So your idea is perfect if you want to do a challenge by yourself, and is something we're definitely considering adding in the future! Because in our model, a challenge needs at least 2 people. So if we want to support a single person challenge in the future, we'd want to implement something like giving away to charity or something else, exactly like you said!
I'll probably build this eventually. Let me know if this is open source, I'd be down to implement it. It looks like you're using PHP/Symfony, so this is right down my alley.
The daily check ins require a photo upload. Of course people can cheat by uploading non-legitimate photos, or just lie, but for now we are maintaining the honor-system approach. We think this will work (and its working in the challenges we're currently running with people we don't know!) because the challenges are with small groups of people. If the groups were huge then it'd be way easier to blend in and cheat, but with smaller groups where you're building the connections, we hope that people find it less motivating to cheat.
Also, if we keep getting users, we will definitely keep improving the cheating detection mechanisms (using AI and other logic), and also adding features like reporting users, reputation scores, etc.!
Great question! We thought hard about this and decided that the best way is to split it evenly if everyone loses. So, basically the same outcome as if everyone won. It seems a bit backwards, but this makes sure incentives are as balanced as possible - the creator of the challenge should avoid making the challenge impossible
The users split it between them! We do charge a small transaction fee, but we'll never take the buy-in amount itself. So for example, if a challenge is $100 to join, and 5 people join ($500 pot) but only 2 people survive, then the users will get $250 each (everyone will pay $5 participation fee to join).
We purposefully limited the group size to max 5 people, as we wanted to keep it small so that real connections are made and people are less likely to lie (just like you said).
And there's the option of letting anyone join (people you don't know), but since the group size is small we're counting on people actually building that genuine connection through a common mission.
A really cool outcome that we envision is that a bunch local people meet through this app on a challenge, then once complete, they meet up for drinks and hang out.
You might be right. But for now, I think we want to intentionally leave it constrained, and only add bigger groups later down the line when there's more demand. We want to instill that small group vibe as much as possible for now
