November 3, 2020·Permalink

October was Penance’s first month of triple-digit revenue! The app grossed $125 for the month before donations, nearly doubling the previous high of $65 in September.

The breakdown

• Total revenue: $125
• Goals created: 8
• Fines paid: 16
• Accounts registered: 10

I attribute the growth, such as it is, to me becoming way more vocal about Penance. Until late September I was head down on feature work and hardly said anything about Penance on the internet. In October I published multiple articles about Penance (mostly on Indiehackers and the blog) and now the homepage gets consistent traffic, although still not tons.

Since the app is now firmly in “MVP” territory, I expect I’ll keep focusing on promotion and allow customer feedback to drive any new features I add in the next quarter or so.

Donations by cause

• National Rifle Association: $37.50
• Black Lives Matter: $15
• Trump Campaign $10
• Direct Relief: $62.50

For those unfamiliar with how Penance works, 50 percent of every fine our customers pay goes to a charity of their choice. While Penance is small, I’m donating the other half to a different charity each month. This month it was Direct Relief.

New features

• “””Concierge””” onboarding (my wife and are I handling this). My hypothesis is that customers’ success with Penance has a lot to do with how good they are at setting goals. Walking them through the onboarding—even though the app itself is pretty simple—lets me ensure they choose realistic, achievable goals, at least to start.
• Freemium access. Customers can now start tracking their goals and fines without a credit card.
• A billing UI where customers can see their payments over time and which charities they supported.

October 27, 2020·Permalink

A reader on Indiehackers asks:

How do you overcome the main issue with your business model — for you to succeed your customers must fail?

This is not, unfortunately, the main issue. The main issues, ranked by importance:

1. Nobody has heard of Penance.
2. Nobody has heard of me.
3. I’m the only designer, writer, or developer working on the product. But I’m also a terrible designer, just barely literate, and don’t have nearly the time I need to code all the features I want.
4. When you start using Penance to form a habit, it’s easy to ignore the app and lapse into your old ways.
5. Penance only works for certain goals: specifically, those that focus on process over results. It’s great for a goal like “write 250 words per day,” but no good for “finish my dissertation by December 31.” And it’s rare that people set goals that way.

So this is not top five among the issues Penance must overcome, but maybe top ten, and it’s a very perceptive question regardless of where it sits in the pecking order.

It is true that Penance makes money when users acknowledge they screwed up on some goal they set, and pay a fine for that. You could consider that a success for Penance and failure for the customer, but to my mind it’s neither.

What is success for Penance? It’s when people find Penance useful for making and breaking habits. So if someone signs up, sets a goal, pays $10 in fines, then decides Penance is useless for them, I don’t see anything successful about that, even if it shows up as $10 revenue on the books.

If the same person sets their goal, pays $10 in fines, achieves the goal, sets another goal, pays more fines, achieves it, sets another goal, et cetera, that’s a huge success. Or if they set a goal, pay $0 in fines, and achieve the goal, I consider that equally successful.

In any of these scenarios, it’s important that the value of the goal you set exceeds the price of the fines you pay. Someone who pays $100 in fines to accomplish something stupid (“play tiddlywinks twice daily”) isn’t a success. But given that people individually will spend thousands on gym memberships, diet books, education, counseling, coaching, and cosmetics, clearly there are some goals that are commonly considered “worth paying for.”

Penance is a success if and only if it makes those goals more achievable. Supposing it siphons off a bit of the cash people would otherwise pay to achieve them, so much the better.

October 25, 2020·Permalink

Originally I didn’t see a path to making Penance freemium. (That is, free to use, but with certain features requiring payment.) The point of the product is that you pay for your sins. If you haven’t provided a credit card, there’s no way to pay, so why bother?

The problem with that approach is that it makes converting visitors almost impossible. The conventional wisdom with online products is that putting a paywall in front of anything will reduce conversion to a small fraction of what it would be otherwise, and that squares with my experience here. I spent the last month posting about Penance around internet, which drove hundreds of visitors to the homepage, and borderline nobody signed up. A couple people did and I am grateful to those folks. But on aggregate the rate of signups was unacceptable.

Penance also faces the problem of being a weird product. Nobody visiting our homepage has used anything like Penance in the past. So it’s unlikely they are taking out their credit cards without first seeing the app and getting an idea for what it does. Freemium lets them do that.

So how does freemium work on Penance? Although you can still provide a credit at the time you sign up, you can also skip that step and starting tracking your goals and fines without it. If you record a fine, when the bill comes due, instead of charging you for it, Penance sends an email asking if you want to add a card. When you add a card, you have the option to go back and pay old bills, but that’s not required.

Those with cards on file still get charged automatically.

Watch this space for news on whether this approach works out any better.

September 29, 2020·Permalink

What am I personally working on this week?

No work before 8AM or earliest meeting ($20)

At my job, we recently finished a project that was understaffed and targeting an outrageous deadline. To make it happen, I got in the habit of starting work at 5 AM or earlier. Not as bad as it sounds—I’m an early riser. Long term though, it’s a huge waste of productive time, and I added this penance to break the habit.

I expect to keep this one active for a month, minimum, to ensure I don’t backslide.

No laptop after 5PM ($20)

Simple enough. I’ve been wanting more time away from screens. This one doesn’t officially ban phones, ipads, or TVs, but in the spirit of the goal, I’m avoiding them.

We’re currently in the middle of nowhere Idaho and in the absence of screens, there is nothing to do in the evenings except read books. You start to appreciate why people got so well-read before there was a TV in every house. I’ve been averaging something like 70 pages a day since instituting this.

Don’t say “classic” ($5)

A stupid verbal tic I picked up. I’m prone to falling back on a few stock phrases. Clearing those out of my vocabulary and forcing myself to think of new responses was one of the main motivations for making Penance in the first place.

Paid this one three times and it’s just Tuesday, that’s how reliant on this word I’d become.

No Twitter, only recap ($5)

I get a daily email recap of tweets from a few accounts I like. This goal requires I only look at that email, instead of going to twitter.com and absentmindedly scrolling a couple times daily.

September 27, 2020·Permalink

This week we paid our first-ever hate gift donation: $49.89 to Black Lives Matter, via the Black Lives Matter Support Fund at Tides Foundation.

Why The Tides Foundation?

Black Lives Matter is a very pervasive hashtag but—as I now know—not any single organization, which makes donating to the cause damn hard. There are endless charities claiming to support BLM, and cases of people setting up charities using the BLM branding, then siphoning donations off to other random causes.

I have heard the push back that it doesn’t matter where the hate gift money ends up—all that matters is that my users are losing money, and experiencing the motivation that loss inspires. I disagree with that but, even supposing it were true, I want to hold myself to a higher standard. I want my users to pay their hate gifts secure in the knowledge that their money is going to the highest-leverage organization I could find.

Hence, the Tides Foundation, which is currently rated 4/4 on Charity Navigator and has a history of scoring >90/100 for financial responsibility and transparency. Admittedly their board’s salaries are higher than what I consider justifiable for a charity. Even accounting for that, their administrative costs are 12% of revenue which is fair.

If anyone has a better suggestion for a beneficiary of BLM hate gifts, I’m all ears: jordan@penance.app.

Was It Really A Hate Gift?

In fairness to the user(s) who paid this money in the first place, I’ve got no idea whether they meant this as a hate gift. They could be fervent BLM radicals. We accept all types at Penance.

My original concept was that people would feel greater motivation to achieve their goals if they thought their money would go to an organization they “hate.” That’s how my brain works. And I know a few others using the app are using it in the same way.

However my guess is that the average person seeing the option to specify a beneficiary of their fines will choose an organization they agree with. In that case calling this a hate gift is misleading.

Regardless I’m running with the “hate gift” moniker for this feature. It is 100x better branding than calling them charitable donations—or anything in that vein—which you’d forget the moment you heard about it.

What’s Next?

This week I’m rolling out a couple new hate gift beneficiaries, both of them causes that should be particularly inspiring during this election season.

And for the gun nuts in the audience, I’ve checked the numbers, and this week we will pay our first donation to the NRA Foundation.

September 26, 2020·Permalink

Aside from harassing friends and colleagues to use the app, this is the most public I’ve been about Penance to date.

Although there are a few key features missing, the core functionality—charging my users money when they record their screw ups—is ready, working, and throwing off monthly revenue in the high two-figures.

So, I figure it’s time to tell the world about Penance.