Of Course You're Awesome. Now Pay $10 a Month to Hear Someone Else Say It

http://newsfeed.time.com/2010/08/24/of-course-youre-awesome-now-pay-10-a-month-to-hear-someone-else-say-it/

by zackattack • 16 years ago

80 43 16 years ago

newsfeed.time.com

ayb• 16 years ago

Congrats to them for the exposure! Awesome example of someone taking an idea, bootstrapping it, and running with it.

I saw it on HN first :-) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1616154

jasonlbaptiste• 16 years ago

I'll make a good bet they saw it on HN first too :). For better or for worse, many of the tech writers of mainstream pubs pay attention here.

bond• 16 years ago

Yeah, saw it here too. It's nice to see it's picking up...

jrockway• 16 years ago

Guys, I found a way to save $10 a month. I just tell other people that they're awesome, and due to some social stigma (or perhaps my intrinsic awesomeness, who knows), they tell me the same thing back. Now I have $10 extra every month... maybe I am awesome!

scottkrager• 16 years ago

You are awesome....where's my $10?

psadauskas• 16 years ago

You're awesome, too. There, I saved you $10, go buy lunch with it.

Tichy• 16 years ago

This drives home an important point: newspapers/media just like to tell a good story. They are less interested in "business fundamentals", but in outrageous things.

It's cool that they also mentioned the other projects by the same person.

gecko• 16 years ago

So, the way I figure it: let's say each phone call lasts only two minutes. You literally just look up the number, call the person, say "You're awesome!" and then hang up. That still works out to just $10/hr or so, not counting phone costs. I can't imagine they're really making much money on this.

gwern• 16 years ago

2 minutes sounds ridiculously long to me.

philwelch2• 16 years ago

Two minutes is a gross overestimate. You can get it down to 30-60 seconds if you have an autodialer, but 90 seconds is a generous estimate even without. So figure 90 seconds per call, 30.42 calls per month per customer, you have 45 minutes per customer per month. $10 for 45 minutes is $13 per hour. $10 per hour labor (a generous rate for US-based English speaking labor) leaves a very thin margin, but still potentially profitable.

If you scaled this, you'd want to have a VoIP autodialer system, at which point you'd get down to maybe 60 seconds per call average, which is 30 minutes per customer per month, which is $20/hour revenue, so $10/hour labor would give you $10/hour on top of that to cover everything else. You could do this with call centers, which imposes real estate cost, or you could have a web-based system for employees to connect into from home, which also gives you the benefit of being able to hire them as independent contractors instead of employees and hence not having to worry about their taxes or health care.

There's further optimizations you could make. $10/hour is a high rate for paying people to place unwanted phone calls to complete strangers. I know because that's more than what I made doing that job. If you were running a call center of stoned teenagers and college students, you could probably get away with paying them $8/hour to call up subscribers and tell them they're awesome. Yes, most call centers are staffed by stoned teenagers and college students, at least the ones in charge of making scripted, outgoing calls. Well, at least mine was.

pvg2• 16 years ago

If you were running a call center of stoned teenagers

People only call centers staffed by stoned teenagers because they have to - they have an immediate problem they want help solving. Or they receive unwanted and unsolicited calls from them. Nobody is going to pay $10/month to receive a daily call from a stoned teenager who mispronounces their name.

ryanwanger• 16 years ago

An interesting aspect of this is: there are lots of professions where people dread phone calls. If the awesomenessreminder guys were able to call from a different number everyday (which they might be doing anyway, via Skype), it could completely change the feeling those people get when the phone rings each day. After all, one of those unknown numbers is going to be a lot of fun!

They should pitch that service to property management, technical support, customer service, etc.

dpcan• 16 years ago

Wow, does this go right along with the comments from the dev's thread about this app a couple days ago or what???

People were saying that he was throwing ideas at a wall until one stuck or got noticed, and sure enough, here's a popular publication with a link to his new app.

He must be having a chuckle right now. Not sure if he's actually making money, but this has to feel like and accomplishment.

StavrosK• 16 years ago

You're saying this as if it's contradictory. Those people were right, he was throwing ideas at a wall, and one did stick. It doesn't make their point wrong, and I remember many commenters saying that this is a valid strategy (which apparently it is).

volare• 16 years ago

Previous thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1616154

pvg2• 16 years ago

Not sure if he's actually making money

FTA:counts just over 100 subscribers

So, no.

here's a popular publication with a link to his new app [...] this has to feel like and accomplishment

It's a blog. And by that standard, pretty soon 'I posted to HN' will be an 'accomplishment'. Just for fun, let's look at the next two headlines:

Guyana's Health Minister Cautions Against Singing Too Much About Rum

Bizarro, Cat-Hating Woman Found

jackowayed• 16 years ago

He just launched, and he's bringing in $1500/month (website says 151 customers now).

If he pays people to make all the calls, it should take him almost no time to run the business. And even paying the callers a reasonableish sum, he probably keeps ~1/3 of the money.

So he wrote an extremely-simple website, got it some exposure, and hired a friend to make the calls, and now he's got $500/month in recurring income that has a good chance of growing and requires little recurring work. Sure, he's not going to get rich, but that doesn't mean it's a failed venture.

jacquesm2• 16 years ago

194 customers now!

That's really pretty good. I think Zachary really nailed the 'make something people want' angle :)

snth• 16 years ago

I don't know if many people would buy this for themselves, but it would make a great gag gift for someone.

joeld42• 16 years ago

Yeah, can you get them to call your friends and say "you suck!"??

blhack• 16 years ago

I just asked one of my friends if she wanted to participate in an experiment, and that it was a surprise :).

Luckily, she is a good sport, and I think she'll love it. The thing I'm interested in is if this just gets annoying or not. (If yes, I'll just cancel the service)

notahacker• 16 years ago

That's probably true. It'll be interesting to see how many people continue the subscription.

Goosey• 16 years ago

I really like this idea. One thing that surprised me when I entered Cognitive Behavior Therapy was the power of affirmations. The old Saturday Night Live 'Stuart Smalley' is an unfortunate social stigma that stopped me from ever taking the practice seriously until I was shown some hard evidence of it's effectiveness (no, I don't have it on hand, you can google as easily as me).

So I gave it a try. Then I tried it some more. Over time it really takes a transformation. At first I really felt like Stuart; but that is because I didn't believe the things I was saying. If I kept lowering the bar eventually I could find compliments about myself that I actually thought were true. The good feelings and confidence those smaller compliments gave me helped boost me to higher levels, and up and up, until the point now where I feel an abundance of confidence in most of my day to day interactions that I never had before.

Affirmations are really just a mind hack to architect your internal reality intentionally. You DO have an inner reality, so why not try to take control of it? :)

EDIT: Oh, but back to this startup.. I like this idea, but I hope they understand the principles behind affirmation therapy as a part of CBT. Simply telling someone they are awesome will have no actual affect if they don't believe what you are saying, so there needs to be a little bit of a day-to-day feedback process to hone in on the target emotions you want to generate. I doubt this much effort is being put in, but I might be willing to drop $10 to find out. :)

frossie• 16 years ago

Simply telling someone they are awesome will have no actual affect if they don't believe what you are saying

Yeah, the same goes with child development - there's quite a lot of research that says that it is counterproductive to praise a kid for something that they don't believe is praiseworthy.

But there are surely cultural variations to this. For example, I occasionally have had waitstaff in (US) restaurants where when I order an item on the menu will say something like "Excellent choice" or "Awesome". That really feels wrong to me, but since they do it, I suspect it works well at least on some people. So maybe the same thing happens here.

aresant• 16 years ago

I love it - Zack I bet you'd get another nice bunch of eyeballs if you'd post a takeaway on your stats from the mention - I'd be very curious about visitors / conversions from such a strong PR piece -

olegk• 16 years ago

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cbk980jV7Ao

mgrouchy• 16 years ago

This is a fun idea, I wonder if there are some kind of legal ramifications in this though?

Only reason why I say this, is Tim Ferris wrote an article on the Visa Concierge service ( http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2010/05/01/credit-card-... ) and they would do just about anything, but they wouldn't call you and tell you that you were awesome, they were "not allowed to do anything of a medical or emotional nature."

I'm thinking maybe not if there are other companies who do this, but who knows.

daychilde• 16 years ago

I think there's a difference in having access to a concierge-type service, where the nature of the service is not completely described (there's no set list of provided services, only rules to help the employees figure out if a request is acceptable or not), versus this service, which is very clear, focused, and narrow.

Even the request for daily affirmation was answered with the contact of a possible company that might provide it; so perhaps if knowledge of this service spreads, it might be a recommended source of that service.

magicseth• 16 years ago

I've built an app for the iPhone that does this for you. It can even tell you you're awesome every 15 minutes! It is called Yantra (http://myyantra.com) and is designed to give you periodic reminders to be present, focused, or focus on the good. There is a community of people so that you browse what other people are telling themselves, and contribute as well.

I love the constant stream of positive affirmations.

jacquesm2• 16 years ago

Super press Zachary, congratulations!

philk2• 16 years ago

This is hilarious and I'd love to know how many new people sign up after this article (and how sticky customers are in the coming months).

Also, I know it's simply a rhetorical flourish but:

or, for $7.50 a month, you could give just a quarter to a homeless person every day and feel real good about yourself.

I wouldn't feel good doing this at all.

Empedocles99• 16 years ago

You could say why... but instead, you left it to my imagination.

philk2• 16 years ago

Fair enough. Off the top of my head, a whole host of reasons:

a) I'm unconvinced that my money will make a positive difference.

b) I don't want to reward begging.

c) I don't find interacting with the homeless enjoyable.

d) If I give the quarter to the same homeless guy each day he'll come to expect it and become unhappy if I don't one day.

e) Doing the same thing every day quickly makes it routine and destroys any enjoyment.

I'm just surprised that people always use the "giving money to the homeless" thing as an example of doing good, when there's far better stuff around. (For example, you could save your $7.50 for twelve months[1] and mail off a $90 donation to the charity of your choice).

[1] If you give less frequently you'll minimize the cost of processing your donations.

WingForward• 16 years ago

Six months of this service is what my sister is getting for her birthday this year.

Of Course You're Awesome. Now Pay $10 a Month to Hear Someone Else Say It

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