1 |
Set your monthly new follower growth goal |
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Pick the amount to donate if you fail |
3 |
Choose an enemy or anti-charity |
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Meet the goal or the enemy gets the money |
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How does it work?
Only a little gets done without setting specific measurable goals. Pick how much you want to grow your audience each month. This should be ambitious, but realistic.
Stake a sum of money towards achieving your goal. This should be enough so that it hurts if you actually lose it.
Discover a new sense of motivation to get things done by choosing someone you really disapprove of. Someone who you really do not wish to see receiving the donation.
Pick if you want your commitment and punishment to be public. This can help generate even more motivation, but also potentially rallies people to support your growth goal.
FAQ
Frequenty Asked Questions
What problem is GrowOrPay solving?
GrowOrPay helps us fight procrastination by tapping into loss aversion and our distastes. Not meeting a growth goal in itself is often not a big enough incentive to stop some of us from procrastinating. We might feel disappointed, but failing to reach our goal won’t make us cringe. By tapping into loss aversion and our dislikes, GrowOrPay is able to generate surprising amounts of extra motivation with relatively small amounts of money. Having to give $50 to someone we despise might cause as much pain as losing $75 or $100. This is a unique growth hack product in the PaaS (Pain as a Service) industry. 🙂
Similar things have been offered before - what’s different?
There’s Beeminder, Stickk, Gofuckindoit etc. All of them allow you to stake money on a goal, but tend to be pretty general, too involved and lacking in user experience. GrowOrPay focuses on social growth only (fully automatable, no reporting from user required), user experience (it should take less than a minute to set everything up) and effectiveness (pain is less about the amount of money but rather about how the money is used, so GrowOrPay only offers anti-charity for now).
How is this helping me grow my audience?
It isn’t. There are a million ways to grow your audience and what works well also keeps changing. There really is only one thing that actually matters - consistently showing up, doing the work and getting things done. GrowOrPay is here just to provide procrastinators with additional extrinsic motivation at the lowest cost possible.
There is of course an opportunity to use social media to engage your audience in growing support for your goal as they may become invested in helping you avoid the payment too and we’ve made it easier by providing links and automated posts.
How much does it cost?
You can start as low as $19 per month and go all the way to $199. However we take a 30% cut of the committed sum to continue developing and supporting the platform.
Isn’t making payments to political parties on behalf of someone else illegal?
This depends on the country and sum. We may request permission to use your name where necessary and you’ll have the option to instead let us use the payment for paid advertising (ie twitter ads) for the opposite cause in case you want to remain anonymous and there are challenges around making that happen. You can rest assured that we will not engage in anything illegal and if all else fails, we’ll just return your money (minus fees) to you.
How do I pick the enemy?
Use the free text box to let us know who you want to send the money to and we’ll figure out the rest! We’ll add recommendations based on your profile in the future if we see enough interest.
What happens to my money if I meet my goal?
The previous sum gets added to next month's money at stake, so you will automatically get an increasing motivation to work towards your goal. Staked $20 for a monthly goal and made it? Well now your second month's growth goal stays the same but your enemy gets $40 if you don’t make it ($20 from last month plus $20 for new month). Beautiful, right?
So will I eventually lose my money? That doesn’t seem right. What happens if I keep hitting my goal for like 12 months straight?
Don’t worry, there is a light at the end of the tunnel. If you deliver on your goal for 1 year straight - then you can choose to have the sum returned to you or given to the charity of your choosing ( fee for returning to yourself is 20% higher to encourage more giving) turning the whole year of hard work into a positive experience for everyone.
Can I cancel my subscription? What happens then?
When you cancel the subscription your goal and staked money will work the same until the end of the current month. You won’t be charged for the next period and you will have an option to choose if the last goal donation goes through.
What happens if I change my mind halfway through and don’t want the donation to go through?
You can always cancel the service and request the donation not to go through.
How do I know you actually made a donation to the specified enemy?
We’re happy to provide proof. Just reach out to ask about it.
What if you don’t know my enemy or can’t find where to send money to?
We’ll contact you to decide on the appropriate action then.
Do you make payments to enemies every month?
We tally up your wins and losses over a longer period of time and make one payment once a year, unless you reach out to us and request a more frequent schedule. We won't howerver make payments more frequently than 3 times a year to avoid chargebacks for money we have already paid out.
Why did you build this?
I built this mainly because it was fun, I wanted to get back to building and learn a few technologies and lastly to actually measure the effect of negative incentives. I’m planning to compare the user growth rates for folks interested and folks interested who actually commit and publish the results.
I have improvement ideas and feedback!
Great. Contact @keskkyla on twitter directly or chat with us on the right here! 👉
