2013

Earlier this month some dozens of you got a delightful little email from us like this: this is super embarrassing but there’s a chance you were affected by a bug where we thought we canceled a charge but then it went through anyway. partly as self-punishment we’re just refunding all the charges where that could possibly have happened. so either you’re rightfully getting a refund or you’re getting a random reprieve on a past derailment! either way a refund of $

UPDATE 2013 August: We decided this was so ingenious that we made it fundamental to Beeminder. There’s no longer such a thing as not precommiting to recommit. In other words, goals no longer freeze when you derail. Below is the post in its original form for posterity.   The First Great Beeminder Epiphany...

At the risk of launching a thousand rants from the old neckbeard guard, it’s hard to imagine what writing code was like before git and GitHub came along. GitHub has made it really easy for people to collaborate on projects, and gives you some nifty stats to boot. For some people, those shiny graphs are enough (and if that’s you, by all means, try out tenXer). But if you’re reading this, there’s a good chance that

StickK popularized the idea of the anti-charity as a commitment device. Another [Update: former] Beeminder competitor, Aherk, offers to publish embarrassing photos of you on Facebook to ensure you don’t fall prey to akrasia. Another clever idea — proposed by Jennifer Hamon on Akratics Anonymous —...

My mom recently lost $5,000 to my brother in a commitment contract gone wild. That was started in part as an experiment early in Beeminder’s beta period before we’d thought of things like the exponential pledge schedule. Believe it or not, it was actually a pretty positive outcome: my mom gradually...

[Prescript: Yes, we paid someone $270 because this post was late (see blog.beeminder.com/blogdog). We think it was worth it and hope you’ll agree!] UPDATE 2014-07-17: This post now reflects the current prices. When it was published the prices were: Bee Lite $5/mo, Plan Bee $10/mo, Beemium $25/mo, Beekeeper...

Exciting news about Beeminder today: we’re on the front page of the Wall Street Journal! It’s an interesting little write-up about the Quantified Self movement as “digital mother” — capturing Beeminder’s relationship to Quantified Self beautifully — and features one of our favorite beeminders (Okay,...

If you asked 100 people to fill in the following blank, Family-Feud-style, what would be the most popular answer? “I’ve always wanted to learn ______” In an informal poll of authors of this blog post, the runaway winner was “a new language.” It’s pretty easy to get through “ciao” and “auf wiedersehen,”...

This is crossposted on AndyBrett.com. The third James Bond movie, Goldfinger, opens with an amphibious mission to destroy an illicit chemical processing facility. After emerging from the water and planting the explosives, Bond strips off his drysuit to reveal a perfectly pressed white tuxedo and calmly...

Rule #1 of Beeminder: Things that make staying on the yellow brick road easier make reaching your overall goal harder. There’s no free lunch. Any leniency today will get paid for down the (wait for it) Road. If that sounds counter-intuitive, imagine the extreme case of ultimate leniency where we’re...

It’s been six months since our last crash of ineptitude so it’s time to disabuse you of the notion that we may have gotten our act together since then! The backstory is that we’ve been fortunate enough to have some scaling challenges — mostly due to our ridiculous architecture — so we decided we could...

For a long time I found that I was spending too much time on certain unproductive things and struggled with getting myself to do what I actually wanted to do with my time. The big break came one morning when I noticed that there was a very tight correlation between the things I wanted to stop doing and the traditional Christian concept of

This is a guest post by Nick Winter, cofounder of Skritter and CodeCombat and author of The Motivation Hacker. He also works on Quantified Mind. We’ve mentioned Nick Winter and The Motivation Hacker before, in particular because we were so enamored with Nick’s beeminding of romantic gestures to his...

We’re often praised for our stellar customer support. For the possible benefit of other startups, or anyone else who’s curious, here are our secrets! First, all the usual “customer is always right” stuff is just common sense if you’re genuinely excited about promoting your company and having your users...

The second most puzzling thing about Beeminder, for those who don’t use it, is why people don’t lie to avoid paying us. Here’s why! Beeminder is foremost a Quantified Self tool, so it feels really wrong and counterproductive to falsify your data. People take a lot of pride in their graphs since it’s...

RunKeeper! Now with more running! and cycling! and walking! Beemind all the RunKeeper things! Get it while it is hot! Actually, we’ve had an integration with RunKeeper for over a year now — it was the third autodata source to land on our front page. We’re up to eight now. TagTime was the zeroth , Withings...

UPDATE TEN YEARS LATER: Oh my goodness this is all so ancient now. The things below are still true but probably you’re looking for our help doc on do-less goals, which we keep up to date. First, a point of nominology: We’ve renamed the Set-A-Limit goal type to Do Less. The names “do more” and “do less”...

This post is a random assortment of items and announcements. Normally we use the beemails for that, but (a) it’s an emergency blog post day and (b) we wanted to let you blog readers know that we’re actually sending regular beemails, so if you want more of this kind of thing, bump up your beemail frequency...

SAD TROMBONE UPDATE 2021: Jawbone up and died in 2017 and shut down fully in 2018. This blog post is now of historical interest only. The Jawbone UP was at the top of our list for the next device to add to our ever growing list of integrations. Jawbone recently released the second generation of their...

Tomorrow is the beginning of November, which kicks off National Novel Writing Month. Last year we put together some tools for NaNoWriMo and blogged about it: Beemind Your NaNoWriMo Progress. This year we have some new tools to support beeminding writers. The biggie that we’re really excited about is

UPDATE: A revised and updated version of this article is now on Messy Matters. It’s amazing where one trivial user-visible improvement per day will eventually get you to. We’ve made 1000 user-visible improvements (UVIs) to Beeminder in the last 1000 days. We had to or we’d have owed one of our users...

We released a 2.x version of the Android App in the last couple weeks, and we’re so excited that we just cannot hide it! Things have improved immensely since we officially released our smartphone apps over a year ago and we figured that not only is this latest release worthy of some considerable...

It’s that season again. This time last year, Philip Hellyer urged us to get a jump on our resolutions. This year, we’re proud to have him officially part of the Beeminder team. New Years Resolutions are ridiculous. Your current delusionally euphoric self dictates something for your future self to do....