Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

So Tinder for parents is a terrible idea. (Full disclosure: my wife's a Peanut member. She's been meaning to uninstall it for a while.) Think about the key observations that made Tinder take over the dating space: people are basically superficial and judge who to go out with based on looks alone; people have spare time to flip through photos; people want to be casual and not invest too much in a date before getting to know them. These are the exact opposite qualities that you want in a mom-friend. When you're a new mom you're probably not looking your best, and putting up a profile picture isn't high on your list of things to do. You don't give a shit what your mom friends look like, and once you're reading through text it's more like "Facebook for moms". You have very little free time to swipe through profiles, and when you do, you want your mom-friend-relationships to count.

There's a lesson there for people who want to phrase their startup idea as "X for Y". You should ask how similar Y is to the userbase that originally made X popular, and whether you are capturing the qualities they have in common or just randomly cargo-culting a successful product. "Flickr for video" works because a photo-viewing community and video-viewing community are substantially similar: they both have similar casual interactions around shared multimedia, and they both benefit heavily from recommendations, discovery mechanisms, and social sharing. Similarly, "Google for China" works because people in China have information needs too yet actual Google has an antagonistic relationship with the CCP. "Uber for laundry" and "Uber for housecleaning" are both terrible ideas because Uber's value proposition is that you can get transportation on-demand and it can be done by unskilled people as long as they get you safely to your final destination, while both housecleaning and laundry are stuff you do once a week, on a planned basis, and you really want to trust the people who are doing it. "Uber for grocery delivery" (Instacart/UberEats/DoorDash/Postmates) is a decent idea, though, because grocery delivery is also something you want on-demand, do regularly, and can be done by basically anyone.

I found the best thing about Tinder when I used it was that by stripping down information and interaction to the bare minimum, it gets people face-to-face quickly with few established expectations, which is the best way to get to know anybody. There is so much about a person you can't learn through a web site or an app, and conventional dating sites worked very hard at getting you to invest a lot of time and work into interactions that only gave you a false sense of knowing someone. With Tinder you just showed up thinking literally only "I have seen a couple of okay pictures of this person and they thought my pictures and two lines of text seemed acceptable as well" which really set expectations appropriately and let you schedule a lot of dates without feeling disappointed about the outcome.

I can see that making a lot of sense for parents. The last thing they need is another high-pressure, high-judgment thing in their lives. Much better to meet someone and feel like it's no big deal if something doesn't click on either side. At least that sounds plausible to me.

It doesn't work with the reality of being a parent. There's no such thing as low-stress, low-commitment way of meeting people when you have an infant or toddler. At the very least, you need to arrange for a spouse to take the kid or deal with their retinue (car seat, stroller or baby carrier, snacks, water, milk, bib, baby wipes, and diaper). At worst, you need to arrange for a sitter, schedule everything, communicate all the baby's needs to the sitter, and be available in case anything goes wrong.

The closest to a low-stress outing for parents is "I'm going to be at this playground in this park for an hour on Saturday morning, and whoever wants to join me is welcome to come." You're at a playground anyway, so if nobody shows up it's an ordinary Saturday morning with the kid. It's time-boxed so you can often get away without the snack/milk/diaper/mealtime accouterments. Scheduling is what you'd have to do anyway, and similar to what other parents have to do. This is how my wife actually meets and hangs out with most of her mom friends. They're usually organized over Facebook though; there's no need for a separate app for it.

Facebook is the Excel of social. It's the bare minimum that everyone uses, can be used as an MVP for any community, but can be beaten in a specific niche by a specific app.

> The closest to a low-stress outing for parents is "I'm going to be at this playground in this park for an hour on Saturday morning, and whoever wants to join me is welcome to come."

That's perfect. I don't think the perspective is as different as maybe I made it seem. On Tinder I always met people for a drink someplace where I knew I liked the drinks, or that I was curious to try anyway. If the person was a dud or a no-show, at least I didn't invest much effort and got something out of it anyway.

Another way of putting it that might resonate better is that finding someone you click with is an intrinsically low-yield process. At first glance, it seems smarter to try to improve the yield (% of good matches) rather than volume (sheer number of people you meet), but services that try to do that don't accomplish much if anything. At best, they produce small increases in yield while increasing your time investment and/or emotional investment significantly. I don't know if that describes your situation, but if it does, it might turn out that the best strategy is to accept that the yield will be low and optimize to make high volume as painless (logistically and emotionally) as possible. The equivalent of Tinder would be an app that provides you with a steady stream of new people to invite to the park. If they're not your next BFF, or your kids don't get along, or even if they're bad people, bad parents? Well, that's the kind of person you have to be prepared to encounter when you go to the park anyway, so no biggie.

I have a different perspective as an immigrant and parent of a toddler: Americans make it a lot harder than it needs to be. My friends in Europe do all kind of things with their little kids, constantly meet friends... Americans have a LOT of excuses but at the core they just don't prioritize social life above other considerations.

Oh yes, I agree, Peanut is terrible. I recently moved to a new area and left all my mom friends behind, so I was desperate for a way to find new ones, but it's useless. There needs to be an OK Cupid for moms.

me being stupid but I actually thought flickr for video would fail because video takes more work than photos to create and because it takes more time to view them. clearly I was wrong

YouTube's genius was to realize that that was no longer the case. They've said in interviews that a lot of the impetus to create the product was to realize that tools like cell-phone video and iMovie meant that video would rapidly become a lot cheaper to produce, and that meant there'd be a market for video-sharing. Cell-phone video is also what took the average duration of a video down from 60min 8mm cassettes to 2-3min digital clips, which are the perfect size for a webpage view.

The part that gets me with video is the upload time. Do people just have faster connections than me, or is the secret to create a phone app that restricts the files to greatly reduced resolutions? Seems like flickr for video would require greater bandwidth or time requirements, but I might simply be clueless.

Mobile data has been fast enough for many years now, depending where you live.

My 2 year old phone has 20Mbit/s upload and 79Mbit/s download on a good day. I don't upload videos, but if I did I expect that's fast enough in the background.

The phone upload is way faster than my "fiber" connection at home was, when I still had one.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com