dreeves

24 ms·

181.
by dreeves 13y ago
Ooh, hey, thanks for pointing out Beeminder! We often have users tell us it's great for people with ADHD, and we have some thoughts on the cheating problem you mention: http://blog.beeminder.com/cheating
182.
by dreeves 13y ago
I'd bet that the strategy of always picking the favorites is about the best you can do.
183.
by dreeves 13y ago
From http://messymatters.com/the-perfect-bracket/ : "accounting for team strength, the chance that each of the 63 tournament games is won by the favored team is a mere 1 in 70 billion". Which implies an expec
184.
by dreeves 13y ago
Agreed, Draft is super slick. (And shameless plug: Draft integrates with Beeminder! http://beeminder.com/draft )
185.
1000 Days of User-Visible Improvements(messymatters.com)
1 points by dreeves 13y ago|0 comments
186.
by dreeves 13y ago
Well said! My startup, Beeminder, actually implements auto-canceling subscriptions. I've been trying to convince other startups to do the same: http://blog.beeminder.com/autocancel Previous Hacker News discussion here:
187.
by dreeves 13y ago
In related research, the Filter Bubble problem itself is exaggerated: http://messymatters.com/bubble
188.
by dreeves 13y ago
I'd say, yes, the value is almost as high, because it's not about the changes themselves (many of our "visible improvements" are bugfixes that only happen in weird cases) but about showing that you're constantly imp
189.
by dreeves 13y ago
Great question! It's often been the case that we're spending most of our time on more substantial stuff, and drumming up some little UVI at the end of the day just to keep that graph happy. There were times, early on, when it felt
190.
by dreeves 13y ago
Post author here. We're quite serious that our startup would have failed if not for hard-committing to gradual daily improvement like this. The article quotes Paul Graham a lot, who basically claims (in How Not to Die) that if you do s
191.
1000 Days of User-Visible Improvements(blog.beeminder.com)
25 points by dreeves 13y ago|9 comments
192.
by dreeves 13y ago
I'm often asked for recommendations on how to learn to program and this will probably be perfect for nerdier types (but looks like it assumes zero initial knowledge, which is awesome). What other things do folks recommend? Coursera? Co
193.
by dreeves 13y ago
I'm confused but I think I mean it the other way around: most users will pay Beeminder occasionally. There are some exceptional people who never ever fail who will never pay Beeminder (and those people apparently didn't really nee
194.
by dreeves 13y ago
My understanding is that Indinero [ http://indinero.com ] is a superset of this, with a focus on accounting. Or are the two complementary?
195.
by dreeves 13y ago
We do have safeguards for that sort of thing. Like there's a deadman's switch for if you disappear completely. Similar to our auto-canceling subscriptions for our premium plans: http://blog.beeminder.com/autocancel
196.
by dreeves 13y ago
Wow, your notes on Nick Winter's book are amazing! I should note (for others) that the book is also fun and fascinating to read even aside from the technical content and concrete advice which you've expertly distilled. I'm fa
197.
by dreeves 13y ago
The way we think of it is that Beeminder is a goal tracking service that you pay for, except that if you never need Beeminder's kick in the pants -- if you keep all your datapoints on the yellow brick road -- then the fee is waived.
198.
by dreeves 13y ago
It's really important for us to understand this reaction, so I'm glad you expressed it! It does seem super perverse on first blush. We've written about this a lot, actually. Eg, http://blog.beeminder.com/perve
199.
by dreeves 13y ago
Thank you so much for the kind words about Beeminder! (I'm a cofounder.) We do indeed view it as a more flexible version of the Seinfeld hack. I agree that the Seinfeld hack (aka, "don't break the chain") can be incredib
200.
by dreeves 13y ago
Highly recommended. Beeminder implements it too (inspired by the Hacker's Diet).
201.
Premium vs Freemium vs Subscription - Lattice Labs Blog(latticelabs.com)
1 points by dreeves 13y ago|0 comments
202.
by dreeves 13y ago
Summary: Y'know how online polls are unscientific? You can science that shit up with a statistical technique affectionately called "Mr. P". Article gives a famous example of a magazine in 1936 doing a massive poll of its read
203.
Forecasting Elections with Dirty Data(messymatters.com)
2 points by dreeves 13y ago|1 comments
204.
by dreeves 13y ago
I see someone suggested Beeminder in the comments of your post (thank you, whoever that was!). Also by the creators of Beeminder (me and Bethany Soule) is TagTime, which is related to your idea of periodic prompts. We call TagTime "sto
205.
by dreeves 13y ago
Beeminder got bitten pretty bad by this yesterday, as one of the "small number of customers" affected by the duplicates. Several users let us know they were seeing quadruplicates. Oy. We're still huge Mailgun fans though, and
206.
Google Glass(es)(messymatters.com)
2 points by dreeves 13y ago|0 comments
207.
by dreeves 13y ago
(First, thank you so much for the Beeminder plug! This is a big day for us, thanks to you!) I like just forcing blog posts to happen on a reasonable schedule. Like tomorrow is an "emergency blog post day" for us on http:/&#x
208.
by dreeves 13y ago
By the "best-friend heuristic", as we say in the post, you should totally go with the kisses. (I'm pretty sure we'd not have batted an eye at that. :) We're talking about emoticons, right?)
209.
by dreeves 13y ago
Ha, yeah, that's the biggest secret to amazing customer support, for as long as you can handle it: have the founders do it. We have a few non-founders helping us with support but they're quick to say "let me pull in the hacke
210.
by dreeves 13y ago
Author here. Quick summary of the customer support lessons discussed in the post: 1. Be (really) informal 2. Be grateful (even to jerks) 3. Don't just offer help, ask for it 4. Reply immediately 5. Avoid going dow

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