Review HN: Heykiki - Find an instructor or practice buddy for an activity

by aditya • 16 years ago

20 17 16 years ago

aditya• 16 years ago

A friend asked if I had any feedback, and I thought I'd ask the rest of HN what you guys thought. All ideas/suggestions/comments/critique welcome!

jawngee• 16 years ago

Hmm, http://bit.ly/d9PAr8

prawn• 16 years ago

For anyone curious about the link, to save you the time and trouble: it's an empty search for "sex" at HeyKiki. That will make some even more curious, but it's not really worth the click (sorry jawngee).

ashley• 16 years ago

It would be cool to have an option to tap into Facebook or other social networks somehow, so that there would be a higher likelihood of meeting up with someone who was a friend of a friend (or further out) rather than a complete stranger. Plus, if people on Kikiverse were coming together for a bigger event, the event could be simultaneously posted on FB. Most of my friends in the 18-29 age range and the student groups on campus used FB for planning group outings.

joe_the_user• 16 years ago

The concept might be appealing at first blush but I can't see this doing anything that meetup.com and craigslist don't do.

I spend a fair amount of time looking around for prospective partners and teachers in a variety of activities (including martial arts). The problem isn't that people can't find each other. The problem is most people don't have much commitment to pursuing an activity on their own. If two people are in a city looking for activity partners, they'll find them. But in the Bay Area, a large metropolitan area, you'd be lucky to find a committed activity partner for anything but the absolutely most common activities.

Just think, it's easier to be posting for a prospective partner than actually practicing the activity. So the number of ads one finds on meetup.com and craigslist is probably greater than the number of people you can actually get to practice with you consistently (I have two meetup groups - membership is consistently 20x attendance. Sure, if I put in a lot of effort, I might boost that but it's not a money making gig for me, so why should I? I don't mind having five people show up but this relatively low turn-outs is still a measure of the difficulty in getting people committed to an activity).

Even more, just about everyone is in alternative activity class (yoga, painting, whatever) has been recruited by the teacher. Very few people actively keep a look-out for a special teacher for any extended length of time (I think I know this because I'm one of those very few people). So the model of "connecting people" doesn't work.

dnsworks• 16 years ago

There are many ways they could be improving on Craigslist:

- More keywords in the posting template - a semi usable search system (this alone outclasses craigslist by 10 years) - Less spam - An API for integrating with affinity sites - Better integration with maps

clarion• 16 years ago

I like the concept. There just need to be more people using it :).

The one thing that nagged me was the popup when you click on any of the actions that kiki is doing. I was expecting it to take me to that activity's page right away so I could navigate to teach/learn/practice from there. The "Excited?" popup felt a little jarring.

zzzmarcus• 16 years ago

I think the idea is great. I don't know how close you are to launch but I'd at least make the featured activities all have some seed data (cello was the one I clicked with no results).

Also, I'm pretty lazy but the registration form at first glance seemed a little much. Middle name? Captcha?

Looks cool though. I think there is a lot of future for sites like this that encourage and enable real-world experiences.

Super_Jambo• 16 years ago

Seems kinda US centric, it let me put in a country of England but now my posting has no location attached to it.

http://heykiki.com/listings/98

I also did not spot the ToS button when I was logging in and so had to re-do the capatcha

mathewgj• 16 years ago

i thought it was sub-optimal when someone used the word 'boomerang' in a tweet mentioning me, and next thing i know heykiki (which i had not heard of before) @'ed me with a non-relevant link to a search results page for boomerang-throwing classes. i would not do this.

dannyr• 16 years ago

Sportsvite tried to tackle this for physical activities but didn't really get any traction. Not sure about its numbers but I don't know anybody using it.

sidenote: Not a good name though if you try to get into the Philippine market. The last four letters of the name refers to a part of the female anatomy in Filipino.

jmuscle• 16 years ago

sounds good to me...i've had a bad experience finding a respectable boxing trainer in my neigborhood as well as a dance instructor to help me and my wife w/ our first dance for our wedding so this site seems very useful for me...would be good if their instructors had more ratings/reviews from existing clients so users feel more comfortable setting up a class or training session.

danskil• 16 years ago

It would be great if you paired with some local community colleges.

In addition to "learn" "practice" "teach" and "explore" I would personally add "Play" it could be used as a portal for people looking to find pickup games of soccer of someone to play boardgames with. the LPTE all imply that there is some net knowledge transfer, I do many activities just for fun, and would like to meet other people outside of my normal group.

Site looks great, purple...a very non-traditional yet memorable shade.

imperator• 16 years ago

The value proposition should be more visible.

"What are you interested? Where?" is a question and doesn't answer what I get from the website. It doesn't necessarily give me a reason for being there.

"HeyKiki lets you connect with instructors and/or practice buddies for any of your interests," is not visible enough. I really had to look for it. If that's going to be the value proposition, then it needs to be brighter and larger.

Good luck with this site. I started a skill exchange that was similar to Heykiki a while ago. It was called Foobity. It was very difficult to get traction. Sites like these need a lot of users to start being useful. We tried to expand our userbase and accessibility by making a facebook app right when FB opened their platform, but even that didn't turn into lots of usage.

We also had a competitor whose name I can't remember. They had a more polished version of what we were trying to do, but even they faded into obscurity.

Something about this mode of getting people to connect is very difficult. Part of finding teachers and learning partners is that a system of actual payment of pupil-to-teacher insures commitment. And casual non-money interaction takes a bunch of other factors to connect.

Still, I think this is a good idea because anything that increases the chances of people coming together to enjoy learning and practice activities that fuel their passion is a good thing. I hope it is successful.

jscn• 16 years ago

One minor design related thing: the diagonal stripes behind the search box on the front page create an optical illusion where the boxes get warped. I do not find it pleasant to look at.

UpFromTheGut• 16 years ago

A small bug: if I want to search for "basket", I'll type "basket" + TAB + [ZIP] + Enter. It looks like your overloading the tab key though, so it selects the first suggestion when I hit tab. You might consider handling suggestions the way Google does on their homepage, that seems to work well.

Edit: typo

roundsquare• 16 years ago

I clicked on "boxing" for fun and a bunch of results came up.

The left side filters work well, but I have a question. Why can someone click on beginner, intermediate and advanced at the same time? Doesn't seem to make sense to me. I think it should be a radio button, not check boxes.

Edit: Two more things.

1) A personal pet peeve, please have the "Remember Me" default unchecked.

2) For some activities, the gender is important. E.g. for some kinds of dance, you need to parter with someone of the opposite sex. For other activities, some people might want to partner with someone of the same sex (e.g. self defense). I know having a gender indicator can be abused... but any kind of meetup site will run this risk.

Review HN: Heykiki - Find an instructor or practice buddy for an activity

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