My YC submitted company - Thoughts or suggestions | Hacker News Reader

My YC submitted company - Thoughts or suggestions

sleep.fm

9 pointsryanspahn36 comments

I disagree with the comments saying that the purpose is unclear -- I understood immediately -- but this just seems like begging for being the butt of practical jokes. I don't want to wake up to getting rickrolled, and I don't want to not get woken up because somebody chose John Cage's 4:33 as my alarm message.

LoL - RickRolled... yes you can have a lot of fun with it, but you can regulate your Social Alarm Clock, impeding the practical jokes.

I only allow few people to send me alarm messages, like my g/f who is away at school and some of my family members who are sure not to RickRoll me.

I think getting Rickroll'd would be the perfect start to a bright and early morning.

Well, without signing up, I don't really get it. Maybe you'd care to explain it to us in a few lines? A few things of note though:

1) Breaks the back button on my browser. That's a no no

2) The splash image takes way too long to load.

Since you asked for thoughts + suggestions, here are mine:

I totally agree on all three points of the parent to this post (wtf is it, don't break my back button, and why is the bg so beastly).

The only keys that could give me some context don't really make any sense: "sleep and wake up social network" - huh? alarm messages - what? Vertical and horizontal scroll bars on my maxed-out browser window - why? No chair at the computer desk - oh noes! where am I gonna sit? "Sleep with us... and let your friends wake you!" - This sorta reminds me of this one time in college...

I'm curious to know what your site does, but not curious enough to sign up to find out. But if I did want to sign up, why do you need my website? Which website? My business website? Personal website? Blog? Flickr? The chamber of commerce for my city of residence? (Same goes for "name" is this my real name, first name, last name, or a user/nick name?)

Why does the input look right justified? That feels awkward.

The thick black border around the brown box changes its thickness on the bottom left side.

You've got a lot of work to do to get your front page together. I will be interested to see how you progress, and to learn what your site/company is about.

Thanks I appreciate your comments and suggestions :)

OK, I really don't understand the point. Can you explain to me several different user cases for your site? How many people out there do you think will want to use your sleep.fm?

Why does an alarm clock have to be a social networking site? This seems to be a rather utilitarian thing that works perfectly fine via the multiple alarm clocks I already own. All of my friends would use a service like this to mess with me, if I gave them privileges to wake me up. I wouldn't be able to resist the temptation to abuse it if the roles were reversed.

Sleep.FM is introducing a new form of communication that further enhances our always connected digital society. The always connected generation enjoys IM, Voip, Email, Social Networking, Twitter, text messaging, chat rooms, lifecasting and now they can start off their mornings providing each other with personal greetings, pertinent information or having fun with one another through alarm clock messaging.

Yes, this definitely can be used for practical jokes(which some may enjoy and others not, but either way it's something both parties will talk about). Practical jokes aside, we have used Sleep.FM' Social Alarm Clock to send...

- Happy Birthday alarm messages - Messages detailing an important meeting has moved to an earlier time - My colleague's cousin in Iraq being awakened by his kids alarm messages - My friends(newlyweds) who have different sleep schedules waking each other up

The Social Alarm Clock has been wrapped around a modern concept(a social network), one that allows users to regulate who sends them alarm messages, as well as upload alarm message to their Sleep.FM friends. As a social network there more ways to monetize users, as if you look at lone applications like Skype and Twitter they are challenged in this regards!

I'm sorry, and I really hope I'm not the first person to tell you this, but I just don't think this is a very good idea. I just can't see why anyone would ever want to use a Social Alarm Clock. I don't like waking up anyways, being Social isn't going to make it better. If there is one time when I am fine having absolutely no social interaction, it is in the 10 seconds a day when I wake up. I don't want to do any of the things your site allows me to do. It doesn't seem like very many other people here want to either.

I think there are some ways you could adapt this to be more viable but in its current form it just really isn't going to work. If you want to go forward with this idea, I would recommend widget'izing it, this is one function that would be more useful integrated into an existing social network.

Also, I don't think very many people have a computer sitting next to them to use as an alarm clock.

I think there's something there, but probably not in its current form, as rms says. I think it's probably misleading to call it an alarm clock, since people associate it with waking up. Yeah, unless you're hot, I don't want you waking me up. Reminders might be a better metaphor.

I have a friend who doesn't keep track of anything, and relies on his girlfriend to tell him when to do what. Whether this is a good way to go about a relationship is debatable, I can see how you'd set alarms for people to do something because it's important to you, rather than the person executing it. Say like, "pick up groceries at 5pm", but send it at 5pm so he has no excuse not to remember.

Happy birthdays wishes. "hey how did the date go?" messages right after your friend's date. "how did that pitch go?" messages after your colleague got devoured by VC's. What's in common is that you sent the message at the time you remembered, and they received it at a time when it's relevant to them, while you might be out golfing at the time. You can seem thoughtful at the moment it's relevant to the receiver of the alarm message, and when it's convenient to you.

Or you can send messages to your future self (say 5 years later), so you'd get messages from your past self saying, "this is what I want to do by the time I'm your age. Have you done them yet?" Or you send friends messages later on saying "I was really mad that you ate my ice cream last sat, but I was too shy to say anything at the time."

I think it's probably worth exploring what you can do with asynchronous messages that don't get delivered immediately, cuz that's essentially what it is. Limiting it to just messages you can send for waking is limiting, but perhaps not as easy to sell to people otherwise.

While widgetizing it is one way to go, I think this best fits on a mobile app of some sort. Mobile devices are seen as personal extensions of self. This sort of thing falls under that category.

Yes, we have a Windows Mobile prototype working and it will be finished soon. iPhone in Feb. when they release their SDK.

We definitely are aware of of other uses of The Social Alarm and will be detailing that in a presentation on Tuesday.

There are a ton of things to be done by meshing the alarm clock(or an audio alert system if you prefer to classify it as such) with the Internet. We plan on implementing a lot more to this concept!

Again, thank you everyone for your comments and honesty!

"Audio Alert System" is impressive and it can be used to represent the various ideas you want to integrate in your website.

Thanks for your comments!

No offense, but that is the worst idea I've ever seen in my entire life. Nobody in the whole world would ever want to use that.

Thanks for your input! Not everyone will enjoy this, but we hear both sides of the fence.

Sleep.FM was a semi-finalist for TechCrunch40 and recently chosen out of 20 companies(they pick 6) to present to a crowd of 400 where Microsoft and Facebook will be present.

That's because people in The Valley have no concept of what the other 99.9% of the population wants. They see a novel concept where most Americans will get woken up once when they didn't want to and be nothing but annoyed.

Also your video at http://www.jumpcut.com/view?id=5DA53674478211DCAE95000423CF3... should be the moment of zen on the daily show.

No offense...

The site looks horrible, graphics aren't pleasing. I don't like the background picture, nor do I like anything else design wise. I simply won't use a website that looks like that.

It requires plug-ins to be installed (and I don't trust your site enough to have it install the plug-ins).

I think that idea is pretty bad. Instead, maybe have a facebook app that sends wake-up reminders (with permission from the receiver) via SMS or something similar.

How are you going to make money off this idea, I'm pretty sure no company is going to want to buy you out.

Also, don't put a TM symbol in your logo unless you actually have a trademark on that logo (which I highly doubt that you do).

What are those scrolling images on the front page? What has that got to do with anything?

:-) I liked the background picture since it is perfect night setup and goes along with the utility - alarm clock.

Great thank you so much for your feedback. It's a big help!

Here is a full summary...

Sleep.FM - The Social Alarm Clock is an alarm clock social network, where upon the alarm time passing on the site(mobile versions soon) you are awakened by your alarm messages(audio files or voice-mail) received from your friends on the network.

It is themed around the human conditions of resting and waking where user environments are bedrooms. Users interact with one another by entering each others bedrooms to leave one another gifts(with or without comments), emails and or alarm messages.

The back button issue.. does that happen on the splash page or when you click, "Already a member? Click here," which takes you to another page?

Thanks!

The back button problem is on the main splash page. It looks like you are doing some kind of javascript redirection. So there are actually two entries in history. When you go back one page in history, it jumps forward again.

Incidentally, there have been several related products in recent years. Someone (maybe Sharper Image?) was selling an alarm clock that supported downloadable alarm sounds. I don't remember exactly, but I think it worked like those digital picture frames. That's not to say that you couldn't do it better. But I think your biggest issue may be that most people don't sleep next to their computer.

Tanked my back button as soon as I tried to back out of the first page.

I'm going to chime in and say that this doesn't seem like a very good idea. Of all the things to cram into the social trend, waking me up seems like the worst. I cannot see any reason to let my friends wake me up, or for that matter anything other than my cell phone alarm clock.

Others have suggested a FB app, but even that seems like something I would never use. Just my two cents.

Why did you make the decision for this idea to be a stand-alone site rather than a feature (widget, fb app, etc)? From your description it seems like it's better suited to the latter.

Well, this is awesome. I am throwing away my cell phone immediately.

But, keep an eye out for your completion: http://www.zombo.com/ .

Good luck with your Series A.

Now that I think about it....this concept may be better suited as a facebook application. I think the high-schoolers may have fun waking each other up for school.

You should have a tour, so people can see what you have to offer without signing up.

It's like!.. a cellphone.

but this ads social networking features and a tag cloud: THE FUTURE IS NOW!

Can you give a summary of what it does? I don't understand and don't feel like signing up

Also, it hoses the back button on my browser, which is annoying

It is not a bad idea, here are my suggestions:

-Put a FAQ -Get a Designer to do the graphics, more white

Good Luck

I had to scroll horizontally, and the text input boxes are not exactly in the surrounding block.

I am using Safari 3.

thanks... it is not compatible for MAC yet.

Breaks back button, very frustrating. I don't get it, needs at least a short explanation on the front page.

We are in private beta now; been for a month or so...

Thanks for all feedback!

How does it deal with different time zones?

The alarm clock time is set by the time on your computer.

Your site is slow.

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