Rate my startup: Adore.ly | Hacker News Reader

Rate my startup: Adore.ly

adore.ly

22 pointshobonumber150 comments

You need to get rid of this error: https://img.skitch.com/20110209-rtu2pqwq6kqjqrdeuf34y6p2ep.j...

I like the idea. The execution was well done. Clean, simple, easy. Your initial landing / signup page needs some work. You did a good job of instilling trust, but I didn't know what your service did. This will have a negative impact on signups.

1) Make a video introduction. Do some grass roots stuff like sponsoring a rose exchange at a few local schools (might be a bit late for Valentines day now). Write a press release today - this is newsworthy with the proximity to Valentines day and newsies are struggling for feelgood stories. Get some testimonials. Find out when someone gets married after using your service and do something huge. Take out some Facebook ads. Do some in-game sponsorships with facebook games.

2) Users. Your product is built around users. Your product balances on trust and if you monetize too early, you won't stand a chance of being trusted. Switch when marketing is no longer a problem and something you do to continue to push the product.

3) In order: Trust, scaling technology, competing services from people with money, the "one off" usage case.

4) The design is well done. You start building trust on the first page. Inside of the app, your product is easy to understand. It's fun. I didn't like the error message above. The number of modal popups got annoying fast. There was nothing to do "after" I sent my note.

Great points!!!

1) WIP - we're only 2 devs and one business guy! 2) Agreed - its all about the users. 3) Good points, we agree with this - we just wanted to see if there are valid opposing viewpoints. 4) We'll fix the error message and figure out what to do after you send the adore. Thanks for bringing this to our attn!

"we're only 2 devs and one business guy!"

You're in Waterloo? I'm local. If you'd like to chat x@y where: x = rob.brown and y = gmail.com

Hey Victor here.

1) I do agree with you that the front page is kind of too mysterious and that might put people off from signingup.

2 & 3) Agreed.

4) We are working on it. Just to let you know, when we lauched we had a method of not requiring people's emails. However, that path got shut down so now we have to release this temporarily fix. Do you have a good recommendation to get around this without users explicitly inputting their adore's emails?

It started as an app for the University of Waterloo Facebook hackathon but it's taken off since then. We launched 4 days ago. We have seen decent growth. So what is it?

Adore.ly lets you adore a friend on your friendlist and your identity stays anonymous unless they adore you back.

We're looking for feedback on everything from interface, to troll and creep protection. Our questions are:

1) How do we keep growing? Is it launching features, or focussing on promotional stuff? 2) Do we focus on users or focus on monetizing? When do the priorities switch? 3) What are the challenges you think we face? 4) What do you like about the app? What don't you like?

Thanks guys for your feedback.

- Love love the basic idea.

- Focus on promotion.

- Get users, don't monetize until you're at least a year in.

- Don't launch features. Make your existing feature better (by keeping the creeps out, increasing its viral factor etc, all the backend stuff that's actually really hard, versus adding comments and likes, which is easy.)

- You can slowly add little interactions, but stay away from commenting, private messages etc for a loooong time, that's not where your value is.

- Again, don't add "standard" features like comments, profile pictures etc, since that will just dilute your positioning.

"increasing its viral factor" Care to recommend a few?

One of the major challenges I see is that casual users won't be rewarded if there's no love coming back.

How do you keep the edge-users (who may not any replies) engaged and feeling... adored?

"""How do you keep the edge-users (who may not any replies) engaged and feeling... adored?"""

We have thought about doing something similar to likealittle in terms of messages but our messages are too personal.

What do you feel that would keep the users engaged while they are waiting to be adored back? (We can't force the other party to adore you back.)

I remember an email version of this app about 10 years ago - I loved it for a bit surreptitious flirting at school!

The app looks really great and the signup process is straightforward with clear CTAs. Alas the FB integration makes it rather slow (maybe I have too many friends? ;). It seems to loads friends each time I open the page - could this not be cached? It took me a moment to realise the grey box was a friend selector; it might help to make it white and give it focus on page load. It couldn't seem to grab my girlfriend's email address and asked me to type it in (making me wonder why integrate with FB at all).

There's no way for me to share content on either FB or Twitter. I'd be happy to post to my wall (and tweet) that "I just adored someone with adore.ly".

If you're trying to build up UGC then I'd happily rate a few anonymous adores and I'd be interested to see the wittiest/cutest ones.

For user retention, consider email updates: 1. thank you for signing up, 2. thank you for sending your first adore, 3. it's been a few days, time to send another adore? And for the receiver: sending a second (and third) email a week or two later if they haven't clicked through to the site. The option to opt-out of emails is important but the granularity of notifications settings looks good. I also hope you have a Valentine's day promotion lined up!

I'd forget about making money until you have say ten thousand users and I'd remove the limit of three adores until then too. Then I'd limit adores (to 5) and users could unlock more adores using a platform like SuperRewards or FB credits.

If my girlfriend 'adores' me back then I'll get back with what happens...

This is very interesting. We didn't want to post to wall because I personally don't like posting much up there but obviously, if we did, its more content for us and some people wouldn't mind. So I agree, maybe that option should be provided.

I like the idea of email notifications but we are worried about spam. This is something we struggle with everyday in our brainstorming sessions.

Thanks for the points! :)

Hey,

Initially, we had a "wall posting" feature. User signs up via facebook and it will give them an option to post on their wall. However, I realized that if we require wall posting permission right up the front, that would really put off a lot of people. You see facebook doesn't allow us to change permission half way and this is one of the drawbacks of the facebook API (even if you like it, you can't force a permission change).

Love it, especially the naturally viral nature. Two thoughts:

1. These things need to expire - or, I need to be emailed and asked to come back and renew them periodically. I don't want this popping up 2 years from now and killing my marriage.

2. Make it easier to understand that it's okay to adore many people.

Bonus thought: Might want to warn people that adoring friends with a very small number of facebook friends is DANGEROUS.

1) Good idea, we have some other ideas on what to do with adores that just "sit" there. I agree that something needs to be done with them.

2) True - a big counter perhaps.

Bonus: aww, that's the whole fun :P

I like the idea. One thing I found confusing at first was the explanation of how the process works. I had trouble understanding how the system would keep my adoration private while at the same time providing a meaningful way for the other person to adore me back. It made more sense after reading the "How does Adore.ly work?" and seeing that the other person is simply prompted to then "adore" people from their list of friends, and then triggering only if you were one of the "adored". Take that observation with a grain of salt, however. I've never really gotten into Facebook applications.

Also, I'd agree with Peter's advice that you simplify the home page further. I personally wouldn't put the "No wall posts", "Troll and Creep Proof" on the front page. It seems to me you'd be inviting objections that weren't present in the first place more often than not. If the Hacker News crowd was the target audience, it would probably be different.

Great work and good luck.

I feel like I've seen this idea before, recently. Did you used to have a video?

Maybe I'm just mixing up startups though

It has been done quite a number of times before, and yeah, one of the most recent ones was on HN less than a week ago.

Not your imagination.

Posted four days ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2179649

Of course, eCrush, crushlink, and many others did this years ago: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymous_matching

Do you really think we could push out an app like this in 4 days? Our application has FB integration, and is significantly more complicated than Secretpoke, which is essentially just a mailbot from what I can gather in the front-end. I'm sorry, but it requires SIGNIFICANT imagination to map the social graph to who you like and adore.

Counterpoint to a lot of folks here: I don't like the idea.

This sort of thing has been around for a very very long time, mainly as a way of harvesting email addresses to spam. I remember receiving an email "crush" that is exactly this as early as 1999.

How is this different at all?

I think you are misunderstanding the concept. We don't want to spam you at all. Our goal is to improve matchmaking by bringing in the social graph. We are talking friend-to-friend matchmaking here. Its anonymous and there is a degree of trust between mutual friends. That wasn't there in 1999. There was only web + email. There was no social graph.

Me being a curmudgeon: I'd actually say that the narrow technocratic definitions imposed by the "social graph" lead to generally _less social_ results. (For an example close at hand, I believe that I did an awful lot of growing up by confronting fears of rejection and learning to act on an attraction.)

Me responding to your points: Of course there was a social graph, it just wasn't reified in a database. Here's how it worked: You got an email saying someone had a crush on you. Curious to see who it was, you then entered all your friends & classmates email addresses in to see if there was a match. Not a whit of difference in what's actually happening; you've just made it shinier and removed some of the manual data entry.

The "Step 3: ??? that comes before Step 4: profit" was, of course, that all your friends now received "someone has a crush on you!" emails too, and the marketer running the site had a nice fat verified mailing list to sell to unsolicited bulk email operations.

Perhaps it's a failure of my imagination, but I cannot see a way for you to run this as a profitable business without similarly turning the 'users' into the product.

Perhaps it's a failure of my imagination, but I cannot see a way for you to run this as a profitable business without similarly turning the 'users' into the product.

That is a criticism not only of this start-up but all other start-ups where you are not paying a subscription fee. If you are not paying then you are not the customer, you are a part of the product.

Nice, but is it wise to put your startup in Libya's hands?

I agree.

I wanted to buy adore.me or adore.com

As you can probably guess, none of that was within my financial reach lol.

The design and UX is really nice. The launching page is also great especially with those promises about privacy etc.

Couple of issues: 1. "blockup popper", intentional? 2. Why do I need to submit the adore's email? I don't buy the explanation about traffic, it should work without it.

I don't really see the reason why somebody would use (or keep using) this service, there should be some deeper purpose and the adores would just act as easy actionables which would initially attract users and keep users active.

Edit: I read the "how does adore.ly work" and it makes more sense! You should explain this earlier. Well, I see it's there put I didn't get it.

Could you clarify what you mean regarding traffic explanation? I didn't get that part. Your other points are very valid, and we are working on features to make people come back (multiple times a day) to our service.

Glad "how does adore.ly work" clarified matters, we will try to show that more prominently!

Thanks so much!

I meant the part where it says 'Due to traffic, we need your friends email.' I don't want to give it.

We are trying to work around that. Facebook DOES NOT allow us to obtain your friend's email (without them explicitly agreeing).

Why do you need it in the first place? I'd believe there's way to make it work without the email.

Excellent, I love the basic idea (just read it, didn't use it).

You should work on simplifying the homepage further, there's probably still too much stuff in there. The "how it works" should perhaps be up front, not behind a click.

That said, it’s already really good

Yes, but remove the focus from what you don't do (post on your wall, reveal your identity, etc) and focus on what you will do. Put the tag line about what adorly does above the privacy stuff at least.

Through our user testing, we found that users have a bad taste in their mouths when it comes to using FB apps. It's important to build that trust with them.

I agree with what you're trying to say - maybe we will do both? Then content size becomes an issue though.

Thanks!

Would you mind telling me why didn't you sign up?

We had a lot of page views but signup rates are not as high as we expected.

To me, I would have liked to see some screenshots of what the person being adored would be seeing from their side. I understand the basics of the process but didn't want to login and trust you with my facebook without visualizing what would happen first =)

I don't have facebook so sadly cannot play, my girlfriend does but I don't see any upside is showing this to her :)

from reading how it works, it seems that it might be a good idea to offer some hints to bias the match, possibly with location or something that doesn't identify you but hints at you. 'Someone in your state adores you...' that kind of thing. Find something in common, analyze 'likes' for example. 'Someone who also liked Twilight adores you...'

Cool, I've always thought this would be a good idea.

Do you ask for the adoree's email because you don't get permission to send them facebook messages? That part seems sketchy / makes it much less useful in the case where you don't know their email.

Also, a hover with full name on each friend would be very useful, to e.g. distinguish between every "Ben" with an obscure artsy picture.

I like "blockup popper".

facebook messages don't work because facebook doesn't allow applications to send anonymous messages. The only scalable way is really through email (maybe SMS).

Wow. This is nice and great timing for Valentine's day. The concept is very well done. Agree with RBr, trust is absolutely required.

Why do you need friend list data for the FB login?

It's needed so you can adore your friends. You can't do anything on the site without the friend list.

I can't work out where I turn off my popup blocker (assuming that's what you mean). Why can't you just use an absolutely positioned div or a new page?

If this site takes off, I'm going to be extremely annoyed because I had this same idea a few months ago but didn't implement it. I'm an idiot.

The model has been around for a while - you should give it a go! Your execution will be different and could be more successful. You'll learn a ton in the process too.

really interesting..and nicely designed.. good luck with your startup! keep an eye out for competition though..cuz theres a lot!

We'd be more worried if there wasn't competition than if there is!

The "How does it work button"... doesn't work...

JS Console: "Uncaught ReferenceError: FB is not defined"

Disconnect is breaking your page before I even get a chance to give it a chance.

Are you sure you don't have facebook blocker? I had to turn off that Safari extension in order for this site to work.

That's what Disconnect does. I think there's a bigger problem if using Disconnect breaks all javascript on your website though. Especially if it breaks the piece of text that is supposed to convince me to turn it off. Additionally, I don't know my crushes/adores' email address...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com