Back yourself

Almost everybody knows what they should be doing. Very few people are short of the information. What they are short of is a reason that survives a wet Tuesday in February, and no amount of knowing has ever been that reason.

That gap — between what you meant and what you did — is the whole of the problem Pledro was built for.

Intention is free, which is exactly what is wrong with it

A resolution costs nothing to make and nothing to break. Nobody is expecting anything from it. It has no counterparty, no deadline that bites, and no record of whether it happened. It is a sentence you said to yourself in a good mood, and the version of you who said it is never available when it matters.

So we made it cost something. Not as a punishment — as a way of moving the decision.

When you enter a Pledro challenge, you decide once, in the moment you are best placed to decide: motivated, clear-headed, looking at a target you chose. Everything after that is just whether you go. The argument you would have had with yourself at 6am was already had, and won, by somebody far better qualified to have it: you, last Sunday.

You only lose by not showing up. Complete it and every penny of your entry comes back.

That is not a slogan on a poster. It is the mechanic. Your entry returns in full the moment your wearable confirms you hit the target, and the only route to being out of pocket is not doing the thing you said you would do.

The wearable is not a feature, it is the point

We could have built this with an honesty box. Most things like it do — a photograph, a tick, a self-reported total. It would have been a fraction of the work.

We did not, because a scoreboard of claims is worth nothing to the person who actually got up. If completing can be typed in, then the standings are fiction, the reward is shared with people who did not earn it, and the only person genuinely worse off is the one who ran in the rain.

So nothing counts until a wearable verifies it. There is no manual entry anywhere in the app, on any currency, at any entry fee. It is the strictest thing about Pledro and it is the reason completing means anything at all.

Backing yourself, not against anyone

There is a version of this product where you take other people's money, and it would probably do well. We did not build it.

Every reward on Pledro is split evenly among everybody who completes. First and last are paid the same. There is no ranked mode, no winner, nobody to beat. You are not up against the person next to you in the standings — you are both up against the same target, and there is no version of the arithmetic where their success costs you anything.

That decision is why the app never celebrates a result at somebody else's expense, and why a challenge you did not complete says NOT THIS TIME · GOOD FIGHT rather than anything sharper. There is no gloating in the design because there is nothing to gloat about: everybody who did the work got the same thing.

What we get out of it

Less than most people assume, and we would rather publish it than be asked.

Our share comes only from the entries of people who did not complete, and it is capped at a tenth of everything entered. When everyone completes, we earn nothing. On free Grind challenges — which is the entire beta — we earn nothing. It is the only business model we could find where the outcome we most want for you is also the one that pays us least, and that seemed like the right way round.

The arithmetic, including the cases that are worse for us than a reader expects, is in the fee guide.

Back yourself

The name for all of this is two words, and they are on the front of everything we make.

Not believe in yourself. Not manifest it. Back yourself — put something behind the claim, let a device rather than your memory decide whether you were right, and take it back when you are.

Most of the time you will be. That is the part people underestimate about themselves, and it is the part a receipt is very good at proving.