p/himoment
Personal development
Thomas Schranz ⛄️
hiMoment — Your digital happiness guru
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hiMoment is an app combining research in positive psychology with artificial intelligence to help you become happier by focusing on what's good in your life.

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Thomas Schranz ⛄️
😰 Today life becomes faster & faster. Social media news feeds do a very effective job at generating expectations, anxiety and stress. 😊 hiMoment is a new app based on research in positive psychology that helps you to capture your best moments regularly to shift your attention to the good things in your life. Great attention to details by Christoph & Mrož 👏👏👏
Christoph Maria Löwenherz
thank you @__tosh for hunting! My name is Christoph, I am the co-founder of hiMoment, an app that helps people happier and grow, featuring hiMo the happiness guru. hiMo’s method combines research in positive psychology with smart algorithms and an entertaining user experience. We hope that it will help as many people as possible become the best versions of themselves - whether it is to become happier, more confident, or more motivated to pursue one’s goals. My cofounder @mrozilla will answer all questions related to the product and experience, while I am happy to take your questions regarding psychology and the business side of things. Try it out and let us know what you think!
Kelly Kuhn-Wallace
❤️ things that encourage taking a moment to identify and appreciate the good in one's self/experience/work/day/life. Founders I coach are typically annoyed by the intentional 5 minutes this takes of our Slack chat...for two sessions...and then they bring it up if I forget.
Christoph Maria Löwenherz
@kkdub thanks for your comment! this is exactly our experience. It takes a bit for users to get in but once they are committed, they don't stop. Perhaps you can recommend hiMoment to the people you coach. hiMo will remind them so you don't have to ;)
Peter Buchroithner
very cool, congrats on the launch. Why did you guys decide to go App-first vs integrate into existing platforms (= chatbots)?
Mrož
@peterbuch cheers! Have a look at what I wrote to @natalie_korotaeva above for details but in general, we've hit some UI limitations to delivering the experience we wanted to 😐 However, there's this secret experiment I'm cooking over the weekends, we'll see how it goes 💪
Christoph Maria Löwenherz
@peterbuch UI limitations aside, it's also to be plattform-independent. Also makes monetization easier, and I am a bit worried that FB will do the same thing they did with pages (throtteling organic reach massively) What are your thoughts on this?
Christoph Bitzner
Very promising! However, you are using a conversational interface in your app. Why did you decide to do that? Do you plan to build a chatbot version of it as well?<3
Mrož
@bizarrochris cheers! Have a look at what I wrote to @natalie_korotaeva just above—including a little secret as well 🙀
Jordan Krueger
Facebook login is unfortunately broken. On my iPhone, I'm already logged in to Facebook, Chrome, and Safari – I shouldn't have to enter my username and password into the Facebook interface inside this app to register with Facebook.
Christoph Maria Löwenherz
@jordankrueger hi, thanks for that. this is unfortunately a trade off we had to accept until we are fully native with our app. You have to enter your password once when you sign up. But I do get what you mean, we want to eliminate every possible barrier.
Clemens Helm
Hi there! Thanks for posting this here, the app looks really promising. One question: The description in the app store say that the app is based on “research in positive psychology”. What findings specifically?
Christoph Maria Löwenherz
@clemenshelm thanks for your question. There are a couple of concepts we are linking together. When hiMo asks you what the best thing of your day ways, we are using the so called “savoring technique” that has been researched for decades and identified to be one of the best things we can do to improve subjective well being. Fred Bryant is a leading research on this specific topic. hiMo will also pose several happiness challenges to you, all of which are based on current research. In FLOW, we are showing you two of your moments and ask you which makes you happier - again and again. Here we couple "savoring" with "decision making". There is quite some research that connects happiness and our ability to make choices. Most notably, it appears that similar brain regions are affected when we are happy and when we make decisions. But no one has actually connected these two elements the way we are doing it in FLOW, and we are ourselves curious about it: We see that it works; we see that people really like it. But it's never been researched, so we are now partnering up with a university to investigate its effects.
Clemens Helm
@christoph_loewenherz Cool, thanks! I'm gonna give it a try. I'll let you know how it's working out for me ;)
Christoph Maria Löwenherz
@clemenshelm great, thank you!
Ghost Kitty
Comment Deleted
Christoph Maria Löwenherz
@reiter_jakob "Bad things" are some of the best learning opportunities we can get. So yeah, bring on the challenges (and don't avoid them!) But FOCUSING on negative things is something entirely different. Our brains constantly rebuild themselves in a process called neuroplasticity. Focusing on negative emotions, thoughts, or past events strengthens these patterns in our brain. Your stomach will take a hit when you eat bad food only. Your brain works like your stomach, but it digests thoughts and experiences. Based on the research, I would definitely not recommend the ostrich method (ignore/avoid everything that is bad) or trying to find something good in everything (Try Hitler!). I would encourage sacrifice immediate pleasure for longer lasting future pleasure. I would recommend dealing with negative things upright when they happen. But I wouldn’t linger too much on them, and certainly not reminisce about them.
Kahana Live
@reiter_jakob in 8 seconds or less...? Inspiration is the point here, not whats normally reserved for Psychologists. Very good work by Mroz and Christoph.
Chris Wilson
This is what I do with my DayOne journal... really the same thing.
Christoph Maria Löwenherz
@automateiq There are crucial differences to a journal, most notably our collections (best of lists which are created automatically based on hashtags you set and based on time periods) and FLOW - a machine-learning based way of browsing through your moments that is aimed at providing you a microdose of happiness within 5 minutes. But great if you are using the method already
Andreas Diesenreiter
Really nice app, hope it can do videos too one day <3
Mrož
@andreasz_com cheers! It's not only videos but any kind of multimedia, we need to keep in mind that there are so many different ways people find things that make them happy 🎧 🖼 🏄 We've got big plans with video (imagine getting an AI-made summary video of your best moments in a collection), stay tuned!
Chris Buttenham
As someone who is fairly in-tune with the quarrels of mental health and the impact traditional social media has on us, I think this is a fantastic concept. Just downloading the Android app now!
Christoph Maria Löwenherz
@chrisbuttenham it's a great mental workout. Once you have a couple of moments in, you can keep coming back to it, as a daily ritual or when in need of an intensive dose of it. The method behind it has been shown to prevent anxiety and depression.
Markus Raunig
Since you are asking me to capture personal moments of mine - what about privacy?
Christoph Maria Löwenherz
@markus_raunig thanks for your interest. This comes up very often, even our earliest test users (friends and family) were very keen on this. The intimate experience in hiMoment absolutely has to be accompanied by the feeling of privacy— we believe in "share it with yourself". At the same time, our artificial intelligence needs to be able to work with the data to be able to help you be happier. Tricky situation. To solve this, this we’re looking into the concepts of differential privacy—ultimately being able to draw conclusions from big-enough datasets without being able to identify the individual records. For now, have a look at our privacy promise: https://himoment.com/legal/privacy/
Kahana Live
Like the idea of a repository for special moments. This adds a new dimension to whats lacking in Insta, Photos , 500px, or even Flickr for heavens sake.
Mrož
@cpspencer cheers! And on top of that, it doesn't have to be necessarily a photo 📝 There's plenty of happy moments where we don't have a photo and these deserve to be remembered as well!
Stefan Adelmann
Hey guys! I really like this idea... To me, the app feels like some sort of "anti social network". I think you might really hit a nerve of many users, who are struggling with happiness from conventional social media. Nonetheless, integrating some social features could be very helpful to spread the app... do you have any plans on that?
Mrož
@stefan_adelmann I like the "anti social network", might steal it 😬 There’s plenty of apps that focus on sharing your moments with others, just think about Facebook or Instagram. There’s one issue with these, though. Everything on social media is immediately quantified. How many likes, and hearts, and shares we get on every single post. This gets into your brain 😝 hiMoment is intimate. When it comes to happiness, you’re not sharing your moments with everyone, you’re sharing your happy moments with the person that matters the most—yourself. hiMo motivates you to add anything that makes you happy and nobody will judge you :) We’re looking into ways of including your friends in the whole thing (imagine tagging your best friend in a moment you’ve experienced together) but we can’t lose that intimacy in there. Our first test here are shared collections—you can generate a link for any of your collections and send it to anyone you want 👩‍👩‍👧‍👦👨‍👩‍👧👩‍👩‍👧‍👧 Have a look at this example: https://shared.himoment.com/coll...
Stefan Adelmann
@mrozilla I think this is a good plan. I like the idea of sharing a moment with a friend on a one-to-one basis. I think you really have to be careful with social features, otherwise you might annoy users who feel like "oh, it's just about sharing again." :-) But again, I think this has enourmous potential because it really reflects the Zeitgeist. So, keep up the great work! :-)
Mrož
@stefan_adelmann Exactly, "intimate social" would probably be the keyword for these interactions. And I absolutely agree that it would be greatly beneficial to getting more people on board, sharing a moment with a friend who isn't using hiMoment yet is a very natural growth tool 📈 Thanks a lot!
Thomas Knappitsch
So what will happen if I use hiMoment and can't really think of positive moments in my life at all? will it make me desperate then?
Christoph Maria Löwenherz
@thomas_knappitsch It's a common problem at the beginning that people feel their life isn't special enough. But most likely, they are just not good at noticing the small moments. So in the beginning, take your time and really come up with that best moment consistently. It could be the smallest thing. If you do this consistently for a couple of days, I promise it will be easier as your brain is adjusting to the task. That's when you enter an upward spiral. your mood will improve, you'll see more good things, other people will notice, they'll be in a better mood around you, etc etc. I was a notorious pessimist when I developed the hiMoment method, so my first hiMoment took me 20 minutes to come up with.
Georg Kuttner
Sound like a "fun" app, but what's your plan for making a real business out of it. I guess upselling antidepressants won't cut it?! ;-)
Christoph Maria Löwenherz
@georg_kuttner Happiness should always be for free, but we'll add premium services that will help you develop any mindset, stay motivated, and reach your goals. We also get frequent visits from professionals who would like to use this as a digital addon to their coachings and therapies. While your comment is funny, depression isn't and we feel it's important to mention that hiMoment does not cure depression or work for depressed people. It takes a completely different set of tool to heal depression than to make people happier.
Alina Stanislavska
Just what I've been looking for to point out that I actually do have something to be happy about each day. Really great concept, guys.
Christoph Maria Löwenherz
@alina_karnaukh Glad you like it. It's precicely the "have something to be happy about each day" that makes a tremendous difference. Might take you a bit of time on your first days, but within a couple of days, I swear your number one question won't be "hm, what was good today?" but "which of all these great things was the best today?"
Dimitrios
Nice work guys, interface looks really nice and I guess we all do need some positive vibes. But an app that "makes me happier" is a pretty bold claim, especially for such a complex and relative concept like happiness. How can hiMomemt really make me "happier"?
Christoph Maria Löwenherz
@dimnls thanks for your question! Science knows a lot of practical things that we can do to become happier, but unfortunately that knowledge isn’t very accessible - either we don’t know about it or the findings are difficult to implement. that's why we created hiMoment. Our happiness guru hiMo guides you through the method that we have created. In essence, he helps you focus your attention on the good things your life by regularly asking you to write down the good things that happen in your life. It's the focus on these small moments and that shift in focus on good things that has been shown to be one of the crucial differences between happy and unhappy people. For most people, happiness really is an inside job.
equinux
This app has the potential to help a lot of people especially teens. People can get too wrap up in seeing the best scenes from other people's lives when they scroll through social media. It's great to see you develop an app where people can focus on the positivity that is going on in their own life. It can foster gratitude and improve overall well-being 👏
Christoph Maria Löwenherz
@equinux thank you! I agree that teens would especially benefit from it. However, it will be super difficult to convince them to post their moments on hiMoment rather than on instant gratification social media sites. But it's our big goal, so we're putting as much focus on being entertaining as we put on being scientifically sound!
Steve Daniel
Great app! People definitely need that and I think that this is something that will help lots of people. However why can we only sign up with Facebook?
Mrož
@stevedaniel cheers! For now, it's the fastest solution to authenticate real people 🙋 You don't have to create a new account, come up with a password, remember it, go through account confirmation emails, you know how tedious the process can be... For the future, we definitely need to add options to log in using various services—not everyone has/wants to use a Facebook account these days 🗓
Adam Shapiro
Love the idea. Should rethink the CX for people new to the app. Forcing people to create an entire collection right from the get-go is a bit of a barrier and prevents people from exploring more of the app. For example, my first moment was work-related, but I don't have 4 other work-related moments to log for the day...
Christoph Maria Löwenherz
@adam_shapiro hi, thank you yeah, we are reworking that particular part. While you may not come up with 4 moments that easily, you can import 4 moments off your phone gallery. Work might not be the best topic to start, thanks for pointing that out.
Adam Shapiro
@christoph_loewenherz Another thing is the Flow CX. I don't understand how you select which moment you like better. If I tap a moment it just gets larger. With some random swiping it seems to choose one but there's no indication which moment you chose or how to correct it if you chose the wrong. Really confusing.
Christoph Maria Löwenherz
@adam_shapiro thanks for reporting that adam. hiMo tells you to swipe the better one OVER the other one. I am sure it will help if we repeat this message. great feedback!