alexlong
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- Joined
- Oct 19, 2023
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Hey all, I'm exploring various ideas for products and being a programmer / productivity nerd I decided to make a goal setting service where you essentially set a goal, choose a gift that you will get when you accomplish the goal, and then pay up front for the gift. When you accomplish the goal you get the gift. It's kind of like beeminder but you pay in advance and get to celebrate your accomplishment instead of be punished if you don't accomplish your goal! I'd appreciate any feedback people have on this and anyone willing to try it. Below is my evaluation of it, including the CENTS model.
Control - I think this is one of the biggest weaknesses of this idea. As I've prototyped this service with a few friends I've already noticed the issues with having to order things for people from other websites like Amazon. I'm pretty sure it violates Amazon's ToS to constantly buy and ship things to other people using your personal Prime account for example.
Entry - I think I'm fine here. I imagine it will take a concentrated effort to build up a community of users that would actually be excited about using a service like this so I don't think competitors could quickly butt in.
Need - I think there's a decent demonstrated need for services like this among niches groups of people who are productivity / goal nerds. Beeminder is a very popular and well known service in that niche as are Stikk and the Forfeit habits app.
Time - Maybe some risk here as it is somewhat logistically complex to organize the purchasing and shipping of people's goal gifts to them. Kind of hard to automate that if they can choose any website and item that they want as their gift.
Scale - Biggest risk here is that people might not end up wanting to use this more than a couple times a month or something so it'd be hard to really provide enough value to make the service feel sticky and worth paying for. In other words, it'd be a relatively low volume per costumer and probably low profit per interaction.
Summary: I think the biggest risks are in Control around the logistics of purchasing things for other people and shipping it to them in a time and cost efficient manner, and potentially in Need around there being a strong enough desire for people to use a service like this to help them move forward on their goals.
Would love to hear others' thoughts. Thanks in advance.
Control - I think this is one of the biggest weaknesses of this idea. As I've prototyped this service with a few friends I've already noticed the issues with having to order things for people from other websites like Amazon. I'm pretty sure it violates Amazon's ToS to constantly buy and ship things to other people using your personal Prime account for example.
Entry - I think I'm fine here. I imagine it will take a concentrated effort to build up a community of users that would actually be excited about using a service like this so I don't think competitors could quickly butt in.
Need - I think there's a decent demonstrated need for services like this among niches groups of people who are productivity / goal nerds. Beeminder is a very popular and well known service in that niche as are Stikk and the Forfeit habits app.
Time - Maybe some risk here as it is somewhat logistically complex to organize the purchasing and shipping of people's goal gifts to them. Kind of hard to automate that if they can choose any website and item that they want as their gift.
Scale - Biggest risk here is that people might not end up wanting to use this more than a couple times a month or something so it'd be hard to really provide enough value to make the service feel sticky and worth paying for. In other words, it'd be a relatively low volume per costumer and probably low profit per interaction.
Summary: I think the biggest risks are in Control around the logistics of purchasing things for other people and shipping it to them in a time and cost efficient manner, and potentially in Need around there being a strong enough desire for people to use a service like this to help them move forward on their goals.
Would love to hear others' thoughts. Thanks in advance.
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