Habit Labs
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
What the company did
Habit Labs, founded in Seattle in 2010 by Buster Benson, was a social health software startup built to induce behavior change in individuals around their health using data, gamification and social challenges. Formed through a 2011 merger of Benson's Health Month and Jen McCabe's Contagion Health, it developed the behavior-change platform Budge, which let users challenge one another to adopt healthier habits and earn rewards. A Y Combinator Summer 2010 participant, it raised $865,000 in seed funding from investors including Y Combinator, 500 Global and angel Jennifer Lum.
02 / Habit Labs FAILURE REASONS
Failure factors
Founder Buster Benson wrote (11 Jul 2012, opened) that Habit Labs’ product path through Budge reached a dead end and that his guesses on how to change behavior had been mostly wrong, as the company was ending.
Habit Labs led to Budge and Budge led to a dead end.
guesses on 'How do we change ourselves?' had been mostly wrong.
03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- Operations ended
Buster Benson’s post describing closing Habit Labs; founder blog (11 Jul 2012, opened) states 'Habit Labs is ending soon' and 'Habit Labs as a company is pretty much over.'
04 / CONTEMPORARY REBUILD ASSESSMENT
Difficulty of rebuilding this project today
Material for this section is being gathered and checked. It will appear here once ready.
Overall assessment: Not completed
05 / CAUSAL CHAIN
How the factors connect
- 01
Habit Labs was formed in 2011 through the merger of Buster Benson's Health Month and Jen McCabe's Contagion Health.
- 02
The company raised $250,000 from angel investors in August 2011 but never got its Budge platform out of beta.
- 03
In March 2012 co-founder Jen McCabe left in what Benson called a typical co-founder split over different visions.
- 04
In July 2012, having run out of money, Benson shut Habit Labs down; Health Month was sold to Digitally Justified Technologies while Budge was closed and its code released open-source.