We are all a victim of procrastination at some point in our lives. Often taking our goals and commitments for granted until we reach our personal or professional deadline. Leaving our work at a mediocre level and our minds lost. That’s when Honā, a social application platform, taps in.
Honā is a social accountability platform that assists users in committing to their goals through the habit of growth and collective accountability—this is the vision that Honā’s founder George Siosi Samuels presented on Day 2 of the New York conference. He later joined Backstage host Nidhi Arora to discuss more about the platform and their latest partnership with Bitpost.
Arora started by asking about the 1,000 new members of the platform in their #bitpost30 blogging challenge. This challenge was a collaboration with Honā and BSV publishing platform Bitpost. The aim was to help participants publish a blog post every day during the whole month of September 2021.
“Bitpost is like a medium but for Bitcoin. We partnered with them for a 30-day blogging challenge. As a result of the 30 days, we wanted to prove that our platform could actually help people get to the finish line better than anything out there. So by the end of the challenge, we ended up having an 81% success rate for the group,” Samuels explained.
“A lot of people or the participants shared on Twitter that they’ve never been able to finish anything for a long time, especially with writing, and they were able to do that using our platform,” he added.
Honā works by choosing a goal, setting a deadline, and staking money towards achieving goals. Once users complete their goals, they will get their money back or reward themselves using BSV micropayments. However, if they don’t hit their goals, the money goes to the community pot instead.
Samuels revealed that they didn’t force the participants to download any digital currency wallets during the blogpost challenge. Instead, they lead them to make their own choice whether to do it or not.
“Because we’re dealing with users who are not crypto users, we wanted to make that onboarding experience a little bit smoother; so that they’re not inundated with being forced to download a crypto wallet or any of those sorts of things. So, we kind of lead them towards making that choice by getting more habits and goals achieved within the platform,” Samuels said.
The story of Honā started way back in 2016 when it emerged out of a productivity accelerator group on Slack. Previously known as “The Pack,” like a pack of wolves, the app aims to bring diverse range of professionals together and collectively pursue their goals.
“Wolf packs, when they’re introduced to ecosystems, they have this positive effect on the entire ecosystem. So, we kind of wanted to replicate that on the Honā platform and community. Helping people, actually not only achieve their goals but learn from their mistakes along the way, because we believe that the journey is actually greater than the destination,” Samuels said.
For Samuels, the 1,000 users were just the tip of the iceberg, and their next step is to hit 10,000 users utilizing the accountability platform.
“We’ve gone into public beta, so that means now we can actually start getting a lot more users on with a lot more ease, and there’s so many use cases that are popping up. The challenge has been to focus on which one right at this point in time—10,000 users and just helping more people achieve their goals and enjoy the journey,” he said.
Samuels reminded the viewers of one of the famous quotes from the late martial artist Bruce Lee. “‘Knowing is not enough. We must apply. Willing is not enough. We must do.’ And so we want to help more people start doing and turn their ideas [and] their dreams into reality, through accountability,” he said.
Watch: New York presentation, Honā: A Social Accountability Platform Using Blockchain
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