Last Resolution Standing was Ultraworking’s answer to New Year’s resolutions’ universal yet often fleeting zeal. With many parts of the world coming out of COVID lockdowns, we thought of how we could help people to both perform better and feel more alive.
Designing a “Friendly Battle Royale”
We combined some known best practices around goal-setting and follow-through and accountability with Sebastian’s suggestion of a “dangerous Japanese game show” vibe — it was a (friendly) competition to see who can get their New Year’s Resolution going the longest. The idea was to sprinkle a bit of excitement, a touch of competition, and a dash of fun to help participants stick to their goals.
The pillars of the app - Accountability, Competition, Streaks, and Choice - were carefully chosen based on what we thought would hit a nice of mix of legitimately helping people to keep their resolutions and, on the other hand, . The streaks reward consistency, the leaderboard adds a hint of competition, and the “Declare Victory” feature gives participants agency.
Some bonus features we included were the ability to “prove it” via Instagram and the chance to meet remaining participants for a video call after you had survived for a certain number of days. These were both opt-in, but had good usage.
The final “easter egg” feature that we added was the random callsign generator, which gave the onboarding participants three adjective-noun pairs (e.g., Elegant Falcon or Marvelous Explorer) and the chance to reroll. Callsigns may seem like a small addition, but the game show theme and desire for anonymity with a public leaderboard made this feature particularly valuable.
Building with Speed
The Ultraworking CEO, Sebastain, and I and decided to build LRS as a way to jumpstart a move from an ops-heavy few months back into product that our customers would love.
The only problem was that January 1st was just a few days away, so we spedrun it.
Fortunately, our entire team thrives on speed and our backend expert, Saad Zafar, was particualrly thrilled at the prospect of doing a hackathon-like launch. Add in some clutch game design and copywriting from Sebastian with visual design and frontend (Svelte + Tailwind) from me for maximum throughput.
At the end of it all, we launched on time and to much fanfare.