How does it work?

When users sign up to a plan, the plan will show up on their Lift list along with an instruction for what to do that day
Steps are sequential, so each time a user completes a step, they unlock the instructions for the next step.The next step will show up on their Lift list the day after they check-in.

What are the benefits of creating a plan?

“Since I read your email last night, I’ve signed up for this plan (Get Productive the AgileWay) and ordered the corresponding book.” ~ Beta User

We’re still learning but here are some benefits we’ve already identified:

• Build your brand
• Engage your community
• Promote yourself: give something of value to potential clients and followers

That sounds cool, but I don’t think I’m qualified to write a plan.

Hold up! You probably are.
Anyone can write a plan. We think the following people will be especially great at making plans:

• You’re a coach or personal trainer.
• You’re a topic expert in diet, communications, nutrition, fitness, productivity, etc.
• You’ve just achieved a goal and want to help others do the same.
• You want to achieve a goal yourself and know the steps to take to do so. You’d love for others to join you along the way.
• You’re a teacher: you know how to structure plans and teach people new things.
• You’re an author with a book that teaches skills.

What kinds of plans can I write?

Plans can be about anything!
We all have different goals and different skills to share, from training to a 5K or marathon to increasing productivity and becoming a better public speaker.

Who can take my plan?

You can share your plan with anyone using the public link included in the Details of Your Plan email. They’ll need to create a Lift account to participate.
Links for more info:
Create a Plan: https://lift.do/plans/new
Tips for Writing Your Plan: http://blog.coach.me/tips-for-writing-your-coaching-plan/

Follow the instructions at the bottom of this post to learn how to use this feature. Continue reading for some background on why and how we built it.

The Need for Goal Tracking by Mail

We designed Lift to be a universal tool to support any goal. This includes supporting any person, no matter what software they use or in this case do not use. The upcoming web beta gets us closer to that goal by making it possible for anyone with an internet connection and a browser to use Lift. But it still doesn’t support people without regular access to the internet. For them, we’ve built Goal Tracking by Mail. 

How did we go about designing our first non-software feature? Well, the same way we go about designing software features at Lift.

The Feature Design Process

We design new features at our weekly Monday meeting. Feature owners give a quick presentation of design options, everyone else on the team shares their feedback/ideas and then we vote for the winning design. 

We like to follow a rule of looking at 3-4 different designs for any one feature before making a final decision. This helps us think more deeply about the feature, its implementation and the pain point we’re solving.

Here are the designs we explored for the Goal Tracking by Mail feature:

Find Your Star Habit Chart

We liked this design because it adds in habit discovery.  As you turn the star wheel (press the TURN! tab to try it) the sky changes as does the star that the arrow points to. This design proved too complicated to implement since it would have required us to build a star chart, an index of stars and their correlated habits as well as a journal for recording check-ins.  

Monthly Calendar with Lift Chocolates

The second design option was almost too delicious to pass up. Who wouldn’t want a daily dose of chocolately goodness as a reward for performing good habits? Well apparently Tony, Herzog and everyone else sporting crazy streaks in the No Sweets habit. A lot of people track health goals on Lift so this design was destined to get the ax.

Seinfeld Super-streakman Sticker Chart

Occasionally people write in suggesting we look at Jerry Seinfeld’s Don’t Break the Chain productivity method for feature ideas, so we did. We’re huge fans of Seinfeld, who is a huge fan of Superman and his love for the superhero inspired this sticker chart. Stickers come with a yellow top layer that you can keep on to show you’re on a streak (or peel off if you aren’t any longer). Our lawyers told us we couldn’t use this design because of trademark issues. Our check-ins are green and so is (gasp!) Kryptonite so we didn’t see a long-term fit with this design, either.

The Winning Design

Sometimes simplicity is best. We chose this design made by Alicia because it has an intuitive UI and is easy to scale. Anyone can print the chart out at home or at their nearest printing facility.

Instructions: How to Use Goal Tracking by Mail

1. Download and print the form.
2. Write in the habits you want to achieve in the left-hand column.
3. Check off the box when you’ve completed a habit. 
4. Once you’ve filled out a week’s worth of check-ins, send in your form and a self-addressed stamped envelope to:

Lift Luddites
℅ Erin Frey
760 Market Street
5th Floor
San Francisco, CA 94102

Please allow 6-10 business days for processing of Props & Comments.

Have a great day and a better tomorrow,
Tony, Jon, Matt, Erin, Alicia, Matt & Amanda.

Notes:

1. If you have an iPhone, Download Lift
2. and don’t forget to follow us on Twitter for tips and habit geekery.

Click for Photo Credits

To that end, we’re extremely pleased to announce that Lift has closed a Series A round of funding led by Bijan Sabet at Spark Capital. Bijan joins Evan Williams, Jon and me on our board.

Several experts in building startups and habits also joined this round. These investors are SV Angel and Adam Ludwin from RRE along with personal achievement expert, Tony Robbins, author of Getting Things Done, David Allen, and Emmy winning director, Greg Yaitanes.

Also, earlier this year we extended our seed investment from Obvious to include three angels. We never officially announced them. They are Tim Ferriss, best selling author of 4-Hour Chef/Body/Work-Week, Narendra Rocherolle of Smile/Webshots, and Jeremy LaTrasse of MessageBus.

Obvious continues their partnership with us and invested in this round.

Runway

Since our launch two months ago, Lift has helped people toward 500,000 habits that span diet, fitness, happiness, career, relationships, and hobbies.

That’s a good start, but there’s so much more we want to do. We’ve had most of the summer to get to know Bijan and our new investors. What impressed us most was how committed they are to the mission and the belief that this sort of tool can have a major impact on the world. (Here’s Bijan’s thinking on the investment.)

The established support systems have uneven availability and validation. In the future, you shouldn’t be required to choose between fifty sets of advice, attend in-person meetings, pay $50 per coaching session, or rely on products whose merit is merely aggressive marketing.

The characteristics we’re looking for in Lift are to be universally available, to be proven and self-improving, and to work as well for hard goals like diet as we do for easy goals like drinking more water.

This investment gives us the runway to get there.

You and Your Goals

Having read this far, I’d encourage you to do two things:

#1. Browse our popular habits and if you see something related to one of your goals, download Lift for your iPhone.

#2. Follow @liftapp on Twitter. We’re increasingly putting out tips and research from the data that Lift users generate.

Have a wonderful day and an even better tomorrow,

Tony, Jon & the Lift Team

Unlimited Aspiration

In beta testing, we saw our users achieve habits across 180 different goals.  This is just the tip of the iceberg—people have an unquenchable desire to pursue their better selves.

Sometimes you have big goals, like changing your diet or running your first marathon. Other times you are missing a basic habit that sounds trivial but has eluded you for years (yesterday, 105 Lift users celebrated their new flossing habit).

Sometimes goals already have the support of in-person organizations paired with detailed advice. What what do you do when you’re away from the organization?  Or if the advice is too daunting?

One Lift user thought going to a weekly meeting and counting every calorie was more effort than he could give to weight loss. Instead he adopted an “eat low-carb lunch” habit and lost 15 pounds.

Sometimes good advice doesn’t travel well. I love my dentist, but his advice fades the second I leave his office. We had a leader of a Zen Center email his solution to this problem, “We love meditating at the center, but always struggled to keep up our practice individually. Now with Lift, the support of the center goes home with everyone.”

However, most of your goals have no support at all. Nobody is going to create an organization dedicated to helping you achieve “Don’t buy anything on Fab.” That is actually an active habit on Lift (and also a huge compliment for Fab).

When your mind is wandering and you think, “Gee, I wish I had the motivation to get up and do [blank],” remember there is probably a Lift for that.

Version One

Today, we’re releasing an iPhone app that hands you two things: habit tracking paired with a supportive community. You may be wondering, rightfully, why these two things?

Our most successful Lift users wanted to track their progress toward goals because they believed that created mindfulness. One user described her success succinctly, “I started paying attention.”

There are plenty of tracking tools out in the world, each with their own opinion on what matters. Here’s our opinion: focus on simplicity and consistency.

Did you make progress today? You should be able to mark that with a single touch. At no point should you have to scroll through a list of options or browse through a hierarchy of choices.

Once you have made progress, we show you how consistent you’ve been (and call out when you’re on a streak). There are no tricks, nags, or gimmicks.  Real life progress is more motivating than a game.

For many people, tracking progress is already a fundamental tool for success. Lift is that tool, made simple, and packaged for the phone so that it can go anywhere with you.

However, that’s not all it takes to achieve your goals.

Sometimes you need a boost of encouragement, a dose of inspiration, or a bit of information. For that we connect you with your friends and with the people in the habits with you. They’re like a portable support community—there when you need them.  

As an example, two of us on the Lift team tried out a vegan diet, and what we needed more than anything was to know where our vegan coworkers ate lunch. That’s the kind of information that you don’t find in books.

So welcome! Download Lift and enjoy your trip.

Tony, Jon, Mark, Matt.

(email: team@lift.do)

Unlimited Aspiration

In beta testing, we saw our users achieve habits across 180 different goals.  This is just the tip of the iceberg—people have an unquenchable desire to pursue their better selves.

Sometimes you have big goals, like changing your diet or running your first marathon. Other times you are missing a basic habit that sounds trivial but has eluded you for years (yesterday, 105 Lift users celebrated their new flossing habit).

Sometimes goals already have the support of in-person organizations paired with detailed advice. What what do you do when you’re away from the organization?  Or if the advice is too daunting?

One Lift user thought going to a weekly meeting and counting every calorie was more effort than he could give to weight loss. Instead he adopted an “eat low-carb lunch” habit and lost 15 pounds.

Sometimes good advice doesn’t travel well. I love my dentist, but his advice fades the second I leave his office. We had a leader of a Zen Center email his solution to this problem, “We love meditating at the center, but always struggled to keep up our practice individually. Now with Lift, the support of the center goes home with everyone.”

However, most of your goals have no support at all. Nobody is going to create an organization dedicated to helping you achieve “Don’t buy anything on Fab.” That is actually an active habit on Lift (and also a huge compliment for Fab).

When your mind is wandering and you think, “Gee, I wish I had the motivation to get up and do [blank],” remember there is probably a Lift for that.

Version One

Today, we’re releasing an iPhone app that hands you two things: habit tracking paired with a supportive community. You may be wondering, rightfully, why these two things?

Our most successful Lift users wanted to track their progress toward goals because they believed that created mindfulness. One user described her success succinctly, “I started paying attention.”

There are plenty of tracking tools out in the world, each with their own opinion on what matters. Here’s our opinion: focus on simplicity and consistency.

Did you make progress today? You should be able to mark that with a single touch. At no point should you have to scroll through a list of options or browse through a hierarchy of choices.

Once you have made progress, we show you how consistent you’ve been (and call out when you’re on a streak). There are no tricks, nags, or gimmicks.  Real life progress is more motivating than a game.

For many people, tracking progress is already a fundamental tool for success. Lift is that tool, made simple, and packaged for the phone so that it can go anywhere with you.

However, that’s not all it takes to achieve your goals.

Sometimes you need a boost of encouragement, a dose of inspiration, or a bit of information. For that we connect you with your friends and with the people in the habits with you. They’re like a portable support community—there when you need them.  

As an example, two of us on the Lift team tried out a vegan diet, and what we needed more than anything was to know where our vegan coworkers ate lunch. That’s the kind of information that you don’t find in books.

So welcome! Download Lift and enjoy your trip.

Tony, Jon, Mark, Matt.

(email: team@lift.do)

This post is to catch you up.

Launch

We’re going to launch an iPhone app in August—a simple, positive way to achieve any goal.

In our beta group, the Lift app has worked for health, fitness, productivity, happiness, and relationships. That’s a lot of good things, but there’s also a lot more work to be done.

We think our first version will work for many users, but that we’ll spend a lifetime improving Lift so that it will work for everyone.

Team

We’re a four person startup and if you’re a fan of startups, want to work at Lift or just want to know more about who we are, then you should read our Work At Lift post.

Mission

We’re all driven by the idea that we can make a giant impact on human potential through positive support. I’m going to go bold for a bit before coming back to the pragmatic.

We want to eliminate willpower as a factor in achieving goals. Imagine smooth, fun, optimized, self-reinforcing paths for every aspiration. That would qualify as a giant impact on human potential. We think we can turn chores into positive draws.

We’ll get there. Eventually. Step one is to make positive support loops generally available. A little bit of tracking of your goals paired with a little bit of positive support has gone a long way with many of our early testers and that approach is already working across hundreds of different goals.

Many Steps Lead to Big Wins

People make progress toward goals by either having major epiphanies (Eureka! moments) or through incremental improvements. We’re in the incremental camp because that’s how we experience sports, music, business, education and even our relationships with friends and family.

The Power of Habits

Success often feels like it comes down to a battle with your own willpower. That’s no fun. Thankfully there are researchers like BJ Fogg, at Stanford, who break goals into tiny habits that are so small that you can’t help but get momentum. There are articles like this NY Times piece on Decision Fatigue, that explain how to work around the finite capacity of our willpower. There are books like The Power of Habit, by Charles Duhigg, which go into great depth about the success that comes by focusing on creating new habits. 

This growing knowledge about how to apply decades of psychology research in simple ways is what allowed us to build Lift. When you set a goal, think about what habits will support it.

Tracking = Mindfulness

Proponents of habit design often work as if they have complete control of your environment. But they don’t. The secret defense for the chaos in your life is to develop mindfulness, or as one of our most successful friends says, “the ability to pay attention.” The universal tool for developing mindfulness is tracking. You could use a piece of paper, or, in August, you could use Lift.

Lift is a habit tracking tool, which has some pros and some cons. Mindfulness is one of the biggest pros.

Screenshot

Here’s a screenshot from the version of Lift that I have on my phone.

Feedback Loops

Lift offers two feedback loops: visualized progress and support from a community of people with similar goals.

When our beta testers report success they describe seeing their progress and wanting to beat it, seeing what other people are doing and feeling inspiration and accountability, and feeling great when they get recognition from other people. 

Beyond Gamification

The feedback loops above evolved from an idea we had to gamify your life, which is a friendly way of making you as addicted to living a good life as you might be to playing video games or slot machines. We ended up dropping any semblance of gaming because we found the above feedback loops just as powerful and much more flexible. The core idea is the same though, to give some positive support to your goals. We talked more about moving beyond gamification in this AllThingsD article. 

Quantified Self: Less Is More

We’ve also been influenced by a global movement of self-trackers who call their community Quantified Self (there is is probably a monthly meetup near you). People in this movement are inventing new tools to track and analyze every part of their life.

Our goal was to put together a simple tool that would work reliably for all goals, so we had to hone in on the most powerful data to track: consistency. 

Consistency is what pushes people toward making new habits. Here’s one of our beta testers inching toward hitting Inbox Zero (completely emptying your email inbox):

Any Goal, In Practice

We’re serious about supporting all of your goals, although, in practice, people tend to have a lot of similar goals. Yesterday, 2 out of 5 Lift users tracked their flossing (including me). That’s an example of a supposedly trivial, fundamental habit that everyone’s been told to pick up and that most people will say they wish they did. But flossing has never had proper support (just bi-annual guilt from your dentist). 

Exercise habits are less trivial and we see a lot of activity in “Exercise” and “Go to gym.” These habits are also getting more social support. You’re much more likely to get props for having an awesome gym trip then you are for another day of flossing.

The hardest habit in the community is “Don’t eat sweets.” The most interesting (to us) is “Talk to at least one stranger.” There are a lot of great stories in that one.

Getting to know each other

Thank you for reading all of that. Now that we’ve broken our radio silence, we’ll be posting more to this blog and to our twitter. Make sure to follow us.

We’d also like to hear more about you. If you have time, would you mind filling out this quick survey (this is also the place to go if we didn’t answer all of your questions)?

To our future selves!

Tony & the Lift Team