

My Weekend Project: Mr. Goal -- simple goal reminders by Email and SMS. - omarish
http://mrgoal.net/hn

======
stretchwithme
what are the advantages over having your yahoo or gmail calendar text you?

will remembering my goals better actually help me reach them, as is stated?
why might that be?

do you vary the frequency of the reminders at all?

Would this be enhanced if you had human mentors that saw the interactions? I
find messages computers are dismissed pretty easily, while people a need to
respond or show progress to humans.

~~~
mahmud
_will remembering my goals better actually help me reach them_

I think quite the opposite. What makes you reach goals is never forgetting
them to begin with.

I can't speak for others, but I have very _few_ goals, and they haunt me,
awake or asleep. The rest of the "self dev" stuff I off-load to my fiancee :-P

~~~
stretchwithme
I think what really would be helpful is breaking down goals into concrete
tasks, which only a human can do or push you to do.

I think technology can facilitate mentors as they ask the questions one needs
to answer if one is to translate goals into the actions required to achieve
them.

~~~
derefr
> breaking down goals into concrete tasks, which only a human can do or push
> you to do.

If it's a goal a lot of people have, and which follows a general formula, then
once _someone_ has written it down, the software can store it in a central
database and let everyone else make use of it. Imagine entering "write book"
into your to-do list app, hitting TAB, and watching it expand into "write
proposal chapter, find writing group, show chapter to group, modify chapter
using feedback, write outline for draft, [...], submit to publisher."

Then, if you immediately know how to "write proposal chapter," you can just
stick with that and check it off when it's done—but if you're unsure, you can
select that sub-task and hit TAB again, and it will expand into "select
writing tool, find environment suitable to writing, schedule writing time,
create new document"—and then there would be a placeholder step with a
question in it, "what are you writing: {prose fiction, technical guide,
biography, etc.}" You'd select, say, prose fiction, and it would replace the
placeholder with more steps: "think of name and other physical details for
main protagonist, think of conflict, write first paragraph introducing both
character and conflict, [...]"

And there's already a collection of such lists available online to get your
database off the ground: the eHow/Wikihow/etc. type sites. You could also
parse the StackExchange-driven sites for answers that look like ordered lists.

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PStamatiou
Feel free to integrate Notifo for push notifications. Dirt cheap. :)

<https://api.notifo.com/>

~~~
dholowiski
That's awesome, I'll be checking it out for my project. I thought I was going
to have to write my own iPhone app, but I see you've already done that.

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jharrison
Congrats omarish. I had this exact same idea rattling around in my head a week
or two ago. I have recently been thinking that I needed someone to work with
as an accountability partner, someone that would keep me on point. Not wanting
to burden anyone with that I began thinking of a way to automate it. Your new
service looks like it fits that bill. Thanks for executing.

~~~
omarish
You're welcome. I hope you find it useful :).

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vnchr
On the payment page, I was confused by two things: \- "Regime Length" \- HOW
MUCH I'D ACTUALLY PAY

It actually seems that they might be tied together? Is "regime" in your
context referring to the months of subscription that I can sign up for, the
max length ahead of time I can set a goal...? I did not recognize its meaning
in this context.

Also, it was not clear how much I'd actually pay you if I signed up for a paid
plan. The sub-heading of the "Cost per Month" shows that I can cancel, but am
I paying monthly or per year? Anyway, that's what I thought reactively. It
seems that cost per month multiplied by regime length is the sub-heading cost
amount for each subscription.

That makes no sense to me.

And as someone trying it out, I'm not sure if I'd sign up for a free plan that
I'd be afraid of upgrading.

Cool idea. But I am afraid to sign up for anything besides the free plan based
on the payment matrix.

~~~
omarish
So

Regime Length -- how long the plan with Mr. Goal will last. I think of it as a
personal trainer, so a 1-month regime will be 1-month of help with you goals.

The actual amount you pay is in the cost per month row -- $3.06, $2.70, $2.96.
If you multiply the cost per month by the number of months in each regime and
then scale by the discount, ($2.70 / month * 6 months) / .82 (as it's 18%
off), you get $19.74.

It's pretty confusing, so I think at this point I'll figure out how to
simplify the process as a whole.

At the moment, the table moves on 2 degrees of freedom: 1. feature set, 2.
plan length. I'll try holding plan length constant -- so I'll make every plan
3 months. I suspect that it's hard to understand a 2-d table when the
featureset itself is moving both on features and plan length.

I'm going to re-work the pricing table today. Could you please shoot me an
email: omar.bohsali@gmail.com if you're interested in providing some feedback
on a new pricing plan? I'll get you setup with whatever plan I come up with,
for free, of course.

Thanks.

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va1en0k
It neither logs me in with my password (just registered and a) I didnt forget
the password I typed and b) it was saved to LastPass) nor restores it to my
email (I checked Spam, yes)

And, something like a random time (like, some random moment from 17pm to 20pm)
will be a cool option

~~~
omarish
That's a bit weird. Could you please email me at omar.bohsali@gmail.com ? I'll
debug this one with you, sorry for the inconvenience.

As for random times, it actually does that a little bit. I pushed most of the
timezone code to behind the scenes so that it will automatically figure out
your timezone through javascript and then push it server side via ajax. I also
put in a random checker in the views that will decide if the user should have
their timezone checked.

Given the timezone, it tries to guess your "working hours", i.e. 8am to 6pm
your time. It'll send you a set number of random texts throughout each day,
that number is set by the message frequency in your profile.

That was one of my biggest concerns. Google calendar sends me a daily email at
5:15am with my calendar in it. That's nice, but I have a hunch that the texts
will be less effective if people know that they will come at a set point
throughout the day. So that's my rationale for randomizing the delivery time
throughout the day.

I have been thinking about dropping in a slider bar to set both the text
message frequency, as well as the texting window throughout the day, so I'll
definitely be implementing your feature in the near future.

~~~
va1en0k
thanks.

my problem is I can't keep a schedule due to serious sleep problems (it just
not worth it). I think randomizing my timetable will help to distribute my
tasks so getting them done will be simpler. I'm not sure, but experimenting
with such idea sounds great for me

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liedra
Nice project! It'd be nice to have a link to who you are (an about page) on
the site. Makes things a bit more friendly :-) You also might want to put a
dedicated page for your privacy policy up (even if it's just a very simple
one) since you ask for contact info.

~~~
omarish
Good call. I will do both right now. Thanks.

~~~
omarish
Added: <https://mrgoal.net/about/>

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alexharrower
Nice! This is exactly what I've been looking for to keep track of my goals.
Feedback page?

~~~
omarish
Going for a run and I'll have one up. For now, you can contact me directly:
omar.bohsali@gmail.com. Thanks.

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ramanujam
Really well made. Here are a few things that i wanted to share

1\. I signed up for the free plan and i am not seeing an option to upgrade to
the paid plans. 2\. A better word choice for 'Introspections' would be nice
3\. Making the 'forgot password' page consistent with the site design would be
good. I guess you will be having it on your list. 4\. Notifo push
notifications would be really awesome!

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kluikens
I use Todoist, and love it. But the one feature I desperately want added is
the ability to have start dates so that Gantt charts can be created for my
week/month/year.

If you had this, I would give Mr. Goal a try and if it was any good, I'd
probably pay for it. It'd be nice to have a service that told me how hellish
some school weeks would be in advance.

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Ramirez
Hi, I made a similar service www.randomremind.me, but it is not so serious as
yours. I use it for rotting goals in my to-do list.

Also I tested your app a bit and it tells me to 'choose a password that's at
least 5 characters' even when I am putting in 5-character password. But
otherwise seems OK. Good luck.

~~~
Ramirez
Ability to delete my goals would be nice.

~~~
omarish
implemented :)

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microcentury
On your home page, 'every-day' should be 'every day'. (You only use the hyphen
when it's a compound adjective, e.g. 'every-day event'.)

And actually, re the sentence 'Doing something, every-day, until you achieve
it', you could remove all the commas and it would mean the same but read
better.

~~~
omarish
Good point. Fixed.

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_grrr
Looks like it could be useful. One comment, the tag line: "do everything you'd
like" doesn't seem quite snappy enough, might be to do with the use of the
apostrophe. Maybe something shorter might be more memorable, such as "achieve
anything".

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crazymik3
Very nice stuff! If you don't mind me asking, what do you use as an SMS
gateway?

~~~
dholowiski
I'd like to know too. I'm building an SMS project and the best I can get is
around $0.03 per SMS (moonshado through heroku) and I'm not sure how I'll be
able to make any profit at that price.

~~~
willcannings
Beware of moonshado unless you're sending marketing messages - their support
pages state that all texts sent from them have this footer: "Msg&Data rate may
apply txt STOP to opt-out". Not something I'd want if your users are paying to
be sent messages (like with this service).

I'm looking at using CDYNE for texts. At volume they also charge 3c, but
there's no distinction between networks with their price so you pay the same
to text Nepal as you do San Francisco.

~~~
dholowiski
Thanks for the tip. So far the texts have been 'clean' - no extra stuff, but
I'll keep an eye out for that. The reason I went with them is that you pay $20
for 20000 credits and I thought it was a credit per SMS, but it's actually
around 29 credits per message. Another person mentioned twilio- it's the same
price but looks like it has some other nice features.

~~~
willcannings
Yeah their credits are a bit sneaky :) Twilio only supports US numbers which
is a problem. If you're looking at telephony companies, Tropo
(<https://www.tropo.com/>) is only 2c per message and sorta supports
international numbers. Their 'support' is basically "if it works, awesome, if
it doesn't, well we never said it definitely would". It's worked well to
Australia for me so far. International support is coming at some point, though
I don't know if it will still be at 2c per message.

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shaytac
Having the app send random texts makes it much better imho. If you set it up
like yahoo and google calendars it just-another-reminder-app. Btw, liked the
Ataturk background.

~~~
omarish
good eye :)

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Omnipresent
excellent idea. For weekend projects like these...where do you get the pre
made de facto buttons like login, signup, forgot pwd among others..

~~~
omarish
I found this tutorial that did a great job explaining it:

[http://particletree.com/features/rediscovering-the-button-
el...](http://particletree.com/features/rediscovering-the-button-element/)

The icons are from FAMFAM: <http://famfamfam.com/>

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quickpost
I love it. Simple and to the point - will definitely try it out. What are you
using as your payment processor?

~~~
omarish
I just plugged in Chargify a few days ago and it's working out well so far.
Glad you like -- feel free to pass any feedback to omar.bohsali@gmail.com.
Thanks!

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constabulary
My project: Mr Gaol -- parole reminders by email, SMS and uniform

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eurohacker
as a beginner to programming - what programming languages / platform you used
for it

~~~
omarish
I wrote the site using Django [1]. Here's a great tutorial I used to learn the
ins and outs of django a few years ago [2]. Feel free to ping me if you have
any questions if you decide to give python/django a try. I'm omarish on
freenode.

I also keep this page updated with the technologies we're using: [3] (see the
section on technologies).

[1] <http://www.djangoproject.com/> [2]
<http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/intro/tutorial01/> [3]
<https://mrgoal.net/about/>

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dadupta
this works

