February, 2010

Company / Rewards — Comments Off
25
Feb 10

The Value We Create For Brands

Brands and retailers are always looking for the most effective ways to acquire customers.  They are willing to spend big bucks on doing so, leading to the existence of a $150 Billion advertising industry.  Unfortunately, much of this money is spent without a guarantee of customer acquisition nor a way to measure whether customer acquisition occurred as a result of the advertising.

We believe that the best way for brands and retailers to gain customers is to initiate a relationship with them.  As opposed to just broadcasting a message, brands should give potential customers a token of goodwill.  This means a free trial of their products.  “Try before you buy” is becoming the motto of American consumerism.

Earndit is creating a channel by which brands can forge relationships with a great demographic.  Earndit users all exercise and own an iPhone or iPod.  As such they are all conscious of their health and/or appearance, they have the disposable income to own an iPhone or iPod, and they have the market awareness to track their exercise behavior.  The intersection of these characteristics makes for a wonderful pool of potential customers.

The benefits Earndit affords brands are:

  • exposure similar to traditional advertising
  • new customers who redeem points for rewards
  • goodwill generated by giving a reward for exercising

We are giving brands all these benefits for nothing more than the cost of the reward they offer.  Other than that, the exposure to our users and the generated goodwill is free.  In the future we anticipate that we will be able to charge brands for the ability to offer our users rewards, but for now this access is free.

Game — Comments Off
23
Feb 10

Making Exercise More Fun

For most people exercise is something to be dreaded.  The excuses given most often by people for not exercising are:  it takes time, it hurts, it’s not fun, and the payoff isn’t noticed for a long time.  Earndit can’t do much about those first two things, but we want to do our best to fix those last two.

Earndit will turn exercise into a game!  You will be able to earn trophies to show off on your profile page.  These trophies can be collected by achieving certain exercise behaviors.  In an effort to keep the game fun, we won’t tell you ahead of time what those behaviors are.  Well, fine, we’ll tell you one.  If you workout three consecutive Fridays and only one other day in each week, then you will earn the “Preemptive Strike” trophy.  It’s considered preemptive because you’re exercising before ruining your body over the weekend with food and drink.

You will also be able to earn bonus points for working out on certain special days.  Again, in the spirit of fun, we won’t tell you which those days are until they’ve passed.  This keeps you guessing (kind-of like the location of the Double Jeopardy question).  On some weeks we may even give bonus points to the holders of a particular trophy of our choosing.

Finally, you’ll be able to see where you are on the leaderboard to see how you compare with others.  There will actually be two leaderboards.  One will show the rankings of all Earndit users in your state for whatever calendar month we’re currently in.  The winner of this leaderboard collects a well-deserved trophy after each month is over.  The other leaderboard will be for you to play with so you can see how you compare with different people over different periods of time.  For example, you’ll be able to see where you stand among your friends over the past 60 days.  Or you’ll be able to see where you stand among people in your age group over the past 7 days.  Because this leaderboard changes based on the filter you create, there is no trophy collected for this leaderboard.

Tracking — 12 Comments
15
Feb 10

Potential Data Partners

We want to give you credit for doing any form of exercise.  The catch is that we must rely on data collected from a reliable source (i.e. non-human).  It’s not that we don’t trust people, it’s just that we know that the lure of rewards creates the temptation to exaggerate how much exercise you’ve done.  It’s only natural.  In order to do away with such temptation altogether, we will have to rely on technology to collect the data for us.

Fortunately we are at the beginning of a growing trend known as “The Internet of Things.”  While the concept is much larger, it implies that our daily activities will soon be trackable and managed the same way all data is.  The world of exercise has a plethora of such devices, many of which are made possible by the iPhone.

Examples of devices that are currently on the market which could potentially feed us data on your exercise include:

  • Nike+ sensor
  • Adidas miCoach
  • Garmin heart monitors
  • Garmin GPS watches
  • Polar heart monitors
  • RunKeeper iPhone app
  • MapMyRun iPhone app
  • EveryTrail iPhone app
  • FitBit
  • BodyBugg
  • and many more!

Eventually we would also like to tie-in with gyms so that you get credit for every time you visit the gym.

At the beginning we will use only Nike+ data because they have an open API that allows us to collect that data without a formal agreement with them.  Of course we will still need someone’s permission and Nike+ login info in order to retrieve that data.

Company — Comments Off
9
Feb 10

Our Name

Coming up with the right name for our company has been a rather difficult process.  Since inception we have been using the name “Sweatshop”.  The thinking here is that you get to shop for rewards with the points you’ve earned from sweating.  Personally, I love the name.  However, given the obvious negative emotions about the word sweatshop, we always knew we’d have to come up with another name.

After tossing around a few other ideas, we fell in love with “Earndit”.  It makes perfect sense: you did the work; you deserve to be rewarded for that work; you earndit!  And when a friend asks how you got that cool new watch, you can simply say “I earndit.”