If you want to get better at something, you have to get feedback about where to improve. Getting or giving that feedback isn't always easy, but the Herndon, Va.-based team behind HowMyDoin wants to make the feedback process as easy and quick as a Buzzfeed survey. The three co-founders, who all work as independent business consultants, have put together a Kickstarter to get their app off the ground and are already well on their way to raising the money they need to put their idea in the hands of business owners, employees and anyone else looking for a fast and easy feedback method.
"It's a simple tool to provide feedback, but you can see some deltas and really see improvement," said Jeff Kelly, who co-founded HowMyDoin with fellow consultants Curt Buermeyer and Laurence Rudolph a little over a year ago.
At its core, HowMyDoin provides simple surveys individualized for a user. Anyone they give their HowMyDoin handle to can take the survey, with differing options for anonymity. Then the results can be looked at and measured over time as the user looks to improve. Executives wanting feedback from employees, business owners wanting individualized customer feedback and really anyone looking for improvement can thus not only find out how they are doing at any given time but see improvement (or lack thereof) on the same scale over time.
"Weeks, months and years is what we're looking for," Kelly said. "It's not a performance evaluation, it's really for anyone who wants to get better."
The individualized aspect is important too, he explained. It's part of what makes HowMyDoin stand out as different compared to Yelp or other review websites.
"Yelp does it store by store," Kelly said. "This is about each person."
The traits people are surveyed on depend on what they want to improve and can be as specific as sales or vague as measuring if someone is a "good person," but what matters is that they can be looked at over time and help people mark their improvements.
"It's a very consistent question format," Laurence said. "It makes improving yourself easier to focus that way."
The founders feel confident about reaching their Kickstarter goal of $27,000 by the end of the month and in fact only decided to go the crowdfunding route because of wanting to hang on to control of their product rather than from lack of interest from investor groups.
"They're still waiting in the wings and will probably come into it in the future," Kelly said.
The Kickstarter money will go into getting the first version of HowMyDoin out for testing. New features and a host of surveys for people to customize will come along as well. The real dream, according to the founders, is to have a HowMyDoin profile treated like a resume or what people would look up on LinkedIn.
“It will be like a public score card," Kelly said.
To see what HowMyDoin hopes to create, check out the video the team put on Kickstarter below:
