Show HN: my new project, an anti-snub dating site

http://www.secretpoke.com

by bjonathan • 15 years ago

119 113 15 years ago

bjonathan20• 15 years ago

Hi fellow HNers,

I wanted to show you our new project: SecretPoke.com .

As big shy people ourselves and with Valentine's day coming up, we wanted an easy, anonymous and fun way to reach out to our crushes :)

We would love your feedback as much on the concept than on the execution (name, copy, design,...). We built it in less than 10 days and we are ready to modify the website quickly to take your feedback into account!

I also hope that SecretPoke will come handy to some of you ;)

As a thank you for your feedback, and for all what HN taught me during the past year, here is a code to have 3 more crushes for free: thankyouhn . You can enter it on the homepage when you are logged in.

Thank again, we are eager to hear what you think !

http://www.SecretPoke.com

namityadav• 15 years ago

Not bad for 10 days work. Just one small comment -- lose the song in the video. It's distracting. Use a simpler background music that sets the mood, but doesn't keep the viewer from focusing on the value proposition. BTW, what did you use to make the video? All the best!

clistctrl• 15 years ago

nah man, I love the song. I was able to follow just fine with it.

Joshim5• 15 years ago

I would also be interested in finding out how you made the video...Thanks!

bjonathan20• 15 years ago

Thanks all of you. For the curious a screenshot of the live map of our visitors: http://i.imgur.com/UfXT0.jpg

Dont forget to use the coupon: thankyouhn to get 3 more crushes for free :)

Keep the feedback coming we looooove it !

dkarl3• 15 years ago

Before using it I would want to be reassured on two points:

1. I wouldn't feel very optimistic using such a site because I assume the emails you send will seem like spam and will be deleted by the recipients without much thought.

2. Using this site makes one vulnerable to cruel trolling. Imagine three or four people getting together, "secret poking" people they know, and sharing the results for shits and giggles. If I really need this site, am I brave enough to expose myself to that?

Personally, I couldn't use this service, because I'm beyond the age where it's acceptable to need it. I do feel like part of the target audience, though (especially ten-years-ago me) and am happy to be being served.

TheSOB882• 15 years ago

You seem to have a general mistrust of others. I've found life is a little better if you don't assume everyone's out to get you from the get-go.

bjonathan20• 15 years ago

Hi dkarl,

Thank you for your feedback.

To answer your remarks:

1. We added a copy of the email we are sending in the frontpage (click on "what will they receive?") so you can see by yourself that it is a cute little mail. We are monitoring strongly the pourcentages of the crushes and we are testing some variations to know what perform best. You are right we need to communicate trust and we work toward that.

Although if she delete the email there is no arm for you as your anonymity is still preserved.

2. People are generally not that bad, I cant assure you that it won't happened. But SecretPoke only offer 3 free crushes so it should limit the secret poking ring .

I hope you will be served and that it will be with a person for whom you have a crush ;) Give it a try ... Life is full of good surprises :)

shadowfirebird• 15 years ago

Well, I've had a secretpoke. It was almost certainly spam from you. (You chose a hint that made no sense.)

Call me suspicious, but wouldn't this be a great way to gather email addresses for mail marketing! (Almost as good as Facebook...)

On the plus side, I thought it was cute and made me smile for a second. So, thanks ... but, no thanks.

jfritsch• 15 years ago

It redirects to de.secretpoke.com and then I get an error message. Hope you get it up again shortly.

We're sorry, but something went wrong. We've been notified about this issue and we'll take a look at it shortly.

bjonathan20• 15 years ago

thank you we seem to have an issue with the german version of the website

it should work in english: http://de.secretpoke.com/set-locale/en

We are gonna fix that ASAP thank you !

bjonathan20• 15 years ago

Ok it's automatically redirecting to the english version now. Thank you !

draz4• 15 years ago

An idea for you: give users the option to send flowers (or anything else, for that matter). When the email is sent to the crush, it might say: "your secret crush would like to send you flowers. please fill in your address" or something. The initiator's credit card it charged if the crush fills in the address. You make money off the flower shop affiliate referral.

bjonathan20• 15 years ago

Thank you for the idea :) We thought about adding a "store" for when there was a match but I have to admit that we never thought about doing that at the sending !

We definitely have a lot of options to explore !

sorbus• 15 years ago

That would look, to me, extremely spammy. An email from a service I've never heard of offering to send me flowers if I give it my address? Yeah.

kaerast• 15 years ago

I agree. To me the email looks spammy enough already - adding in a request for information right in the email would make it sound even worse.

francoisdevlin2• 15 years ago

Eh, whatever happened to doing the good old fashioned leg work yourself?

For the men: There isn't a woman in the world who will be impressed by saying "Can you fill out this form so I can send you flowers?"

draz4• 15 years ago

I just assumed that the person did not know the crush's address. But I suppose he can still employ affiliate programs if the person DOES know the crush's address.

michaelcgorman• 15 years ago

What happens if I have more than one email address and my crush enters a different one than I did?

bjonathan20• 15 years ago

We wanted to simplify the website as much as possible so we limited to one account = one email . But other users requested that feature so we gonna add it in the coming days.

Thank you for your feedback :)

zackattack• 15 years ago

man some big money was made off this in 2003

bjonathan20• 15 years ago

love to hear that :)

Do you remember the name of the website back then?

Tutorialzine• 15 years ago

I actually think he accented on "2003" and not on "big money".

Anyway, I would suggest that you create a facebook application to go with the website, you could get quite a following.

hncommenter12• 15 years ago

Here's a whole story about them from 2002: http://dir.salon.com/story/tech/feature/2002/08/07/crushmast...

draz4• 15 years ago

could you give some examples? bjonathan could benefit from learning more about the other services (what worked for them, what didn't). I remember back in the day there was a Facebook app that did something like that. Though I'm not sure how well it did because I never used it. Or did I...? (No, I actually didn't :-) )

bjonathan20• 15 years ago

Thank you, yeah I would definitely have a lot to learn from that !

We thought about doing a Facebook app but ToS seem not very friendly with apps doing anonymous action :)

Perceval• 15 years ago

2005? Man, I fell for this back in high school, sometime between 1996–2000. It was a site functionally identical to this one. I got an email about someone who had a crush on me, asked for either the email or the AIM screenname (I forget which) of people you had a crush on.

I dutifully entered some girls at my high school and shortly thereafter I got a match: Julie. This was exciting, until she emailed me saying something along the lines of, "lol i was just trying to see who liked me."

Soured the whole experience for me.

I wonder if the SecretPoke designers have considered non-good-faith use cases? Is there any way to distinguish between good faith use, and manipulative, embarrassing, or purposeful outing use cases?

seabee• 15 years ago

You can mitigate it by restricting how many people can be matched with a single email/SN. It's hard to try and out someone out of your whole class when you can only have 3 'crushes' to use; the odds are low unless you're pretty sure you know who likes you, at which point the service is a little redundant.

bjonathan20• 15 years ago

Hi Perceval,

Sorry for Julie ;)

Seabee is right, the limit of 3 free crushes help to limitate that side effect.

We cant prevent 100% non-good-faith crushes but you could still have answered to Julie that you entered her email because it was obvious that she was in love in you ;)

SecretPoke only reveal identity if it's mutual so if somebody was joking you, you can always answer that it was the same for you. (I know that it's a little childish but it's "effective")

If you have any ideas to prevent Julies of the world to use SecretPoke to break our little hearts please share with me, we would love to implement some to see what is happening :)

Thank for your feedback

sankara• 15 years ago

In case you didn't know, orkut had this feature for quite sometime. I'm not sure if it's still active though.

bjonathan20• 15 years ago

Oh ok I didn't know, I gonna take a look. Thank you for the tips :)

slig2• 15 years ago

Not exactly the same feature. It would only notify both users if they mutually assigned each other as crushs.

They removed this and other features completely in the new redesign from last year.

BoppreH2• 15 years ago

What's the difference?

jaredsohn• 15 years ago

Both hotornot (with its Meet Me service) and okcupid have features with some similarities, too (although in both cases, you are rating profiles on their site for people who you most likely don't know IRL instead of entering e-mail addresses of people you know.)

marquis2• 15 years ago

May I use this to flirt with my boyfriend?

bjonathan20• 15 years ago

Yeah sure! Lot of our users are sending 1 crush, and we are guessing that it's at their loved one .

pdaddyo• 15 years ago

I was just typing in my girlfriend's email (unbeknownst to her) when I realised this could be a test: will she mention it to me this evening? Intriguing!

axod• 15 years ago

Entering multiple crushes seems a crappy thing to do to me. Be interesting to see how many do that.

swombat• 15 years ago

Worth pointing out it's just been covered in TechCrunch EU as well:

http://eu.techcrunch.com/2011/02/04/not-sure-if-she-likes-yo...

Sounds similar to FitFinder and the like... Web 3.0: The flirting network...

bjonathan20• 15 years ago

Yeah we are so happy for that :) even if the feedback has been light (from users i'm talking)

Did you try the website ? Have any feedback to share with us :) ?

We are looking for ways to improve the website so thank all for your comments !

alienreborn• 15 years ago

Nice design and video but the problem with these services is that anonymous mail notifications are generally disregarded as spam by many people.

sequoia• 15 years ago

I've had this same (ok similar) idea, kudos to yall for making it happen!

I'm curious how you phrase your email. I've seen many "CLICK HERE TO FIND OUT WHO HAS A CRUSH ON YOU" style ads; how are you making sure you're not seen as one?

Re: sending flowers/gifts anonymously: I suppose some people might like it but "Please fill out your address for your secret admirer," I think that for a lot of people this might seem more like "SecretStalk."

hanskuder• 15 years ago

I hate to burst the collective bubble of shy people everywhere, but the problem of "I like him/her; there must be a way to find out if he/she likes me back!" will NOT be solved by a cool new tool or piece of technology. It will be solved by actually gaining a bit of confidence and actually asking the person in question out on a date.

This site is a cool idea. I'm sure you'll get plenty of users and some legitimate mutual crushes. But a comprehensive solution to the shy-person-A-likes-shy-person-B chicken-and-egg conundrum this is not. Shy person A or B would be much better served by learning to take a chance and just go for it.

evbart• 15 years ago

I wonder what the stats are behind this, the odds of finding a crush as it scales...

Given how many people seem to use the missed connections section of Craigslist (which seems pretty hopeless), I bet these are higher odds :-)

Xurinos• 15 years ago

What you said is true; however, there is a huge market of people who will grasp at any opportunity that will allow them to stay within their comfort zones. Sometimes just the small chance that something could happen is sufficient.

For example, somebody forwarded me that stupid "Bill Gates will give you money if you forward this email" message, and they commented, "This probably is not real, but just in case it is, I am forwarding this. I am really strapped for cash and will take any chance." This desperation, be it for money, for companionship, or for any other strong desire, is ripe ground for snake oil. And the snake oil is that much stronger if it works -sometimes-... like hoping you win the Power Ball to solve your debt problems and seeing that there are average people like you who are winning it.

prpon• 15 years ago

This desperation, be it for money, for companionship, or for any other strong desire, is ripe ground for snake oil. And the snake oil is that much stronger if it works -sometimes-... like hoping you win the Power Ball to solve your debt problems and seeing that there are average people like you who are winning it.

One of the best quotes I've seen in a while.

chegra• 15 years ago

Ok, let me see. Back in 2005 a friend sent me one of these crush anonymously. I didn't want to guess on the site who it was, but I wanted to know who it was. They had this feature where you enter your email if you forgot your password. So, I thought to myself, not many of my friends would know about this site and whoever it is was probably the only person of my friends to be on it. So, I enter the list of female friends to recover their passwords[Just finished my undergrad, had loads of free time]. If they weren't on it the site came back with an error message. In the end, I came across one person who it was successful for.

Point being be careful with your error messages they might give away your users anonymity.

bjonathan20• 15 years ago

Lol ok nice one we gonna fix that like right now :)

Thank to your twisted mind :p

Thats why I love HN you always find your way around ;)

daeken• 15 years ago

Avoiding information leakage, whether in terms of error cases (e.g. incorrect padding on crypto showing a different error, leading to a padding oracle attack) or in terms of user-facing content (e.g. exposing whether or not a username or email exists in the system) can be difficult. That said, you should always err on the side of showing a single message rather than multiple -- in this case, always show success. This is common practice in certain things, like always showing "incorrect username or password" rather than "incorrect username" and "incorrect password" messages, but most people don't consider it for other things.

The less data you give to users about state that isn't necessarily theirs, the better.

mahmud• 15 years ago

Please DON'T do that. Don't type people's email addresses into whatever forms you come across online.

sbov• 15 years ago

As much as you protest this people will still do this.

Coincidentally, this is why I have a separate email address for any site that anyone may look down upon. Figuring out what sort of services you sign up for online is usually as trivial as trying to sign up a new account with your email address.

This is also why if my site enforces 1 user per email address, I make sure I do that check only if all other information is valid. In comparison, most sites let you enter a bunch of invalid information but a valid email address and will happily let you know that person already has an account. If you have to enter fully valid information, theres some risk you will sign the user up and let them know someone is using their email address for things.

TheSOB882• 15 years ago

Sooo, how'd the relationship turn out?

kgtm• 15 years ago

If you're ever going to be her: crazygrl+secretpoke@[...]

draz4• 15 years ago

how do you guarantee that the particular female friend had a crush on you and not on another guy (and just happened to be using the site for him)? :-)

stefanobernardi• 15 years ago

This webpage has a redirect loop

oewolf• 15 years ago

Same here: Error 310 (net::ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS): Demasiados redireccionamientos.

bjonathan20• 15 years ago

I'm sorry I just saw your comments. Is it still happening?

johnrob• 15 years ago

The tone of the site is a little too business-ish. I can't pinpoint how, but (colors aside) it has the form of a business product like basecamp.

Take a good look at http://www.hotornot.com/ . I don't have the design chops to explain why, but that site comes across as less serious. If you can find more fun consumer sites that have been successful you should be able to identify some common design techniques.

bjonathan20• 15 years ago

Hmm ok I get what you want to say. We are not native english speaker so sometime we are a little afraid to go by the "humor road" and be a little off.

But you are right so we gonna A/B test our jokes real HN style ;)

dkarl3• 15 years ago

I think it's the background-on-a-background. I see a rectangular white area behind the content and a light grey background surrounding the white area. The whole thing should be white so the pieces of the page seem like they are naturally grouped together instead of trapped and constricted together inside the little white rectangle.

goatforce5• 15 years ago

Thanks for the shout out!

If anyone is a ruby-ish person in Toronto, ON and they want to work on Hot Or Not and other similar sites, i'd encourage you to email me at jamie.wilson@avidlifemedia.com

ritarius• 15 years ago

re: 'what they receive': 'they are afraid to take the next step' doesn't feel right. of course they are afraid (that's why they're using the site) but it doesn't put them in a good light, right from the beginning. alternatives: a) make it seem like only really cool, confident people use this site b) make fun of it, 'this is a site for super shy people who are actually really cool on the inside but have social anxiety...but you should still give them a chance!'

epo• 15 years ago

Typo in first sign-up input box, should be "Your" name.

bjonathan20• 15 years ago

Wow thank you! I dont know how we didnt saw that earlier :) It's fixed on local but there is too much people to deploy in production right now (ruby on rails power ) . We gonna update the website as soon as think are quieter (so I hope never ^^)

vessenes2• 15 years ago

I like this idea a lot, but you absolutely need to kill the logins and just use facebook connect. It solves so many problems with the service, and will help it go viral, AND will let people just point and click on their friend list.

Nice viral app, though! I hope it goes well. I bet you more than double if you use facebook for connection and messaging.

Splines2• 15 years ago

If I were serious about sending something through this, I'd be worried that using FB connect would leak information. Besides, why would I want my friends to know that I'm not confident enough to approach someone I had a crush on? ;)

deno• 15 years ago

There's no reason Facebook Connect should leak any information more than anything else (like your Gmail inbox).

> Besides, why would I want my friends to know that I'm not confident enough to approach someone I had a crush on?

Using Facebook Connect does not automatically equals spamming user's activity stream. Besides, this wouldn't be the most embarrassing app on Facebook by a long stretch.

Actually, I'm not fan of Facebook myself (and I don't have an account), but I must admit Facebook Connect would be perfect for this webapp. As @vessenes mentioned this would solve quite a few potential problems, like matching (different email addresses, spelling errors; while with Facebook it's unique account id). But also seeing your crash's avatar could be much more engaging than just typing names. And since SecretPoke's business model seems to be paying for extra crushes, I'm going to bet users presented with their full & interactive contact list are more likely to make an emotional decision and take out their credit card or agree to spend their Facebook currency.

vessenes2• 15 years ago

This worry could be pretty easily assuaged with good copy.

"We never, ever tell anyone who crushed on them without seeing if there's a match"

and

"See what will be posted to your crush's walls:"

nollidge• 15 years ago

In "I agree with the Terms of Service", there should be an obvious link style for "the Terms of Service". At first I was thinking "what terms of service?"

Joakal• 15 years ago

You're unlikely to read it anyway. The ToS uses the most lightest grey text and it's in français.

mustardhamsters2• 15 years ago

I was all down for this, about to find someone to submit to, when I decided I'd take a look at what the crush is going to receive. The wording in the first sentence put me off. I would change "Someone has a crush on you, but is afraid to take the first step..." to "Someone has a crush on you and is wondering if you felt the same way..." or something like that.

The wording there prevented me from using the service.

mustardhamsters2• 15 years ago

More importantly perhaps, if the crush doesn't know the specific email address I used to submit, how can it find me? It might be good to allow users to connect multiple email addresses to their account to allow for more matches.

FiddlerClamp• 15 years ago

Those custom crush messages are just begging for trouble: Hint - "I shagged one of your parents."

dangero• 15 years ago

There was a website that did this around 2002 and it was funny because I'm pretty sure their technique for getting new users was to send false positive spam messages, "Someone has a crush on you. Come to find out who." Really nobody did, but you inevitably went to the site and entered the email of every person that you had a crush on in the off chance it was real. Then, BAM email database expanded rapidly. This idea is super viral.

sidwyn• 15 years ago

Very interesting. Problem is, my friends know that I'm a tech geek and I'll probably be the one using this website to inform them.

jtsnow• 15 years ago

Looks like a re-hash of eCRUSH, launched on Valentine's Day, 1999.

Herald_MJ• 15 years ago

Looks like someone's been taking some of Gabriel Weinberg's advice... (http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2011/02/if-i-were-starti...)

perlgeek• 15 years ago

Right now I either get infinite redirection loops for the front page, or internal server errors. Seems somebody hasn't expected so much traffic...

joshfraser• 15 years ago

I think you'll find you have the wrong demographic here on HN. You need a bunch of 14 year old girls to get this one to go viral. Of course, you've got a great viral loop if you can actually get it going.

mooneater• 15 years ago

Im sorry but its hard to get past the name.

"Poke" is just too sexual. It might appeal to some people, but I can imagine a lot of women having negative associations with being "secretly poked". I do, and Im a guy.

mitcheme2• 15 years ago

I assume it's a reference to Facebook's "poke". If so it gives a frequent FB user a pretty good idea of how the site works at a basic level.

I didn't even consider the "dirty" meaning until you brought it up and I hardly use FB.

mkramlich• 15 years ago

great idea. i could see this becoming very popular. i recommend fixing the message mismatch between crush and poke. it's possible to have a romantic/sexual interest in someone without it being a crush. frankly crushes are kinda creepy and definately most commonly associated with juvenile/immature states of mind. by downgrading the verbage to interest or attraction, something like that, and totally removing all usage of the word crush, I think you'd get more users, a wider age range, and have a less confusing site message. This is a minor criticism though. The core idea sounds extremely promising with a large market, and is useful for non-techies/non-elites, which is awesome.

grandalf• 15 years ago

This is very similar to http://www.messageunicorn.com

BoppreH2• 15 years ago

What happens when the person who received the poke indicates three guesses? Do the two people left out receive emails too?

If so, I think this could quickly spiral into a pyramid scheme.

AgentConundrum2• 15 years ago

I really hate writing this, so if this comes off as needlessly harsh I sincerely apologize, but I see a lot wrong with this site.

The first problem is that it's nothing new. I remember sites like this when I was in high school, and I graduated in 2003. Maybe you've built a better mousetrap, and maybe the world is just ready for this sort of thing now, but I'd bet there's a reason there isn't already a dominant site in this area given how long the idea has been around.

I remember from the high school version of this that it was horribly abused. It's a great attack vector for certain types of bullies and misguided prankster friends, and it will be used as such.

I should also point out that people can have multiple email addresses, and not all of your friends and acquaintances will know you by multiple addresses. What if I send the message from the wrong address, and my crush only knows me by something else? If she does like me, she'll have to send her own "first message" to my other address. If I suddenly receive another "someone's crushin' on you" message, wouldn't I first assume that it's someone else, since if it was my crush was mutual, I would have got a confirmation, not a request, right?

So let's assume that the crush is mutual. The only way the crushee to find out who I am is to put herself out there as well. It's sort of a large jump to ask someone, especially a shy someone, to make. Also, what if the crushee knows you by a couple email addresses? Which should she send a request/confirmation to? She could send it to both, but then she's using at least two out of her three freebies. If she likes two people, and knows both of them by two emails, then one of those two people can't receive a confirmation on both accounts unless the crushee decides to shell out two Euros (Around $2.70 in American/Canadian currencies). I sincerely doubt someone would do that.

One major problem is what I'll call "balls." Do women really want a guy who's too fucking timid to just come right out and say they like them? No.

I'll give you an example:

My hotmail address (used for likely-to-spam signups and as an MSN moniker) was created solely to send a "crush" email to a girl I liked in high school. This was back when hotmail had a directory you could use to email people you didn't have a proper address for.

So, I sent her a message saying basically, "hey, we've got a couple classes together and I noticed you, etc. etc." When I got a response back, is was just "You've piqued my interest. Spill, who are you?" with instructions to just man up and approach her in class. Women tend to like confident men, and men who hide behind internet filters tend not to be the confident type.

Finally, I just want to note that there's also a question of legality here. I can't cite a source off the top of my head, but I know there is legislation in Canada and possibly in the States that classifies "Tell-a-Friend" type email functionality as spam. These emails are therefore subject to fines. I don't know if they enforce it for things like this, but it's definitely something to consider.

mitcheme2• 15 years ago

'One major problem is what I'll call "balls." Do women really want a guy who's too fucking timid to just come right out and say they like them? No.'

I've had lots of crushes on shy guys. Problem is, I'm shy too, so I don't say anything -- and end up with the not-shy guys I crush on, because they ask first. Most of my female friends have had crushes on shy guys too, but the same thing usually happens. In younger crowds (I'm guessing the main demographic for these sites) girls who ask out guys can be rejected pretty harshly so its usually not worth the bother even if you aren't shy. In HS, one of my friends had her crush throw food at her from a car window after she wrote him an anonymous (but fairly obvious) note admitting she liked him. This even though they had hung out lots and she considered him at least a friend. It was more than a little discouraging for all of us, especially since his aim was so bad we ALL got covered in it. Ugh.

AgentConundrum2• 15 years ago

Fair enough. I suppose that portion of my argument was a bit short-sighted. Consider it retracted.

jellicle• 15 years ago

Hasn't this scam already been done?

Years ago there were a flurry of sites like this. They'd send spam to sadfsdfsadfhrtrth@yahoo.com (fake address that I'd only ever used once at some shady ecommerce site) telling me that someone had a crush on me, and all I needed to do was provide my credit card number to find out who.

Ho-ho-ho.

bjoernw• 15 years ago

This is a great way to find out if your girlfriend/boyfriend has a crush on a specific person. Sign up as that person, send this to your significant other, win/fail.

chamza• 15 years ago

I would never use it, but that video is the cutest thing I've ever seen. Good idea nonetheless.

ciupicri• 15 years ago

I'm using firefox-3.6.13-1.fc14.x86_64, yet the site asks me for a modern HTML5-compliant browser. Firefox 3 can play Theora videos.

dprice1• 15 years ago

I don't have much to say about the functionality, but I did notice that while the site is in English, the default view for the "Terms of Service" is in French, and there seems to be no way to display them in English.

Unless I can understand the ToS, there's no way I'd use such a site.

Show HN: my new project, an anti-snub dating site

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