
Of Course You're Awesome. Now Pay $10 a Month to Hear Someone Else Say It - zackattack
http://newsfeed.time.com/2010/08/24/of-course-youre-awesome-now-pay-10-a-month-to-hear-someone-else-say-it/
======
Goosey
I really like this idea. One thing that surprised me when I entered Cognitive
Behavior Therapy was the power of affirmations. The old Saturday Night Live
'Stuart Smalley' is an unfortunate social stigma that stopped me from ever
taking the practice seriously until I was shown some hard evidence of it's
effectiveness (no, I don't have it on hand, you can google as easily as me).

So I gave it a try. Then I tried it some more. Over time it really takes a
transformation. At first I really felt like Stuart; but that is because I
didn't believe the things I was saying. If I kept lowering the bar eventually
I could find compliments about myself that I actually thought were true. The
good feelings and confidence those smaller compliments gave me helped boost me
to higher levels, and up and up, until the point now where I feel an abundance
of confidence in most of my day to day interactions that I never had before.

Affirmations are really just a mind hack to architect your internal reality
intentionally. You DO have an inner reality, so why not try to take control of
it? :)

EDIT: Oh, but back to this startup.. I like this idea, but I hope they
understand the principles behind affirmation therapy as a part of CBT. Simply
telling someone they are awesome will have no actual affect if they don't
believe what you are saying, so there needs to be a little bit of a day-to-day
feedback process to hone in on the target emotions you want to generate. I
doubt this much effort is being put in, but I might be willing to drop $10 to
find out. :)

~~~
frossie
_Simply telling someone they are awesome will have no actual affect if they
don't believe what you are saying_

Yeah, the same goes with child development - there's quite a lot of research
that says that it is counterproductive to praise a kid for something that they
don't believe is praiseworthy.

But there are surely cultural variations to this. For example, I occasionally
have had waitstaff in (US) restaurants where when I order an item on the menu
will say something like "Excellent choice" or "Awesome". That really feels
wrong to me, but since they do it, I suspect it works well at least on some
people. So maybe the same thing happens here.

------
Tichy
This drives home an important point: newspapers/media just like to tell a good
story. They are less interested in "business fundamentals", but in outrageous
things.

It's cool that they also mentioned the other projects by the same person.

------
jrockway
Guys, I found a way to save $10 a month. I just tell other people that they're
awesome, and due to some social stigma (or perhaps my intrinsic awesomeness,
who knows), they tell me the same thing back. Now I have $10 extra every
month... maybe I _am_ awesome!

~~~
scottkrager
You are awesome....where's my $10?

~~~
psadauskas
You're awesome, too. There, I saved you $10, go buy lunch with it.

~~~
ww520
You are super awesome! The saving bucks keep on passing.

~~~
Locke1689
I'm awesome. Bam, infinite savings.

~~~
shrikant
Okay, now this is just an awesome Ponzi scam.

------
dpcan
Wow, does this go right along with the comments from the dev's thread about
this app a couple days ago or what???

People were saying that he was throwing ideas at a wall until one stuck or got
noticed, and sure enough, here's a popular publication with a link to his new
app.

He must be having a chuckle right now. Not sure if he's actually making money,
but this has to feel like and accomplishment.

~~~
pvg
_Not sure if he's actually making money_

FTA:counts just over 100 subscribers

So, no.

 _here's a popular publication with a link to his new app [...] this has to
feel like and accomplishment_

It's a blog. And by that standard, pretty soon 'I posted to HN' will be an
'accomplishment'. Just for fun, let's look at the next two headlines:

Guyana's Health Minister Cautions Against Singing Too Much About Rum

Bizarro, Cat-Hating Woman Found

~~~
jackowayed
He just launched, and he's bringing in $1500/month (website says 151 customers
now).

If he pays people to make all the calls, it should take him almost no time to
run the business. And even paying the callers a reasonableish sum, he probably
keeps ~1/3 of the money.

So he wrote an extremely-simple website, got it some exposure, and hired a
friend to make the calls, and now he's got $500/month in recurring income that
has a good chance of growing and requires little recurring work. Sure, he's
not going to get rich, but that doesn't mean it's a failed venture.

~~~
philh
More numbers: On IRC, zack said he figured 2 minutes/call, which is one
hour/customer each month. Skype appears to cost less than 2¢/minute (that's
PAYG, presumably he has a contract), which is $1.20/customer/month. That
leaves $8.80 for wages and profit.

~~~
scrrr
Theres an irc channel for HN?

~~~
philh
#startups on irc.freenode.net.

~~~
scrrr
thank you.

------
ayb
Congrats to them for the exposure! Awesome example of someone taking an idea,
bootstrapping it, and running with it.

I saw it on HN first :-) <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1616154>

~~~
jasonlbaptiste
I'll make a good bet they saw it on HN first too :). For better or for worse,
many of the tech writers of mainstream pubs pay attention here.

------
ryanwanger
An interesting aspect of this is: there are lots of professions where people
dread phone calls. If the awesomenessreminder guys were able to call from a
different number everyday (which they might be doing anyway, via Skype), it
could completely change the feeling those people get when the phone rings each
day. After all, one of those unknown numbers is going to be a lot of fun!

They should pitch that service to property management, technical support,
customer service, etc.

------
mgrouchy
This is a fun idea, I wonder if there are some kind of legal ramifications in
this though?

Only reason why I say this, is Tim Ferris wrote an article on the Visa
Concierge service ( [http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2010/05/01/credit-
card-...](http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2010/05/01/credit-card-
concierge/) ) and they would do just about anything, but they wouldn't call
you and tell you that you were awesome, they were "not allowed to do anything
of a medical or emotional nature."

I'm thinking maybe not if there are other companies who do this, but who
knows.

~~~
daychilde
I think there's a difference in having access to a concierge-type service,
where the nature of the service is not completely described (there's no set
list of provided services, only rules to help the employees figure out if a
request is acceptable or not), versus this service, which is very clear,
focused, and narrow.

Even the request for daily affirmation was answered with the contact of a
possible company that might provide it; so perhaps if knowledge of this
service spreads, it might be a recommended source of that service.

------
philk
This is hilarious and I'd love to know how many new people sign up after this
article (and how sticky customers are in the coming months).

Also, I know it's simply a rhetorical flourish but:

 _or, for $7.50 a month, you could give just a quarter to a homeless person
every day and feel real good about yourself._

I wouldn't feel good doing this at all.

~~~
Empedocles99
You could say why... but instead, you left it to my imagination.

~~~
philk
Fair enough. Off the top of my head, a whole host of reasons:

a) I'm unconvinced that my money will make a positive difference.

b) I don't want to reward begging.

c) I don't find interacting with the homeless enjoyable.

d) If I give the quarter to the same homeless guy each day he'll come to
expect it and become unhappy if I don't one day.

e) Doing the same thing every day quickly makes it routine and destroys any
enjoyment.

I'm just surprised that people always use the "giving money to the homeless"
thing as an example of doing good, when there's far better stuff around. (For
example, you could save your $7.50 for twelve months[1] and mail off a $90
donation to the charity of your choice).

[1] If you give less frequently you'll minimize the cost of processing your
donations.

------
aresant
I love it - Zack I bet you'd get another nice bunch of eyeballs if you'd post
a takeaway on your stats from the mention - I'd be very curious about visitors
/ conversions from such a strong PR piece -

------
gecko
So, the way I figure it: let's say each phone call lasts only two minutes. You
literally just look up the number, call the person, say "You're awesome!" and
then hang up. That still works out to just $10/hr or so, not counting phone
costs. I can't imagine they're really making much money on this.

~~~
philwelch
Two minutes is a gross overestimate. You can get it down to 30-60 seconds if
you have an autodialer, but 90 seconds is a generous estimate even without. So
figure 90 seconds per call, 30.42 calls per month per customer, you have 45
minutes per customer per month. $10 for 45 minutes is $13 per hour. $10 per
hour labor (a generous rate for US-based English speaking labor) leaves a very
thin margin, but still potentially profitable.

If you scaled this, you'd want to have a VoIP autodialer system, at which
point you'd get down to maybe 60 seconds per call average, which is 30 minutes
per customer per month, which is $20/hour revenue, so $10/hour labor would
give you $10/hour on top of that to cover everything else. You could do this
with call centers, which imposes real estate cost, or you could have a web-
based system for employees to connect into from home, which also gives you the
benefit of being able to hire them as independent contractors instead of
employees and hence not having to worry about their taxes or health care.

There's further optimizations you could make. $10/hour is a high rate for
paying people to place unwanted phone calls to complete strangers. I know
because that's more than what I made doing that job. If you were running a
call center of stoned teenagers and college students, you could probably get
away with paying them $8/hour to call up subscribers and tell them they're
awesome. Yes, most call centers are staffed by stoned teenagers and college
students, at least the ones in charge of making scripted, outgoing calls.
Well, at least mine was.

~~~
pvg
_If you were running a call center of stoned teenagers_

People only call centers staffed by stoned teenagers because they have to -
they have an immediate problem they want help solving. Or they receive
unwanted and unsolicited calls from them. Nobody is going to pay $10/month to
receive a daily call from a stoned teenager who mispronounces their name.

~~~
philwelch
I worked in one of those call centers, albeit not stoned, so I'm speaking from
experience. Stoned teenagers are more than qualified to spend 30 seconds on
the phone with you every day and tell you you're awesome. The quality control
where I worked was quite good, especially with pronunciation issues. Calling a
paying customer to tell them they're awesome is far, far, _far_ less demanding
than what we did where I worked.

------
snth
I don't know if many people would buy this for themselves, but it would make a
great gag gift for someone.

~~~
blhack
I just asked one of my friends if she wanted to participate in an experiment,
and that it was a surprise :).

Luckily, she is a good sport, and I think she'll love it. The thing I'm
interested in is if this just gets annoying or not. (If yes, I'll just cancel
the service)

------
magicseth
I've built an app for the iPhone that does this for you. It can even tell you
you're awesome every 15 minutes! It is called Yantra (<http://myyantra.com>)
and is designed to give you periodic reminders to be present, focused, or
focus on the good. There is a community of people so that you browse what
other people are telling themselves, and contribute as well.

I love the constant stream of positive affirmations.

------
olegk
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cbk980jV7Ao>

------
jacquesm
Super press Zachary, congratulations!

------
WingForward
Six months of this service is what my sister is getting for her birthday this
year.

