Duolingo gives you points for completing lessons that you can trade in for streak freezes. A streak freeze costs 200 points (IIRC), and you seem to normally get ~5-10 points per day that you complete a lesson (closer to 5 or 6 on average, it seems a little random). But basically it seems like you earn enough points to buy a streak freeze every month or so.

I'd be interested in hearing from people who had problems staying motivated and then solved those problems somehow.

I think it's a good idea. I'm working on two different micro-SaaS ideas with two different cofounders and for both projects I'm using Hubstaff to keep track of the number of hours we're both putting into the project, both to make sure we're putting in an equal effort and also to get a sense of whether the money the project makes down the road (if any) ends up being greater than the market value of the time I invested into it.

I'm having this same problem on the side-project I'm the most passionate about. To get past it, I just tried finding someone on the Indie Hackers forum to work on a project together, and I've now got two different cofounders for two different projects (so it hasn't directly solved my problem for my passion project but I'm hoping some of the added motivation will carry over). I want to get their SaaS ideas up-and-running within a month or two's worth of full-time work (so, after ~225 hours invested from me).

Obviously I'm still early on in the process so it's hard to say what will happen to my motivation later on, but so far I'm finding it to really help me to stay motivated.

Here's the forum where I looked for a cofounder: www.indiehackers.com/group/lo…

I posted about myself there but the people who reached out to me were not great fits; the two guys I ended up working with were both people who had previously posted there and whose posts I'd found interesting, and so I sent them each an email introducing myself.

IMO the key thing you should try to figure out is how to incentivize members to keep each other motivated. I feel that's the main value-add you can offer. IMO WIP's task tracking feature itself is not much of a usefulness improvement above just using a git log or a Trello 'Done' list (I was tracking my finished tasks in my personal Confluence wiki before I started using WIP).

If WIP was my project I would be reading up on all the different analogous real-life behavior-modification programs out there for helping groups of people stay motivated to finish something difficult (like fitness programs, boot camps, etc.). One idea in particular I find interesting is the idea of training partners (in fitness), which is analogous to "battle buddies" in the military. The idea is that you are assigned someone that you need to keep tabs on to make sure they're OK. You could even run monthly contests where each person in a training partnership has to pick one product and try to work every day on it, and then the winners get some kind of perk (maybe some achievement or something).

I'm trying to get partnerships going like that on my own but I think it's always on the site owner to push people to do things they might be too shy to do on their own initiative (at least that has been my experience in the few times I have been the person "in charge" of a large gathering of people).

Just tried it. Honestly, I think you'll have a lot of trouble convincing people to use this. To have this app solve your stated use-case (seeing how your family is doing without directly contacting them), you'd need to convince everyone you want to follow to add your app to the list of social apps they use.

You might be able to find some online or offline community for which something like this would be useful (e.g. a Reddit group or Facebook group or something), but I can't think off the top of my head what community might be interested.