Launched but no sales. Any feedback?
So I recently launched Habit Challenge (https://habitchallenge.ml) which allows you to pledge money towards creating a new habit. We check in with you daily to see if you did your habit or not, and you lose some money when you don't do it.
I marketed the website mainly on Reddit and got about 100 views so far, but no sales.
The only somewhat useful feedback I've gotten is someone commenting that they aren't sure what the value of this is compared to competitors like Beeminder (https://www.beeminder.com). Maybe this is the problem, though one comment isn't much data.
My main questions are:
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What do you think of the product?
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At what point does my lack of sales mean my solution is invalidated?
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What else should I do to get sales/feedback?
Thanks for all the help!
A little twist: make other people have to pay for their friends.
If I had to pay you $50 if Joe doesn't keep to his habit, you can bet that I'm going to push Joe to get it done. In other words, you're holding a friend's money hostage.
Not only does this help spur network effects ("hey, want to try this habit thing with me—we can put $50 toward each other's exercise habit"), but you'll inevitably get people who are so lazy they won't mind upsetting a friend or two and you'll take your rip off that.
Re: ideas to build sales, it'd be neat to see an anonymized public scoreboard of sorts. So, show how much has been lost/kept over time. Could even hook that into a Twitter/Facebook API to push out updates when that happens. For example, "Joe just lost $100 for not keeping up with his Reading habit. Want to show Joe how it's done? Set up your own challenge on Habit Challenge."
Edit: Also, examples! I'm struggling to think of a good habit to pay you for and it's making me want to put it off until tomorrow. Having a carousel with a title like "Need some habit ideas?" above your signup form may help to nudge folks.
Overall nice work. Good luck with everything!
P.S. Word puns. Habit Rabbit would bring in folks just because it's hilarious :p
Agreed with what you have here, except the carousel bit:
http://shouldiuseacarousel.com/
That would be an interesting variation on things. Although I wonder if people would actually be willing to pay for that? I don't know if I'd pay for my friend to start exercising everyday. Maybe it would be useful as more of a gift, as @BrianJagger mentioned.
I do like the idea of building network effects into the product. Maybe there's a way to build that into the current website as well. You could challenge your friends to use the website or something like that.
A public scoreboard and social proof in general would definitely be effective, though that requires some initial sales which is the main problem here.
And yeah I think adding some habit ideas would be good. Will probably do that soon.
Also, I love Habit Rabbit. Might use that haha.
Thanks for the detailed response!
I literally just renamed away from habit rabbit because like 8 other products already thought of that and there is an app in iOS app store called that.
Haha, that means it's just a good name. What are you building?
I think it means it's easy to think of which in theory means it's easy to remember which in theory means it's a good name?
I'm slowly shipping away at habit.fm figured even though it's nothing to do with music/radio/podcast it's easy to remember.
It wouldn't have to be friends, it could just be from other people on the platform. So one person fails a task, so that "Task" fee is paid to someone who succeeded at completing their task. The hard part is if more people succeed than fail (your money drys up).
I think that would form a self-selecting group of people who just all want to make this money. Those people would also be incentivized to lie about doing tasks, since they want to make money.
Yep, certainly big issues.
I like this friends model. Could even be a gift. Maybe the person who is challenged gets the money if they complete the habit of x days of y activity.
I'll answer your questions briefly:
Mixed feelings: I like the idea, but for me there wouldn't be enough reward. Why should i pay a fee to get back my money? I could easily just give it to a friend and have him give it back to me.
"Marketing" on reddit is no marketing. 100 views from potentially trolling / unqualified visitors and no sales has ZERO validity/significance.
Do a complete marketing run, include some strategies like social marketing, content marketing, influencer marketing, posting to qualified audience etc. If you have gotten at least 10000 qualified visitors but still no sales you can start thinking again about pivoting your product.
Reddit does seem to be a sub-optimal place to post new products, ive had mediocre experiences with it too in the past.
Yes, there are many subreddits being run by overly "active" mods, who tend to be ban-happy
That makes sense. It would only be valuable if you don't have a friend to do that with, or it's something that you don't want your friends to know about.
It's targeted to subreddits that are about 'habits/self improvement' so I expected that to be at least somewhat useful. Are you saying reddit is just a bad place to market?
And what exactly does the word "qualified visitor" mean to someone who knows nothing about marketing?
Thanks for taking your time to respond!
Im not saying reddit in general is bad to market. But many subreddits are, as they were not generally designed to be places where people market products but a tight-nit community for exchanging knowledge and opinions, not necessarily showcasing/representing a product.
"qualified" in this case means a visitor who is an actual potential client or customer of your product: He/she has a need that your product fulfills and is able to pay for it.
Example: If you sell something online, but your marketing efforts are directed at minors who are not having credit cards, they might be interested in buying it but just technically cannot do it.
I don't know anything about either of these services, but I feel like you are approaching it in exactly the opposite way that you should be.
I have two kids (8 & 10), I have tried "Punishing" my kids for bad behavior which in turn causes fights, anger, stress and the "lesson" of the bad behavior isn't actually learned.
What we have found is if you focus on the good behavior and really draw attention to that, the bad behavior reduces significantly. (reward the good, this could be verbal, financial, etc.)
So from my understanding of your service, you are punishing people for failing something. What does this cause? Stress, frustration, sense of failure, stupidity, etc. All thoughts are negative, which just increases and increases until a point where you give up and in your case, quite the platform (who wants to keep losing money simply because they failed a task? No one!)
Instead, you need to PAY people for meeting their goals. Reward good behavior, ignore the "bad". From a "Freelancer, Indie Hacker" kind of person, if I can make an extra $100 a month for doing basically simple, daily tasks that I have to do anyway, I'm more likely to get more done, and stay in the system.
The catch of course for you is, how do you make money while also paying people for reaching goals?
You make money by charging them to be on platform (probably something small, $5 - $10/mo.) aim for tons of users rather than fewer users at a higher cost.
Idea #1: Maybe people add goals, but they are goals that other people on the platform could do for you. So maybe I "need someone to research the top 5 invoicing tools, so I can pick which one to subscribe to." Maybe I'm willing to pay someone $5 to complete that task for me. (This is along the lines of Fiverr but less weird). This idea works because I might consider my time to be worth $75/hour, if I can use my time on work that meets my rate rather than mundane tasks, it's super worth it to me to pay someone else to do simple but important tasks for $5/$10. It's easy cash for them, and relatively inexpensive for me.
Idea #2: Get companies to sponsor people, maybe Starbucks is willing to give someone a $10 gift card if they complete 25 tasks. In return, every task you complete has a "Sponsored by Starbucks" label and Starbucks logo. On your main homepage you show a list of completed tasks by everyone in the system with that "Sponsored By" stuff.
That's about all I have off the top of my head. "Fining" people for failing just sounds like a losing situation for everyone.
This is the right answer.
Thanks for this detailed response Micah!
I mostly agree with your thoughts on positive vs negative reinforcement. When trying to get people to do things, positive reinforcement is the ideal choice.
I chose negative reinforcement for this because it was clearer how to implement it, and it's something I would want to do as well. I wanted to frame it more as 'investing in your future self' than 'avoid losing money by doing your habit', but that distinction may be lost in the product.
Rewarding people who achieve their goals would be great. I mean, who wouldn't sign up for that? But at the same time, it sounds very hard to monetize. It would definitely need a partnership of some kind to work, and that would be a completely different product.
I will think more on how it could be done in a 'positive' way though.
Monetization will be hard either way you go I think, if people don't want to join because who signs up to purposely lose their money you won't make money. If you do a positive direction, how do you support that. It's tough for sure.
Maybe the change is to have a subscription to join and it's just a community of people working together (ie. wip.chat).
Tracking tasks and assigning a value to them is difficult, leads people to either create simple easy tasks to succeed. Too big and they fail a lot.
Tough product :)
Hi! Cofounder of Beeminder here, excited to nerd out about habit apps and commitment devices! And sincerely excited about new competitors in the space. Here's the list of ones we currently know about -- blog.beeminder.com/competitors -- and I'll add Habit Challenge to the list soon as well. dreev.commits.to/add_habit_challenge_to_competitors_list_by_next_week
Hey @dreev! Thanks for the support. Right now we're re-working the site based on some feedback so it's probably not ready to be added to any list yet haha. I will let you know when we have a more finalized product.
Ok! I just snoozed the deadline on my commitment to add it to our list of competitors :)
Hey! You could maybe try launching on Product Hunt too!
I avoided PH initially because it seemed a bit too broad/generic to get people who would be really interested. But if nothing else is working, I may try it.
Try to launch it on PH, you will get a good feedback.
I would recommend you to do a launch on Hackernews, this might get you tons of feedback.
Yeah I'll get there eventually. Want to get some initial validation before doing a big launch like that.
Instead of paying for not doing, you could get paid for doing. I mean, it just feels like a fine if I don't go running, while I could earn money by getting out...
Do you mean paying all the money initially, then earning it back, instead of losing it gradually? That could be a way to flip it into positive reinforcement.
Or you could act as an escrow, so they convince friends to bet against their progress. Like, I'll give you 2$ per day if you run every day for a month. Then, you collect 60$, etc...
Good job launching Dmitri.
1 The word habit isn’t always positive in native English, with discipline and practice being more positive forms.
2 This depends on your costs and funding
3 Market research. Who woukd use this ?
Good luck !
Until you have 5000 visitors at the top of the funnel, you have no idea how judge the data.
That's a pretty big number. What kind of tactics do you think would get me from 100 to 5000?
First of all, congrats on your launch.
As for the service itself, it's a very hard task to convince people to put their money just to "keep habits". I would start from something absolutely free, but with advanced gamification. People love to play, give them a game! Working on habits can be gamificated in many interesting ways.
Thanks!
Are you saying you don't think people would pay money for this?
Doing something free might get users, but wouldn't make me money which is the main purpose of this.
I think the first and most important thing is the value for users.
Yes, I would start from something valuable and free and ask for money later. As a user I would trust more the service that is not focused only on making money. Giving something for free will bring you money, later.
Hey, first of all - congrats on the product launch!
Can you clarify what makes your product different from beeminder? Why should people choose habitchallenge?
Couple of things that I would do/add:
Give more information regarding the organisation/s the money will go to. Explain why does it matter funds to be donated to them specifically. Show how exactly people are doing good by choosing your product.
Generate some challenges that people can take - for example some health wise such as work out 3 times a week for 3 months straight.
Keep up the good work!
Thanks for the support!
I think the main differences at the moment are:
It is far simpler. Beeminder is based on data analysis which is cool, but complicated. HabitChallenge is a lot simpler and is just focused on getting you to do your task for the day.
We reach out to you via email everyday to check in and give encouragement. Beeminder just collects data. In this way, we're more of an accountability buddy as well.
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Those are some useful tips. I think suggesting challenges would be a good idea.
Thanks again for taking your time to respond.
For me, I think focus more on the jobs to be done versus the way they are done. I'm less interested in paying money for failing to adhere to habits as i am towards a system that has a 95% success rate for habit change.
also, very nice landing page.
I see what you're saying. Putting money on the line seems like a pretty effective way to ensure success though. Do you have thoughts about other ways to boost people's success rates?
The landing page would be nice if he wouldn't use the same pictures that hundred other startups already used :((
undraw.co is a pretty valuable resource for noobs like me who can't make illustrations and just need to validate ideas. Hopefully in the future I can do something more unique.
Oh, now I understand why I see the same pictures again and again. I wouldn't use them at all - just because they are so popular.