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Comment by dlivingston | Hacker News Reader

The US reviews are very peculiar: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/the-bright-app/id1471800945?ls...

101 ratings with all but two being 5-stars. I hesitate to say that the positive reviews are largely fake, but it sure seems like it. Broken English and vague praise for the app characterize most of the reviews.

For example: "My friend recommended to me for experiencing this app. At the fist time, I didn't know this application could bring benefits to me. However, after all I use this app more frequently because its advantages. Very useful!"

What? Further, all 5-star reviews with the exception of one were written between 01/28/2020 and 01/30/2020. That leaves exactly three reviews of the 101 written outside this two-day window. Massive red flag.

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I was a customer at one of their gyms and the app was garbage. It frequently crashed and there were huge bugs with basic stuff like the dates I'd be billed for renewal being wrong. I didn't realize I was still subscribed and they charged me ~$250 for a month where I didn't even go in.

Unethical Life Pro Tip (takeaway): Pay people to submit five star reviews about your competitor’s product that obviously look fake. Bonus points if they're all submitted on the same day.

Let's just refrain from going too far with any ambiguous quips at the product. I dont think anyone is going to gain from that.

But this is relevant. If both the product and her CV are weak, the racism card doesn't hold up. If I was deciding if I want to invest money in some app, I'm pretty sure seeing most of the reviews are poor quality fakes would be a lot more important factor than founders race.

You're mistaking the forest for the trees. You could go look at a handful of other funded apps and evaluate their reviews. You're going to find similar things.

My point was that you don't need to get into a more subjective, personal quip, as the arguments brought by others (eg. The CV) here are already strong enough to dismiss the racism claim.

I think you are also missing the forest for the trees. The point of her post is that she submitted the exact same proposal to the exact same VCs from her husband's email instead of her own and actually started getting responses for the first time.

Or maybe that’s because her husband has a LinkedIn page which is easily googleable and mentions three years of working in Google, and she has zero relevant experience.

Her husband is on both decks. So at best, they didn't so much as glance at her pitch deck until the husband sent it.

Or maybe they only look up the senders of the emails before deciding to even open the pitch deck. Seems rather odd.

I don't think any VC would like to be attached to the app if the author were to be committing fraud under the FTC Act. Not only are the app reviews suspicious, but the testimonial pictures[0] are definitely faked.

[0] https://getbright.app/

I thought this unlikely but doing a quick look

This:

https://reductress.com/post/the-best-haircuts-for-what-youve...

is very close to the person (Sonya) on get bright's testimonials.

https://getbright.app/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/testimonial...

It could be the same Sonya just doing other things (hair shots etc) of course so not certain they are fake testimonial photos but certainly weird.

The one you found is the most ambiguous, since there's no background in the (cleverly) cropped testimonial photo, but Google Images turned up pictures for every single testimonial[0,1,2,3]. The timestamps from these websites go severy years back, as well. [0] https://www.stclairdentist.com.au/smile-makeover/ [1] https://www.dmdentalgroup.com/articles/professional-teeth-wh... [2] https://helpingminds.org.au/new-geraldton/ [3] https://reductress.com/post/the-best-haircuts-for-what-youve...

Ah that’s almost exactly the same timeframe as the Android reviews.

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