I Done This Blog

How I Ran a 10K

July 14, 2011 by I Done This Support Leave a Comment

after running 10k Incremental progress is almost a law of nature; nevertheless, I’ve often fantasized about accomplishing a lofty but distant goal, pursued it for a month or two, merely made incremental progress, and quit.

Sometime in January, shortly after we first launched iDoneThis, I decided to pursue my long-standing desire to run long distances. I’ve started that many times. Shin splints, knee pains, being in bad shape, busy life, you name it — each time something got in the way and I dropped the habit before accomplishing anything meaningful. Not again.

This time I put a goal in front of myself: run Bay to Breakers — and I carried it through. In 12 weeks, I went from being only able to run 1 mile at a time, to running 7.4 miles continuously (just over running 10K).
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Ernesto Ramirez, Wellness Polymath

June 30, 2011 by I Done This Support Leave a Comment

Meet Ernesto Ramirez, Ph.D student in public health, Quantified Self organizer, and disliker of to-do lists. Ernesto uses iDoneThis to feel great about what he gets done every day, to motivate himself to do more, and to create a record of his life. He made the following word cloud to show his last 62 days on iDoneThis. Ernesto’s an inspiration to us at iDoneThis, too — we’re working on giving everyone on iDoneThis his or her own individual word cloud. (Look out for it soon!)

Ernesto Ramirez

BIO

Ernesto Ramirez is a doctoral student studying Public Health at San Diego State University and the University of California, San Diego. He is interested in using technology to help people live a life of wellness. He’s getting married next year and is really excited about that too.

Brianna Roux, Scientist

June 16, 2011 by I Done This Support Leave a Comment

Meet Brianna Roux, young scientist, college student, and amateur knitter. Brianna uses iDoneThis to track school projects, check-in on her knitting progress, and advance medical science.

Brianna Roux

BIO

I am currently a senior Biomedical Engineering major at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, with a minor in biochemistry/molecular biology. After I graduate, I plan to continue my education and get a Ph.D in Biomedical Engineering. I also work at Rose-Hulman’s Homework Hotline, which is a free service for students in grades 6-12 to call in and get math and science homework help. In my free time, I enjoy knitting and woodturning.

Cheryl Yeoh, Entrepreneur

June 8, 2011 by I Done This Support Leave a Comment

Meet Cheryl Yeoh, first-time entrepreneur, co-founder of CityPockets and recently named one of 25 women driving NY’s tech scene. Using iDoneThis every day, Cheryl traces the footsteps of her rising startup and already has a couple of major milestones logged into the calendar.

Cheryl Yeoh

BIO

I co-founded CityPockets, a daily deal digital wallet with a secondary deals marketplace that’s based in NYC. I was born and bred in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and braved the American soil in 2002 on a full scholarship to study engineering at Cornell University. Since then, I’ve educated people about labyrinths, founded a Toastmasters Club at my first job, and worked as a management consultant before ditching Michelin starred restaurants for quinoa and kale to start CityPockets. The journey of my startup has been an incredibly winding road so far, but ultimately rewarding.

Dr. Hari Palaiyanur, Ph.D

May 19, 2011 by I Done This Support Leave a Comment

Meet Hari Palaiyanur, newly minted Ph.D, NBA fanatic, and eater of vegetables. Hari used iDoneThis to motivate him to make progress on his dissertation every day, until he had his degree in hand.

Hari Palaiyanur

BIO

I was born in India and have grown up in the US for most of my life. At some point in college, I became addicted to basketball. I’ve lived in the Bay Area since graduating college and am planning to move to the East Coast this summer.

Age: 27

Location: Berkeley, CA

Contact: LinkedIn

Andrew Zarick, Digital Media Strategist

May 5, 2011 by I Done This Support Leave a Comment

Meet Andrew Zarick, digital media expert and hip hop enthusiast. Using iDoneThis every day, Andrew has discovered that he gets more done than he otherwise gave himself credit for.

Andrew Zarick

BIO

I’ve lived in Brooklyn for almost 8 years. I started my professional career as Digital Strategist for DUMBO-based interactive marketing agency, The JAR Group. I recently founded a marketing agency called AZBK, specializing in performance and acquisition marketing through paid search, social and display channels. While in DUMBO, I co-founded Digital DUMBO – a community of New York’s brightest digital thought leaders. The organization has quickly grown into one of the city’s largest digital communities with over 4,000 members. When not helping companies acquire new users or grow revenues with online advertising, I manage 100BestRapSongs.com – a hiphop music aggregator. When not working, I enjoy trying new restaurants, playing soccer, meeting interesting people and trying to see the world.

Scale Customer Service through Copywriting

April 26, 2011 by I Done This Support Leave a Comment

Technology provides the basis for this two-man team to run a web service that has handled nearly 30,000 email entries. But going from about 600 registered users in late March to over 5,000 in mid-April not only required us to scale our technology, it forced us to scale customer service as we saw our support emails explode from 23 total requests between January and late March to about 300 over a two-week stretch at the beginning of April.

Great customer service is a highly personal process, but, of course, nothing says great customer service like a fantastic product. In the words of 37signals, “Copywriting is interface design” and “good writing is good design”. Here are 4 lessons that we learned as we learned how to scale customer support and knock our support email volume down from as high as 16 per 100 new users to zero by becoming better writers.

Willem Bult, Entrepreneur

April 22, 2011 by I Done This Support Leave a Comment

Meet Willem Bult, world traveler, entrepreneur, and software developer. Willem uses iDoneThis to build fine internet products by reflecting every day on his step-by-step progress towards his goals.

Willem Bult

BIO

I write code and travel the world. I’ve lived in Europe, SE-Asia and the US. I’ve always been interested both in software development as in entrepreneurship. At age 15, I was selling my first “real” application. While pursuing my B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees I started four high tech companies. Software I created has taught children in the slums of Delhi how to speak English, and a company I founded makes people smile every day when they receive our personalized game products.

How We Got Our First 5,000 Users

April 20, 2011 by I Done This Support 19 Comments

Celebrate — this week we got our 5,000th user! This is the most users either of us (Rodrigo and I) have ever had for any web project of ours. In the past, we’ve taken the “build it and they will come” attitude towards web development … and they never came! Here’s the story of how we got our first 5,000 users by constructing custom narratives for influential communities.

Alex Z., Food Logger

April 19, 2011 by I Done This Support Leave a Comment

This is the first in an ongoing series profiling iDoneThis users. Meet Alex, denizen of New York City, and active food logger. Alex uses iDoneThis to write down every single thing he eats every day.

BIO

New York City native. Tried caviar at age 7 and loved it. Not a superstitious person outside of sport. I enjoy looking for things and ultimately finding them.

Age: 28

Location: New York, NY

Contact: ajz8 AT cornell DOT edu