I’m looking for people to help with my bootstrapped startup www.getmotivatedbuddies.com, an entirely humanetech focused business. I’m well validated with a large, passionate user base that is growing daily. We’re in the process of building the actual site (right now it’s just a funky landing page and backend system) and testing the hypotheses of the service, but we need help.
In particular looking for:
Cognitive Psychologist focused on the relationship between Attention/Time and Space/Behavior
Social Psychologist focused on identity (self/social and behavior)
and possibly:
Behavioral Psychologist
Developer interested in machine learning for ethical use.
Your site looks beautiful, and a great initiative! My compliments
I need to find buddies myself for my non-profit startup and certainly interested to join… but still in early stages.
For now I just have some product feedback:
Seems like you are dealing out money, and the domain has a DotCom extension. In the About section I couldn’t find whether you are a non-profit and what the revenue model is (maybe you are entirely sponsored?). Some additional explanation might be in order.
To sign up one needs to go through a form with 20 questions. No problem, but… there is no way to peek what questions will be thrown at me. I.e. if I don’t like answering some question on page X of the form I will have already given away a bunch of personal data. (I had this experience with a startup incubator that had a 19-page Google [!!] form for subscription and no way to look ahead… really disconcerting).
I hope you appreciate my feedback, and keep rocking!!
Hi Arnold, thank you so much for your feedback, yes it’s greatly
appreciated!
There isn’t information about the nature of the business because it’s in
such early stages. I can tell you directly that this is a for-profit
business designed from “ethical use” principles. I launched it as-it-is in
order to validate my idea, and now that it’s validated I’m moving forward
to build the actual product. The service of matching is my way of building
the community, while learning more about everyone’s priorities, how they
talk about them, and how to structure the information we receive.
The site will be a subscription model site, free of advertising. The site
will be designed to incentivize you to take action OFF the site. So time
spent on the site will not be a metric of success, another reason we will
not be doing a free/advertising model.
I agree, it could be good to give people an idea of the questions asked
before starting. Although right now, nothing is sent to us until you click
submit on the form.
My goal is to encourage action, encourage action, encourage action. A
majority of people who have the difficulty of motivation struggle with
making a decision. They over-ruminate. So every design choice is and will be
geared to help the user make a decision, and take an action that is in what they believe to be their best interest. I try to err on only offering information that will lead to taking an action and reduce rumination.
On the form nothing is sent to us until you click submit. A few people do
start the form and stop, but it would be redundant to show the questions on
the form before the form and see if you want to answer them. That is less
respectful of the user’s time in my opinion (because they read the
questions twice). I also feel that most users can get a sense of the
questions that will be asked based on the nature of the service as
described on the landing page. In the current situation you can start
answering, and if you don’t like the question stop answering and don’t
submit.
That said everything you said is totally valid and as we start to do actual
design (as opposed to me futzing around on wordpress), I will definitely
integrate your comments.
Any other thoughts, please don’t hesitate to reach out!
Fair enough… then a simple mention of this at the top of the form, or the 1st page would do the trick.
From the screenshots I was led to believe one question asks about your weaknesses… As long as such questions are not required to be filled, then it would not be a problem. Alternatively, or in addition, you could have a question icon with an explainer text and/or example response.
They are required, because otherwise it would be unfair to users who do fill them out, but there is also explainer text/examples when you sign up. These questions are the most direct ways for users to see if the other person is a match. More important, one of the motivations for creating the site was privacy. Right now people put all this same private information on reddit, and that seemed silly. So my version is the more private version.
