Review of Virtue Map after using it for two weeks

I came across the Virtue Map anti procrastination service via a Facebook ad and was initially intrigued as I do quite often struggle with procrastination. However, as I began to engage with the sales process, I found it to be very pushy and focused on extracting as much money from me as possible upfront. When you go through the signup process, they try and sell another ten different products. This left a bad taste in my mouth and made me hesitant to proceed with the purchase. I actually abandoned the buying process at this point because I was so put off.

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I don’t have screenshots of the website but here’s an email so you can get a sense of their approach.

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They started sending emails trying to get me to sign up. I ignored them for a few days until the discounts got very compelling (80% off - it’s almost free!). At that point it was cheap enough that I was prepared to try it out.

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Once I decided to go ahead with the course, I was disappointed by the quality of the content. It was often filled with spelling mistakes and seemed to be very generic and lacking in depth. 

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(Day 106)

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Other times, content was provided without attributing the authors

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(Day 102)

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The overall philosophy of the service has merit. I do like the idea of drip feeding content. Short 2-3 minute bursts of information make sense to me. I also subscribe to Driven and love the way they do it with a chatbot that delivers digestible nuggets of content via a conversational interface and short videos.

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Virtue Map’s execution leaves a lot to be desired in my opinion. As I mentioned above, the content does not meet my personal quality bar and I find the marketing approach unfortunate. My suspicion is that the vast majority of people who sign up for the service are like me and don’t read the emails after a few days/weeks. 

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You’ll find your fair share of people on Reddit/review sites who rave about it. My suggestion is you look at the examples above (and I’ll post a few more below) and think about whether the content would be useful or not. I have my suspicions about whether the public reviews are actually legit.

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How Virtue Map could be improved

Aside from cleaning up spelling mistakes, citing sources and reducing the upsells, I think Virtue Map could actually be a decent product if they made these changes:

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1. Make an actual app with interactive exercises. They have a PWA (progressive web app) which is just a way to read the content. There’s no way to go through the exercises that are sometimes included with the content (there are PDFs included in some of the lessons that you’re meant to print out). To me, this felt like too much effort. If it had been easy for me to jot down a few notes for a specific exercise, I would’ve done it. But expecting me to print it out (or even copy and paste it from a PDF into my journaling app) wasn’t going to happen. 

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2. Create an accountability community outside Facebook. They invited me to a Facebook group where I could communicate with other Virtue Map members. I do like the idea of accountability buddies but I don’t want to go on Facebook (which is a massive source of distraction for me and I’m pretty sure they actually recommend not using it!) to talk to people. There are alternatives to Facebook (e.g. circle.so) that they could’ve used or they could’ve built it into their app.

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3. Give users a way to rate each lesson: there are some lessons in the anti procrastination course that were impactful but a lot of it was common knowledge that I found useless. If the author of the course reviewed feedback about each lesson, I think they’d find that only 30% of the content is worth keeping. That’s not a bad thing, it just means that they’d go for quality over quantity.

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My verdict

I wouldn’t recommend Virtue Map. There are books about procrastination with content that is far more solid and other apps (e.g. Driven) that do a better job of delivering content in small chunks.

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We do plan to build micro courses into Focus Bear in the future and I’m going to draw on the experience I’ve had with Virtue Map to make it as useful as possible.

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