Show HN: Here is our first app after 6 months working on it. What do you think? | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Here is our first app after 6 months working on it. What do you think?

yosee.com

42 pointskornifex47 comments

Your point of differentiation seems to be rating the scene of various venues. I would focus the landing page, app, and pitch on this, because at first pass, it looks like yet another startup that is trying to rate restaurants, stores, and parks. Having a screenshot with "New York City" and "Times Square" is not helpful (btw, note that it's Times Square and not Time Square). I would focus the locations down to just bars and clubs to start and take out anything else. No need rate Starbucks, either -- I already know what kind of place it is, globally.

You would have to talk to more people to get the right questions, but I don't think "how are the boys/girls?" is the right type of question. Is it hip, dive, relaxed, crowded, noisy, lively, chill, etc. I think the best way to think about this is to figure out how people would answer the question, "what kind of place is it?" I also think the response needs to be more than just a single 5-point rating.

I think that you are absolutely right, even though we want to focus first on the 5-star rating of people and then we plan to offer a way to choose up to three pre-defined tags (as you rightly said hip, dive, etc.) to elaborate your rating of the place.

Sorry for the "Time Square" error, we use Foursquare venues and weren't paying attention, we will fix that.

We will also rethink our landing page in order to make it easier to understand what we do.

Thanks for the feedback ! :)

THere is no reason why the first screen of the iphone on your home page should show the Login screen. Its not relevant to the product, and everyone who wants to use it will understand that you have a log in. Remove it!

Yes, you're right, we were going to make subtle changes on the order. Thanks for the tip. :)

Agree, even though in this case the login screen is quite nicely designed. Login screens are a barrier like a locked door where you have to go into your pocket and find the key. Not pleasant psychologically.

It seems very heternormative. Girls rate boys, and boys rate girls?

Yes, we are planning to add gay/lesbians support, but we have a problem because the comments you post are limited to your gender (girls can see other girls comments, boys can see other boys comments). But we are definitely thinking about it!

Uh, this should not be an "oh that's for a future version"...in an urban city (which is presumably where this kind of app would be most used and most useful), you are alienating a good part of the audience.

Gender fairness issues aside, this kind of "design" issue raises doubts about how well you've thought this product through. Social/place-rating apps are hard, given the dominance of the big players in this space. This gender thing complicates things but is by far one of the easier things you'll have to deal with, and it doesn't appear you're dealing with it well.

That sounds harsh, but better to take a hard look at this now than at launch date.

Yes, you are right and this is definitely top priority.

There are also plenty of people who are interested in people of two or more genders that you shouldn't erase. This is the kind of thing where, if you really can't figure out how to make it work with your current design, you seriously need to go back to the drawing board.

Absolutely beautiful, both the page and the app (though I don't have an iPhone):

Are you planning more login API support other than just Facebook? I'd imagine you want to run the gamut: twitter, foursquare, etc - maybe even get rid of your own login altogether to make it easier for people (of course this limits you somewhat - but I'm pretty sure your target audience has at least one of these accounts)

Thank you very much! We are thinking about Android and maybe WP next…

Yes, we are thinking about it, though people may be afraid of linking it to their social accounts, therefore we will continue to support our own login system.

> maybe even get rid of your own login altogether to make it easier for people

Please never suggest this to anyone ever again. I'm so sick of having to authorize apps with vague descriptions of what they'll have access to.

Other sites doing something badly does not mean it shouldn't be done.

You're making the generalization that this app will also do it wrong, and maybe that's likely, but I think it's too pessimistic.

If every single application everywhere rolls it's own auth every time, you're going to have 10 auths (which according to security advice should be seperate) to remember.

regardless of implementation the idea of unifying (or even semi-combining) login is not a bad/not worthwhile idea

If every single application everywhere rolls it's own auth every time, you're going to have 10 auths (which according to security advice should be seperate) to remember.

You're confusing with what is [perhaps] technically the most reasonable solution with what your potential users will be willing to do. That's a mistake.

isn't thinking about user convenience a good thing?

Can you elaborate? Are you saying that the most reasonable technical solution is what people should select, regardless of what the potential users are willing to do?

I think the app looks pretty nice. But clearly I am so far out of your target audience. I find it a rather sad commentary that how a place rates on the boys/girls is "a good reason to go" there. It just seems very shallow. I guess the types of places that are defined by the boy/girl rating rather than the food or the service or what ever else they offer are perfect for the people who are more interested in the boy/girl rating. That is not me. I'm sure you will find your user base though.

I agree with you but we are still planning on adding more traditional information. :)

I enjoy the site and the app looks nicely designed, but the boys vs. girls thing isn't interesting to me. Is this an app to find places to hook up with people? I don't generally judge cities, venues etc by the attractiveness of the people and an app for doing that should probably be aimed at a fairly specific demographic -- probably a similar demographic to OkCupid's.

We believe that when a place is crowded with what you think are cool people, it may very well be a cool place as well.

We do not target single people specifically but groups of friends. We think that friends who use the app together can have a lot of fun. The range of age is from 13 up to 35, even though the idea comes from a 45 year-old man. :)

Your site is nice and it feels well designed. My only complaint is that even on my 100 mbps connection, it took forever to load the content in the smart phone portion of the site.

Another question I have is what makes me want to use this as opposed to yelp or foursquare?

We believe that when you choose a bar, or a club, you may want to focus on the people first, and Yosee lets you rate these people and say if they are cool or not. Cool places for cool people. :)

You should change your website to show it off then

Love the landing page. I like the "Absolutely nothing will be published on your timeline..." bit.

I wonder how the Boy rate Girls is going to work for you guys. If you could blog about the stats you get that would be interesting as well! I know this is not the place for that but Lisbon, Taipei and Paris' girls come on top imo.

Thanks! We will talk about some stats as soon as they're relevant.

Beautiful website. Best of luck to you! How's support in the UK?

Thanks! :) We use foursquare for all the places, so it should work everywhere. We had people testing it all over the world (brazil, russia, canada, UK, etc.).

The first few seconds I don;t know what the app does....more importantly how it is different from the bazillion other place rating apps.

Yosee Support link on the itunes page points at the broken link support.yosee.com

Cool intro although it took a while to load for me.

also getting an error trying to register. 'the file /tmp/<hash>' does not exist

Should be fixed, thanks for the feedback!

The site looks great, not very mobile friendly though which you should maybe think about given your target demographic.

Yes, we are going to add mobile support!

hummm... here at work it says "This Connection is Untrusted / yosee.com uses an invalid security certificate. / The certificate is not trusted because no issuer chain was provided."

I'll have to see it at home... (company security manager sits right in front of me :P )

Weird, but you're welcome to try at home. :)

will certainly do, it has nice feedback :)

I'm at home, also getting this certification warning

What is your browser?

Same security warning here. Using Firefox 20.0.1 at work.

Should be fixed now, thanks.

Yes, thank you, it works OK now :)

Not getting any connection errors from chrome.

getting the same untrusted notice on Firefox...at work.

Nice website, but couldn't immediately tell what the product does.

Thanks for the feedback, we will change the order to make it easier to understand!

The design is very clean, I love it !

Thanks!

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