were only a few people in his... »