Four&me – Connect with great people and get together for amazing activities | Hacker News Reader

Four&me – Connect with great people and get together for amazing activities

itunes.apple.com

45 pointsfourandme54 comments

Your T&Cs (particularly the waivers) aren't legal in Australia and yet the app is still available to download here. Might want to get some region-specific T&Cs before distributing the app outside of the US? For example, in the state of Victoria at least you can only waive liability in the a) case of death and injury and b) only in the cases of recreational sport (but you have to use specific language available on the Victorian government website). Also, I don't think an Australian can give up the right to sue. This does create a potential liability issue in terms of operating the application here (and I imagine it does in many other jurisdictions as well.)

So that's the reason I have to have a US iTunes account to download software.

"aren't legal in Australia and yet the app is still available to download here" Why wouldn't this affect web apps?

Thanks! Didn't know this. Will check this out and decide what to do.

Hi everyone,

We are actually building a similar system called Inging™. We are ready to release a beta in a month. Inging™ is an Interest Based Social Network connecting you with others purely based on your favorite activities! The URI is http://www.inging.io . Right now we are allowing people to sign up to get the first invites as soon as we release the beta.

The TM on your brand looks unfriendly and as though you're writing in the style of Paypal T&Cs. I thought you might be trying to make an ironic point but it doesn't seem that you are (Correct me if I'm wrong).

Hi,

We don't fully understand what you mean by "writing in the style Paypal T&Cs", but for the second part. Not trying to make an ironic point.

We are always open for suggestions and productive criticism.

It's clear that either English is not your first language, or you are not familiar with the culture of youths and young professionals in the US. This may present a problem since that appears to be your target demographic.

1. You don't need to put "TM" everywhere, especially not on the main logo of your website and in forum posts. Notice how nobody else does this. It looks out-of-touch and off-putting to most people.

2. "Motorcrossing" is not a thing, nobody says that. For one, it's "moto" without the 'r'. Second, it is not commonly said in gerund form. This is just one issue with choosing to focus on the "-ing" suffix. Baseballing? Soccering? Photographing? They just don't make sense that way.

3. Another issue is the way that form modifies the base words. The way you highlight it on your site changes "diving" to "div-ing," which is strange. This is because the word "dive" is not fully preserved. Same goes for "dat-ing."

4. "Inging" is not something I would likely say out loud. Similarly, "What is your *ing?" is awkward. Personally I think it would be very difficult to build an identity and community around "ing," not to be attempted unless you have a strong grasp on cultural linguistic trends.

5. The parallax scroll of the top image does not work well on iOS. On chrome it does not move until the scrolling stops, and on safari it is very janky.

Hi and thank you for your feedback.

The misspelling of motocross was an honest mistake. And yes, english is not my fist language. I am actually from Germany. But the funnier thing is that a lot of my american colleagues missed that misspelling too.

With some words it works with some it does not. We already took that under consideration. The landing page tries to make a visitor instantly understand that the system is all about finding others in your area with the same interest in activities.

The highlighting of the "ing" part is just a branding teaching concept. Inside the system the "ing" is not being highlighted of course.

At the end it is kind of like asking "What's your thing?". I guess if you dislike using that phrase, it goes back to personal preferences and what you like or dislike saying.

We also understand that a product is not appealing to every single person it gets seen by. We did get a lot of positive feedback so far. Not only from the family and friends group, but also from external sources.

Thx for the parallax hint. We did get rid of the parallax scrolling feature for mobile devices. I personally was not able to reproduce the chrome or safari issue. The only time I saw it not behaving correctly, is when the site was loaded in chrome being bloated with tabs and eating up a bunch of memory. One of my partner's browser always has that issue ;) For some reason he does not like closing tabs!

Thx again for your input and taking your time to look over our landing page. It always helps when others take the time to share their point of view and thoughts! Have a great weekend.

Good luck with your idea ;-). Why don't you open your own thread/news? Liebe Grüße und komm uns mal besuchen, können einen Kaffee trinken

Vielen Dank für den Hinweis. Um ehrlich zu sein habe ich nicht gewusst, dass man eigene Beiträge posten kann. Ich dachte immer das die Leute von hacker news / YCombinator interessante Nachrichten teilen.

I wünsche euch das Gleiche, VIEL ERFOLG!

I think that there is plenty of room for growth and platforms in the activity based niche. Our products seem similar, but are completely different at the end. Especially when it comes to the approach -> "Bringing people together!". Same thing with SameGrain. Same goal, different approach. But all are completely capable of co-existing, in my opinion

My assumption about such an app is that similar to couch surfing, the most motivated users are guys looking for a hookup, and that will probably be a turn off for other demographics. I don't have an Iphone or else I'd be interested in testing the hypothesis.

5 people is a pretty crowded hookup...

When you see one hot woman and four awkward guys playing tennis poorly everywhere in SF, you'll know why

Unfortunately, CS turned into what you described but even when it wasn't so apparent, it was still happening "secretly". Before it overtly became about guys looking for a hookup, I was a frequent participant in events in a big city, and after a few months, I got to know the 'seedy' underbelly, ie who had hooked up with who, etc etc. In most of these cases, they weren't locals hooking up with locals so perhaps the missing foreigner-hunting aspect of Four&me will help to keep things more level...who knows, though

First, I really like this concept! I'm hoping you guys will be able to suggest activities that are missing 1 person based on where I am and such.

I signed up and was pretty excited. But then there is only 1 activity nearby with 1 member on it (probably another HN reader). And I live in Manhattan -- I'd expect lots of activities. The biggest problem to address is the chicken&egg problem: nobody will use it if people aren't already on it. In this particular case, this means that you really have to go out of your way to organize activities. I suspect this means that you should only launch in a city you can organize a large number of activities in and then grow from there.

This is the reason why we reach out to you guys, thanks! We see our after-launch chicken-egg problem and therefore we'll change a few things to proceed with a regional focus. For the next 2 weeks we'll keep it open though to get some more feedback for the idea and product itself.

This is a pretty cool concept. It obviously has a lot of overlap with Meetup (which I've used for years) though I like the fact that it is more immediate. Meetup tends to involve RSVP'ing for an event upfront and many times events are closed days in advance. As a business owner myself, sometimes I just don't know when I'll have time off and like the spontaneity that something like Four&Me could offer. I think you need to start with a specific region though. It could be quite discouraging for users to login somewhere (like London) and see nothing happening around them. It makes it more likely to uninstall the app and not even consider using it again... Not quite sure how you could go about doing this.

To address some of the criticism surrounding facebook logins - yes, this may be a put-off for some people, but then it has also worked remarkably well for a lot of apps, and for most non-tech-savvy users, it changes the registration process from filling in multiple fields, to a couple of clicks - I personally think there is an appeal to that, particularly for a new product. Plus, you're not asking for too much from users when they connect through FB (though perhaps you could cut this down even further - do you really need my interests? Or could this be another step where I could just click and type a few myself?).

Good luck with the app! Hope to see it grow!

Thanks Jason! As a business owner would you consider to use an app like four&me as low-cost demand generation tool for the service/product you are offering?

Regarding your thoughts:

We'll change a few things to proceed with the regional focus. The next 2 weeks we'll keep it open to get some more feedback for the idea and product itself. But I'm 100 % with you that we must change a few things.

As of today we only display the interests, but for future versions we will use them to "match" people with similar interests. There are so much pro's and con's for social logins. As a tech savvy guy I love the simplicity of it...

I wish you luck, but the App Store is a poor place to explain any concept. I'd link to a proper site.

Thanks =). Check out www.fourandme.com

I wish I could actually use the service by pointing a browser at this url. You're artificially limiting yourself to iOS users.

Oh, this really isn't going to work in Europe or Rest of World where iPhone just isn't dominant.

Shame, looks like a good idea. But no web site, and no Android = no use.

Clickable: http://www.fourandme.com

Ignore them. You can't serve everyone.

It is sort of ironic that your mascots are 5 androids.

I've been hoping a "small Meetup" would be created one day. Congrats!

One thought: allow people in their profile to list a few interests, then when someone with those interests is nearby, it pings you with the suggestion to do something now or set something up with that person soon.

Cheers!

Good one ;-). Will discuss this with the team. Let us know if you find anything else: ismail@fourandme.com

We are actually building a similar system and the feature you are talking about will be included in a little bit different way. Our system called Inging will be web only at first. We should be ready to release a beta in a month. Inging is an Interest Based Social Network connecting you with others purely based on your favorite activities! The URI is http://www.inging.io . Right now we are allowing people to sign up to get the first invites as soon as we release the beta.

Same concept as Spontacts (https://www.spontacts.com) which had trouble receiving a critical mass and thus was sold by Deutsche Telekoms Scout24 to Jochen Schweizer about a year ago.

It's like a non-douchey Tinder. I approve.

I hate it when cool stuff is only available for smartphones.

http://www.inc.com/john-rampton/8-companies-to-watch-out-for...

hey guys, some more background information: four&me is a social discovery network that enables you to search, create and join activities in groups up to five individuals. we've just launched our mvp today. any feedback or thoughts? this would be crucial for us to validate our hypothesis.

This would be such a bless for lonely people like me, even if I get rejected by one team you could always try next time with different people.

Even if the site doesn't go viral, I'm sure many people would love for it to stay alive, it can have more impact than most startups out there that's for sure.

It has the chicken and egg problem but surely you can figure it out. Best luck.

thanks for your thoughts! i just relocated from germany to the bay area to start a new job and have exactly the problem you've described. Finding people with similar interests was easy at college, but after graduating it gets a bit more complicated. thats the problem i want to solve for me personally for example. =) Best, Ismail @ismlsrn

That's pretty cool. I relocated to Berlin recently.

I wanted to tackle the same problem but in a different way. The solution I'm building is still in dev but is more similar to complete app (social to do app).

Thanks! I grew up in Berlin. Let's catch up for a coffee, when I'm back home one time, if you'd like to?

Ismail@fourandme.com

What is the hypothesis?

Our hypothesis is that people will connect with others online and get together for activities offline. We want to provide the flexibility to do activities of any kind everywhere, e.g. joining for a run in the morning in city A with two persons, going for a coffee after lunch in city B with one person and having dinner+drinks in city C with four persons.

I downloaded the app and an iPad and found that the three suggestions I was able to visit were fairly boring. One interesting unscalable idea would be to find 10 events that are truly unique and create an event for those. Just grabbing coffee is not super interesting but if you had a very unique type of event(e.g if one of you is an archer teach four people archery) I would definitely check it out.

The app lives from user content =). We've just launched it yesterday night. So please feel free to spread the word and create many creative and interesting activities. We will do so as well of course.

Come see us also at the Launch Festival in SF, March 2-4. Happy to have a discussion and get your thoughts :) We provide original Haribo gummibears from Germany hehe.

It's user content but it's your company. You need to jumpstart it http://paulgraham.com/ds.html

Only Facebook users are allowed to use 4&me. More than disappointing....

Thanks. What would be your preference and why? With our 1st version we want to learn from our users, so feedback is more than welcome :)

Regular logins were once popular.

Go see how Reddit did their registration. You don't even need an email.

This is more like AirBnB than Reddit.

I think social login is fine as long as you give people a bunch of options (twitter, gmail, fb etc) If you give one option at the beginning it should be non-exclusive

I don't use services with a Facebook login. They know enough about me as it is. Regular local logins should be an alternative.

I don't use Facebook, but I understand that a lot of people are uncomfortable with meeting random strangers from the internet unless they've already posted a lot of information about themselves online.

What's the logic in restricting it to meetups of maximum five people?

We believe that networking in small groups is more powerful than bigger meetups. We did a dozen of 'tests' with friends and came to the conclusion that having more than five people in an activity harms the fun. Example: going out for drinks and getting a table in a big city like Berlin or San Francisco with 6,7,8 people is not always easy if not having made a reservation timely... Same dilemma going out for dinner, doing sports activities etc.

social networks can't be launched broadly. Unless you can niche down to a space where you get very high penetration, this thing is DOA.

That is an interesting hypothesis. Certainly true for facebook, but as far as I know not true for the new breed of social networks like snapchat and tinder? Though one could argue they are focussed on narrower demographics as opposed to geographically constrained locations.

this is a MUCH needed app. well done.

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