Penance
self-flagellation as a service

Success For Penance

October 27, 2020

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.