As a team we really like to work on ways to improve on our daily routines. We share an interest in quantifying ourselves by using timetracking tooling, to-do apps and daily practices such as stand-ups. We played around with Fitbits a while ago and noticed there’s tons of dashboards but just so little effort put into combining data sources to turn everything into small bits of actionable insights that you can use during your day.

That’s when we set a mission for a hackathon project. It wouldn’t just be a nifty thing for ourselves, it could actually help others. We realized the shift in the type of occupations these days. More and more desk jobs and flexible hours of working. It causes people to mostly sit throughout a majority of their day and therefore there’s an increased difficulty to stay healthy, have a right balance, and consequently be productive.

“It wouldn’t just be a nifty thing for ourselves. It could actually help others.”

We flushed out and validated by means of a quick-and-dirty prototype during a hackathofn to see if there would be any interest. The solution: a Chrome extensions that serves small contextual pieces of advice every time the user opens up a new tab. Why a new tab? Because we researched what channels people tend to use most often to unobtrusively add in messages that would help them change behavior. Guess what, we found people with desk jobs open new tabs 40 times a day on average. A perfect way to communicate behavior-changing snippets of useful advice.

A quick and cheap experiment of a weekend with some preliminary research on the market, type of users, and potential needs, turned into something that now serves 3500+ users. Tabtics was featured on Lifehacker, Betalist, and Producthunt.