Dear Get Up and Move Users, investors, supporters, family, and friends -
Today you will notice something a bit different.
When you point your browsers to getupandmove.me, you will be gently redirected to our new home on the web: imoveyou.com.
Andrey and I have many reasons for choosing to change our name. I’ll share a few with you here, briefly, but we encourage you to get in touch with us to ask questions and send comments.
My iPhone is 301.904.5136 (call anytime!). You you can email us both - jen@contagionhealth.com andandrey@contagionhealth.com.
First, there's a practical reason for the change - we made an early but significant mistake common in web startups. We chose a URL with a '.me' ending instead of a '.com' ending.
We actually don't own getupandmove.com, and during user testing it became apparent that not owning this domain name was confusing some folks. Over and over we've seen people type "getupandmove.com" into their browsers.
We've been trying to buy the getupandmove.com address for months now, but to no avail.
That means that if we want to make it as easy as possible for users to remember us, we need to pick a new name - an available .com phrase that suits our mission, vision, and values.
We went through WEEKS of tough whiteboarding sessions, asking many people we know including our advisors and investors, even setting up an Amazon Mechanical Turk job to try and find just the right new name.
It was very, very difficult, but after much deliberation, we had it: imoveyou.com.
Why imoveyou?
It's pretty simple - we noticed many of you are using getupandmove to motivate each other to do nifty things other than exercise.
Way back in November, when we launched the earliest version of Get Up and Move, we thought the only potential use for the platform would be healthy microchoice challenges.
Luckily, we were right (you're still using Getupandmove.me to do fitness related challenges a large part of the time), but we were also sort of wrong - you're now using Get Up and Move to provide social support for many more activities.
In addition to the more 'classic' microfitness challenges (dance to 2 songs, walk for 15 minutes, do 50 bed jumps :) we were seeing a lot of emergent behavior on the site that the phrase 'get up and move' didn't seem to capture.
Examples include drinking 8 glasses of water, finishing a work project, even watching True Blood with a friend.
You showed us the larger potential for getupandmove: rather than just a site where you nag friends to exercise, it's a social action network where proof of your action creates currency that moves others.
As we whiteboarded what the site actually does now, we discovered it's already evolved into a place where I can move you to do all sorts of fun, good-for-you activities.
You're telling us (via email, our forums, and during in-person conversations) that the benefits of using getupandmove are no longer just physical - they're mental, they're emotional, and perhaps most importantly, they're social.
You're telling us Get Up and Move helps you feel more connected to friends and family who are far away in real life, thanks to sharing photos, videos, and emails about the activity you did together.
Using imoveyou.com connects you to your communities, to your tribes, to your people, to your own good intentions (and how you act on them or not) in a way that hasn't been done before.
imoveyou.com isn't made for *talking* about what to do with your Saturday afternoon...it's made for you to create a small plan and do it with friends, quickly and easily.
We've heard the site described as Evite for healthy actions, or a lightweight Plancast for health and wellness.
We're happy with both those comparisons, as it means that we're succeeding at our primary mission - injecting a strong shot of social into your daily wellbeing.
Get Up and Move showed us the tremendous power of reciprocity. By saying "I will do this if you will do that," we created - together - a fascinating promise-based network that amazingly works *just* based on the honor system.
In the next few months, we'll go far beyond social proof (uploading photos and videos of yourself completing a challenge, commenting on group challenges, etc). We will begin to provide you with other concrete ways to verify that you've completed a healthy action.
We will become the Paypal for verified healthy actions.
It's a pivot we're very excited to share with you. Get ready to just move it at the end of the month when our first test is up and running (literally and figuratively).
But I digress :). Today is about celebrating our new name together, and inviting you to join us at our new home: imoveyou.com.
All the same functionality you know and love will still be there - a few design changes and a new URL reflect the extent of how we're sharing this new identity.
To our wonderful Cabot users, who joined us via the Get Up and Mooove campaign or Random Acts of Cheddar, we still love you! You'll be able to access all the features and challenges you currently enjoy, and your community page - except for the web address - will remain unchanged.
Andrey and I are pretty pumped about this.
We welcome a new opportunity to explore how making healthy commitments to each other - online - allows us to move and motivate each other to DO what we say we will - offline.
Thank you to all our users for continuously moving Andrey and I to build a better social action platform for you.
We'll get right back to it!
:) Jen and Andrey
