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That sounds interesting. In that case, I would be interested in getting your perspective on the market value and potential for this MVP that I released recently: http://www.habbit.me

It's an app where your objective is to build your ideal future selves by mastering the habits needed to bring them into reality (in the present you). For now, it's an experiment to try and make habit-building more engaging and durable since changing personal habits are difficult to do in the long run.

Thanks for letting me know. It seems that there were some problems at around the time you were on the site (judging by the time you posted this comment). I'm looking into it right so hopefully it doesn't happen again.

Yep, probably going to get a basic blog up by the end of this week (as soon as I take care of a dozen urgent things on my todo list!)

In that case, good luck to your next venture! :D

I'm glad that you like it! And thanks for the feedback, I'll definitely be working on how to better hook users on the homepage.

I plan on having a mobile version of the app too, but as I'm still only one person working on the web app full-time, it might be a while before that future mobile app comes out. In the meantime, I hope your current app works out for you!

Thanks, glad you like what you see!

As for the tools I used, it's currently hosted on Heroku and I built the app on the Meteor framework and MongoDB database. I chose them to let me focus primarily on the core app and design. That way, while I still had to know enough to use them, I didn't need to spend another couple months learning the deep ends of all the technology.

In so far as learning from scratch, I actually already had a basic foundation in the areas I needed to learn. In design, I grew up as an avid artist who enjoyed drawing, crafting, and doing some crappy graphic designs...at one point, I was even seriously considering becoming an architect. So picking up photoshop and building my graphic design skills weren't too bad for me.

In programming, I took an AP computer science course in high school and loved it. I unfortunately didn't continue programming afterward, so my ninja java skills are pretty non-existent by now. Nevertheless, it probably helped me see programming as something I could learn instead of this complete black box of mystery that truly non-technical people would see.

So I feel it would be unfair toward others who had none of these backgrounds to say that I truly learned everything from scratch. Beyond these basic skills though, yes, I had to start from all the itty-bitty basics of web development, such as the different languages available, figuring out what the heck is a library/plug-in/framework/jquery, using the console, how to deploy, and so many other first-time experiences that I can't list them all. I'm happy to say that these are second-nature to me by now though, so if I had to do it all again, I think I could probably build Habbit in half the time.

Thanks, glad your first impression is so positive! And of course, I'll be working hard to make it sure it stays fantastic for the long-term.

As for future selves, I'm making the assumption that what you want to be at 30 is different from what you want to be at 60. So even if they're both in the future, they're in different stages of your future.

And in the short-term, I'm assuming that some might focus on improving a different aspect of themselves each year, like focusing on exercise and fitness for one year and master those habits, then move on the next year to focus on finance and career, and so on. From that perspective, you'll have slightly different selves and goals in each year.

Those are just my assumptions for now though. I'll probably observe and improve the use of future selves over time based on actual usage.

http://www.habbit.me

It's a gamified app for building your ideal future self with habits!

It was just launched yesterday on HN so, for the first day of my first startup, I'm happy with getting over 60 users signed up already. Not sure how to tell what's good traction or not though.

Thanks for your feedbacks! And you're right about needing a favicon soon, it's among the top items on my todo for design at the moment.

If all else fails though, I'm glad that I might have a career as a children's author! But really, thanks for your kind words about the illustrations and story-telling. They mean a lot to those countless drafts of redesigns and rewrites.

I especially like your idea of publishing a book version as a companion to the web. If the app grows big enough, I may very well do that!

Wow, thanks for your wealth of feedbacks! It's especially valuable to me since I'm so used to the interface that I wasn't quite sure which part of the interface might not be as intuitive as I liked.

Thanks also for your ideas, definitely considering some of them already!

Sorry about the confusion on the landing page, you're right that I definitely need to convey information better from the start. Glad that you tried it to the end though!

I'm a recent graduate from UC Berkeley actually and, since Habbit became such an important project to me, I decided to continue working on this as my full-time job instead. :)

Thanks for the insight, especially on the second point about the future self. I'll fix that when I can.

Oh boy, thanks for catching that!

Thanks for your feedback! And certainly - I realize that the site title is a little difficult to see. I'll try to improve that in my next design iteration. (Same goes for the second point that you mentioned.)

Thank you for the kind words, I really appreciate you taking the time to review!

As for my business model, you pay what you feel it's worth. At the end of every month, you can review your progress and set your price. While that might not be a contemporary method, I feel that each individual will probably derive different levels of value from Habbit. :)

Any currently in UC Berkeley? I'm an undergrad here at the moment.

You have a good point about people already being motivated to do something if they're looking for an app. However, "wanting" to do something tends to be a short-term motivation as compared to the grittier, determined motivation of "doing" something. For example, in my experience with my sister when she wanted to learn foreign languages in her spare time, she started off very motivated and we got all the right resources and "tools". However, when the "honeymoon" period of motivation wears off, it becomes difficult to keep going at it until you reach that stable sweet spot called "habit".

Though I referenced "motivation" earlier for simplicity, the underlying psychological mechanics I want to build in are much more complex than motivation. I've been researching an interesting cross-disciplinary domain between psychology and technology and have learned that it IS possible to use computer or mobile devices to motivate and shape the habits of a person. For the actual implementation of that, I'm still tweaking it around, but will hopefully be able to have some experiments out by this summer or fall. Of course, I could always try the faster route and find someone else to build the app for me, but I like programming enough that I want to achieve the self-satisfaction of building the first prototype at least.

(A semi-success story. After the past 2 years of tweaking and examining our assumptions, my sister and I have successfully designed a self-sustaining system that keeps her engaged in what she wants to learn...on a 10-hour daily schedule, she's learning 3 languages, music and other subjects without supervision (she's 15). It's more rigorous than her high school curriculum but it's amazing how lighting-speed she learns when she's in this state of flow everyday. Now hopefully what I've learned from this can be applied to many other people too.)

In my opinion, rather than say that solitude sparks "ideas", I think it's more accurate to say that solitude sparks "insights". And by insights, I'm referring to a new understanding or perspective of an issue. And I believe that insights, in turn, are what leads to ideas of new ways to solve the issue.

I don't think solitude necessarily means that you have to lock yourself away in a dark hole. I thought of solitude as still seeing the world, whether through books, online communities (like Hacker News), or observing things out in the real world, but still retaining enough private space to think and ponder without distractions.

Coming from a psychology background myself, I would say yes, we definitely underestimate how external factors affect our decision-makings. Peer pressure is one obvious influence, but I would personally say the biggest influences come from factors we're not even aware of. Some I can think of at the top of my head are the way we're influenced by:

- our fear of loss - our first impressions (which usually influence all subsequent decisions/habits) - our sense of ownership of an idea/opinion/product - our self-fulfilling expectations (something you expect to be great will usually be great) - and so much more we're usually not aware of

For more on the topic, a very readable and engaging book on behavioral-economic influences is Predictably Irrational. At his blog, he shares some of the book's interesting ideas and findings about different factors: http://danariely.com/the-books/

It might depend on the gap between you and the others on the team. If the gap is small enough that they can keep up most of the time, learn with/from you and, most importantly, listen to you seriously when you give suggestions or point out problems, then it could probably work out. If the gap is big enough that they don't recognize good suggestions or important concerns from you when you bring it up, definitely stay away.

The above suggestion is partly based on my personal experience of working with a team where the two main leaders weren't the smartest in what they were trying to do (building the organizational structure of a growing business), which happened to be my forte since it's what I love to understand and study. As time went by, there were increasing problems with getting sales and building the business, which I felt were directly related with how we structured how people worked together.

I raised and pinpointed several issues more than a few times, and even had a two-hour face-to-face session where I had the chance to strongly emphasize the importance of the problems and had outlined steps to solving them. While they would listen to me out of consideration, they had their own assumptions about how the issues should be addressed and none of my suggestions were implemented. I eventually left in about a month, and most of the consequences I predicted came true so that they're having a much harder time than they need to.

True, interesting coincidences! Since I just recently joined HN, I haven't had much opportunity to bump into non-programmers (and programmers) who are also interested in psychology. Though this is a bit off-topic, I'm glad that posting the article (The No. 1 Habit of Highly Creative People) could bring around all sorts of people. Nice to meet you!

If we're talking about habit of highly successful people, I would agree it's persistence. But if we're talking specifically about highly creative and innovative people, then we may have to measure them with a slightly different set of metrics, for which solitude may be a more relevant habit than persistence.

Though I can't say whether solitude is THE number one habit, I would agree it's one of the best habits to have for generating insights and ideas.

I'm taking up self-teaching by choice and habit because I often like to learn things on my own at first. (Half of my "education" from middle school to current college studies have all been self-taught in a variety of subjects during my spare time.) And with all the resources available -- books, online tutorials, quora.com, wikipedia, etc -- it's not difficult to pick up the basics on your own.

As for my progress so far in web programming, I'm starting from the front-end basics of HTML, CSS and Javascript first. The past two weeks were spent on relearning HTML and CSS (I picked them up back in middle school but forgot over the years) and will hopefully start on basic javascript in about a week. By my personal metric of success, I'm pretty satisfied with my daily progress and can at least build basic websites that meets established web standards.

That would describe me as well, though I've taken up self-teaching myself web development since about a week or two ago. Though I come from a (traditional) business and psychology background in my studies, I feel most at home in the strong entrepreneurial culture of the tech space.

For your first question, as a non-tech person myself, I personally thought this place was a pretty good overview of all the options available for eventually attracting a tech cofounder:

http://viniciusvacanti.com/becoming-your-own-technical-co-fo...

To sum up the key points from that blog, it's basically: 1) Go work at a start-up 2) Become a key member of the tech community 3) Blog about your idea 4) Hire a programmer (to at least build a prototype) 5) Roll the dice on a stranger 6) Build your own prototype

Since what I was trying to build is not technically intensive, my personal choice was to learn some coding and build a rough prototype first.

I agree that it would be easier to just hire someone since my idea isn't tech intensive, but for a college student like me, I don't have $10k at my leisure for hiring someone, must less $30k to get to product/market fit. Which was why I decided to learn coding myself since I have time and labor, just not money. But like you said, the initial code would be messy and unscalable at first, so my goal at the moment is get to a working prototype and attract/partner up with good tech cofounder afterward who could rewrite the entire thing.

I agree it'll largely depend on the product I want to build. Fortunately for me, what I want to build is relatively simple technology compared to what I see a lot of programmers capable of making, and the most complex part is probably the psychological framework that I spent the past couple months researching and designing before I could even get started on the technical part.

I'm also aware that my coding skills will never outmatch someone else who probably started when they were 12 or something, at least not in a year. At the back of my mind, I know that programming will be hard, but at the front of my mind, I think my ignorance would probably be very useful for pushing me into something I can't turn back on.

Sure, it's a consumer app intended to help people with productivity and goal-achieving by directly influencing their behaviors through a psychological/behavior economical approach. Too many apps focused on technological efficiency (ie. a better way to list your goals, how to track your time, etc) and not much on the psychological aspect (ie. maintaining long-term motivation, getting started on chores you hate, etc).

In terms of stage, I'm pre-mockup at the moment since the last 2.5 months were spent on researching and designing the psychological framework before I could get started on the technological parts. It took up a lot of time but necessary since there was no previous framework for guidance.

I don't have a visual mockup yet, which I plan to start working on next week, but I do have a very fleshed out textual description of what was needed for the prototype to work.

Thanks, your story is definitely encouraging!