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Show HN: Streak.ly tracks what you do daily and I'd love feedback on the concept

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Show HN: Streak.ly tracks what you do daily and I'd love feedback on the concept

#1

Post by kylebragger »

I've been working on a side project called Streak.ly with a friend of mine for the past month or so; it's intended to help keep you motivated to do otherwise mundane daily tasks (like do 10 pushups, read for an hour, etc.) by letting you log "streaks" — consecutive days in a row of doing something.

It's in private alpha/beta/gamma/whatever right now (has some rough edges to clean up), but is more or less functionally complete and pretty stable.

I'm a big fan of the Seinfeld calendar, and have seen other services which do similar things but were unsatisfying to use, either from an aesthetic or functional perspective. Streak.ly is designed to be simple, good-looking, fast, fun, (and hopefully addictive). (FWIW, it's also a place to experiment with user stickiness stuff I can potentially roll back in to Forrst.)

There are also some in-progress social/game/motivational features I plan to roll out in the next few weeks that hopefully contribute to the enjoyment factor of the app.

Streak.ly uses Twitter for authentication, and I've set up a URL to let HN folks in early: http://streak.ly/auth/twitter/start?secret=showhn

I'd love any and all feedback and/or criticism you may have.

Thanks!

Re: Show HN: Streak.ly tracks what you do daily and I'd love feedback on the concept

#3

Post by zeedotme »

nice looking but pretty limited for the moment. Honestly think most people who use tools like this will be looking for simplicity in their lives...and so convincing them to add another tool to their daily tools list is going very difficult considering all it can currently do (i realise it's alpha mind)

Re: Show HN: Streak.ly tracks what you do daily and I'd love feedback on the concept

#4

Post by kylebragger »

zeedotme wrote: post #3

nice looking but pretty limited for the moment. Honestly think most people who use tools like this will be looking for simplicity in their lives...and so convincing them to add another tool to their daily tools list is going very difficult considering all it can currently do (i realise it's alpha mind)

Thank you, and totally makes sense. Hopefully there is a nice middle ground where this could fit. My theory is also that if I can a) show value to enough folks that they start to realize, "hey, this is pretty useful and I can probably manage to use it 5 mins a day" and then b) get them to invite small groups of friends, the upcoming features in that vein will create a stickiness in those groups. Probably obvious to most but makes sense in my head at least.

Re: Show HN: Streak.ly tracks what you do daily and I'd love feedback on the concept

#7

Post by kylebragger »

il wrote: post #6

For a simple webapp like this, please don't make me get a twitter account/sign in to use. Generate a unique URL for me to use, or hash my email address or something like that. Reduce friction, I want to be able to use this with 1 click.

Very good point. I've got plans to add "use it now, sign up later" stuff in, it's just not made it into production yet.

Re: Show HN: Streak.ly tracks what you do daily and I'd love feedback on the concept

#9

Post by sraquo »

Here's my somewhat similar homebrew GTD system: http://img821.imageshack.us/img821/6109/progressb.png

You see time spent (in minutes) coding (+) and anything else done at the computer (-) taken from RescueTime, along with basic efficiency score and stuff done / to be done for my main project (game) and everything else (misc). Coloring is manual, blue = "worked well", red = "could have done better".

The file sits on the desktop and is the place where I keep my general to-do lists, so it is always open. Works well for me.

Note: censored some "misc" stuff, so don't think I normally work 4 hours a day :)

Re: Show HN: Streak.ly tracks what you do daily and I'd love feedback on the concept

#10

Post by kylebragger »

sraquo wrote: post #9

Here's my somewhat similar homebrew GTD system: http://img821.imageshack.us/img821/6109/progressb.png You see time spent (in minutes) coding (+) and anything else done at the computer (-) taken from RescueTime, along with basic efficiency score and stuff done / to be done for my main project (game) and everything else (misc). Coloring is manual, blue = "worked well", red = "could have done better". The file sits on t…

This is really, really cool.
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