Beeminder Home
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... »
Tag Archive
akrasia
akrasia horizon
api
bee-all
best-of
bugs
buzz
case studies
commitment contracts
commitment devices
competition
dog food
economics
FAQ
fitness
food
force majeure
get everything done
guest posts
integrations
lifehacks
mark forster
meta
money
navel-gazing
nerdery
new features
press
productivity porn
PSA
psychology
quantified self
rationality
resolutions
road dial
science
self-binding
soup nazi
startups
stickk
tagtime
tips
trello
weight loss
yellow brick road
The Anti-Magic Principle
Wednesday, May 27th, 2020
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
Friday, February 28th, 2020
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... »
Social Reality And The Canard About Keeping Your Goals To Yourself
Thursday, November 21st, 2019
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... »
Redqueening, Inbox Zero, Backlogs, and Fluid Dynamics
Wednesday, October 23rd, 2019
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 »
Dogfood Binge
Thursday, October 10th, 2019
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... »
The Pareto Dominance Principle for Apps and Websites
Tuesday, July 30th, 2019
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... »
Quantified Self Talk: Tracking My Personal Reliability
Friday, April 12th, 2019
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... »
Derailing Is Not Failing; or, Beeminder Revenue Proportional To User Awesomeness
Saturday, March 2nd, 2019
“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... »
Beeminding With A Physical Button
Thursday, November 15th, 2018
Zachary Jacobi has been beeminding since 2015, when he started using Beeminder (on the recommendation of... »