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Comment by rschmukler | Hacker News Reader

Would love any and all feedback. Ideas, features, UX problems. Whatever you guys have I'd love to hear!

Greetings, having lived with 2 roommates for a good time period, I was very interested checking out how you are trying to solve some of the issues surrounding it.

Here is my immediate feedback:

1. Overall looks good, professional enough to trust. (Personally, not a big fan of vanilla Bootstrap 2.0. But I'll hopefully be one in thousand users who even know what that is)

2. Awesome, a clear call to action! However, I was hesitant because besides a bunch of icons and paragraphs of promises, it's not tangible how it works and how you are solving issues better than a bunch of magnets, a fridge and small pieces of paper. Add a walk-through or at least a few screenshots.

3. Login with Facebook only (as noted by others) makes sense but I'm not a big fan of this being the only option. Case in point, one of my past roommates did not have a facebook account.

4. Join or create a "Room" -- Errr... This naming made no sense (to me) whatsoever. Why are you replacing 'shared residency' or 'house' or 'apartment' with 'room'? To me, this is silly and - in my interpretation - seems like an overly clever play on the words 'room' and 'roommates'. Unless of course, you think we all sleep in bunk-beds in the same physical room (which, if you live in New York City is a possibility).

Okay, so I am now on my dashboard, I understand that my other roommates need to be invited. Okay. Instead, I'd like to poke around a bit first. I'd like to schedule/add chores, some existing bills, todos etc. so that, when they join, there is something to use/look at. Hm, that doesn't work because of some before_filter requires me to have them join first. That's a no-go for me.

Right now, I still have _no_ _idea_ how this thing works, what kind of forms/options you are going to give me and if they apply to the specific real-world situation (since there was nothing to be seen or checked-out pre-registration).

Because of the requirement of invitation, I can't move forward checking out what it does, so I'm losing interest quickly and am bound to leave and possibly never return.

Keep up! Looking forward to the next iteration :)

It's funny, I was talking with a friend about making something like this since I might be moving into a place with almost 10 people. I won't be able to use it for real for a few months, but it would be nice to test out the system without having to invite someone. The overall design looks very nice and clean though.

Edit: I can't see what my house name is when I'm logged in. Is this because I haven't invited anyone yet? I invited a friend and they entered my house name but it was not recognized.

Thanks, it's mostly Twitter bootstrap based. We definitely think that this application gets way more useful as a house has more roommates.

The problem with letting you browse around before inviting is that all of the tasks require some other user. I am very open to the idea of doing something so that people can somehow get use to stay dedicated so they don't forget about us while they wait for their roommates to join up.

Any ideas? Maybe a little preview video or something?

Video preview would definitely be nice. A useful video would be something like "Hi I'm John, I live in a house with my three buddies and we manage our house chores/expenses/etc with GoodMate. I make sure my rent is paid using x feature. I check what chores I have to do here...", etc etc. I'm very curious as to how everything works so a video would be great.

fantastic idea. I'll work on something just like that!

i doubt this audience is going to be receptive to a site that requires a facebook login. it's probable you have other demographics in mind though.

Yeah, the facebook authentication is kind of a double edged sword. We want it because it will make it easy for users to invite their roommates, and more importantly, it allows us to have the concept of an "identity" to tie actions to. Going forward this could let us create a sort of roommate-resume tied to your identity.

Instead make it really easy for one roommate to create everyone's accounts, then you reduce the conversion requirement to just 1 person (though you do slightly increase the friction on that one person you radically decrease it on the others).

As a hacker, sure, I'd rather not have this potentially spam my wall with posts. But as a college student living with other college students, it's the perfect choice. This could prove to be really useful, I'm looking forward to trying it.

We never post to your wall :) We should make that clear though, thanks for the tip!

I was going to try it out, but the Facebook log-in deterred me. I know my roommates would not use it for that reason, so it's a no go.

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