Big goals and grand proclamations are rites of passage across cultures, from New Year's resolutions to annual career check-ups for the truly organized. The average person, however, does not follow through on many of these big plans. Life gets in the way - and the enormity of the task at hand often overwhelms even the best of intentions.
A new startup called Alive is taking a social angle on goal attainment that brings in a person's network to provide moral support - and to layer a game element on the whole process by offering badges, points and, eventually, real-world rewards for achieving set goals.
Users are encouraged to break a giant goal into smaller chunks, and then get props every time they achieve even just a step towards the larger goal.
The co-founders, Kajetan Armansperg and Martin Strunk, explain it thusly:
There are two impressions that led to the idea of alive: The first was a feeling that all travellers know - once you start to travel, it’s hard to stop. You come to a point where you ask yourself what else you want to learn, see and do in your life.
We had that feeling in the last year of our studies - and thought we needed some kind of a “bucket list”.
It’s great to have goals, but how do you get there? We often fail not due to a lack of resources, but a lack of focus and motivation. The second part of the idea originated during the training for a marathon run: If you break your goal into small steps (or training units), celebrate a small success every day and get the support of your friends, it’s a lot easier to stay on track.
It sounds simple, but had not been implemented before, so we decided to create alive - a social app that helps you achieve any goal.
The pair met during master studies at HEC Paris' school of business. After graduating, they decided to go for their own big idea - self-funding their own startup focusing on "peer-powered motivation."
The company plans to make money by connecting the identified goals with partner companies providing related goods and services.
While you pursue your goals, you need certain things - if you plan a trip, you need tickets or traveling gear, if you intend to learn a language, you probably need a course or a teacher, and if you want to run a marathon, you need shoes.
We partner up with companies that provide discounts on these things as a reward for your progress. Great for them, because we match companies with users who actually need their products - actively pursuing a goal over a prolonged period of time sends a strong intent signal. Great for our users, because they earn what they need to achieve their goals. It’s a win-win.
For users that don't have a goal in mind, they can explore other suggested challenges, alongside goals that other users have created for themselves. This allows for inspiration, in addition to setting up personal goals.
Read on for the Tnooz Q&A with the Alive.do co-founders.
Describe what your start-up does, what problem it solves (differently to what is already out there) and for whom?
We all have goals, ambitions and dreams - alive helps you achieve these, no matter whether it's about discovering the world, learning a new language or just exercising regularly. How it works?
First, keep track of your big goals, but focus on small steps – on alive, you pick (or create) a few challenges, then set small steps that will get you closer to reaching your goal. Defining those steps can be difficult, which is why you can also copy steps that other users have taken on similar challenges before.
Second, get support from your peers - we team you up with friends and like-minded people pursuing similar goals. Not only does it motivate to see how others are progressing, it can also lead to inspiration and unlock a world of support.
Third, turn the path to success into a game - you can “boost” your friends, in effect betting on their success, and earn points once they take the next step. Points allow you to compare your progress with others and (in the future) to unlock rewards from our partners.
Also, a competitor recently launched in the U.S., pursuing a similar approach. Three things set us apart:
First, we have implemented a layer of gamification that actually has a clear purpose: Users single out the “boost” (a micro-bet on the success of a friend) as the most motivating factor of alive. While we currently use “badges” as rewards, we will implement real-life rewards as our partner network grows.
Second, we have found a way to deal with the “atomization” of goals / challenges that our competitors are struggling with – if “visit Cambodia”, “go to Cambodia” and “travel to Cambodia and see Angkor Wat” are different goals, it is difficult to identify common goals. We use several means to guide users to existing or similar challenges, thereby creating a real community of like-minded people.
Third, and based on this, we are able to suggest adequate steps to users as they start using the platform. This considerably lowers the barrier to entry and makes the product even easier to use. It fosters community learning and ultimately helps our users achieve their goals faster.
Why should people or companies use your startup?
There is a vast amount of untapped human potential out there. People have great goals, ambitions and dreams which deserve to be made real. Unfortunately, we often lose focus on these goals, as our daily routines and small setbacks lull us into a version of our life that is smaller than it could be.
alive provides a community that not only inspires you, but also offers the right support and lasting motivation. If Facebook is about whom you know, and Twitter about what you think, alive is about what you do and want to do.
Other than going viral and receiving mountains of positive PR, what is the strategy for raising awareness and getting customers/users?
Partner firms promoting their respective challenges on our platform play an important role. We are also in contact with several sportsmen, travel photographers, adventurers etc. who (as “heroes”) can share their story on alive, inspire other users and help create a positive impact on many people’s lives (if you read this and are interested, go ahead and contact us!).
How did your initial idea evolve? Were there changes/any pivots along the way? What other options have you considered for the business if the original vision fails?
The initial idea was more focused on tracking exactly what users did when and where. We thought we needed GPS and other means to have a sufficient data input and to prevent cheating. We then realized that technical control could be substituted by more effective social motivation: In the end, what matters is not how far and how fast you ran exactly, but rather that you found the motivation to run at all. This is why alive is now built around user-defined “steps”. In the future, we’d like to build a mechanism that allows users to rate these steps’ difficulty.
Where do you see yourselves in 3 years time, what specific challenges do you hope to have overcome?
We hope that in 3 years time, alive will have successfully positioned itself as the place in the web to set, pursue and achieve challenging goals. Our top priorities are the completion of our mobile apps, localized versions of alive and the integration with other travel/productivity/learning apps. Even more important: in 3 years time, millions of goals will have been achieved with the help of alive.
What is wrong with the travel, tourism and hospitality industry that requires another startup to help it out?
It’s a long process between hearing about a new destination for the first time and actually booking your tickets and getting there. alive and its inspiring and motivating community greatly facilitate this process and get more people to actually travel and see the places they always dreamt of seeing.
Tnooz take:
Setting goals is a vital way to make big things in happen - but often the relative enormity of the goal is too daunting to actually move forward on it.
One of the tried-and-true ways to attain big goals is to break the goal down into manageable chunks, thus allowing for a feeling of satisfaction and progress as each step is completed. Eventually, so the theory goes, the goal will be completed thanks to these small progressions.
The concept here is solid, the question we have is: Will people want it?
With competition from the new DailyFeats and the more established BucketList.org, it's hard to believe that these sorts of concepts will receive any sort of real traction. If people are not able to reach these goals by themselves, will they be able to with the help of their friends? Will the rewards be enough for people to accomplish their goals? Will it just become another to-do on an ever-increasing list?
This all remains to be seen. Here's what we know: The design is much more clear and attractive than many of the other "goal" sites out there (which is refreshing) and the focus on small steps is vital. They key here for success will be differentiation, as well as building a passionate community that will effusively evangelize the brand to anyone that listens.
The company should focus on success stories - ie. goals achieved using the service - thus providing an accountable role models for new users. In addition, the founders should continue to bake psychological insights into the product - the more people that succeed, the more likely they are to share their success - and bring more people into the fold.
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