If so, you are a potential user of this AI assistant that helps you cultivate healthy habits. But that’s not the most interesting part. The same approach can be used to prevent users from dropping off your own service! The essence of the approach is very simple.
The essence of the project
Shelpful is a service that helps you create healthy habits. The strange name Shelpful, as it turned out, is composed of two words: “Super” (super) and “Helpful” (helpful).
With the help of the service, a user can develop a habit of learning, keeping track of their personal budget, taking vitamins, drinking more water, reading or writing more, getting the right amount of steps in a day, staying in touch with friends, and anything else they consider important and useful.
The habit-building method is very simple: the service sends the user timely reminders to “do it,” and then asks if they did it or not. If they did, the service praises them. If not, it finds out the reason, advises how to overcome the obstacle, and motivates them not to give up and keep trying.
The service communicates with the user through their preferred messaging apps. Currently, the main messenger for the service is WhatsApp.
Of course, people can simply ignore the service’s messages That’s why the startup is trying to convince users that “every time you respond to Shelpful messages, you are voting for the person you want to be.”
The core of the service is an AI assistant, which the founders named “HabitGPT,” that is, ChatGPT, focused on habit building (habit).
To start, the user must tell the AI assistant what habit they want to develop in themselves. Within 1 minute, HabitGPT will send a plan of action created by it to develop this habit. And within 5 minutes, the service will be ready to send reminders and discuss the progress of the plan.
You can start by developing one habit and then gradually add new ones.
Shelpful is not just a service of automatic reminders, because it also tries to convince a person to do what they planned. If a person decided to do physical exercises in the morning, then the service 15 minutes before the appointed time will offer them different options for gymnastics or, as an option, go for a walk or ride a bicycle – and all this time will try in different ways to push them to do something, until they do it. After which it will congratulate with the achieved success.
One chat may not be enough to develop a habit. Therefore, users of the service have the opportunity to join regular online meetings of small groups led by live coaches, where they will study and share with each other the results of applying recipes for habit building from popular books “Tiny Habits” and “Atomic Habits.”
If a person is enough to communicate with the AI assistant of the service in a chat, the subscription to the service will cost him $35 per month. If he trusts live people more than AI, communication in a chat with AI and a live coach will cost him $65 per month. And if you add regular online meetings with a coach in a small group to this, the price will rise to $165 per month.
The service is still in beta testing, so users get a 50% discount on the first 3 months of subscription.
Despite such an early stage, Shelpful raised its first investment of $3 million from the Apollo Projects fund, led by Sam Altman, the founder of OpenAI (which created ChatGPT).
What’s interesting
Yesterday, I wrote about two secrets to creating successful AI assistants:
- Assistants should not help people do things better, they should help people do things they do poorly.
- Assistants should help people perform regular actions.
Today’s Shelpful fits this recipe perfectly, as it helps people start doing things regularly that they don’t do at all or do poorly.
Many people really want to “start a new life on Monday” – go to the gym, learn a foreign language, walk 10,000 steps a day, and so on. For example, the above-mentioned book on habit building “Atomic Habits” once took first place on the New York Times bestseller list, selling 15 million copies.
So, people not only want this, but they are also willing to spend money on it. At the same time, a service like Shelpful, which really helps them with this, will probably be much more effective than a book – which you can read, agree with everything that is written in it, but do nothing about it
Because you can’t just snap your fingers and cultivate a habit by just reading a book.
It is believed that it takes 21 days to cultivate a habit. However, studies show that this period depends heavily on the person and the circumstances in which they are. It turns out that some highly motivated people can do it in 18 days. But in general, the duration of the transition from desire to a cultivated habit can take up to 254 days.
At the same time, the task of the user is unlikely to be limited to the cultivation of one habit. Researchers say that 40% of a person’s life consists of performing small habitual actions.
Thus, the life cycle of using the service, even if it gives real results, can be quite long – if we multiply the actual time it takes to cultivate a habit by the number of habits that a person may want to cultivate.
I don’t know if the founders of today’s startup have this in their plans or not, but today’s Shelpful can be turned into a so-called “super app”. A super app is an application that has many completely different functions (for example, calling a taxi, an online store, and a bank), which are united only by the fact that the same person can use them.
If Shelpful helps someone cultivate the habit of learning a foreign language, why not build a language learning service into it? If the habit of going to the gym, then a service with exercises. If taking vitamins, then a store to order them. And so on.
Where to run
I had never even thought of such a version of an AI assistant before today’s review. But the idea of today’s Shelpful is undoubtedly interesting. And there will surely be an audience for it, as a huge number of people really want to cultivate some kind of healthy habit. And not just one
So the first option for possible movement is to create an analogue of Shelpful.
However, I had another thought.
Many creators of “useful” services like the same applications for family budgets or fitness or even educational courses suffer from very high user churn. The graph above is a graph recently published by Paul Graham showing the decreasing number of users who started taking the free online programming course Replit every day.
And such a picture is characteristic of any free or paid “useful” service. Because people find it difficult to force themselves to do useful things. Only bad habits are cultivated themselves and quickly
This means that “useful” services need to create within themselves some kind of analogues of HabitGPT, which help users cultivate the habit of using them – so that fewer users drop off.
Very often, services believe that this problem can be solved by “onboarding” users – the process of explaining how to use the service to solve certain tasks. But this is clearly not enough, because a person can be shown and explained the essence of morning gymnastics exercises – but this does not mean that he will do them
Therefore, the second direction of movement is the integration of what can be called “behavioral onboarding” into their services. That is, the tools for cultivating the habit of using a specific service – for example, arranged in the image and likeness of HabitGPT.
However, creating such a tool will require the creators of each service to have separate brains and resources. Therefore, you can go even further and change the orientation of HabitGPT from B2C to B2B – creating on its basis a platform “habit cultivation as a service”, which other services and applications will be able to integrate into themselves via API.
And this could become the third – quite unusual, but interesting direction for the development of the idea of today’s Shelpful.
About the company
Shelpful
Website: shelpful.com
Last round: $3M, 12/15/2023
Total investments: $3M, rounds: 1