Goalie

A few months ago, my wife and I did a fitness challenge with a couple of friends where we all set a weight-loss goal and everyone put down $100 with the agreement that only those who succeed will split the pot. It was incredible how the money pushed us to stay motivated until the end, not to mention how fun the whole thing was!

So recently, the we both took two weeks off and built this into an app, hackathon style.

We decided on some important principles:

Keep the groups small - Max 5 people. Keeping the groups small means people can build real connections with each other. Small groups also help keep people honest; it's much harder to cheat when you cannot "blend in" among hundreds of other people.

Keep it simple - You pay with credit card to join a challenge, then we pay you out with PayPal if you survive and split the pot. We collect a transaction fee on the initial payment which is our business model. Keeping our business model simple and transparent will lead to user trust.

Prioritize self-improvement over competition - We're staying away from "competition" style challenges where winner takes all. Competitions will incentivize cheating, which also leads to user disagreements and conflicts. With our beta users, we saw first hand that keeping the priority on self-improvement led to a healthy group dynamic.