This post was first published by Nathan Challen on LinkedIn as part of our entry in the Product Hunt Makers Festival – Green Earth edition 2021.

GreenHabit has a simple belief:

 

Change a daily action. Repeat. It becomes a habit 🌿; that habit over time grows 🌳 and creates a change in you. A changed you will positively impact the planet 🌏.

 

This premise is based on the famous words inspired by Gandhi:

“Be the change you wish to see in the world”.

Yes, you first must make a change from within. However, breaking old habits is hard to do on your own and that is where GreenHabit comes in. GreenHabit is your accountability partner and personal change coach. Your coach will guide you to success through the proven process of forming new positive habits.

It all starts with making one simple change in your daily routine. GreenHabit will then help you to amplify the significance of that change globally!

Want to know how? Then keep reading.

Why GreenHabit?

You know that little thing you could change in your day-to-day life that would affect the environment? Maybe it’s a shorter shower, biking instead of driving or taking a tote bag shopping instead of using plastic bags… you learn of it, you get passionate about this idea, you even take action… For what? Maybe 3 days. Then you get busy. Through convenience or comfort you return to do what you used to do, right? Everyone else is lazy… You think, “What difference can I make by this change”? And you simply go back to the old way, the habit is forgotten and the impact is lost.

I know this because I am guilty! A little voice in the back of my head at some point says, “What is the value of my sacrifice really?” and I cave. If only I could help influence others through my commitment and my own action. That is why I built GreenHabit over the last weeks in this year’s Product Hunt Makers Festival.

Why bother?

I see it like this. There are two worlds: one without GreenHabit (the world we live in) and a new world with GreenHabit — a brighter future.

👿 Without GreenHabit

  • You make a change, maybe it sticks, maybe it doesn’t. Green ideas and habits come and go.
  • Unless a government regulation, new tax or extra cost affects our hip pocket we keep doing what we are doing.
  • No one can see what action we are personally taking; there is no measurement and no lasting change.

 

😇 With GreenHabit

  • You make the habits that you learn stick, and stay with you for life.
  • Through subtle awareness, others become conscious of your commitment and the impact it is having, and are motivated to do the same.
  • Knowing your change has been adopted by thousands increases the value of your sacrifice, and publicly displaying your commitment will keep you accountable.

Ask yourself, which world do I want to live in?

🚀 Amplify change

GreenHabit has the potential to amplify awareness. Ultimately, with enough people adopting green habits we, yes ‘we’ — that is us as a community; can make GreenHabit a recognised ‘performance badge’ adopted on personal blogs, social posts and company pages to lead readers, followers and customers to know of our individual and or organisation wide commitment.

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The ‘roll your own’ performance badge will create a unique embeddable widget for your website featuring your achievements. Tap to try it out.

What is GreenHabit?

GreenHabit is a personal habit coach available in Messenger as a conversational bot. Your personal coach will guide you to:

  • create a new habit — one at a time;
  • keep you accountable — until the habit is fully adopted;
  • measure and reward your success and encourage and guide when you fail;
  • allow you to see the scale of your change and influence others.

Over a 90 day period your coach will help you to transform into the greener, planet conscious version of you. Through your achievement you can lead others to do the same.

How does it work?

Research suggests the adoption of a new habit is most successful when there is a connection to purpose combined with a strong commitment to the change followed by consistent daily recommitment. With GH your new habit will be reenforced through:

  • intrinsic motivation and external rewards for your achievement
  • ongoing accountability to yourself and to others.

To do this the bot rewards you daily with a badge:

🌱 Leaf — encourage the beginning of a fledgling habit

🌿 Frond — growing habit on it’s way to becoming a life habit

🌳 Tree — a fully developed life long habit.

To earn a tree takes time, when you receive one it’s time to celebrate 🎉. You will be given a badge plus a unique token to share when referring others to GreenHabit. Your referral token entitles you to receive tree badges when someone you invite adopts a green habit which you will proudly adorn your badge.

Gain massive impact! 🚀

One small new green habit, for example: ‘Working from home for 2 days a week’ would save ~3,000kg of co2 emissions over 12 months. 

Twitter has 353M active users. It is said that you can reach almost anyone through just six connections (One better than the “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon”).

By sharing your GREEN HABIT achievements and others adopting the same it’s not unreasonable to say your small change will motivate others, and that small change you made could just influence the planet.

To put in numbers. If an influencer with just 10k followers were to adopt just green habit their 3,000 kg co2 could impact 1.5m kg* of co2 per year! But you don’t need to be an influencer to make an impact, anyone can start a habit. You can show your badge or tweet achievements to impact those around you you never know how far it can reach.

Remember the Gandhi quote I started with? It’s actually a misquote. It’s sentiment is the same but in the case of GreenHabit, I think the true words of the great man are more relevant:

“If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him… We need not wait to see what others do.

– Mahatma Gandhi

Take action

GreenHabit is my solo entry in this years Makers’ Festival by Product Hunt. It’s been a fun side hustle in spare time over the last couple of weeks but I’d like to see the product live on beyond the competition; it’s a simple premise but needs mass adoption to have any effect at all.

https://www.producthunt.com/makers-festival/green-earth/voting

If you’d like to see it live on then make a commitment by taking action:

Tell me what you think? Is it worth changing to greener habits? Let me know your thoughts in the comments.

*Calculation based on 5% effective influence.

Want to connect? Reach out to Nathan Challen on LinkedIn or Twitter.