411, 2014

These Three Mini Habits Will Make Your Day Infinitely Better

By |November 4th, 2014|habit formation|6 Comments

I’m bad at keeping up with my daily tasks. I have about 18 things I want to track and it’s a mess. Goes alright for a few weeks, then inevitably it all comes crumbling down.

I can imagine loads of people have the same feeling. It can be overwhelming. That’s where mini habits come to the rescue!

Mini habits are easy. They’re so ridiculously small it’s almost impossible not to do them. They typically take less than 2 minutes to complete.

Here are my personal favorites:

The “How are you so energetic, it’s only 8AM!” habit

Every morning, straight after rolling out of bed, do 3 pushups, or however many you need to get your heart rate slightly raised.

This is much more effective than your morning coffee. You’ll have a small win to kick-start your day, and on top of that you feel more energetic.

Whenever I do sports in the morning, I know that day is going to be a big WIN. I don’t know whether I have cause and effect mixed up, but still 🙂

The “Wow, you’re such a social butterfly” habit

You remember all those friends from high school? The ones you’ve been meaning to contact for the last 7 years? Friends come and go, but if you never take initiative, more will go.

An easy solution for the more introverted among us (including yours truly): send a message (text, Facebook, whatsapp, whatever) to one person you’ve been meaning to talk to for a while. This sounds like it’s complete bullshit, but it makes a huge difference in the long run.

The “Are you a rocket scientist?” habit

I want to read more. I say I want to read more. But I never actually do it. The act of actually picking up that book and starting to read just seems so… daunting. There’s always more important things to do.

The trick is to make the goal so absurdly small that it becomes easy. Pick up a book and read 2 pages per day. If you do just that, you win.

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For most of us, these are starting points. They naturally make you want to do more. If you just start now and do these three habits for one full year, I can guarantee you’re going to be a full-blown fitness addict with a huge social circle reading one book a week!

Oh and by the way, HabitBull is perfect for tracking these kinds of habits 😉

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2010, 2014

Hi, we’re Thomas and Boyan

By |October 20th, 2014|startup life|27 Comments

We’ve been working on HabitBull for 7 months now. As in any startup, the highs and lows are extreme. A few weeks ago we were demotivated because we weren’t getting enough active users a day. It’s one of the most important metrics of any consumer facing business and we were fucking it up. Not enough growth.

When you get demotivated, you start talking about solutions. Wasting time drinking coffees. But no real work gets done.

It’s scary to think about our beloved baby in terms of hard data and facts. We talk a lot with the people who are using our app, and I love seeing how HabitBull can actually change their lives. But sometimes it’s necessary to take a long hard look in the mirror.

We hadn’t been growing much for a few weeks in a row, and we couldn’t figure out why. Even worse, we couldn’t even imagine new features which would help us gain any significant amount of new users.

More coffees. More procrastination. More brainstorming.

Then we found an interesting correlation.

We started asking people for money a while back. It seemed to be a win-win situation: we got some money to pay the bills, there was no backlash and we kept growing.

Except that we didn’t. You see, there’s quite a bit of lag on the number of active users. It’s really hard to notice any patterns while they’re happening. Hindsight really is 20/20.

So 2 weeks ago we decided to make the app completely free. Before, there was always some kind of restriction. You either had to send us an email with feedback to unlock all features, or share the app with some friends, or pay. But now, for the first time you didn’t have to do anything.

A fairly average growth rate in weekly active users is 5%. When you get to 7% it’s pretty good, while 10% is killing it. Last week we got a whopping 37% without any marketing at all!

Now, one week doesn’t mean anything. That’s an event, not a trend.

But at least our motivation is back! 🙂

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