Show HN: I paid an engineer $4k to build a dating site | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: I paid an engineer $4k to build a dating site

24 pointsngm198526 comments

http://www.percodate.com/ - DO NOT PAY FOR THE SITE. Use code HEYHN if you want to sign up.

I've had some experience with website development, but I'm not technical whatsoever. So I went on craigslist (in Los Angeles) to look for an engineer to build a dating site.

Luckily, I found someone amazing. We agreed on $4,000 in milestone payments and $6,000 in potential bonuses if the site does well.

We recently launched the site and would love your feedback. I know the design is lacking, but any feedback would be appreciated!!

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Random impressions:

- The "Home", "Sign In" and "Sign Up" links at the top of the main page don't go anywhere. The "Home" link is unnecessary. The "Sign In" and "Sign Up" links should go to anchor tags at the sign in and sign up forms.

- The Birthdate drop down menus are broken for me on the sign up form. I only see a vertical scroll bar when I select the day and month, and I have both vertical and horizontal scroll bars when I select the year.

- The What I Want page should initially has nothing selected in each box. I think each option should start populated with "Anything". That way if I don't care about pets one way or another, I don't have to waste a few clicks setting it. Or do I need to actually change an option from "Choose Option" to "Anything"? It's unclear.

- When I finally select everything in the "What I Want" page, the red text "Please choose an option for each field." doesn't go away. Did I not select everything well enough?

- At the bottom of the "What I Want" page you have every percentage listed from 16/16 to 0/16. Is that really necessary?

- The Profile page has square images on top of other users, but when I resize my browser window too small horizontally they're squished into rectangles. In addition, those images are huge! It took a few seconds for them to load the first time I visited the page. They should probably be resized. Also, perhaps profile images should be stored as jpegs instead of pngs?

- Search form, perhaps it should be pre-populated with the options that I chose on the "What I Want" page? And again, even when I have every option selected, it still says "Please choose an option for each field."

- On someone's profile, under their Personality Type, there's a yellow circle that on mouseover says "They don't have your preferred personality type, but keep reading!". What? When did I specify a preferred personality type?

On a whole, it looks well done for a MVP. Some other people have criticized the lack of design, but personally, I like the minimalist look. These are just first impressions, I hope they help.

FYI, I'm using Firefox 29.0 on Linux.

Thanks for signing up and digging deep/doing the dirty work, 8_hours_ago!

I have all your comments saved and noted. To make a few responses:

I was worried people wouldn't understand the message filtering feature, so I probably overdid it with the 16/16 thru 0/16 copy.

The "Please choose an option for each field." copy is permanently there, but I can see why it's confusing after filling everything out so we'll have to change this.

The browser resizing has been a bit of a struggle. We're making it a responsive site, but we'll keep working on it.

Overall, thank you for your detailed response. It definitely helps. And I appreciate your comment on the minimalist look!

Well, you paid $4k and it shows. No clear UVP (unique value proposition), no design, looks half done - if even. I would not use the word amazing with this - in any context.

Definitely an MVP, tzaman. And my apologies I wasn't more clear. In my opinion, he's done an amazing job for being the only engineer working on this and making it come to life. I also value our working relationship as we wound up being a great team. A lot can go wrong with someone you don't (OR even do) know.

You of all should know (since you're building a dating site) that what attracts us first in any kind of interaction are the visuals, so I really recommend to put more effort there :)

But yes, I agree that done is better than perfect.

you should probably include a way to get in touch with you in your profile

Thanks for the heads up, pskittle!

What makes you different? Why would I use this site instead of Tinder or Match.com or even craigslist? There's a ton of dating sites. What makes your matching algorithm and filtering tools special? The screenshots on the home page don't really communicate this.

Second, I'd allow users to search before registering an account. But contact details are withheld until account creation. That way I can verify the efficacy of the matching and filtering functions before paying money. Or put another way - if I find someone interesting, I'm more likely to whip out my credit card and pay to get in contact with that potential special someone.

Thank you for the feedback! I was hesitant about doing what you said with the search/registering an account. I didn't want it to feel too bait and switch. But I'll definitely be sending this to the engineer!

How it's different:

We let you filter your inbox with the exact same criteria as the search criteria (Ethnicity, Body type, Height, etc). This is mainly for women who normally receive a lot of messages on other sites.

We also let you know if you meet a certain threshold of what someone else wants (whatever criteria they are choosing to filter their inbox with). This is mainly for men so they don't waste time sending messages to women definitely not interested in them.

When all the other dating sites brag about number of messages being sent, we want to be the exact opposite. We're all about sending LESS messages.

Thanks. That's much clearer and a good pitch. And it addresses a pain point with other services. You should put similar, concise text on the home page. Even using a cheesy tagline like "Get More With Less".

For women especially, highlight the $50 fee as means of filtering out the skeezy, stalky losers that proliferate on other sites. Highlight the exclusive, higher-quality service you're trying to build.

Love this - bringing even more focus to the pain point.

> We let you filter your inbox with the exact same criteria as the search criteria (Ethnicity, Body type, Height, etc). This is mainly for women who normally receive a lot of messages on other sites.

The problem is this, that most people don't really know what they want.

Pretty much all the dating sites have filters on them for allowing you to chose which profiles you wanna see.

The outcome? Any woman who uses these filters message the same set of guys, tall, making decent income, same ethnicity, same religion, good looking(if you use OKC looks filters), etc etc. Most women I have dated, would never even find my profile on an online dating site(ethnicity, religion and height would disqualify most of them).

Similarly as a guy, if you qualify for most of these filters, then you end up staring at pretty much every girl out there. If you are just in it for short term dating, then its fine, but sooner or later you get fed of not being able to meet a girl you can talk to.

Yes, most people while looking for a partner look for these fixed attributes, but what most profile-centric sites miss is that most people do not actually end up with a six ft tall $100K+ making blond, blue eyed european model. When I meet a girl at Phish concert, she is not just another person who fits all my checklist, she is a person I found appealing, and I met her at a Phish concert.

Some sites such as HowAboutWe are kind of doing it right by moving away from profile-centric nature to activity-centric(but they still leave something to desire). I wish you understood that profile-centric sites(or rather MOST dating sites) are still hugely disappointing to men/women, attractive/average, straight/gay etc people alike.

I think you're pretty spot on with your thoughts, splintercell.

Personally, I love and believe speed dating is the best option for most people. Even if you don't find someone you're attracted to, you can still have great conversations. Unfortunately, this is out of the comfort zone for most people (only if they knew!).

I'm hoping this is the next best option within online dating. People have checklists and I think it's only fair we indulge them. We give people options/criteria/fields for searching, so it seems plausible to apply the same to peoples' inboxes.

If people wind up being lonely or finding the wrong person due to their high standards, hopefully they'll adapt their standards or find a better outlet to pursue dating/love.

Respectfully, I think you're wrong on your conclusion.

There's a lack of alignment between a person's explicitly declared preferences and the things which actually make them happy. This is so ridiculously true when it comes to dating on and offline.

I think this is the real, society advancing problem on which dating centric startups should focus. I'm all for indulging people (and making a buck), but sites like this one generally are useless, depressing, and alienating to a good number of their users.

Edit:

There's also a really harmful cycle of addiction which a lot of people get into on these sites. Quite often the proprietors design their dating sites to promote such cycles, and it's more than a little depressing.

To see what I'm talking about, read Ian Bogost's Cow Clicker post [1], and then imagine that the daunting chore of participating in the "social game" is directly tied to your self worth.

At the very least please don't do that to your users.

1: http://bogost.com/writing/blog/cow_clicker_1/

> There's a lack of alignment between a person's explicitly declared preferences and the things which actually make them happy. This is so ridiculously true when it comes to dating on and offline. <

I completely agree with you. That was my original point. Nick's answer just didn't make any sense to me. How can you agree that people don't know what they want, yet say that that this is why he created this app, when the explicit stated intention is "dating sites for people who know what they want".

This is more like a "dating site for people who think they know what they want".

Congrats on getting it done to this point. You underestimated how being on HN affects your traffic so it's a little sluggish. ;)

You have too much tiny text. Your signup form is not distinctive. Even adding a class of "bg-success" to your div with the id of "signup-form" (that will give it a greenish background) would be somewhat helpful. Spend some time reading http://getbootstrap.com and you'd be surprised how much you better you will get in a few hours once you understand which classes are available to you. It has a lot of decorator classes that will transform your colorless UI instantly.

Since you provided no test user credentials and I am not willing to skew your metrics by registering, I can't evaluate how the site functions for a registered user.

You featured a blog post very prominently and wrote it in a self-deprecating style. While I appreciate the creativity, that does not help in increasing conversions.

My biggest concern

I am not sensing product direction besides your innovative mailbox that filters by intent. This feels like "I wanted to try building a dating website and didn't think about a unique hook".

I agree that traditional dating sites have abysmal messaging. This can be a good hook.

Thank you, wiseleo. I actually didn't think this post would do too well. As usual, I was wrong!

Appreciate the UI feedback. We'll do some touch ups to liven it up a bit with the help of getbootstrap.com.

I'm a little bummed about the blog post not making at least a decent impression. My humor is all I have! (the blog post referenced - http://blog.percodate.com/we-built-a-dating-website)

The hook without a doubt is the messaging. The goal is to give women relief and men more time back/focus on who to message.

Thank you again!

As-is, this is not an MVP. V stands for "viable" and right now I don't get the sense that it is so. You have a skeleton running, but it doesn't feel like a product yet.

Dating is the most aggressively competitive social media vertical there is. Dark artists lurk in this place, Harvard MBA geniuses with cold hearts and unfathomable amounts of cash. Backroom deals are made to carve up ad publisher territory. Data scientists are plucked from the recruiting pool like daisies from the meadow.

Is that the space you want to compete in? Are you positioned to win here? Step back and look at the big picture.

FYI, the Birthday drop-down menus are funky in FF30.0 on OSX10.9.3: http://i.imgur.com/D9NF5A6.png

You really need to hire a designer :S

Or buy a premade template and adjust it to your needs (if you want the cheap).

i want to give an advise to you as a software developer, please find a designer before find an developer, mostly users want to see "everything ready" web site/projects and most of the time you can show the ideas and flowcharts of project to developers and other business people.

drawing first, writing later.

Its looks ugly needs some css designs :/

Is this a prototype or the actual website?

MVP, melvinmt.

IMO, 4k is pretty high for this.

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