
Until today Beeminder had a fundamental design flaw that was baked in from literally day one. The first line of code for what would become Beeminder was to draw a line on a graph in Mathematica from a target weight to a goal... »
Until today Beeminder had a fundamental design flaw that was baked in from literally day one. The first line of code for what would become Beeminder was to draw a line on a graph in Mathematica from a target weight to a goal... »
Being a fan of overly provocative titles, I was tempted to title this “If-Statements Considered Harmful”. Meaning that it’s so tempting to add little bits of intelligence to your app to make it do the sensible thing in different circumstances. And that’s usually perfectly correct but the Anti-Magic Principle... »
The startup egg-basket principle is: put all your eggs in one basket. Be laser-focused on the one thing you’re best at. If you’re scrambling for survival, focus only on the one most promising thing for making the startup sustainable. For example, most startups should focus exclusively on their premium plans and not have a free plan. So much... »
It’s now been ten years since the publication of Gollwitzer et al’s paper about, as the internet interpreted it, keeping your goals to yourself. I think I’ve heard variants of “did you hear that science shows that you’re... »
If you’re a fan of Mark Forster (as we certainly are) then this whole post amounts to giving a name — “redqueening” — to step 2 of his »
UPDATE 2021:We’re pausing (most of) these dogfood bounties! We still like them in theory but it turns out we all derail often enough that the logistics of getting money from us to users is more than we can keep up with! We do personally enter our personal credit cards in Beeminder and get charged money like... »
This is part 2 in a 3-part series. Part 1 defined Pareto dominance and Pareto-efficient software. I have some advice that now feels (to me, subjectively) too... »
On 2018-09-22 I gave a talk at the Quantified Self conference. This is that talk. You can also see an actual recording of it. I got a lot of encouragement afterwards... »
“Potentially Paying Customers” We ended the last blog post with what you might think is an unfortunate epithet for new Beeminder users. Being buried at the end of a bunch of nitty-gritty about business reasons for the timing of collecting payment info, approximately zero percent of people noticed it, until we had to go... »
Zachary Jacobi has been beeminding since 2015, when he started using Beeminder (on the recommendation of... »