slucaskim

Show HN: Challenge your friends to anything. The catch: you put $$ on the line

Posted by slucaskim on Tuesday October 29, 2024 @09:27AM
from the show-hn dept.

Hey everyone, I built this IRL game where you can challenge a small group of friends to anything that requires consistency. Ex) exercising, meditating, reading, studying, etc. You can define your own rules and everyone “checks in” with photo uploads to prove their progress. The catch is that everyone pays money into a pot to join. Then at the end, only the people who succeed at the challenge...

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Re:Show HN: An app that takes your money if you don't reach your goals on Friday April 19, 2024 @03:20PM (#40090949)

Really interesting point. But so true

Re:Show HN: Shepherd 3.0 – Like wandering the aisles of your favorite ... on Friday April 19, 2024 @01:38PM (#40089750)

I absolutely love your domain!

Re:Show HN: An app that takes your money if you don't reach your goals on Friday April 19, 2024 @11:21AM (#40087948)

So your idea is perfect if you want to do a challenge by yourself, and is something we're definitely considering adding in the future! Because in our model, a challenge needs at least 2 people. So if we want to support a single person challenge in the future, we'd want to implement something like giving away to charity or something else, exactly like you said!

Re:Show HN: An app that takes your money if you don't reach your goals on Friday April 19, 2024 @11:12AM (#40087816)

You might be right. But for now, I think we want to intentionally leave it constrained, and only add bigger groups later down the line when there's more demand. We want to instill that small group vibe as much as possible for now

Re:Show HN: An app that takes your money if you don't reach your goals on Friday April 19, 2024 @11:10AM (#40087791)

The daily check ins require a photo upload. Of course people can cheat by uploading non-legitimate photos, or just lie, but for now we are maintaining the honor-system approach. We think this will work (and its working in the challenges we're currently running with people we don't know!) because the challenges are with small groups of people. If the groups were huge then it'd be way easier to blend in and cheat, but with smaller groups where you're building the connections, we hope that people find it less motivating to cheat.

Also, if we keep getting users, we will definitely keep improving the cheating detection mechanisms (using AI and other logic), and also adding features like reporting users, reputation scores, etc.!

Re:Show HN: An app that takes your money if you don't reach your goals on Friday April 19, 2024 @10:35AM (#40087352)

I love that summary! I might use that later in some marketing material ;)

Re:Show HN: An app that takes your money if you don't reach your goals on Friday April 19, 2024 @09:12AM (#40086398)

Great question! We thought hard about this and decided that the best way is to split it evenly if everyone loses. So, basically the same outcome as if everyone won. It seems a bit backwards, but this makes sure incentives are as balanced as possible - the creator of the challenge should avoid making the challenge impossible

Re:Show HN: An app that takes your money if you don't reach your goals on Friday April 19, 2024 @09:09AM (#40086369)

Yes! It's up to the creator of the challenge to make it public or private.

Re:Show HN: An app that takes your money if you don't reach your goals on Thursday April 18, 2024 @09:53PM (#40082726)

The users split it between them! We do charge a small transaction fee, but we'll never take the buy-in amount itself. So for example, if a challenge is $100 to join, and 5 people join ($500 pot) but only 2 people survive, then the users will get $250 each (everyone will pay $5 participation fee to join).

We purposefully limited the group size to max 5 people, as we wanted to keep it small so that real connections are made and people are less likely to lie (just like you said).

And there's the option of letting anyone join (people you don't know), but since the group size is small we're counting on people actually building that genuine connection through a common mission.

A really cool outcome that we envision is that a bunch local people meet through this app on a challenge, then once complete, they meet up for drinks and hang out.

Show HN: An app that takes your money if you don't reach your goals

Posted by slucaskim on Thursday April 18, 2024 @07:02PM
from the show-hn dept.

https://goaliemvmt.com/

My wife and I just launched this app because we had so much fun with a fitness challenge we did we some friends recently where everyone put in $100 and defined their goals, then only the people who met their goals split the pot. It made us realize there's really no better motivator than money.It's better on mobile screens right now as we just designed for mobile screens for now. And we did...

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