I'm Annabelle, and here's how my iPhone app was born after a girl's night out | Hacker News Reader

I'm Annabelle, and here's how my iPhone app was born after a girl's night out

12 pointsannabelle8916 comments

Hey all,

I'm Annabelle and I wanted to hear what HN users thought about a little project I've been working on for the past few months - it's an iPhone app called 'Dating: Ask a Girl', starring me.

So a little background info regarding my idea - I was at a friend's 21st party at a London club and had an overload of guys coming over and trying to 'chat us up'. Seriously, the attempts were awful, nothing genuine. Any decent guys we saw turned out to be too shy to make any moves. Such a shame.

A couple days later, my friends and I wrote out a few points to help guys approach girls, understand girls and better still, avoid making an arse of themselves. We passed these sheets around Uni for a little laugh and ended up creating quite a bit of a buzz around campus.

As a big Apple fan girl and with the help of two guys I know, I got serious with the idea of creating a video-based app to help guys out for the reasons above. So, a few months down and my app is finally out! There's a free lite version with 3 videos and a full version ($1.99) with 10 high quality clips, summaries, etc. I'm also going to be taking questions submitted by guys and producing more videos to include within the app. The reason I've included a paid version is to cover for the huge student loan that I have to repay.

I was wondering you all thought about my app. I've uploaded one video from the app to YouTube, which you can watch here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AeRIP_-mxYQ

You can also see more videos on my free app here: http://bit.ly/askagirlfree and even more on my paid app: http://bit.ly/askagirl

Hope you like my app and find it useful/interesting.

Thanks,

Annabelle

Okay HN'ers, don't get your hopes up. This is a very good marketing ploy from someone very smart on HN. But I don't have all the facts; all I know is that "Annabelle" created "her" account 2 days ago and has no history of participating on HN.

Annabelle, if this was your idea, how did you execute it? Did you write / design anything? Outsource the app? Who are your partners?

It looks like FIPLAB produced the app (http://www.fiplab.com/). The website describes the product as "Need advice on how to reach out to that amazing new girl you can't stop thinking about, or taking things further with that girl you've always had a crush on? We hear you, and that's why we've created 'Dating: Ask a Girl'."

No mention of any Annabelle the character and co-founder, which is a pretty significant piece of the marketing puzzle.

So what I'm guessing is the geniuses at FIPLAB built and spec'd out the app, and got an attractive girl to join their project after the fact (or some variation of this). I'm not saying this to be a dick, your marketing tactics are great, if you carry it through it should pickup some decent press coverage. But come on, this is HN here, you weren't going to get off that easy :D

I thought they are really poor marketing tactics. Its obvious from the first few sentences what it is.

They had me going with the story and background. It's complete and believable, covers everything about the product and some entertaining backdrop about where the idea came from.

If it were true, it is a very mainstream friendly story and could easily be picked up by writers for casual (non-techy) related publications. "College girl makes dating advice iPhone app", its fun and it draws eyeballs.

So? It's still predicated upon bullshit.

Hi coryl, I'm Annabelle, the girl in the actual app. The app idea is mine and I'm the one who speaks in the videos and I also did the script and recording myself (trust me hun, it IS me in the videos!). My high school friends from FIPLAB created the app, which i feel is pretty obvious since its published under their name. :)

But do check out http://www.askagirlapp.com/ as it has my name there!

Hi Annabelle, thanks for replying. Normally I'm not this pessimistic, but the circumstances screamed of suspicion.

So are you going to be managing marketing for this app? What have you planned to try and get coverage?

No worries. Have a pretty basic marketing strategy, gonna promote it via facebook and my Uni friends and try more viral approaches like youtube etc - due to a small/non existent budget! :p Posted on hacker news to get a more business/technologic approach and insight from you guys.

Try doing a good old press release as well. prMac.com has been pretty good bang for the buck from what we've seen at least in terms of getting the word around for the $20 they charge.

Github account or fake.

There's one big problem with this app. The advice that girls give guys about how guys should behave/act with girls have about the same chance of being useful/correct as flipping a coin.

Don't get me wrong, that means that 50% of the advice is useful, specifically advice like "pickup lines don't work". But other advice such as "be a nice guy," typically is downright wrong.

I am aware that both of the above examples for and against the advice of girls could be picked apart as "straw man" arguments. I won't even say for sure if it's 50/50 chances or 60/40 chances of good advice to bad advice. I do know that the advice is bad advice often enough that guys should instead seek the advice of alpha males than girls themselves.

It's like product management. Yes, of course you ask the user what they want, but you take whatever they say with a grain of salt, because rarely does a user know what they really want. Instead you should seek the advice of those product managers that are best at creating a product (i.e. men that are successful with the ladies) that the customers (i.e. women) love and can't get enough of.

Girls often say they want one thing when they really want something entirely different. Their advice should always be treated as suspect, if only for the very truth that there are no universal likes and dislikes when it comes to women. As far as I can tell, it's the most fragmented market of buyers in the world.

Those situations depend highly upon context, at least they feel like it, so...
I would rather have a chat service where it connected you to girls to answer questions, kind of like KGB but for dating.

Interesting features would be: taking/sending video of the environment, so you can be walked-through how to make small talk. * an emergency call me back service, so you can pretend to have an important call, and either ignore it, or get feedback on what's happening in real-time

So ... your target group is the shy guys who reading this site? What is a point for a non-tech girl to post it here?

If you created a product for dog lovers,would you not go on a dog lovers website to promote it? im just reaching out to a smart target audience and in terms of smartness, this place is the bee's knees. Also as I said before, I posted here to get a more business/tech insight from all of you all..

Meh.

I can say only one word: brilliant.

No, two: perfectly brilliant.

I wish all the best of luck so that you are able to cover the loan and have some left for a little champagne bath. Both the idea and the implementation deserve it. Almost makes me wish I had an iPhone ;-)

Thanks so much for the encouragemnt!

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