My girlfriend tries to explain my startup in 90 seconds | Hacker News Reader

My girlfriend tries to explain my startup in 90 seconds

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59 pointsmarknadal59 comments

It looks like either reddit has discovered HN, or someone figured out that injecting "girlfriend" into article titles garners loads of votes for reasons beyond my comprehension.

It's pretty pathetic how effective of a baiting tactic it is, in terms of both title and content. This is the second time this week that I've seen a submission hit HN's frontpage that used their girlfriend to snatch votes, I seriously hope it doesn't become a trend.

Downvote for unnecessarily derogatory language.

How is it unnecessary? Someone is using their female significant other's gender to promote their product.

Just having his girlfriend make a video explaining his startup wouldn't be an issue - but having her make that video, then submitting an article that "hey, here's my GIRLFRIEND explaining my startup" makes it off as sex appeal.

Since sexism in gaming is a hot thing topic right now, imagine if Spike TV was to advertise that a program that discussed videogames, and that they advertised as being hosted by a "woman", no names, just "hosted by a woman". That's pretty much what this submission is doing.

"Whore" is inappropriate.

"Karma/Vote whoring" is a pretty common term for someone who is doing something immoral/dumb just to get upvotes.

@ntumlin: when the issue is explicitly gender based and is referring to "using one's girlfriend"...there is a great deal of baggage that comes with the word whether the writer intends it or not.

It really depends how you read it. I read the hook as getting a non technical person to explain the product so the benefits are communicated in layman's terms. Most people don't have a partner in the same profession, so it's simply a situational occurrence that it ended up as "girlfriend". It could just have easily been a woman getting her non-techy boyfriend to explain it, which would equally have been a non-issue.

Okay, I sort of get what you're saying but what if it was a gay man saying my boyfriend made this? Or a woman saying my boyfriend made this? What if it was his mom who made the video? Does that still invoke sex appeal to you? The problem here seems to be with your reaction to the word girlfriend and not actually based on anything other than her gender and status. I agree that the girlfriend part could have been left out of the title, but I also don't think it ruins the integrity of this posting at all.

I think based on sexual preference you probably have different ideas of what "sex appeal" means and what your reaction to X word is.

That being said, titles are there to tell you what something is about, and to get you interested. This does both, and part of this example is surely sex appeal. You can debate whether it was intended, but that's how genders work.

Being blunt, how many readers with a sexual preference towards females considered whether or not the girlfriend in question was attractive when they landed on her Google+ page? I suspect the answer is greater than 0.

Gender plays a role in everything, it's human nature.

>readers with a sexual preference towards females

Women are also conditioned to judge the competency of other women based on their appearance. This isn't relevant to the case at hand however. Personally I welcome a lot, lot more posts with women somehow in them because at the sheer mention of women in HN the thread jumps to the topic of gender and I don't see that changing until there are just a lot more women posting and being posted about.

> I don't see that changing until there are just a lot more women posting and being posted about.

A fair point for sure, I hadn't considered that.

The HN community has deemed this post relevant to the front page. Please be more respectful with your language. You can ponder the motives of this post in a more reasonable way without distasteful comments.

Respectful - agree with that.

But this: "The HN community has deemed this post relevant to the front page"

The HN community is only one part of something being on the front page. The other part is the admins who apparently (no transparency here btw.) can control what appears and also make it disappear as well.

Thanks for the edit, zalzane.

You're missing the joke I think.

No I saw it. Effing clever, so points for that.

It has plausible deniability and has an Oscar Wilde wit to it. Touche.

My girlfriend thinks you're wrong. So by law of girlfriends and internet, I should get a lot of votes for this comment

You got it.

Something about this rubs me slightly wrong. I think it's "my girlfriend" and "My boyfriend" and "I know very little about programming, but I do know that his startup is awesome". I don't know the words to describe it, but it feels like a weird gender-in-CS thing. Anyone know more technical terms for this?

I think it's "my girlfriend" and "My boyfriend"

I wonder if it's just safer in the tech online social scene nowadays to avoid gender and say things like "my partner" to avoid gender related trouble. A curious contrast against how we'd speak in regular life. Related: http://tomayko.com/writings/rest-to-my-wife

The problem with partner on HN is it makes me think co-founder or the like. :-\

SO (Significant Other) is solid gender neutral verbiage IMHO

Ah yes, but then people will think you're pandering to the Evil Denizens of Political Correctness that are ruining discourse on the Internet.

In short, you can't win with everybody no matter what you do. :-/

Thank you! It's so obvious but I missed that. Also this term implies marriage (to me at least). #sigh

It's amazing how hard this is.

If we had a gender neutral way of describing a romantic relationship with someone that'd fix it. Right now perhaps it seems like this is specifically targeting gender when it isn't actually the intent.

I've never dated someone who understands what I do so I relate to this but it has nothing to do gender other than I'm a straight male.

the term you are looking for is "significant other".

The guy has a girlfriend and he obviously had a conversation with her where he was too afraid to put it on HN. She took the initiative, as a good woman should do, and did an excellent job demonstrating the tool.

So I would say the more technical term for your feeling is: nonsensical.

"where he was too afraid to put it on HN"

Hard to believe he was "afraid". More likely simply a gimmick to make it stand out (not implying negative by use of that word).

Besides I don't get this:

"My boyfriend Mark is way too much of a perfectionist to post his startup on HN"

He posted his startup on HN that is "marknadal" posted the link to his girlfriends video.

And what does being a perfectionist have to do with this anyway?

I took it to mean that he wouldn't get it done on his own b/c he would never be satisfied with the post. IOW, he was too shy.

Fine. gimmick or not. Give the guy credit for creating a good launch narrative in a sea of "Check out my start-up" posts. This is clever marketing, the conversation doesn't have to go much further.

Hahaha, Thank you. I think we get a little too "technical" sometimes.

"An unrelated person of unspecified gender tries to explain my startup in 90 seconds"

better?

I wonder how many people clicked because they were interested in the start-up and how many people because they were interested in the girlfriend.

Judging by the fact there's hardly half a dozen comments relating to the actual product, I think you have your answer.

I understand what others are saying about a possible "gimmick" by using the "my girlfriend" line to get people to click on it. Although that may be true, and they could be pulling a fast one, I think we are all being too cynical.

Hacker News is supposed to be a community of like minded people sharing their interests with others who enjoy the same thing. I think it is really cute that she did this for her boyfriend. She didn't have to do this, but she either likes him so much, or likes the product so much, that she wanted to help him make it successful.

I don't see how there is anything wrong with that, and if it is on the front page, then others must agree as well.

>I think it is really cute that she did this for her boyfriend. She didn't have to do this, but she either likes him so much, or likes the product so much, that she wanted to help him make it successful.

I don't care how cute it is. If you want cuteness, go to /r/aww, not HN. I want meaningful, thought-provoking content.

>I don't see how there is anything wrong with that, and if it is on the front page, then others must agree as well.

Using your logic, we can conclude that there is nothing wrong with majority of content on Reddit. After all, people upvoted it, so there is nothing wrong with it! So far, the readers on HN have been more thoughtful, and I would hate for the quality of this website to go down.

"I would hate for the quality of this website to go down."

I do agree. I come to hacker news just for the reason you listed above;

"meaningful, thought-provoking content."

But HN is also a community. Every now and then for someone to share something like this, I think that's perfectly fine. I do agree if people do take advantage of this, it would significantly reduce the valuable content that I love about HN. We have to trust that his girlfriend really did post this, and didn't pull a fast one on us.

Everything in moderation.

I guess it's reasonably useful for mockups, but you can not seriously design a website (or any UI) with absolute sizes.

You can set min/max width and percentages are coming soon.

Of course you can. Don't be daft.

There are plenty of advantages to relative sizing, and in general it's a good policy, but there are many excellently-designed web sites whose sizes are absolute – just as there are many shit designs that're responsive as hell.

Eveytime I open a website with absolute sizes I want to cry. Most of my monitors have either crappy or too big resolutions.

Yeah, I am the sole developer so right now it is great for mockups and layouts. But demand the features you want, and I'll work towards them! :)

I started with basic min/max widths, because that was the sizing I commonly used. Percentages are important also, which will be coming.

Plus our experimental logic/animation tool let's you do some pretty spiffy stuff: http://www.screenr.com/Z9o and should support media-query conditionals in the future!

Now do one where she does not mention being your girlfriend, and include a better close at the end. Better yet, use http://videorascal.com (I dont own it or work for it).

Link to Accelsor http://accelsor.com/

> My boyfriend Mark is way too much of a perfectionist to post his startup on HN.

I used to be worried about doing self promotion too, partly a cultural thing (being Irish) and partly because I was worried that people would judge us. This had a really negative effect on my last startup, esp in talking to VCs. I would work on that.

Edit: I just noticed you did in fact post it yourself, so great start. I never did a Show HN for https://circleci.com and I regret it.

Despite the Reddit-esque linkbait title, I could understand the sentiment about someone being worried about doing a ShowHN themselves.

However, my problem with the video is that it didn't really add anything to the non-audio version of the same video currently on the homepage. It mentions the exporting, but doesn't show it. It speaks to responsive, but doesn't show it. I'm not sure if these features aren't baked in yet, but I didn't get anything out of the audio version that I didn't get from the non-audio one coupled with the features page. In fact, the voiceover distracted me from what was actually going on with the demo (particularly looking at the weird stuff going on at the bottom) because it wasn't talking about what was going on as it was happening nor the extensibility of the features being shown, but rather just spoke to the product as a whole from someone that seemingly doesn't know what the scope/final product will be.

Since she's non-technical, it probably would have sold viewers a lot more if she'd been using your tool to create her own page to show just what a breeze it actually is to use.

In the same vein, I think your website could really use some work; the video of the product should go at the top, not the weird <video> of the skewed color-picker (that doesn't need to be there at all, really). Your features should also be on the homepage.

Also, considering the current crop of alternatives in this realm and the more advanced options those have (http://webflow.com/ in particular), I think it would benefit you to show your pipeline and what people can expect down the road.

I feel like this could be more useful if you let users export images as well.

I know plenty of folks who need to do image manipulation but don't want to spend time learning Photoshop and rightly so, for small image tasks.

We currently allow you to download (export) a zip of the page, which includes the images you drop in.

Or do you mean image manipulation itself? If you are good at it, you should join us! We'd love to have you open source it. :)

Well one particular use case I know of where it could be useful is that many people who work in marketing need images for campaigns. It doesn't have to be too high resolution or anything just simple 600px wide images for facebook or twitter.

Now since marketing is run by marketers and they don't necessary know Photoshop or image editing software, they could use some simple tool which lets them drag drop images, text etc with intelligent spacing and margins.

Once they have put images, text in order they want they can get a screenshot of the canvas which they can use for campaigns. My girlfriend is a community manager with a digital agency and she would kill to have a simple tool like this. Since you already have something similar you just need to add option to export the screenshot of canvas to be used for campaigns.

I wish I could help but I am more of UI/UX designer than developer and currently working my ass off on some client projects.

Ooh, gotcha. So just a simple command that would basically do a print-screen for them. Nice idea, I'll have to add that in! Thanks!

Yeah, no joke, I know what you mean about client projects :P.

Your girlfriend thinks you're just a 'good friend'. Impedance mismatch.

Micro feedback: the email address field looks like a button.

Cute girl? Check. Start-up related? Check. 90 seconds? Check. Congrats, you've got exactly what HN is looking for in a front-page post.

Or, Reddit.

Is anyone else disappointed to find that on a product demo, the top half of the comments page have nothing to do with the product?

My wife really liked this link.

Girlfriends aside, the interface is fantastic. I would use this. Good job.

Great stunt to get on front page of HN. Keep on hustling!

Good work!

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