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Show HN: Perspective for Men

helpaguyout.com

29 pointspaul_cryer44 comments

The advice that men get when asking women about romance is often pretty much useless and will do more harm than good. It would be way more useful to ask men that have their stuff together and know what they are talking about. Besides, every man has female friends to ask. So, sadly, I don't think this is a good business idea at all.

This. How people view sex, relationships, gender roles etc. is highly variable, and the advice you get from the opposite sex has to be taken with a grain of salt. You can see this in the subreddits about relationships or particular genders on Reddit where the advice is all over the place and some of the advice given would be damaging to follow, so having to shell out money for similar results sounds like a hard sell to me.

I'd go further and say that the notion that there is "a" female perspective is sort of pernicious.

Well, there is a female perspective - thing is, women will tell men about what they are wanting but have no idea how provide the feeling of what she is wanting. I whole heartedly agree that women giving romance advice to men is, a bad thing (I also think men giving women romance advice is also a bad thing).

Thats what I meant by pernicious, not all women are like that. Some certainly are like that, but not all. I have had girlfriends who wouldn't tell me about what they were wanting, and in fact my current girlfriend is perfectly able to tell me how to provide the feeling she wants most of the time.

That's awesome, hold onto that! Most of the time you have to play the domination game in order to have anything of meaning with a woman - but if you have a girl that's on the same plane with you, that will reduce the amount "drama" in the relationship and also become a much more long term and productive relationship too.

Sorry for misinterpreting what you wrote.

"A sucker is born every minute."

There seems to be very little overhead involved in keeping this site running, and I assume the owner of the site gets payment upfront, so there shouldn't be an issue paying the answerers.

I don't think the author of this site is going to be able to live off this site, but it should be good enough for gas money...

I'm a programmer and this site looks like it was designed by a programmer. If you are serious about this idea, spend some money and pay a designer to make it prettier. I think this is the kind of site that needs an appealing design.

In particular, the bottom section with the 'guarantee' and the logos of 'buzz' sites looks like one of those dodgy software download sites with the fake awards and testimonials.

Also, I would want to see some samples of Questions & Answers before I handed over my cash. Have a question of the day or something so people can get a feel of the quality of your responses (if you have any yet).

I second the point about design and especially the point about giving one or more examples. $2 is a tiny amount of money, what's more important to me (and costs more) is the time I will spend on your site. If I spend 30 minutes polishing a question and get BS replies, you can't give back my time.

This may sound corny (but hey, the whole idea is a bit so) but I think putting a few pictures of the ladies who answer would also boost your chances.

It's $2 per answer. That seems pretty expensive if I want a lot of answers for one question.

Great tips. Thank you for the input.

Neat idea. I tried it.

Long drawnout payment maze, used paypal, double-billed and my transaction history shows 3 entries - don't have any idea what any of them mean. No big deal, its just $2 but weird.

Some one-click payment approach would be nice.

How do I get a response? Email? Poll the site? No clue anywhere in the process that I noticed anyway.

Good luck!

Hi Joe,

Thanks for trying it out.

Please click on the "Check status" page which shows your current questions. Click on the view details link - which show a status of either :

(1)Waiting for a respondent (i.e. no one has reserved your question yet. (2)In - Progress (i.e. Someone is working on the answer. But it has not been submitted yet). (3)Completed. [ You will be able to view the response, and rate (1-5) the respondent]

Hope that helps. I just found out that the system does not send out emails when answers are complete. I will have to get that fixed today. In the mean time, please log in occasionally to check status.

Thanks. Paul

Got a sterling answer by the way. Far more detailed and thoughtful than $2 justified. Some philanthropy involved in the responders makeup I suspect.

Maybe I'm way off but I don't see people paying the kind of money your asking for this. What's the advantage over Yahoo Answers or Quora?

There are girls on those sites as well, there are also plenty of forums for specific questions with male and female members.

How are you verifying gender?

Best of luck either way, what do I know, I thought Twitter would never take off...

As far as constructive criticism:

The site seems fast and functional which is great. I think the logo could be improved and the pink / maroon color and gold / brown text colors could be adjusted.

Thank you for your tips. I appreciate it.

Check out the last box (scroll down) "Gender Verified" on this page: http://www.helpaguyout.com/ladies.php

Basically, we ask women to submit their publicly available profiles such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter for one-time verification purposes.

But Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter don't verify gender, either.

That's true. This seemed to be the most simplistic way I could come up with without discouraging registrations. I would be happy to entertain your suggestions.

I don't really have any, aside from the 4-chan approach - send a photo holding up a sign with the date and some random string of characters - but that might also discourage a lot of women.

on FB I am a 100 year old woman

We have all been through various phases in life where some sort of female perspective would have helped out a lot. HelpAGuyOut.com lets guys ask question and get advice from women on dating, relationship, love, life, almost anything. We are charging $2 for a question and passing $1/answer to the ladies who respond to the question. The monetory factor helps prevent spammy answers while making everyone's time worthawhile. Furthermore, 100% money back guarantee allows the asker to get a refund for any response that he/she deems unsatisfactory.

Thank you for your feedback.

-Paul

I guess there's a certain perverse beauty about creating a website where a nice guy can pay a woman to tell him he's gotta be even more of a nice guy.

Just for reference, if you're a man and find yourself at a juncture where your partner makes you feel like you need some "relationship advice", here's the standard package that came from Reddit for free and will serve you better than anything a woman ever told a man for two dollars:

1. Cut all contact.

2. Delete from facebook.

3. Hit the gym.

So if a question gets asked & 20 women respond, they all get $1 each?

Out of curiosity, what advantage does your paid service offer over the likes of r/TwoXChromosomes on Reddit where I can ask my question and have it answered for free?

Yes. But let clarify.

You need to specify how many women you want the responses from. That means, if you want 20 responses, you pay $40. [$2/response].

Try it out here: http://www.helpaguyout.com/asker-submit-question.php It's fun.

To keep things interesting, ask a question to your significant other, then ask the same question to 5 ladies on our site. See what happens. You will get very interesting result. [

To answer your second question, there are variations of advice related services - from free to proffesional ones charging hundreds if not thousands. What sets us apart is the ease of use, low pricing and guaranteed response. Plus our platform allows everyone to remain anonymous - women tend to open up and give a more insightful, genuine opinion that way.

Since the advice is paid for, the asker "owns" the advice and the woman understands that it is a private advice only for him. So, though, anonymous, there is a bit of "I am actually helping this guy out" factor involved.

Some sample questions and answers would help.

Maybe I'm lacking imagination, but I'm not exactly sure what I would ask the ladies, or what kind of answers they could give.

Since all of our Q & A's are private, they are not published. However, as you mentioned, showing some sample may help encourage others to participate. I should probably add a checkbox saying "My question may be publicized" to get permission.

Anyways, to help you get started, here is a sample question for you:

Let's say you are into slightly older/mature women. So your question would simply be something like: "Can I get some advice on dating older women?"

And you would elaborate it further by adding details: "I have not dated anyone for a while. Last week, I met this very attractive woman at a local bar who is 34. We really hit it off. We have been out once for dinner since. Even though I wanted to pay, she insisted we split the tab (mixed signals??). I would like to get romantically involved and take this up a notch but cannot tell how she feels. Any advice on how to pull this off without messing things up or coming across as a little too desperate? I am 21 and she is single."

What's the guarantee that the answer (answers?) I get for $2 are going to be better than those from a reddit thread?

There is no such guarantee. Sometimes, free services might offer much better results. Our pricing, $2 and compensation of $1 to women does not warrant time-consuming, elaborate, results. With the small charge of $2, the intention, and the goal, is to:

1)Keep spammers at bay 2)Provide a small incentive to women to participate 3)Give you a genuine, insightful, no-b.s. response 4)Do not pretend to be a professional advice service

My first thought was the site did not look girly (not to be sexist but no pastels)

Are you competing with http://www.girlsaskguys.com/ ?

Wallflower,

Did not know about this site. Anyways, even though the concept is somewhat similar, I believe our approach and what we are trying to accomplish is different.

$1 seems like a frightfully trivial amount of money to receive for a well-considered answer.

See: "Pay enough, or don't pay at all."

http://behind-the-enemy-lines.blogspot.com/2011/05/pay-enoug...

Frobozz,

Agreed - as long as quality/depth is of critical importance.

A trivial fee ($2) does not warrant such response and neither do we guarantee that.

However, by charging that trivial fee, the goal is to "guarantee" an answer to anyone. In sites like Reddit, unless you can pique some corners of one's brain, you are not likely to get an insightful response in a private setting. We allow you to 'own' your advice and women understand that it is only seen by you and not the whole community. Therefore, they tend to have a more 'personalized' approach.

Of about 65 questions asked and a few hundred responses received so far we have noticed that women are actually taking the time to respond. It's not the $1 they make, but the trend seems to be that they actually 'enjoy' providing advice to men.

How do you guarantee the answer? What hold do you have over the ladies that makes them answer?

If someone is only going to pay me a dollar for something, I'm not likely to do it were it not something I'd do for free anyway.

This is the point of the "pay enough or don't pay at all" statement. Both quality and quantity tend to go down if you go from pure volunteers to paying below market rate.

To earn US Federal minimum wage, answerers would have to spend, on average, 8 minutes on each question. This is not just the reading and writing of the question and answer, but also any time spent getting ready to work.

Obviously, you're the one who has real-world experience of this, and I'm just an armchair pundit who has read a few articles; so you know more than me. I'm just curious about how you have managed to go against the current received wisdom.

You want to get some SEO traffic and linking going on. After the guy says he's satisfied with an answer, ask him if he wants to make the answer public for others to benefit from. (You can also offer for it to be edited to take out any extra detail)

Women giving advice [to men] is not a good thing - women only have a "feeling" based notion of what they want (feelings are intangible and subjective).

In addition to all of the PUA/seduction stuff, theres one simple "technique" I've learned: have fun, fun is infectious (particularly with women) and when women are having fun they get horny and they also start to "feel" something for the fellow that is their source of fun! Fun is light and not weighed down by the dependency for an archetypal mother projection (needy and "smothering" guys, that's you).

Fun feels so good - women love to feel good. If you happen to be the person she's with when she's feeling even slightly above her baseline "good" she will associate it with you, and if you can keep your cool and "play" with her a little bit (ya know, don't be so easy to catch) she will fall head over heels for you.

Likewise for women: just show interest and don't be afraid to be aggressive/forward. I've met so many awesome women who either lament their singleness or wonder why they never attract the 'good' guys.

I got downvoted pretty hard but no counter-arguments?

To whoever asked "What do you think about this site? http://news.ycombinator.com you are probably going to get a lot of women answering that question that read HN already. FYI.

Sorry if this is answered somewhere, but I didn't see it in the FAQ: how do you prevent guys from signing up as girls? I.e. how do you guarantee this is really female advice?

Check out the last box (scroll down) "Gender Verified" on this page: http://www.helpaguyout.com/ladies.php

Basically, we ask women to submit their publicly available profiles such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter for one-time verification purposes.

I wrote something similar as an experiment a year or so ago: http://www.how-they-think.com/

except its free

Why would a I pay $2 to a website when for more or less the same I can invite a female friend to a coffee and talk about the issue as long as it's necessary?

There's a Mr. Turing here to see you about whether this site is really connecting him to a lady, sir.

and what's the guarantee that it's actually a woman answering and not some greedy male who put up a female facebook profile?

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