When applying for jobs via LinkedIn it’s very important to use a PDF. A huge number of people submit Word documents, however, LinkedIn doesn’t render them in the browser. Given that most roles get hundreds of applications, unless someone’s previous roles really catch my eye, I am probably not going to download anything.
This rang so true for me. I’m constantly rediscovering things that I already understood well at my previous job. Once you get acclimatised to the current system, so many previously obvious learnings fall by the wayside.
I recently built a habit contract (a concept mentioned in Atomic Habits) website (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29726228). It's helped me achieve a 116 day streak on Duolingo.
Sorry, about that! It's still working for me but it must be having some teething issues. I'll take a look into it now. In the mean time you can use callum@kommit.to for support.
Thanks! It's a good question and I haven't given it too much thought yet. For now I am just handling all disputes myself, if they get overwhelming I'll have to automate some aspects of it. It'll be interesting finding the balance between making it easy to get a refund when it's necessary but not so easy that the users would want to dispute it on regular basis.
Happy to answer such questions! By disputes I believe @hackandtrip means customers disputing charges with their credit card company. Aka chargebacks.
Beeminder gets zero credit card disputes because we give people a chance to contest their derailments and cancel the charge before it goes through. They have to talk to a human workerbee but we make it as easy as possible. If that doesn't happen in time and the charge goes through but the user still doesn't think it was legit for whatever reason, we refund it. No need for it to ever get disputed with the credit card company.
Love the fact that you make it easier for the customer to get a refund through your process, than through the refund one; I do not work in this space and offering free refunds for my product could be very destructive, but it makes 100% sense here.
Yeah Beeminder is cool, probably the best of the competing solutions that I found.
One way I hope Kommit can add value, is that it doesn't require your commitment to be digital and there doesn't need to be an API integration (Beeminder is primarily based on API integrations). If you can prove your commitment with an image, video or text, your good to go. The downside is that nothing is automatic.
Update: You can manually enter data into Beeminder, therefore it can also handle non-digital commitments. However, as far as I am aware, the manually entered data is not verified (e.g. by having it checked by a reviewer) hence I didn't feel like it was their focus.
> (Beeminder is primarily based on API integrations)
This strikes me as a significant mischaracterization of Beeminder. I've used Beeminder for 5+ years[0] and I've never used an API integration — Beeminder supports manually entering data for any goal. (And basically none of my goals have been digital; I'm not sure where you got the impression that Beeminder exclusively targets digital goals).
My bad, I thought the primary selling point was that it would would hook into the services you already use for tracking your commitment (Strava, GitHub, etc.). I am aware that you can manually enter some data but I didn't think there was any way to validate the data that you enter and I didn't think it was their focus.
Anyway, sorry for the misrepresentation. I will update my comment above to be more accurate.
Thanks for the update, and you're absolutely right that Beeminder doesn't offer any way to validate the data you enter. They discuss why (in their view, of course) trusting user-entered data works in this blog post: https://blog.beeminder.com/cheating/
Hmm I'm not sure that that model is completely without merit. Of course we are responsible for all of our actions, however, we often act against our better judgement.
In Jeff Hawkins' Thousand Brains Theory he describes that the neocortex is responsible for most of our cognition, but that it has to kind of bargain with the more instinctual "old brain" to get us to perform actions.
It's quite possible he's wrong, it's still just a theory, but it kind of lines up with that model you describe.
> Of course we are responsible for all of our actions, however, we often act against our better judgement.
Isn't this just a matter of confusion about what is in our best interest?
When we act against our best interest, it's often because we fail to accurately gauge the outcome of our actions. We may postpone going to the dentist because it seems like a bad idea, or have a bunch of cake because it seems like a good idea; but with the clarity of looking at these things in the past, it's evident that we got it wrong. We should have gone to the dentist and ignored the siren call of cake.
For whatever reason, it seems like a lot of people are just not doing this. They keep looking to the promises from the future, but completely ignore what they know from the past; so they keep repeating the same short sighted mistakes over and over and over again.
Acrasia. We severely discount things, positive or negative, that may happen a way off into the future. We struggle to make a "later problem" into a "now problem". The difficulty is that many of life's challenges require action over a period of time.
I also think, speaking from personal experience, our minds have an amazing ability to avoid thinking about things that are difficult or unpleasant. This can mean that we neglect to do things we should be doing (or do the things that cause us harm) not because those things are infact actually okay behaviours, but because we're not even thinking properly about the consequences. We're just doing.
Yeah I was a bit gutted when I found Stickk after spending a bunch of time building Kommit. It's super similar and I felt a bit silly for not doing the research beforehand.
However, considering Stickk has existed for something like 14 years, it doesn't feel particularly mature. I don’t want to be too disparaging (and I’m obviously biased) but I found their website quite clunky and the apps don’t receive great reviews (1.8 on IOS and 3.0 on Android).
A few aspects that I believe are better in Kommit:
- More control over deadline schedules (you can set it to repeat on multiple specified days of the week).
- More control over punishment rules (you can choose how many consecutive failures are allowed before you're punished).
- You can give yourself skip days (useful if you know you’re likely to need a vacation).
- You can update commitments (there is a mechanism to allow updates while preventing you from dodging punishments).
That being said, they do have some cool features such as donating to an "Anti-Charity" (a controversial charity that you don’t support) upon failure.
Definitely don't be discouraged by the existence of StickK! They technically already have the referee feature (that being your key distinction from Beeminder, which has a much less powerful version of that feature) but everything else about StickK is... well, I think you've already surpassed them despite their decade+ head start. They seem to have sadly been in zombie mode for years, since the founders left. I guess they're still making money though, which should be encouraging for Kommit!
(I'm a cofounder of Beeminder, if that wasn't obvious. Also I just added Kommit to https://blog.beeminder.com/competitors/ -- very excited to have you as a competitor!)
Thanks for the kind words! It means a lot coming from yourself. As I've said elsewhere, I think Beeminder is the best competing solution I've come across :)
Love your attitude towards competition and I'm excited to be considered a competitor!
