TipJoy Launches (YC winter 08) | Hacker News Reader

TipJoy Launches (YC winter 08)

techcrunch.com

57 pointsjamiequint53 comments

Fantastic, I look forward to seeing this service take off. However, I think you have a major (and seemingly hidden) issue: trust.

Don't get me wrong, I don't think you guys are out to swindle me or anything (quite the opposite), but honestly your website sets my 'dodgy brothers' sensor tingling. The main source of information, the FAQ, intermingles sales pitches with fragmented bites of detail about how the service actually works. Most of the FAQ is fluff, with the few facts hidden amongst it. I have several questions about how the service works. For example: When do you take your cut? What happens to uncollected funds? If I donate 10c to someone, am I going to be sent an email demanding payment 5 times a day? (I am not asking for a response on these questions here – I think this information should be on the website itself).

At the moment, if I use your service, I know what is going to happen in a general sense (and I had to read thoroughly to even get this far), but I don't know all the details. Because I don't know the details, I have to trust that you are going to do these right. But why should I trust you to do that? If you were trustworthy, wouldn't you be upfront in the first place? The more I have to trust you, the less willing I am going to be to trust you.

Also, be-careful of how you advertise yourselves. Quite a few statements in that FAQ are quite strange, like discussing passing on future savings to the tip receivers, and the whole money transfer service thing. Why are you asking for more of my trust, or my help? Me... help a company? You're supposed to be helping me! I don't want to trade with you because you're going to be help me in the future, I want to trade with you because you are going to help me right now. So you just need to sell your current rates and features convincingly. Don't get me wrong, slash your prices as soon as you can, but don't promise you will, just do it and let everyone know you've done it when you've done it. You can't tell me you're customer orientated; almost every company says it. Let your customers tell me (word of mouth style, not via your home-page :-) ).

I believe this trust to be an extremely important issue for you to deal with, because you aren't some website asking for my email address, you are a website dedicated to handling money transfers.

“If I were king of the zoo,” I would drop the FAQ format and split the information out into two separate sections. The first would be your selling page, something that compels customers to try the service. The second would be simple, no fluff, factual explanation of what happens. Screenshots, diagrams, and examples can make all the difference.

Sorry, I don't mean to be so negative. You guys have the opportunity to make something great; its excites a man such as myself!

Don't be sorry for good feedback! Thanks.

Very interesting, the most promising implementation of the micropayments concept I've seen yet. I love the ruthless simplicity of their approach, just looking at the url-entry box conjured up a half-dozen sites I had semi-subconsciously intended to tip as soon as the right solution comes along.

Though I hope they find a way around the possible problem of people spamming tips or just frivolously IOUing. Ideally once the thing gets some momentum, people will have a small pool of cash in their account so that the proportion of IOUs goes down, and the benefit of using the site become clear. But they'll have to get to that point quickly enough sustain interest.

What a fantastic idea! You've created not just a start-up but a social experiment. I have no idea if it'll work, but I love the idea of separating the act of tipping and the act of paying.

Do users get a reputation based on the proportion of tips they eventually pay out? Can you force users to tip (e.g. you must tip before you get to read this article, regardless of whether you're going to pay eventually).

And please make it multi-lingual! I'd love to try out a tipping-based business model, but just English won't cut it for me.

Nice to see another great idea in the winter batch, btw!

I agree - that separation is going to make this an interesting experiment when you're tipping for what could very easily be seen as a public good.

I love the idea of earning a reputation based on how much you tip! As I just said in my post to techcrunch: We do expect that there will be some average amount of tips per piece of content which are never paid. As we collect more data, we'll be able to tell content creators what percent of their total tips earned they can actually expect to collect. Since it's free digital content, we think that a collection rate of less than 100% shouldn't be too much of a problem.

Eventually we're going to open up an extremely configurable API. It will allow you to create your own micropayments engine, and determine the distribution model of your content. Internationalization is also on the roadmap. Maybe we'll tip users who help out :)

Suggestion: rel=nofollow for ranked sites. The spammers are already tipping sites that they want to jack up the pagerank of.

Hi, Abby from Tipjoy here. One exciting aspect of tipjoy is that the ranking is determined by the amount of PAID tips something has received. Right now nothing’s yet been paid (except for a little bit we’ve put in ourselves), so the top tip list has the spam you've mentioned. However, as people begin to pay for their tips (by hitting the ‘pay’ button in the upper right corner of tipjoy.com when signed in), the most popular tip list will start to evolve to reflect what’s really worth money to people.

That being said, we're probably going to add a "safe for work" mode, which you can toggle to hide questionable content.

I'm glad you're aware of this. I don't know much about blackhat SEO, but if Tipjoy becomes an "authority site" such that getting a link from you would be the difference between page 2 and page 1 of a SERP, they'd gladly pay more than a few dollars for big-revenue keywords relating to gambling, porn, and finance.

TC commentors are a//holes. Well I think this is a decent product. This problem area has definitely been in need of a decent solution.

TC commentors are a//holes.

You sound surprised...

First of all, congrats to Ivan & Abigail! It's a great product and they did a great job.

As for criticism, I'm always reminded of this quote:

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; because there is not effort without error and shortcomings; but who does actually strive to do the deed; who knows the great enthusiasm, the great devotion, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement and who at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly. So that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.” ~ Theodore Roosevelt

It's a great quote, but conjuring Roosevelt seems a little extreme to combat snarky comments on TechCrunch =)

"In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face, is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is more meaningful than our criticism designating it so." - Anton Ego

critisism is not bad, letting it go by without analysing it or affecting your perfomance is.

You're totally right. None of the comments on the TechCrunch thread were without utility.

This is really cool, it feels much more personal than being stuck with an ad. Hilariously though, on TechCrunch this has become a moral discussion over the virtues of tipping at Starbucks.

Hi TipJoy! Great concept! I was thinking about similar ideas, but didn't come up with two of your clever solutions: aggregation of micropayments to increase efficiency, and giftcards to avoid regulation. But I didn't want to give up on it, because I thought it would be good for the world. I'm glad to see you guys have already built it, and I'm very impressed with the execution!

I might make a suggestion though. While Amazon is great, I'd like to think, or home, at a few people getting tips would be basically able to live off them for a time, and that means they'd need to either get cash, or be able to use tips to pay for living expenses. It might be troublesome to get a deal, but I'd love to see grocery stores as a source of giftcards.

Many thanks, and a hearty congratulations, Kirigins!

Grocery stores are a great idea, although the execution could be a nightmare, particularly if you're thinking globally.

Do you mean a gift card to a grocery store? Does this work for you? http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html/ref=gw_br_gro?%5Fencodi...

Just kidding!

I think the real solution is clearly to put in the legwork to become a licensed money transfer service. We fully intend to, but simply can't afford it till we close a Series A. So not to sound like a broken record, but use the service so we can impress VCs :-D

I really want to see this allow sites to integrate TipJoy between their own users. If you offer a small, tiny cut to sites who do this, I think this will grow by leaps and bounds across the net. Imagine if you could leave a tip for some of the crazy cool comments people submit here on TC. I know I'd do it.

Encourage other companies to put TipJoy on their sites (by letting them have a percentage of peer-to-peer donations) and everyone wins, especially you.

Sounds like a call for an API.

Tipjoy is actually just the first user of a system I'm calling Millipaid. It will be a completely customizable micropayments solution. Before then, we'll release Tipjoy Platform. The site owners get a cut, and the content creators get a cut. It will be up to the platform to decide the distribution. Video sites could really benefit from it. So could sites like thesixetyone, twitter, etc.

Best approach to micropayment yet. In fact, this one may well succeed. I can't think of a way to improve the mechanism - sure, it'd be nice if the tips were cash redeemable, but I realise it's not your fault, and you've made the situation pretty clear.

I know it's been mentioned by others, but I think your site layout needs a little work. In particular, your mechanism is pretty simple, yet you hide it in some text in your FAQ. Put up a "how does it work" page with a flowchart or something.

Oh, one more thing: what about mentioning the tip amount on the "Tip this" button? I know, it would make it marginally bigger, but I think it would help, psychologically. People are probably (well, I am) very wary to press a button that implies payment (if they've not signed up) or actually "destructively" affects their balance with no check-back confirmation. (if they have) Putting the amount right there would definitely put peoples' mind at ease.

I've not read your client-side code, but I'm guessing you guys have made a decent effort to avoid cross-site scripting fraud where embedded buttons are auto-clicked by a malicious script or something. Right?

In any case, keep up the good work!

I can't come up with any big objections to this, and I usually don't have trouble with that (except for the usual: It's purely speculative whether it will gain traction or not.)

It will be interesting to see if bloggers, et al, start playing to the gallery if they get used to "tips".

One suggestion: Allow a way for website owners to 'redirect' a portion of a tip jar's tip to the creator of a particular piece of content.

Lots of blogs are really good at finding the best things on the internet, and delivering them to readers. The content creators clearly should get most of any tips, but the "finders fee" is also an important part.

We intend on building this. The challenge will be making it clear that the button goes in part to both people. We really don't want to make users think too much about tipping.

Awesome idea guys. Unfortunately, no matter how hard I try, I can't get it to work with my site (mobmov.org). Also, it screws up my layout with that inline iframe you inject, which limits my options as to where to put it. Can't wait for the next iteration though, keep up the good work!

It could be because we originally weren't allowing people to tip themselves, which was causing a slew of problems since (of course) people wanted to try out the button on their site. That was just a big UI oversight on my part; sorry. We've pushed a change out there now, so if you try to tip yourself the button says 'thanks' but instead of 'give more' it says 'you own this!' to the left. Hopefully this will solve your problem. Please email us if it doesn't. Regarding the layout, we'll work on improvements to that and will announce an update on our blog once it's ready.

that was it, thanks for the quick response and resolution. :-)

mobmov.org is awesome! So many times since we've been building this, I've thought, "I'd tip that". Yet another. Sorry for the button troubles.

sweet. hope you can come to a show sometime. starting things up again in SF soon

Awesome concept and execution. This has alot of potential!

It would be cool if there were a way to leave a tipjar in the comments/threads/diaries of social sites.

I imagine you can.

Who would you tip the commenters or the person who submits the link?

That is an excellent idea. We'll have to think about how to do this correctly. Thanks

Cool stuff.

Quick gripe: On the main page, you show sites sans subdomain, but you seem to be tracking money based on subdomain, so for example techcrunch.com has two entries.

We changed the domain display to include subdomains. Just a different regex.

I need to change the check to see if a URL is already in the system. I cut off the protocol part, but forgot to cut off the www, i.e. http://google.com matches google.com, but not www.google.com or http://www.google.com.

This will be fixed very soon.

Nice experiment. A couple bug reports: The Tip button doesn't work in IE. And, I found TechCrunch on the list of the sites twice!!! One with www. and one without it.

The twice-techcrunch is because it was submitted twice in a particular fashion. I'll merge them shortly. They've both gotten a bunch of tips, but only one is available on techcrunch.com. It's actually an interesting accidental experiment to see the tipping rates.

I also have a few bug reports: - while signing in it said that my email-address was already taken, and did I left my pwd blank. Highly unlikely and no. - in safari I can't move my cursor around in the email-address field because you jump to the end at each keypress.

And the tip button doesn't work in Safari either. Are you developing on Linux? ;-)

Congrats Ivan and Abbey. I'll be adding it to my blog immediately.

Everyone please be sure to give me lots of money so they'll have nice stats to show on Demo Day.

Ay, financial regulations suck, which is why banks haven’t changed a whole hell of a lot in the last 100 years.

Finally! The need for a service like this has always been around. Your execution is excellent too.

Thanks all! back to bug fixing...

Many congratulations to you both.

Congrats, Kirigins!

congrats guys

So, I get to have an ADDITIONAL amount cut from tips (beyond what PayPal does) -AND- I don't get cash...

People don't really tip online because PayPal is a pain. Amazon's micropayment system takes 20%. We take a few percentage points. As we get more efficient at the financial operations, we'll pass on savings to the content creators.

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