Grow or Pay: Grow your follower count or your enemy gets your donation!

Hi, I'm Silver. Here's why I built this thing: What problem is GrowOrPay solving? GrowOrPay helps you fight procrastination by tapping into loss aversion and your distastes. Not meeting a growth goal in itself is often not a big enough incentive to stop some of us from procrastinating. We might feel disappointed, but failing to reach our goal won’t make us cringe. By tapping into loss aversion and our dislikes, GrowOrPay is able to generate surprising amounts of extra motivation with relatively small amounts of money. This is a unique growth hack product in the PaaS (Pain as a Service) industry. 🙂 Having to give $50 to someone we despise might cause as much pain as losing between $75 to $2000. Why Twitter, why the questionable followers goal? GrowOrPay focuses on social growth because it is easily measurable, fully automatable and there is no self-reporting from users required. This is the easiest way to prove how much effect such negative incentives have with one specific measurable goal. Twitter is a crazy playground with people from all walks of life. Whether their growth goals are questionable obsessions or justified business goals does not matter for the purpose of measuring the effects of the approach. All I need is enough people to try. For those interested, there are examples like Beeminder, StickK, GoFuckingDoIt etc. that help fight procrastination. Some of them are more serious than others, but all quite general and more involved than I think is required to really get to the bottom of the effectiveness of using anti-charities. How would this help me grow my audience? It won’t. There are a million ways to grow your audience and what works well keeps changing. There really is only one thing that actually matters — consistently showing up and doing the work and producing engaging content. There’s a reason GroworPay is a subscription service. The site is here to provide procrastinators with a consistent additional extrinsic motivator at the lowest cost possible. There is of course an opportunity to use social media to engage your audience in growing support for your goal as they may become invested in helping you avoid the payment too and that’s something I’ve made easier by providing links and automated posts in the app. What if I don’t have enemies per se? I also would not actually call anyone my enemy. I think that’s healthy and that’s what we all should strive for. Nevertheless I’m sure you can think of someone whose values do not align with yours or whose actions make you cringe. Groworpay just helps you turn that distaste into a motivational force. What happens to the money if I meet my goal? Your last month’s amount gets added to next month’s sum at stake, so you will automatically get an increasing motivation to work towards your goal. Staked $19 for a monthly goal and made it? Well now your second month’s money at risk is $38 if you don’t make it (ie. $19 from last month plus $19 for new month). Beautiful, right? So I’ll lose my money eventually? Don’t worry, there is light at the end of the tunnel. If you deliver on your goal for ONE year straight — then you can choose to have the sum returned to you or given to the charity of your choosing (our fee differs to encourage more giving) turning the whole year of hard work and growth into a positive experience for everyone. This is weird, but ok! I know it’s weird, but I just felt like building something fun and weird, learning a few technologies and having fun. Go on, log in to see just how easy it is to set up OR go give GrowOrPay some love by upvoting or following it on Twitter. Even if you don’t feel like signing up for a paid plan to grow your audience, you can still contribute by signing in and poking around and becoming part of the control group who was curious, but did not commit. I’ll compare the follower growth counts for both groups to conclude the study after the paid sample gets statistically significant. Good luck with the procrastination fight!