Totally agreed. I've been working on a project that uses a similar model. You get charged a small fee for not meeting a certain requirement, and anything above what is needed to keep the site running goes to charity. (Ends up being about 95% to charity).
Also, there is gym-pact.com, which disburses your money to others who do meet their workout requirements.
I understood that, maybe my terminology was wrong, but you effectively pledge to pay $5 every time your schedule slips.
I'm not sure $5 is enough motivation, and if it were significantly more I'd start to question why I was giving this money to the developers of this app, rather than someone more deserving, like the users who are missing out on using the product, or a charity.
- $5 is our first attempt on finding the right balance for most people where they would be motivated and wouldn't cheat.
- We definitely thought of giving the money to charity. But we would be more inclined to use the resource to do something really interesting (more or less along the lines with "giving it to someone more deserving"), hopefully to build up a "community of shippers" in long term.
I have a folder on my computer with a number of unfinished/unshipped projects. We created Sink or Ship to address the problem of following though and shipping what you started.
Great idea, instantly reminded me of 'Lose It or Lose It' which is the same concept but for weight loss (loseitorloseit.com). Putting money on the line is always a great motivator.
Whenever you get some completed projects it would be cool if there was a gallery to check them out.
Even more interesting would be to have a gallery of all pledged projects. That would be interesting alternative to Betalist/Betabait - filtering the startups who are far enough with progress to bet own cash on launch.
We did a startup that used the same model in stopping online procrastination: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2268710, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fuc0_ZMQ4P8 and our competitor in productivity space blogged about us :http://blog.beeminder.com/timecarrot/. My experience is that, it is really hard to build a business model around behavioral economics, be it weight loss, quitting smoking, or anything else. Based on the data I have seen, people who will think they need commitment device are also sophisticated enough to know that they might fail, hence won't signup. In the end, you always end up serving significantly smaller number of consumers than you have initially assumed.
So what happens if I unlink the app from my Twitter account before you auto-tweet?
Also, it doesn't say how much it'd cost if I don't ship in time, just "Free if you ship it in time. Pay $5 only when you want to make changes." -- what if I don't ship in time and I don't make changes?
thats a great idea. We are just testing the concept out right and scratching our own itch/problem. Figured $5 was the simplest thing we could do to start.
This mentality will just encourage fire drills and burnout.
It does nothing towards improving core problems of software development lifecycle planning issues.
I would suggest reading a book like Peopleware, before embarking on public shame or penalties as solutions. These band-aids are almost always self-imposed, and they almost never work.
Nice idea. Similar to something I've considered recently: an email client concept that would charge postage for every message sent with proceeds going to charity. Might cut down on inbox overload.
For these types of sites that offer negative reinforcement by donating to the charity of choice, I wonder how much a stronger an incentive it would be to donate to a cause the user is against rather than one of their choosing (e.g., donate to the presidential candidate you don't support).
This would be a good idea if the announcement came with the extra cachet of being on time. For example, you could agree to socially promote projects that ship on time, and remove such promotion if it slips. This would need to be curated, though, and so an expensive service (perhaps $50?)
I think it would also be cool to link your projects (shipped or failed) to some type of karma system. This way you can show your scars and your successes. Maybe even target the karma report for VCs.
Maybe you could use most of the money to invest in kickstarter-type projects, who in turn use sinkorship with much higher costs for not shipping, creating a loop of funding
We had a few ideas on how to iterate from here. a kick-starter model is something we considered, but wanted to start with something really small for people to try out first.
On the other hand, I would consider pledging the money to a charity, and giving a small cut to service that facilitates it.