Introducing Freemium simpleweight

What’s new with simpleweight?

As I started earlier, we’re planning an update to simpleweight tonight. For many of our users, you will not notice a ton of difference. As I stated in the Weight Loss Incubator, this update is more a behind the scenes technology update.

What are the big changes?

1. We’re updating from Ruby on Rails 1.x to the latest Ruby on Rails 2.x release.
2. We’re fixing quite a few bugs related to indexing and searching food. We’ve tried to keep this bug from effecting anyone, but occasionally when someone searches, our index would freeze while using ferret. We’ve fixed that by using more of a distributed process.
3. We’ve updated our paging of foods which will make it easier to jump through a large list of foods.
4. We’ve made it easier for us to add new features which we hope to do so more often.
5. Some other minor changes to some custom food and recipe functionality.
6. We’ve moved to implementing Google’s chart api for faster response times and easier printing. We’ll leave flash charts in some areas that require more interactivity.
7. Finally, the big change……

After debating dead accounts and researching successful websites, such as 37signals.com products, we’ve decided to move to a more ad-supported freemium product. what do we mean?

Well, we are going to have two types of products.

1. Free ad-supported accounts with some restrictions like limits on the custom foods or recipes one can enter.
2. Paid Premium accounts which include increases in our prices for 2008. However, if you sign-up now, we’ll guarantee the $18 price will remain the same for this next year.

Please tell us what you think, and as always. you can’t change what you don’t measure. So, add your weight today to learn what you want to change.

Update soon.

Look out tomorrow evening. Ryan has been doing some great work with Simpleweight. We’ll be doing a minor upgrade Sunday, Jan 6, 2008. There may be some down time between 9pm and 12am  updated: 6pm – 9pm CST.

There are no big feature changes for paying customers. (Those will come soon.) But, we do have some changes. I’ll detail later.

Thanks for your patience.

Weight Loss incubator?

Sometimes baby chicks just need to incubate.

As you can probably tell, my brother and I took most of the past five months off from serious Simpleweight development. We made sure to continue using simpleweight in some capacity or another. We prepared a blog post or two (some are still unpublished waiting for future dates). We made sure simpleweight was working and continued to provide personalized service to our subscribers, but we delayed some feature development.

Like newborns learning how to adjust their own body temperature right after birth, we wanted simpleweight to incubate.

By stepping away for the summer and fall, we were able to gain some perspective and motivation. Not to mention, we were also able to enjoy the time off for play time with families, running a triathlon – great job Ryan, bring a new baby into the world – that’s why Scott is tired, and generally just concentrate on fun and other work.

Funny thing about stepping away. When you come back to a passion that you set aside to incubate. One gains a greater understanding of the whole picture. Our huge simpleweight to do feature list we had is not as huge.

We can re-evaluate:

• Do you really need this new feature we’re planning?
• Is this the best way to complete that task?
• Is this getting real with weight management?
• Our we meeting our stated goals and mission?

Let’s step back: What’s our Philosophy?

Our philosophy is to make weight management so simple you’ll actually do it. Food In = Food Out.

Funny thing about newborns. They just seem to know how to moderate their temperature and know how to eat and grow. Same thing with chicks in an incubator. They get out of the incubator and then grow and grow with a beauty a child adores. Natural organic healthy moderated growth.

That’s our plan. Take our new perspective and follow the natural organic moderated growth pattern of simpleweight. We’ll go where the simpleweight users take us.

So, What’s next?

• We’re (I should say Ryan is) migrating Simpleweight to the latest Rails 2.0 release. We’re making some bug fixes and stabilizing some internals.
• After we iron out these technical details, We’re going to add some new features we’ve been promising such as implementing the Simple Weight Club, Simpleweight Workouts, Forums, and User Interface changes. (One at a time of course, it’s much better and easier to do it the slow weigh.)

Stay Tuned for more information on our pending release.

Remember, If there is one thing we can do to help you achieve your weight management goals, tell us, and we’ll do our best to help you!

Let us know what you think should be next for Simpleweight?

Photo Credit: Watching the Hatching via Flickr, by Troy B Thompson

Pay it forward – Simple Weight Loss style!

Leo Babauta from zenhabits.net is sponsoring a pay it forward web event, and I am giving away free 12 month simpleweight subscriptions. To learn how to receive your subscription, keep reading.

What is a pay it forward web event?

The purpose of the event is to bring people closer and restore kindness

To quote Leo quoting Ben Franklin:

Here’s Ben Franklin on this concept:

I do not pretend to give such a Sum; I only lend it to you. When you […] meet with another honest Man in similar Distress, you must pay me by lending this Sum to him; enjoining him to discharge the Debt by a like operation, when he shall be able, and shall meet with another opportunity. I hope it may thus go thro’ many hands, before it meets with a Knave that will stop its Progress. This is a trick of mine for doing a deal of good with a little money.

To Demonstrate the goodness of Humanity, The idea is to perform some act of kindness, but with the intention of never receiving anything in return except asking the person to perform some act of kindness to someone else in the future.

So instead of paying me back, you need to pay it forward.

Leo mentioned he would link to my website if I perform some act of kindness. I don’t know if he will or will not link to me.
(Leo if you’re reading this and you do choose to link to my fantastic simple weight loss site. Thank you.) Regardless, I plan to participate.

What do I have to give to fulfill my act of kindness?

• First, I have some positive inspiring comments I can give to my family and friends.
• Second, I have some stuff (clothing, home furnishings, technology items) I will bring to the local goodwill.
  Reduce, Reuse, Recycle to clean the environment.
• Finally, I will give free 12 month subscriptions to use simple weight to the first 12 people who leave a comment on this post describing how they will use our website to better handle their weight management goals.
  (I recommend SMART goals).

What do I ask in return?

1. You truly need to dedicate yourself to using the site. We want you to reach your weight management goal. Using the site can be as simple as entering your weight weekly or tracking exercise habits daily.
2. Of course, I will trust you to pay it forward and help someone else down the road.

I know you do not want to be the Knave to stop the progress of random kindness.

Remember, weight management is as easy as food in = food out.

Simpleweight outage planned

We’ve been notified by our service provider slicehost.com, that we’ll be experiencing an outage sometime between 0600 – 1000 GMT Nov 9.

If my calculations are correct, that would mean sometime between 12:00 AM CST – 04:00 AM CST.

If you’d like to read more, you can read about the outage at our VPS provider:  http://blog.slicehost.com & http://status.slicehost.com/

Thanks for your patience.