Interesting take on a social networking site | Hacker News Reader

Interesting take on a social networking site

notadouche.com

49 pointsjcapote27 comments

I never thought I'd be flagging my own site.

As happy as I am to find this here, I don't think it's particularly relevant to Hacker News. I figured Adam and I would write something about our reaction to how quickly this site got big - 36 hours and 2800 sign-ups and still escalating - but I dunno if the site itself is particularly hacker-relevant.

One comment, though: it's hard to say just how thrilling it is to see this thing appearing all over the Internet. I'd never have expected this to go so far. For us, this was just an experiment in web design with a snarky theme. Waking up yesterday to see 100 users, or going to PHP class and seeing a hundred new people every 20 minutes while I was working on classwork, was a pretty incredible feeling. I'm glad so many people enjoy it.

You've completely eschewed the conventional norms in the "social networking" scene while still maintaining the core essence of what makes them awesome (especially the "25 things about me" facebook phenomenon); If that isn't relavent to hacker culture, I don't know what is.

I guess. I'd find it more impressive if we'd managed to connect users using a similarly skewered method, but we didn't. (Even if we'd let you connect via similar answers, it would still be following convention.)

there is a dating site that uses a mechanism like that to match up likely candidates.

I'd be curious to see how effective that is! What's the name of the site?

okcupid, sign up to get a better look at their matching algorithm, it's based on asking people loads of questions.

great site -- how many of those 2800 sign-ups filled out the entire profile? I wouldn't be surprised if most of them did!

Very neat. I had fun answering a bunch of questions. Although, I was really hoping for a dating site with a sister site called http://www.notabitch.com/

I think this would make a great addition to a lot of social networking and dating sites. Post a few new random madlibs to users every so often to keep them and their friends interested. Up the stickiness.

It was suggested that we create a series of sites. Notawanker, notacunt, notaspaz... not sure how good that would look on a resume. "Douche" is edgy but not quite offensive; "bitch" crosses some line that "douche" doesn't.

I wouldn't worry too much about that resume, if you keep going like this you'll be the one to evaluate others' resumes.

And you can always list it as 'an experiment in user generated content sites that pulled in 1000 signups per day on the second day', I think that ought to do it :)

You've made a fun thing there !

But I really think you should go and flesh out the theme a bit, just answering a bunch of questions does not make it a social network, there is a bit more to it than that.

Well, that was part of the joke. Somebody on #startups submitted it to Digg as a "nonsocial nonnetwork." That pretty much sums it up. It's why we didn't exactly expect the traffic we're getting. (We're up to nearly 3,800 users, up another 800 in about 4 hours, so growth hasn't stopped yet - and that was in the dead of night.)

Neat :) Reminds me of the launching days of camarades.com, we didn't know what the hell was happening, it spread like wildfire.

If I can give you any advice at all it would be try to create a reason for those people to come back at some time in the future when you've better figured out what to do with this, you're really sitting on something and chances of hitting it out of the park like that twice are slim.

So, to add to your problems a bit I've given you a homepage link on http://ww.com/

Enjoy the extra traffic :)

Hoo boy, this is fun. We're almost at 4000 users, and still haven't sold a single shirt, so perhaps our model's about as weak as Facebook's is. (We're both pretty averse to laying on ads.) Luckily, each user takes up no bandwidth at all, so we're doing fine right now.

The problem as I see it is that our 4000 users means nothing. It's a meme, essentially. Registration happens so quickly that our high numbers don't mean much; the fact that we're getting linked all over means a lot, but I see it as more of a "you have to see this" fad among friends than I see it as dedicated users. (We've got a 50% bounce rate and the average stay lasts under two minutes.)

Anything that we add would have to work without ruining the nature of the site. As in: right now the workflow is "take in answers, give link to profile," which is very sticky but creates a path off the site pretty quickly - and removing that removes the stickiness.

I figure the best route to go right now is just to interact with the people we've got talking to us. We have two email addresses, one for photos and one for haiku, and we got way more submissions than I expected for a first-day submissions thing. Those are the people who're actually talking back and forth with us, so I figure they're a good place to start when it comes to expanding. (I'm figuring out now just how to create the gallery for their stuff.)

Here is an interesting thought: How many of the people that somehow made it on the web set out to do that vs how many of them simply did what they were enjoying best ?

My money would be on those doing what they were enjoying best being in the majority.

When I first filled out my profile at the site I didn't even notice that you were selling shirts. I wouldn't be surprised if other visitors didn't notice either.

...but where's the business model????

(just kidding)

http://cafepress.com/thenadstore

We're old-school: merchandise only, baby!

(We're getting a few artistic friends to make posters, so hopefully we'll have something really worth selling. I also really like the look of the "nad" logo.)

nad: not the best initialism...

Which makes it even more fun for us. ;-)

Agreed! :-)

What might be an idea is to print out the profile user created on a t-shit, or other clothing

That was suggested. The problem is: we don't know how to easily make custom shirts like that. We didn't expect this to blossom at all: this was just a quick test site we made before we started work on our big project. So this has taken us completely by surprise. We didn't expect 5,000 users in under 2 days: it would have been silly to.

Simplicity wins here! You can add all sorts of fun stuff later once you have a base of returning users (and you clearly don't lack creativity for that).

As an experiment in a different approach in getting user info it's really good. I too had fun signing up. But if there is something more to it, I can't say I've spotted it. Why does the user benefit from this service? It was kind of vague for my taste at least. On the other hand maybe I missed something.. :)

Just a technical note, I couldn't get it to work with Opera 9.51, after entering my name I was redirected to the first question and then instantly on the end page. You might want to fix that.

Kudos for the idea though..

now that was cool -- i (for the first time ever) actually had fun filling out my profile!

Great concept. It gives me a very enjoyable way of signing up. You guys actually make us re-consider some aspect of our own registration form. We might borrow some of your idea. Thanks a lot.

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