MOTIV3

Inspiration

One of our group members is a nicotine fiend. We joked that we wished there were able to "short" him quitting, and realized an underlying, powerful idea: it's easier to follow through on commitments when there's money on the line.

The research validates the need for this platform – you're 50% more likely to hit a goal when you stake money on it. We're using that, combined with the social pressure of adding friends to your goal and letting them track your progress, to help people accomplish more.

What it does

We built MOTIV3 to add real stakes to group goals. With our platform, groups can put money on the line to accomplish goals like going to the gym daily, quitting smoking, attending meetings at a book club, or shipping a side project. Other group members validate whether they follow through on milestones, and based on who hits their goals, money is redistributed. If you follow through on your goals and your friends don't, you profit – if all your friends follow through, all the money is returned and you've accomplished a collective goal.

Here's the end to end process:

Users create a goal (i.e. I'll go to the gym daily for the month), a buy in (i.e. $10) for that goal, and an end date.
They invite friends to the goal, who also have to buy in with $10 to participate
Every day, you can validate whether or not your friends accomplished their daily commitment. This creates a decentralized verification process, forcing every user to validate their actions to the other people in that goal.
At the end date, money is redistributed based on how well the participants hit their commitments. n a pool of two people, if one person went to the gym 30 days and the other went 15 days, the person who hit all 30 would get $13.33 ((30 days / 30 + 15 days) * $20).

How we built it

We built a social media-esque platform where users can add people who's goals they want to follow, and vice versa. Users buy in to goals to participate. Every day, users log onto MOTIV3 to validate if their friends followed through on their daily promises. At the end, we pay users out based on who did and didn't hit commitments.

We used CockroachDB, Next.js, and React to build our website; Vercel to host; and Domain.com for the domain. We use Twilio to notify participants in a goal to verify whether their friends followed through on their outcomes. We use Stripe Connect to manage pay-ins and pay-outs (there's a dummy form on our website to play around for free, but the relevant Stripe APIs are in our repos and commented out).

Challenges we ran into

We struggled to figure out a good way for users to validate milestones (like going to the gym daily). If they did it of their own accord, they could lie. Our solution was making it so that other friends that goal are the only ones that can validate that milestone. For example, if the goal was attending weekly four-person book club meetings, Person A's attendance would be verified by the majority of Person B, Person C, and Person D.

We also struggled to integrate Twilio SendGrid, and ended up using Twilio’s SMS APIs instead.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re proud of creating a functioning social network to add friends and discover new group goals. We’re also proud of our consensus mechanism, which forces users to be accountable to their friends. This synthesizes financial incentives with social incentives.

We love the game theory behind MOTIV3 because it’s a positive-sum game. In the financial “worst case” where everyone in a group accomplishes the goal, no one loses money. If you follow through and your friends don’t, there’s financial upside. This creates a simultaneously competitive and collaborative environment.

We’re also glad that it works, minus some bugs with Twilio notifications and front-end goal verification, and that we could literally ship it tomorrow.

What we learned

We learned a lot about what incentivizes people (social commitments and loss-aversion) and how to translate those behavioral principles into a social platform. We also became more familiar with new APIs and took a first stab at the Tailwind.css framework. We reinforced React knowledge and learned about PostgreSQL by using CockroachDB.

What's next for MOTIV3

Some quick bugs we didn't get the chance to fix in this hackathon: Twilio notifications don't always send and the front-end display for checkpoints is spotty when we add users.

Our current consensus mechanism relies on external validation (for example, to verify that all friends go to the gym daily, users might set up a groupchat of daily selfies at the gym). We’d love for that to be implemented on the platform through comments on a goal.

Just for fun, we also want to create ways to “short” goals. For example, if your friend wants to quit nicotine for 30 days with a $30 buy in, taking the “short” position would mean buying in for $30 and being rewarded for each day your friend did smoke. For example, if he smoked 15 days, you would both get $30; if he smoked 20 days, you would get 2/3 the pool, or $40.

We want to brainstorm a monetization model.

Finally, we want to make it mobile friendly and ship it in our colleges to help students follow through on their goals – starting with David quitting nicotine.