Daniel Reeves
Jul 20, 2017 · 3 min read

So good! Thank you so much! Here are my reactions so far:

1. Great point about telling a micro story with the headline and straplines! In case you’re curious, here’s the full list of them currently in rotation: http://doc.bmndr.com/beeminder-taglines

Some are so esoteric they’re practically in-jokes so the first easy win is to just get rid of those. (They’re so funny though!) Then we can pair the headlines and straplines to tell a micro story.

2. I think I agree but there’s a tricky balance to strike. We need to be in-your-face with the “WE CHARGE YOU MONEY FOR GOING OFF TRACK” part because some people are upset by that whole concept and they need to know to bounce right away. Probably we can get the best of both worlds though!

3.1. Oh my goodness, Beeminder is the greatest name ever! Here are the reasons we love it: https://blog.beeminder.com/beenamer/

3.2. We originally had that heading as “Automatically mind data from:” which made perfect sense to us but people thought “mind” was a typo for “mine”. Really “mind” is just a synonym for “track” here. And the verb “to beemind” means to track a metric and pledge money on it. But, yes, this is all too much to hit a brand new user with!

3.3. Ha, we didn’t even notice the “bugs you” pun! I guess we try not to think about the fact that our logo and mascot is literally a bug. :) We actually say things like “the bot bugs you” more because we like to be a bit self-deprecating. Sometimes. When we’re not being over-the-top self-aggrandizing. It’s a balance.

3.4. Oh, honey, you’re buzzing up the wrong flower if you expect us to part with our beeloved bee puns! (We’ll see where we can tone them down in the interest of clarity though. We know the incessant punnery gives some people hives… Sorry.)

4.1. Point taken about the other 95% of the population who doesn’t want to “track progress toward goals” but wants to achieve goals. So far we’ve really focused on niches like the Quantified Self community where tracking goals and visualizing data is absolutely the key selling point. And we think that mindset is key to successful beeminding so we’ve really embraced it. So even if we deemphasize that in the initial pitch we probably want to nudge people in that direction, getting excited about the yellow brick road on the graph and whatnot.

4.2. (Total aside but inbox zero is about not feeling overwhelmed by a sea of email and letting critical things fall through the cracks.)

4.3. As counterpoint to the advice in section 4, we’ve also got to manage expectations a bit. Beeminder is a little like, say, Microsoft Excel. A powerful and general tool, with a ton of features, and a learning curve. It’s absolutely possible to have the best of both worlds. For example, Facebook is surely more complicated with more features and yet your proverbial grandma can dive in and immediately start using it. Beeminder can get to that point. But it’s not there yet, so some of the nerdophilic signaling might be appropriate. Or maybe I’m rationalizing. You’ve got us thinking hard about this!

5. Ouch, but yes, agreed. Time for a new video! Actually, what do you think of this one: dreev.es/eli5 (Still pretty product-heavy I guess.)

6. Smart. But just to point out, our community is absolutely amazing: forum.beeminder.com

7. Yup. Fun fact, we have multiple people who have written PhD dissertations thanks to Beeminder. We tell some of these stories on the blog but our testimonials page is woefully neglected!

8. Maybe it’s massively generous to say that 5% of the population likes math and graphs and making things and knowing how things work under the hood. But we still do also want to appeal to that type of person. Related: blog.beeminder.com/typebee about what the ideal Beeminder user is like.

Thanks again for writing this up! Hugely helpful!

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    Daniel Reeves

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