Get the update on iPhone, Android and web.

Highlights

Lift 1.0 was for habits. Lift 2.0 is for giant goals like competing in a triathlon, dropping massive amounts of weight, learning to meditate, creating the optimal productivity system, or writing a novel.

Step by step, we’ve been crafting an app and a community that could leapfrog the abilities of our original version. We’ve had twenty releases in the past year alone, all focused on getting us to this point where we could say:

If you want to be super human, Lift is the best training available.

In Lift 2.0, you’ll find

1. A personal coach for every person. We’ve launched 700 personal coaches to provide 1-on-1 coaching for 1300 goals. They are great coaches and I can’t wait to tell you about them. One of these coaches is a perfect match for your goals.
2. Deep coaching support. One-on-one coaching is our highest level of support (and the only level that costs money). But everything in Lift is a form of coaching. We pair tools and  community to keep you motivated: progress tracking, reminders, Q&A and props from your peers. These coaching features remain free.
3. A community of peer coaches. On Lift you are always both the coach and the coachee. As you gain experience, give props to other people in your goals, answer their questions, and eventually, consider becoming a 1-on-1 coach yourself. Our first 700 coaches all started as Lift success stories.

A Personal Coach for Every Person

A Lift coach redefines what most people think of coaching. Compared to finding a business coach or a personal trainer at your gym, expect coaches on Lift to:

• Have first hand knowledge  in your most important goal. The coaches are hyper-specialized in the way that Lift goals are specialized. If you just read the 4-Hour Body, we’ll give you a coach who read and practiced the same book.
• Be coached on your schedule. The coaches work through chat messages on your phone. You don’t have to put them in your calendar because they’re always with you.
• Be the best available. We measure the performance of every coach. That means we’re always recommending you the best available coaches.

I should also mention price. In-person coaches can cost $250 per hour. A coach on Lift will talk with you all week for $14.99. High quality coaching is a luxury that we should all have access to. Now we do!

Here a few examples of coaches who’ve been coaching during our beta period

• Josh Roman, a family man and entrepreneur, has a 737 day streak of Inbox Zero. He wants to help you learn to be more productive.
• Dan Clark is a former TV star from the show American Gladiators (he was Nitro). He’s helping Lifters stick to a diet and several have already lost more than 15 pounds. In 30 years of training, he’s seen every side of fitness and health. Hire Dan to help you learn how to drop fat.
• Natasha Lynn is measurably one of the top five most helpful people in the Lift community and is using her 55-day streak in writing a Daily Gratitude List to help people learn to appreciate life.

Coaching is delivered inside the Lift app through a new chat feature. The coach can see the progress of your goal, prompt you with questions or advice, and respond to your questions. It looks something like this:

To hire a coach, browse our most popular goals, join a new goal, or select the coaching options on one of your existing goals.

Side Note: Do you want to be a coach?

We’re building a platform and marketplace for online coaching. One-on-one coaching is just the beginning. If that sounds interesting and you’d like to use Lift to coach other people, give us your info. We’ll be opening Lift up to more coaches very soon.

With each release, we also include release notes explaining the thinking behind the update. Those are below.

Every Lift habit is supported by a community of people who are trying to achieve the same habit. The idea is that like-minded people can provide inspiration, motivation, accountability, and, often, key pieces of advice.

Our inspiration for support communities comes from the real world. Team In Training, Weight Watchers, Alcoholics Anonymous, and religion all have examples of giant behavior change brought on by serious social support. Can we package that into the Lift App in a way that’s fun, generalizable to any goal, and travels around in your pocket? 

Let me use AA as an example, because it’s not quite what Lift is about, but is extreme enough to be a fun conversation point. 

Lift recently celebrated having helped floss one million teeth. You may find the idea of a virtual Non-flossers Anonymous for the 88% of people who don’t floss daily humorous (I do). It’s over the top support for a trivial habit. But it’s working.

At the start of Lift, a friend of mine (I mean that literally, not as a euphemism) invited me to visit her AA group. Two things stood out, the trauma of alcoholics hitting rock bottom and the joy of being in a room of positive support. Clearly, Lift isn’t about trauma. So many of our early users are super successful people who want to be even more successful. There’s nothing about guilt, shame, or rock bottom in the pitch we make.

But the second half, the feeling that together we can achieve anything, is very much in our mission. If we could apply that to flossing, exercise, reading, meditation, and all of the other 30,000 habits that people have created on Lift, then we’d be making an enormous impact on the world.

Let me circle back to how this relates to our most recent product changes.

Previously, the support community we were providing was a collection of all people, friend and stranger alike, who had taken a step toward the same habit as you that day. In practice, the activity feeds were kind of dull—just a lot of strangers without any context.

The switch in the feeds today is that we’re showing you people you know (through Facebook & Twitter) and people who have left notes. The people you know are there for true accountability and motivation. The people leaving notes are there for information sharing (for example, in the Slow-carb diet habit, the notes are an endless stream of inspiration for what to eat).

We’re also starting on something which I called progress summaries above. This is the first step toward something big.

As of this release, every check-in has a summary of progress showing either the total number of check-ins or the total number of days in a streak. We’ve had this in our beta builds for awhile and it’s great to be able to be reminded of what we’re accomplishing.

But this tiny step is something we can and will expand on. An obvious direction would be to start acknowledging non-daily streaks. That’s a common (and reasonable) request from Lifters. Another direction would be to start challenging progress toward progressive milestones. We did this in a very early version of Lift and loved the effect.

See you in the habits,

Tony & the Lift Team