Lose It or Lose It
For as long as I can remember I've been overweight. The earliest I remember measuring anything was when I decided to wrestle in high school and ended up in the heavyweight category because I was 220 something and the range was 184-175. So a mid-weight heavyweight.
Over the years I'd try to lose weight, lose some, then just fall back to whatever I was. I called what I'd fall back to “terminal fat” of around 245# because it seemed to be a natural balance between my activity level and what I ate without thinking too much.
Around 2009 I was on a longer vacation, and I tend to think a lot on vacation. I was tired of always slipping back to what I knew, “terminal fat”, and decided “future Randy” needed to have a slightly worse life if he failed again.
The simplest and easiest way to measure being worse off is... having less money. So I started playing with the idea of “current Randy” putting up money when he makes the decision to lose weight, and if he doesn't make his goals, “future Randy” gets punished by having less money.
So Lose It or Lose It was born. You would give us a chunk of money, $100-$5k, and commit to losing 1, 2, or 3 pounds a week for 10 weeks. Every week you would weigh in by taking a picture of your feet on the scale. If you made your goal for the week, you got 1/10th of your money back! If you didn't, we'd keep your money!
Now, you might be thinking, how does that actually help RANDY since he's the owner of the company... wouldn't he lose his money to... himself? Well, if I or my business partner didn't make our goal, we would the name of a user out of a hat and send THEM the money.
While I owned the company I lost about 80# and have kept it off. We ended up shutting down the company because it just wouldn't take off, I think we might have been too early for something like that. However, I consider it a success because I got down to below what I was in high school, and kept it off. Since then I've lost even more and briefly made it below 200#. From 310# in 2007 to 198# in 2024. It also freed up my time to create Dead Man's Snitch a few months later, which I sold for enough to pay off all my student loans, so another win!
Landing page right before I shut it down:
Wireframes I drew when I got back from vacation:
