StartupTunes

Beeminder

Beeminder is a web product for tracking goals. It basically lets you keep track with just about anything you count on a daily basis, whether it’s your exercise routine or your cigarette or alcohol intake. What it does is it plots them on a graph as you enter them. When you make a goal, there is an ideal curve called the yellow brick road which means you are consistently hitting your goals in a timely manner.

And if you fall off that ideal curve, the graphing stops, and you can no longer enter data. Here is when Beeminder starts its game. When you want to restart the graphing again, you are to pledge real money. And by any chance that you fail again, you still have to pledge again to continue the goal. You can also choose to call off the goal but that’s really up to you. If to you the goal is a rather important one, then you will not mind putting a little money on the line to help trigger the powerful loss- adverse aspect of your brain.

It is indeed a very powerful concept that will surely help you reach your goal with just a matter of time if you persist on doing so. Beeminder is not just any graphing program; it is actually an artifact that makes the underlying productivity theory both visually accessible and quantitatively concrete. It explicitly employs the observations of human behavior. More importantly, Beeminder strives to be a “commitment device” with such power by making you put money on the line.

Essentially, as a service that centers in any goals with quantifiable steps such as losing specific amount of weight in a week or keeping something to a minimum, and what not, Beeminder lets you set and keep track a commitment contract by displaying a graph of your progress.