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...

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

[UPDATE: GymPact (later Pact App) sadly shut down in 2017.] 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 gym, funded by the slackers who failed to...

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 a co-founder of StickK...

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 division slower than him in...

In the beginning of the year we covered our coverage on Quantified Self and Mark Forster’s Getting Things Done blog. There’s been a lot more since then. Here are the highlights

We have a new competitor about to launch: Lift! Their (meta) goal is the same as ours. They want to “eliminate willpower as a factor in achieving goals”. Our approaches, however, are quite opposite. Or at least they have opposite sign. Lift emphasizes in their pre-announcement blog post today that they...

Four score and seventeen days ago, we announced our acceptance into the Portland Seed Fund. Today we are proud to announce that we have graduated. To mark the occasion, here for posterity is our demo pitch, verbatim! Jim Huston and Angela Jackson were phenomenal in putting together an amazing demo day,...

UPDATE 2014: Sadly (for us), Chirpify pivoted away from Twitter-based payments so this post is now obsolete. We will add Paypal support at some point for people who need that payment option (keep bugging us if that’s you!) and we’ve now added direct Twitter integration.   We’re often advised that Beeminder...

This is a guest post by Philip Hellyer who can walk on water and outrun bullets, with the help of Beeminder. He eloquently describes what we think is currently the single biggest pain point (though there are many) with Beeminder right now — how to keep from procrastinating indefinitely on getting back...