Biddybee: Feature Bounties for Beeminder

Backstory: We’ve been sitting on the biddybee.com domain since 2017. At one point we were tempted to build a nerdier version of Uservoice.beeminder.com (later subsumed by the forum) and call it Biddybee.

Then we saw manifoldbounties.com and now we’re tempted to copy it.

Especially since it’s another fun use for Beeminder’s new currency, honey money. We could collect honey for features/projects and either build the thing and keep the honey or return the honey with interest.

Aren’t we already drowning in things to do?

True fact. Also the related problem that business realities may dictate priorities. But we can put arbitrary amounts of our own honey on the features or fixes we want to or need to prioritize. If users also chip in, that’s icing. In the worst case, it’s not worse than the status quo.

Will this engender entitlement? “I paid you for this, why doesn’t it work XYZ way??”

No problem, it’s satisfaction guaranteed or your honey back. (Note that honey is never redeemable as cash, only store credit at Beeminder.) Or some of your honey back if you got some of what you paid for. We can just trust users to be honest about this.

Will it feel disappointing if we only ever do things we were going to do anyway?

Managing expectations is key. We can be clear that realistically we’ll usually be doing boring business-y things or our own pet features. Putting honey on your pet features probably amounts to storing your honey in another bank account. But that’s ok! You’ll either get your feature or you’ll get that honey back.

(Maybe we even let you pull your honey back out at any time, until we start working on the thing the bounty is for, at which point it would make sense to freeze it?)

What if someone puts a crazy amount of honey on a feature request we hate?

We just nix it and return the honey. Or maybe we don’t approve it in the first place.

Is this worth the distraction?

Maybe it actually helps with that? We can start with the things we want to or need to do anyway, dump honey on them, and encourage users to do so as well. There are plenty of cases where we’re happy for tiebreakers. Either way, it’s a fire under our butts to ship things.

And maybe it’s easy to mutatis mutandis this from Manifold Bounties? It’s open source on GitHub.

PS: The creator of Manifold Bounties has given his explicit blessing to steal it all. 🎉