Startup #75 – Changes

cigarette Raise your hand if, like myself, you’re one of those people that gets all freakin’ excited when Jan 1 rolls around and you get to come up with some rockin’ New Year’s Resolutions?  And yes, you’ve said this before, but this year?  Whoo, boy, this year is going to be different.  This year you’re going to wake up just 20 minutes earlier and jog a few laps around the block.  You’re gonna kick it up a notch at work and get that corner office.  You’re going to stop borrowing cool images for your blog post without giving proper credit (thanks, Flickr!)

Next thing you know, it’s July.  You haven’t woken up before 9am since Jan 4th.  Your inbox is littered with C&D’s from angry photographers.  And you keep watching the door to make sure your 24-year-old former intern/current boss doesn’t drop by with a stack of TPS reports to fill out.

What you need, my friend, is a new type of change resolution site that pairs up users who are looking to make similar lifestyle changes.  The site would be pretty basic, you could search by bad habits (i.e. ‘Stop Smoking’ to pull up a list of your yellow-toothed brethren).  Once you find one (or several) people who look interesting, you kick-off a “campaign”: a 6-week competition where the team who makes the most progress towards the specific goal is declared the winner. 

Over the course of the campaign, you would keep track of your progress and view the progress of your change buddy.  Users would score points based both on how *both* of the change buddies are progressing towards their goals, which will help users to encourage each other and give an outside incentive to keep working towards the goal.  


5 responses to “Startup #75 – Changes

  1. great idea…Question is how does the concept of monetization come in ?

  2. In my usual most helpful fashion, is still available.

    Monetization? Well the bevy of ads, complete SMO and SEO, etc. Maybe even have some sort of kitty that the site would get a percentage of (for overhead/fees/whatever to get around the gambling sites, etc.) and the participants are really competing against each other and get paid by the other competitors (out of the site controlled escrow account (minus fees of course)).

  3. Ahh, you guys stumbled on to the dirty little secret of this idea – ads. Here’s the thing. Let’s say that you’re in the “Stop Gambling” section. And let’s say I throw some AdSense ads on there. What is the main keyword that Google is going to index and display ads about? Gambling! To a bunch of people who would love to do nothing more than visit an online casino!

    Heheheh, I’m totally kidding. But it is a good question. And exactly the reason why I spend my time on the easy stuff like the basic ideas instead of the hard stuff like how the heck anyone would actually get paid. 🙂

  4. there’s a site doing this already sort of…

  5. I like this idea – I’d love to find people who want to make the same changes I do.

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