Ask YC: Feedback on BreakkUp.com

BreakkUp was originally an idea my gf had roughly 2 weekends ago. The idea came about after receiving 4 phone calls in a row seeking advice regarding relationship troubles. I took the idea a step further by building it around a pre-established model using open-source (Pligg). Maybe this was a bad idea on my part, maybe not...

For me, this project is an experiment in replicating models for other verticals using open-source. But more importantly, an exercise in CPM/CPA advertising and PR -- two areas I don't feel I have a strong understanding of. I'm currently working to raise money for an original idea and ad revenue will play a big part in our ability to stay afloat. I'm rather excited about BreakkUp's opportunity to generate modest revenue (assuming we get traffic) because I feel the audience will often be in an emotional state when visiting, and roughly 50%+ female.

In total, from idea to beta product -- I've spent ~a week putting this together so criticism certainly won't hurt my feelings. We most definitely need to work on About and Tutorial pages, my assumption is most females have no idea what Digg is.

If I had more time, I'd like to put more focus on the presentation of this site so it looks less digg-like, but my client work needs attention this week. Gotta keep the lights on!

We also own these domains:

http://BreakupWithHim.com

http://BreakupWithHer.com

Suggestions, comments, criticism please. We haven't started advertising it yet except to peers...

Thanks guys.

I tried this same experiment with pligg on a site I put up, freenormous.com (free samples and offers). I found that almost no one posted, even after I worked hard to get traffic and spent money on adwords. Now I get postings--they're just all SEO and spam.

It is very tough to build a community. I spent a lot of time talking to myself under different usernames. Only around 1% of users will post (maybe less, from my experience).

I also found that even with 1000 visitors a month, I was making less than $5 per month with adsense. That would be fine if it didn't take a continual flow of real posts to build content, but it does.

This soured me on adwords based based businesses, and even moreso on any business that requires a network effect to work. Now I focus on business models that offer value even when there are no other users.

It was an educational experiment, though, and for the time investment, gave a good return on enlightenment.

Couldn't agree more with you re: building a community, which is one of my main concerns with a big project I'm trying to raise money for as it relies directly on critical mass for match-making (not dating related).

Thanks for your feedback. Like you I've already learned a lot from this -- have spent a good deal of time researching ad-based revenue. For $100 worth of hosting fees, and my time for a few days -- most definitely worth it.

I hope you're not paying $100/month to host a Pligg site with almost no traffic.

Yes, I'm paying $100 a month and have 30 days to decide if it's worth it. Meaning, I have 30 days to drive traffic to it at which point I'm not going to invest much more time into the site, scale back on infrastructure, and let the site grow via search.

I'd rather be prepared than scrambling.

You have your own box hopefully? $100 is about right then if that's the case.

It's hosted at Media Temple, so it looks like it's a VPS.

If you've only got 30 days to get this site up to speed, you'll want to do something big. Do something outrageous, then submit a press release. Get all of your friends to create accounts and post "just for fun," and then claim in the press release that this is the next big thing.

This advice in pretty generic, I know. What I'm trying to say is that you want to see growth similar to the million dollar home page or the ebay add where someone sold advertising space on his head for a month and it took off. In both of these cases the concept was not particularly novel or even useful, but the media caught on because it was interesting and the ROI for advertisers in both cases was much higher than it would have been on its own (how many people would normally see a forehead in a month?). Basically, a dating advice site can't stand on its own feet after only 30 days, but if you create a story that the media loves then you should see exponential growth.

I feel ya... and yeah, I'm giving myself roughly 30 days in regard to how much attention and funds I drop into the site. If after 30 days there is decent growth but it can't self sustain yet, I'm not going to cut my losses quite so soon and will move forward another 30 days.

However, there is a tipping point where this project will get pushed to the backburner if up-take just isn't happening. Mostly because I need to focus on income generation (finding more freelance work) so I don't have to take a desk job. :)

"I also found that even with 1000 visitors a month, I was making less than $5 per month with adsense. That would be fine if it didn't take a continual flow of real posts to build content, but it does.

This soured me on adwords based based businesses"

$5/month for 1000 monthly visitors is not bad for ads in general. Assuming maybe 10% of those visitors are really active and the others are just one off hits (1-2 pageviews) you're looking at about 5000 pageviews/month which would equate to $1 eCPM on AdSense, which is actually a pretty decent ad network eCPM.

I wasn't thinking it was bad for adsense. I was thinking it was a bad price for my time... It took a lot of hours to create the content, and was difficult to get others to create it on their own.

I find the idea very clever and, in a sense, funny. I'm not a native English speaker and I have doubts about what "break up" exactly means. Is it limited to *friend relations or does it include married people too? If it does, there is a lot of interesting advice that people need: laws, children, compensations...

In general I find very important the evaluation of the partner's personality. There are traits that help detect annoying behaviours or even personality disorders, that are more easily identifiable "remotely" through a written report than in the flesh by the blinded-by-love partner.

The site not only can help detecting the abuse, but also help making a decision and running for the hills :-)

I would suggest: 1) bootstrapping the site with the help of professional psychologists (and if divorce is included, lawyers) to "set the right tone" and 2) putting some machinery in place to prevent bitter people that always give the destructive advice. A bad behaviour in a partner could be solved with a frank conversation. No one is perfect.

I find the looks of the site a little too "packed". It seems to mimic Digg, but Digg uses softer colours. I would add some "air" (margins, smaller icons...).

Just to say, if you're using the open-source Pligg you really should consider some kind attribution to say that you are using the software.

Pligg has that weird Allegro GPL (or some similar name) as it's license model. I can't remember what it says about attribution, but it would be "playing nice" to put "powered by Pligg" on the site anyway.

I also think the current domain is a bit sucky. The two domains you have open up the opportunity for a delineating men vs women users - which could be interesting from a branding and advertising perspective.

I think you've really got something there! And now for the criticism :-)

"real advice from real people" sounds a bit too much like hard-hitting investigative reporting to me.

How about "Should I break up with him?". If it resonates directly with someone, that counts for a lot more than mathematically covering the domain. I like the idea of using the exact language of the target audience, concrete and specific - use a popular idiom if there is one (it doesn't matter if it doesn't match people outside the target). For this reason, I think separating boys and girls makes sense, because you can say "him" or "her" instead of being forced to abstract generalities. Make it concrete and "relateable".

I think also that people don't actually want "advice", they just want to be listened to, get it off their chest.

I get the vibe from the site that it has a gossip quality... almost like two people discussing the problems of a third-party. I don't know if that's something you want to cultivate, or if it would help the site or not - just mentioning it as an observation.

You're sure to have a problem with trolls sooner or later, causing grief amongst those in an emotional state. Possibly, a very clear message and an effective way for users to deal with it is more important than preventing it 100%. Making it seem like third-party ("my friend has this problem...") could add a distance, that makes it easier for people to speak freely.

kinda feel the same way about the new tagline, still toying with it.

i don't want anything making specific reference to him/her or exclusive relationships, i want to position it for friend-based arguments too.

I agree with you about people seeking a place to vent. I want the term/idea of "Break Up" to be used loosely, light-hearted, and taken with a grain of salt.

I don't care how obvious the purpose of the site seems to you, I don't care how much you don't want one, but the EASIEST thing I should be able to find is the "About" section, whether it's a 2 line blurb ont he front page or a separate page.

People need things explained to them and leave if you don't.

The one-liner is available for non-registered accounts on the rectangle image to the right of the site... the big letters read WTF? :)

We're working on the formal About / Tutorial stuff this week.

I actually blanked that out, too. I think it's because it's the same size/placement as a standard ad. It's easily ignorable.

You literally need the words About as a hyperlink. Don't get too creative here. We are used to a certain pattern that every website uses.

a high priority is to add About and Tutorial buttons this week. thanks guys.

Post to Craigslist personals to drive traffic.

People hitting up the personals likely have funny stories to share.

Just wanted to say thanks to all the feedback, was not expecting this much and we really appreciate it!!! We're going to incorporate a lot of the changes and suggestions that have been mentioned thus far, I only wish I had more time and 10 arms!!

I'm not a big believer in the whole "social media" thing, but I do like this site. It's entertaining and besides that, I can see it being useful to get a different perspective on relationship problems. The nice thing about this is that for it to be useful you don't need commenters who are "experts," just people who can see things in a different light. Sometimes that's all it takes!

It's a good idea and will be successful with very little effort. But you NEED to make the comments possible without signing up for the first few weeks, you'd have made me bookmark it if I had been able to leave a comment Because I'd have been curious to go back and reply. But no, I could not comment, could not be bothered to sign up and so moved on

Comments open for a few weeks, spam on yahoo answers and fluther and in a few weeks you'll have a big site. Send me a thank you note then.

Great point and something I've considered doing but it's not in the pligg setup config, so I'll have to dig into the code to make it happen. (i'm a designer but I know a little PHP)

Since you've confirmed this notion, I'll make it a high priority to get it done before we start marketing it. I don't really like the idea of "spamming" though.

Thanks for feedback!

I've found Mollom http://www.mollom.com very effective at preventing spam. It was super easy to add as I was already using Drupal. But it will be more work to add to pligg. Maybe it would be less work to convert to using drupal/drigg http://www.drigg-code.org ?

Here ya go:

http://forums.pligg.com/8774-post16.html

http://forums.pligg.com/pligg-mods/6844-setting-anonymous-co...

It will take a while before the spammers find you. When they find you, start working on that problem, till then, handle your more pressing problem of gaining users.

If you go to Yahoo Answers and point to a relevant link on your own site to the question being asked, I think this qualifies as marketing, no longer spam.

In any case, realise this:

The users of fluther and Yahoo Answers are your CORE audience. You may also take a look at the ask.metafilter.com users - if you sign up for a $5 account, you can post a link to your site under the "Projects" section. You'll get about 200-400 hits, but it's a relevant audience.

Otherwise, you'll have to use a gimmick. This is not ethical, but if you are interested in relevant traffic, then do this:

Post a troll. Target this troll towards christian fundamentalists, teenage girls, or housewives. Then visit a site where these groups are, like a christian forum, a youtube posting of Avril Lavigne or an advice site like flylady. Link to this troll of yours, and watch them get in a hullaboo about it and create links everywhere.

For example, you could write:

"My girlfriend just admitted to me that when Snoop Dogg was in town, she slept with one of his bodyguards. Should I break up with her?"

"My wife has herpes, and our gardener also has herpes. Is she cheating?"

"My sons girlfriend is 14 and he is 18. Is this legal?"

That's linkbait, but you need to target it correctly. The jaded crowd here will immediately see through that, but the groups I mentioned above will believe it immediately.

Yes, unethical I know, but it's just ideas. Pick and mix as you wish.

Great thanks! I found those same threads shortly after your first post and have an email out to someone that has supposedly authored a mod for version 9.x to handle the anonymous commenting.

Will take some of your advice on marketing the site next week, after addressing feedback from HN and making some last minute changes.

I like the open comments idea - what do you think is a good way is to stop the inevitable spammers that come with openness though?

I'd think it would work this way:

1. Use a commenting system that is a bit different from the standard, so the bots can't use it. Wordpress comments already is well known by the bots, so it has to be a bit different 2. When the spammers figure out how to do it, or do it manually, one just has to delete for a few weeks manually 3. When enough users are on the site, one can then make the comments sign-up only.

But in my experience, if you write a custom comment field (or change the IDs), the spammers don't come for a very long time. It's always just bots who monitor RSS feeds broadcasters.

I'm the co-Founder and CEO of Fluther; please don't spam our site. We have a dedicated group of volunteer moderators that remove spam, so it will be a waste of your time.

My honest advice on building a real community: it takes a lot of work, love, and time to incubate. There is no shortcut. Get your friends using it. Add good users one at a time. Make sure it works with for small group, and just keep building.

If you had come and said something like:

"No need to link to your site from our site, I'll help you out and put a link for you for a few weeks", my respect for you would have been massive. And out of gratitude, the guy would probably have linked to you for the rest of the lifetime of his site.

Instead you land like a splash of cold water in the face. You have already forgotten the feeling of being little.

Socialmoth was also a community-driven support website. They let you expose personal tidbits on a public forum. You might try e-mailing them about it, see what sort of problems they had.

I think the UI design of the site is great, but the social design needs a lot of work. Breakups are quite personal and messy -- it seems like the last thing people would want to do is expose details on a public forum.

A youth teen would probably disagree with you regarding their comfortability exposing personal information on the web.

A benefit of BreakkUp is that we're not trying to be a social 'networking' site, it's mostly geared for individuals to use with relative anonymity.

Also, check out http://www.divorce360.com . It seems to be doing pretty well. Maybe you could modify the site to be more of a portal than just a community.

You could add some content to the site (theres lots of information about this topic). Get articles like this:

http://www.wikihow.com/Break-Up

Because of the domain name, you could get a nice rank on search engines.

Just for your info - You might need to give credit to Pligg according to their licensing terms somewhere on your website. You need to link it to their original site. Something like -

Powered By: Pligg | Legal: License & Source

I do same with http://siliconverge.com on About page.

Thanks and I will do that when I make changes to the footer / about section this week.

Opinions on tag line?

COMMUNITY-DRIVEN ADVICE or,

BRUTALLY HONEST ADVICE (original tag line)

Don't forget your target! It's not this crowd - go to fluther and read the quality of the submissions there. That's basically who you are targeting, so customize your text for them.

Add a button to send this to your friend. Take a look at "AddThis", it's easy to integrate and will take care of that problem for you.

I like "Community-driven advice", as brutally honest sounds a bit scary. Teenage girls are sensitive about this stuff, it's the WHOLE world.

It still sounds a bit technological, but I can't think of anything better :)

The fear of "brutal" to the youth audience was my exact concern too... However, I liked brutal because some people just don't understand when they are in a bad relationship, and need a reality check.

Community driven sounds too geeky for your target audience. How about "Real Advice from Real People" or "Answers to Your Relationship Questions" or something along those lines. Then maybe you can include a more detailed description with what the site does for people.

I like "Real Advice from Real People".

It's bad. Too personal, I don't want to talk to "Real People", I want to be anonymous.

I think you should have two voting options: 'Break Up' and 'Stay Together'. With only the option to vote 'Break Up' can there ever really be another conclusion?

Perhaps you can also have 'color coded' comments to denote the position you are taking.

I agree, looking to build in this functionality in the near future.

My main issue is with the domain, the double k hurts. You're appealing to non-web 2.0 people and so typoed domains are not going to be that good. You should look for maybe something that is real words. Other than that, great stuff!

It's really, really difficult to come up with a relevant, concise dot-com domain name that's not already taken.

yeah, i spoke with the breakup.com owner and he's passing on offers that would buy him an exotic.. I just can't afford that. We also own BreakupWithHim.com and BreakupWithHer.com and their respective typos if someone forgets the second H.

Yep.

It's disgusting how some companies/people are reserving all the names they can think of, hoping to sell them to someone.

No wonder we have services with names like "Heroku" - at least that was free.

Hilarious and useful. Just forwarded to some of my more uh..."outgoing" friends.

Interesting idea.. like the design, not sure about using pligg though, had some bad experience with it, but good luck with the 30 day mark, it sounds like a plan

The blurb about your site with the "join now" button looks like an ad because of the placement and because it is roughly 300x250 pixels.

Cool logo.

Nice concept, but i'd work on the design a bit. Overuse of the color red might be a bit much for some users.

If we get any traction, I will definitely put some time into improving the overall look of the site. I really want to get away from the digg-style, but I just don't have time right now to dedicate.

I love the look - very clean, very nice. I don't know about the idea but I think it looks quality.

There's no button to say don't breakup, only to breakup. Talk about negative!

hahah, yeah I thought about that too... but figured "don't breakup" was implied by drama not getting pushed to the home page. I've got a lot of ideas for a version 2.0 though, that deviates away from Digg/Reddit style while retaining core functionality that makes it fun to use.

Watch out for Silahsiz Kuvvetler the Turkish hacker.

Seriously ;)

My honest opinion, and this is about the idea, not the implementation.

If you need the relationship advice from the internet, the god damn internet damnit, it's long past time to finish it off.

http://emo.com/ was taken? I don't want to sound like a troll, but i will, so don't take it personally, but when im in an emotionally bad situation the last thing i need is advice from random people on the internet. I also find it boring/stupid to try to give advice to random people on the internet(hey, im doing that now :D). There is a difference between a community and a mass of random people you know, the former i trust(sometimes). Hope you don't fail miserably or get bored/frustrated with you project, just thought some opposition would help.