

Ask HN: review my startup concept - web achievements - bonquesha99
http://webchiever.com/

======
yourabi
I think you are on the right track with the idea - but I see some problems
with some of the specifics.

1) A lot of companies are paranoid and will want to run this inside their
network/firewall. You should develop that option (look at GitHub firewall for
example)

2) What incentive do platform providers have in pooling achievements / users -
I don't see that happening. I would focus on a white box rewards platform -
think SimpleGeo for rewards.

I wouldn't focus on having Webchiever being the destination for leader-boards
...etc because then you are competing with the people you are allegedly
providing a service for. Become the plumbing, and if you do it well people
will pay.

Cool idea.

~~~
bonquesha99
Something standalone like github:fi would be pretty cool, thanks I'll keep
that in mind.

I was planning on allowing providers to pull achievement data back out like
you're suggesting (unless I misunderstood you) but I'd also like to have a
centralized listing of achievements as well. It allows users to discover
sites/service that their friends are using, which would drive new targeted
traffic to those providers. I think users would be more willing to check out
sites/services if they see that they're friends are using it. If a user is
already using a particular service and sees that a friend of theirs just got
an achievement, their natural urge to be competitive could drive them to check
it out and get the achievement themselves.

It could also be useful for helping users decide things in marginal
situations. Imagine a user is hungry but not yet motivated enough to do
anything about it - seeing an achievement from a friend where they got 10
points for ordering a pizza online could help push that user in the direction
of completing that achievement, and in doing so driving revenue for that
provider.

~~~
tonystubblebine
I definitely agree with you that achievement systems could be usefully applied
to the real world. I built a point system recently to manage my own life and
have now become addicted to flossing. I submitted for a demo account but would
love to talk to you more generally. tony@tonystubblebine.com

Also, are you Sean Huber of InquryApp?

~~~
yourabi
I'm assuming you're making a reference to Jesse Schell's "10 points for
brushing your teeth" talk (link below)

[http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/consumer-
electronics/gami...](http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/consumer-
electronics/gaming/the-most-disturbing-presentation-of-the-year)

~~~
bonquesha99
Yes, this app was definitely inspired by that awesome talk

------
OmarIsmail
Congrats! I had this idea about 8 months ago and knew that it was going to
exist in some form on the web within 12 months. Now there are two services
that are entering the space, so that is very cool.

However, my original idea seemed to be a combination of both webchiever and
iactionable. And to be honest, I think both are necessary to make a successful
service. Since founders of both companies are in this thread, I'll just lay
out my thoughts here for you guys to incorporate as you see fit.

Fundamentally, achievements and points are a form of motivation/incentive that
the designers of software/service can use to reward behavior they want the
users to do. Now this has one really big assumption, that the users of the
system actually care about the points and badges. For my high level thoughts
around motivation check out my blog post
([http://mysimplemindedworld.wordpress.com/2009/04/16/a-framew...](http://mysimplemindedworld.wordpress.com/2009/04/16/a-framework-
for-understanding-motivations/))

So going by Bartle's classification, the people that are motivated by points
for their own sake are the achievers. And for some sites, having a few
achievers do a heck of a lot is enough. However, if your leaderboard only has
5 people on it, the competitive aspect isn't really there and so achievers
aren't AS motivated, and you don't get the Socializers/Explorers.

So you want to have quite a few people part of your leaderboards to spur
competition, set standards, and show off their stuff. However, for small sites
that can be difficult.

The solution? Aggregate points/achievements across many sites/services. Follow
the standard of Xbox Live and have the meta-game of overall Gamerscore be a
big motivator. So while that one particular site may not have been that
interesting to you, if you know that you can increase your overall NetScore by
another 100 by contributing to it, well that's just the extra bit of
motivation you need to do.

You then have a centralized identity that people can show off. You also then
have a service that sites will want to use to motivate their users. Of course
you have the standard chicken/egg problem, however there are enough sites that
want to outsource this kind of point/badge system you'd probably have it
cracked.

Here are the specifics for my idea... which I liked to call SocialScore.

There are two point systems at play. There is what i like to call the
"internal" point system, and then the "meta" point system.

Internal points are applicable only for a specific site, and are used to power
a site's leaderboards. So let's use twitter as an example. If they signed up
to SocialScore they could create an event such as "get a follower" and that
would be worth 100000 points. Writing a tweet they could make 5000 points.
Following someone is 10000 points. Whatever, totally arbitrary and up to the
site owner. It's only used for insite comparisons anyway. You then have a
leaderboard widget system, and also show leaderboards on the central site.

You then have a badge system. Just like Xbox Live each site that signs up gets
a fixed number of SocialScore points, and an upper limit of badges they can
give out. Maybe you start with 100 SocialScore points you can give out (per
user) and 20 badges. Of course there needs to be a verification/approval
system in place to make sure people don't just register a ton of fake sites to
get lots of badges. The integrity of the system is very important.

The interface/rule engine I concepted would consist of the following. A site
master would register a series of events with the SocialScore system. So would
register "Get a follower=1000 points" and the system would return an event id.
And there could be an arbitrary number of events a site could register.

The site master would then create a set of requirements on which to award a
particular badge. For example To Get Badge "Follow Master" a user needs to
have event id XXXX happen 100 times. Or you could get a bit more complicated
and be event id X happens 10 times and Y happens 5 times and Z happens 30
times. You get the idea.

Now on the programming end you have a very very basic API that just registers
events. It's just one call "registerevent(userhash,eventid)" and the
SocialScore system handles all the point calculations, badge awarding, etc.

The SocialScore site can then provide a bunch of widgets that client sites can
embed such as leaderboards, profile-badges, etc. I'd even have the SocialScore
system have a javascript library that would handle notifications, etc. But
that's expansion stuff.

The business model here is great too... your first block of SocialScore points
and badges are free, if you want to be able to award more SocialScore points
and badges site masters have to pay for them. I disagree with the per-event
payment model that Webchievements is pursuing since there's too much risk for
the site. Also, if the aggregator site gets enough traction there are
sponsorship and advertising opportunities. There's the obvious regular
advertising, but then there's the cooler advertising where sites will want to
be promoted to users of SocialScore.

So there's my original design laid out. It seems to be more ambitious than
what both IActionable and Webchievements are going after... I don't know if
that's a good or bad thing.

------
hkuo
Just from my rudimentary math skills, I'm not sure the pay-per-achievement
assignment would work. As an example, let's say I have 10,000 active users per
month, and from their activity, they achieve 10 things per month. At one penny
per, I would be shelling out $1000 per month for your service, $12,000 per
year. Simply put, hell no. Perhaps, a better pricing plan would be in tiers
with fixed costs, and notifications if one were nearing the limit of their
chosen tier?

Also, for that $1000 alone, I could probably hire a developer to build an
achievement system on my own server for my own sites. Just curious, what would
the incentive be for me as a site owner to pay for your service as opposed to
building my own?

~~~
vyrotek
Just so its clear, with this idea you would have to build you own achievement
system regardless. You're just giving the site a copy of it.

 _Just curious, what would the incentive be for me as a site owner to pay for
your service as opposed to building my own?_

It really depends on the complexity of the 'rules' which award the badges and
how often you update the requirements or add new badges. If your badges are
going be like "post a photo!" then you really don't need one. But, if you have
a very high traffic site and a badge that is awarded if X happens 100 times &
Y happens 200 times OR Z happens 3000 times... then you have to consider how
you will manage these requirements. And also how much extra load you're adding
to your database every time a user performs one of those actions.

------
Sidnicious
You watched

[http://g4tv.com/videos/44277/dice-2010-design-outside-the-
bo...](http://g4tv.com/videos/44277/dice-2010-design-outside-the-box-
presentation/)

, didn't you?

~~~
bonquesha99
Absolutely.

------
barmstrong
I've never tried adding achievements to my app...is it difficult to get right?

The services I like to outsource are the ones that are hard enough on their
own...mail server (sendgrid), possibly hosting (heroku), recommendations
(directededge). Some of them which are relatively easy, like comments with
disqus, have been successful, but there is an added benefit here of letting
users comment with the same account all blogs they visit.

Are achievements hard enough that users should offload them to you? Will they
have to define various rules using some sort of interface you develop? I'm
skeptical at first glance, but have been wrong before.

~~~
vyrotek
As far as I understand, the service provided will be a respository of badges.
Your site will have to determine what the badges are and when to award them to
users. Then you'll let Webchiever know about it so they can store a copy. This
way users have one place to show off all their badges.

In regards to how difficult it is. The repository concept itself isn't hard,
but the idea is if you can get enough sites to use you then I imagine other
sites will see the site as a great advertising opportunity and will want to
award badges just to get visibility on the site.

The rule engine is a different story. (Of course I'm very bias) A 3rd party
rule engine is useful if you plan to constantly add badges and/or change the
conditions which award a badge. Otherwise you need a developer to essentially
rewrite your badge awarding queries or code every time you want to make a
change. Or write your own flexible rule engine with a management UI. :)

~~~
bonquesha99
You've pretty much got it, especially the 2nd paragraph. And your right they
would need a developer, or at least some familiarity with the inner workings
of their own site in order to insert the code needed to award an achievement
to a user. They can also manually assign achievements to users, or generate
achievement claiming codes and send those out to users as they see fit.

------
franck
This reminds me of this project by Jeff Lindsay (progrium) :
<http://www.getachievements.com>

I'm not sure it's still active though.

------
johnrob
Problem - if a new game shows up, it doesn't provide a fresh new leaderboard
for the achiever to climb.

~~~
bonquesha99
Could you clarify what you meant by this? When a new game is created, the
developers of the game will be responsible for defining the achievements in
webchiever.

