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My weekend project that won't die: Mr. Goal - Intelligent Goal Reminders. (mrgoal.net)
23 points by omarish on Dec 13, 2010 | hide | past | favorite | 11 comments



Ok, signed up. As soon as I made the account, you are trying to upsell me to buy some monthly plan. You are going for the close too early. At least let me try out the thing. Slowly slowly catchy monkey.


Noted. Thanks!


I'm confused by this. On the one hand it says:

  > We'll randomly remind by email and SMS.
Then it says:

  > These intelligent reminders come to you
  > at the right times.
And there doesn't appear to be any explnation.


Sure. So in my previous iterations, I was thinking of taking user input and understanding when people needed goal reminders, but I've found out that sending random reminders throughout the day works out even better. The theory behind the site is that by consistently remembering your goals, you'll achieve them.

So "the right times" ends up being randomly throughout the day when you're probably not thinking about them. I like this solution because it's really simple, quite random, and notifies the user at unexpected times (only between 8am and 9pm in the user's timezone, though. Mr. Goal minds his manners).

I wasn't sure how to explain it on the front page, would you have any suggestions?


The best time for a reminder is when you're least expecting it.


Those are the exact words I'm looking for. Can I use this on the front page?


Sure, go right ahead.

However, you may want to run a trademark search with the USPTO to make sure some company hasn't already trademarked it for the reminders market. Trademarks are context-specific, so if it hasn't been trademarked for this context, I would file for one.


I've been dying (figuratively) for something to replace my folded-up piece of printer paper and sticky notes, with SMS reminders.

A couple of observations:

The use of the goal title as a top-level URI seems a bit odd (i.e. https://mrgoal.net/goal-name/). Obviously you can use the session info to disambiguate, but when you implement public goals, won't there be a lot of name collisions?

A little more detail on the Settings page about exactly how often "sometimes" or "often" is would be helpful, particularly for knowing how much of my weekly SMS budget will be used for each goal and in aggregate.


I had the idea for this app yesterday :) Looks nicely done.


Your about page needs to be more prominent.


Okay, would you have any recommendations on how?




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