[bckr]

I think about this all the time myself.

Have you looked into StikK? They provide services like automatically donating to your most hated charity if you don't meet your goals (they provide options like the NRA and Planned Parenthood).

[superasn]

No haven't heard of them but sounds like beeminder. In my opinion these automated solutions seldom work in the long run. Otoh having a real human being who calls you up or even WA you to check how you're doing from time to time can make a hell of a difference (right now my wife does that for me in a good way :P but I really think the guys who started bossasaservice were on to something and people were going crazy about them on PH and twitter.. but due the crazy amount of orders and the difficulty of scaling something with a real human I think they had to shutdown. I think the demand is still there though.

[ppterodactyl]

Hi, Boss as a Service founder here, thanks for the mention! :)

We're very much active! (Though we did add a waitlist so we could onboard people in batches!) We're inviting people every week now though!

[bckr]

I just want to give you big ups for going with the waitlist approach. I think the status quo these days would be to try to grow way too fast in order to keep up with the demand (and outpace competition etc). I look forward to seeing if this works out for you.

[dreeves]

> In my opinion these automated solutions seldom work in the long run

Beeminder cofounder here. Can I hear more about why you think this? There are definitely people for whom Beeminder doesn't work at all but you sound like you're making a different claim -- that it may work for a while but then stop working. That's the opposite of our experience. Our churn numbers get really good for those who stick around for a year and anecdotally we have lots of people getting PhD theses written thanks to Beeminder, etc.

But if you've had short-term success with things like Beeminder -- https://blog.beeminder.com/competitors -- and then had it fail, that would be valuable to hear more about.

Oh, and I should mention that Beeminder isn't necessarily entirely automated. If you derail and are about to be charged money but don't agree that it was a legit derailment, you talk to a human about that.

[bckr]

I was misleading when I said it was automated. In StikK, you have to get someone on board who will sign off on your proof-of-work. To make it a service, you could probably pay someone on Fiverr to be your signer.