Why I Built Outduo
TLDR: I needed a tool to help me get more motivated and to achieve my goals in a timely manner, and I figured other people might need one too. I scratched my own itch.
Towards the end of 2015 I was feeling very unmotivated, and unfulfilled with my real job, and so I started reading about productivity, motivation and goal setting methodologies to hopefully find a way to give me the boost I needed. I wasn’t unhappy, just not satisfied.
In early September 2015 I’d reached my breaking point and decided to do something radical (for me anyway). I booked a one-way flight to the startup capital of New Zealand, Wellington, for the end of January 2016. I gave the Wilderness Society Inc (Australia) 3 months notice, and then went back to my research.
One of the best articles I found was titled How an Accountability Partner Can Help You Build Productive Habits, and it struck a chord with me. I’d heard about the idea of using an accountability partner before, but had never tried to put it into practice. I wondered if this method could work for me.
I refocussed my research and started looking for existing web tools that could help me set a goal, challenge a reliable accountability partner, and then allow us to both to work on building a particular habit. The closest match I could find to what I wanted was Go F**king Do It, but this “tool” only makes you more accountable to someone else, and they don’t have to achieve your goal with you.
Having not found any tools that could do exactly what I needed, I decided to put my web developer skills to the job and build something myself.
On 9th October 2015 I registered the domain outduo.com and started planning for what would eventually become Outduo. The concept would be simple; users could set a goal, choose to invite a friend to challenge them, and then track their progress as they built a habit, took more steps, changed weight, or achieved their goal by a deadline. Oh, and the name? Users could try and outdo each other in a duo.
Perhaps ironically, as I was building Outduo I realised that I needed Outduo to keep me on track. One of my first goals in the demonstration version of the product was titled Launch Outduo to beta subscribers with a proposed deadline of 18th December 2015. Seeing this goal on my personal Dashboard every time I refreshed the page definitely helped, even though I didn’t meet this deadline in the end.
I had planned to launch Outduo before the end of 2015, but I had seriously underestimated the large amount of coding required. It really wasn’t as simple as I thought it would be. I was also busy packing up my life for my Wellington trip and still working at my day job too — albeit only 4 days a week at this point.
Come 30th January 2016, I was jetting my way from Hobart, Australia across the ditch to Wellington. I set myself a new deadline of 29th February 2016 to launch the MVP of Outduo to beta subscribers.
While staying at an Airbnb on the city side of Mt Victoria, and working from a combination of the Enspiral Coworking Space and various cafes, I managed to build Outduo into a real product. While still not feature-complete, the Outduo MVP went live on the morning of 1st March 2016 after a very late night before.
During March I switched to a new Airbnb closer to the CBD, and kept perfecting the Outduo code. I finally opened up Outduo to the public on the 14th March 2016. By the end of March, Outduo had gained 61 real users, with 90 goals set, and 8 duos/challenge pairs created.
In late April I’ll be flying back to Hobart, Australia to continue working on Outduo. There’s a lot of potential applications for the Outduo concept, especially within workplaces and the gym industry, and so these will be my next areas of focus.
Outduo has given me something fun, challenging, and more fulfilling to focus on. It’s helped me out of the slump I was in last year (being in Wellington also helped of course).
One of my goals right now is to walk more by aiming to take 10,000 steps per day. My brother, Robert, has joined my goal to convert it into a duo challenge. Because he’s mostly winning every day, indicated by the yellow bars compared to the green, it’s a really good incentive for me to try and push myself harder in the long run.
By looking at the anonymised goal tracking data that’s been collected by Outduo, I know that what I’ve built is actually helping other people to build habits and achieve their goals too.
PS: If you’re interested in my more regular Outduo progress updates, then have a look at my littlelogs record.
