Ask HN: Please provide feedback on our soon-to-launch dating site and widget

http://www.yumbunny.com

by thorax • 17 years ago

21 31 17 years ago

thorax9• 17 years ago

We're finishing up the last few key bugs that we've uncovered over the weekend and wanted to get your input before we start publicizing it. What do you think? Like/dislike?

Thanks, as always.

Jasber2• 17 years ago

Matching people based on looks alone is pretty superficial. I think you're going to have a tough time getting people to adopt this model.

One cool way you could spin this idea is by letting people play match maker. Imagine a Facebook application where a person could set-up two of their friends on a blind date. I think something like this could spread fairly quickly; not to mention people are more willing to accept a friends suggestion rather than a complete strangers.

thorax9• 17 years ago

Thanks for the feedback so quickly!

Regarding looks: Sure, looks are superficial ways to recommend matches, but that's just to get the conversation started (as it is on every dating website, pretty much ever). There's also a key here that you don't get while searching on a traditional site: (in theory) people will recommend matches for you that are actually somewhat attainable rather than everyone drowning the hottest people in contact requests. This should get people closer to more likely matches than they'd get otherwise.

Looks absolutely matter-- and while it is superficial, it's clear that this is what people base first impressions on. We're not looking to be highbrow-- we're looking to help people meet those they'd look good with. I personally agree that I'd hesitate a little, but we tried to find a middleground without going overboard. We'll keep an eye on that, though-- thanks for the feedback there.

As for matchmaking: The idea is for friends to play matchmaker as much/more than random people-- after you signup, you're given a personal widget that matches you up with potential people. And you would send it to friends, embed in your MySpace profile, etc.

For example: http://www.yumbunny.com/public/3FDdUkHKSrSzDy2njcF28u/

Thanks again for the great feedback, keep it coming.

Harkins• 17 years ago

Humans are superficial. Hot or Not was a ridiculously huge success for this reason.

Looks like a good site idea to me, as long as they design to keep down their customer support costs.

Jasber2• 17 years ago

I disagree. Hot or Not was a huge success, but not in the dating market. They launched a dating extension to the website that never really took off (http://meetme.hotornot.com/).

Look at their stats: http://siteanalytics.compete.com/hotornot.com/?metric=uv

People used HotorNot for fun, not for finding real dates. I suspect the case will be the same here.

nsrivast• 17 years ago

What about a 30-second introductory video instead of a picture? I would trust those results much more.

jacoblyles• 17 years ago

That Facebook idea sounds like a lot of fun! Good idea.

falsestprophet2• 17 years ago

I think this a pretty interesting concept. But, I think your branding needs work.

Forgive me for being so blunt, but the name yumbunny is way to creepy and awkward for a dating website. I think it a catchy name that could definitely work for something else.

But the second I loaded the page and saw that guy looking down lasciviously at that way to eager girl, the name became way too much.

yum...bunny. Bunnies are an awful lot like cats (you follow). I just showed this to my roommate's girlfriend; she said, "ew".

A dating website's biggest challenge branding. I am pretty impressed with the branding on downtoearth.com. I think you will be much more successful if you can tone down the creepiness to a basal level like match.com or better achieve negative creepiness like downtoearth.com.

I'm sorry I am not offering other suggestions. If I think of any today, I will post them.

thorax9• 17 years ago

Thanks for the great feedback. :)

We've done lots of user testing so far and get different impressions. The front page image will definitely change and be A/B tested to death once we launch-- it's just what we've got so far.

Note that we're hoping the front page won't be the first thing people see when they encounter YB-- they'll hopefully see it first via the widget on their friends MySpace profile, etc.

Thanks again for the great feedback.

hopeless• 17 years ago

I agree with this. I didn't click the link because I assumed it was either a porn site or an Easter Bunny / Chocolate thing... or even Easter Bunny porn! Really I had no idea what it might be about.

And yeah, matching on looks seems frankly bizarre. Perhaps as a bit of fun, in a hot-or-not way, to construct the most appropriate couples... but actual dating? No.

msluyter• 17 years ago

Agree with you on the name -- "yum" conjures up something delectable while "bunny" makes me think "Playboy Bunny." It connotes a sort of superficiality that would lead me to choose a different dating site.

echair• 17 years ago

If a dating site wants to succeed, it probably doesn't want to aim its message squarely at us...

jrockway• 17 years ago

> It connotes a sort of superficiality that would lead me to choose a different dating site.

It appears that the concept behind that site is that people match your pictures with other people that you would look good with. This is the definition of superficiality.

wheels• 17 years ago

I'm not sure which creeps me out more, the name or the stock photo. I think both need to go.

Unlike other misadventures in naming, with a dating site your users must trust you. It's sudden death there if you mess that up. Even something which registers subconsciously or ambiguously as, "This site is for creeps." will make you dead in the water, which really, in the grand scheme of the amount of work that goes into setting something up, would be a silly reason to do poorly.

jakewolf• 17 years ago

How are you going to prevent rampant abuse from rapid clicking? I was able to click no constantly. Liked how fast new couples load up.

What about a point system for popular accuracy of a users choices?

thorax9• 17 years ago

We want rapid clicking to be fast. Abuse isn't going to be super common because people are going to be bored.

Also "No" doesn't count against anything in our matching algorithm. It's basically just not recommending them for a match. Spamming yes/maybe would end up being averaged out.

We definitely are going to keep track of the best matchmakers in a coming version so we can weigh their pieces better (and also give them some rank/etc to encourage them to make matches).

Thanks for the kind words and great feedback.

falsestprophet2• 17 years ago

How does your matching algorithm work? This seems like a very exciting problem.

thorax9• 17 years ago

There are lots of fun problems in this-- our matching algorithm at the moment is not super complex. Once we have more feedback/data, we will constantly tweak, but the starting plan is to make more successful matchmakers weighed slightly higher over time. And obviously if by random chance two people recommend each other for each other, that'd get a pretty strong rating.

We send matches to the users every week, so we're expecting we don't have to be spot on perfect each week.

Some of the more interesting problems we solved was trying to make this widget as fast and scalable as possible. It's fed entirely from Amazon SQS queues and so has no database access what-so-ever. The entire architecture is designed to scale easily over multiple servers in stages as we need.

Fun stuff all around. Thanks for the feedback!

Angostura• 17 years ago

It's interesting, particularly the crowd-source matchmaking approach.

I suspect the "people who would look great together" meme will put quite a few people off simply because it seems superficial and they won't want to be seen to be overly influenced by looks alone.

You do already expose other information about likes and dislikes, so maybe you could replace "look" with "be"?

On the other hand, I'm not the target demographic. It could be that you will appeal to a rich vein of people who are interested in looks alone, and are happy to be thought of in that way.

Personally, I would be tempted to do some multivariate testing, one with the "be" messaging and one with the "look" messaging and see how results compare.

thorax9• 17 years ago

Great feedback-- we can definitely do that. We went with the more superficial approach to catch people's attention initially and try to raise some eyebrows. I do think I would also prefer to date on a website not exactly termed this way, too-- but we're definitely going to be doing a good bit of testing to see what resonates best. This is our first best guess. :)

auston• 17 years ago

Personally, I think your widget thing will go over really well with teens and some early 20's.

I found it fun - good luck.

As far as feedback goes - maybe ask people for there myspace/facebook profile as well - and think about creating a facebook/myspace app that recommends people (after a threshold of votes) to other people that are single.

psyklic2• 17 years ago

I love dating sites!

In general: Very nice UI! You bill this as a "dating site," but it seems more like Hot-or-Not. If you want it to be a dating site, you'll need to add location, and try to match closer people first. I also think that you should add things like age and only match people similarly.

+ I'm not sure whether your business model will work well ($2.99 for unlimited chatting with someone). I've tried a number of sites, and the chances of a particular person working out is not good -- plus, a lot of people just won't reply after I contact them. More importantly, I'll need to know if someone is CLOSE to me to determine if I'll pay you. Also, your site falls into one of those that I'm distasteful of -- I sign up for the site, and then LATER, I find out there are hidden fees when they aren't initially mentioned.

+ I also feel like there's nothing to "do" on your site. You should have a page where I can see how many people have seen my picture, how many voted yes/no, maybe even to whom they voted yes/no on -- that would be interesting yet not too invasive.

+ Make it clear that the more I vote, the more my picture will be seen -- in other words, if I rate x people, I need to see a noticable increase in the number of people seeing MY picture. This works very well for Facebook apps like Compare People.

+ You may want to approve pictures before they're published. I already saw one in the queue that is non-human, and you could also get pornographic ones.

+ This would be a cool facebook app. Although apps are less prominent nowadays, here's how some current successful ones work -- periodically send me an email about x people voting me as a match or not. Provide a link to your facebook app page in the email that immediately asks me to rate people (more ratings, more views), and a side link to see my stats. This works on me at least!

+ When I first open the page, the larger upper box looked to me like a popup flash ad, and i totally didn't realize that the items on the right were clickable until i accidentally ran my cursor over them.

+ When entering my profile, if I sporadically decide to change my pic midway through, the form forgets everything I entered so far. And maybe the tab order should be both things I like, then things I dislike.

+ I'm not sure what "Loading...please vote to enable this user's queue" means. You should provide a countdown if it matters whether I vote.

+ I also agree with other posters -- "yumbunny" doesn't sound like a dating site haha

thorax9• 17 years ago

These are some great comments. Thanks so much for your time/review/thoughts.

The site is more of an introduction/matchmaking site. I only billed it as a "dating" site in the link I submitted to HNYC because that's kind of the niche it fits in.

Business model: We're testing this out initially to see how it goes. We will be adding location/nearness, but that's not used initially until we reach a critical mass. We definitely weren't trying to hide our messaging costs-- we just didn't want to dissuade people who are just curious from at least getting on the site and seeing matches. I don't want people to get confused and think it costs any money whatsoever to use/match/vote with our site or widgets. We'll keep that impression in mind and do our best to find a better middleground.

Moderation: I 100% agree. We're definitely going to be moderating these pictures before inclusion (a day or two after launch). If you saw a nonhuman it was one of our left-over test images-- we have to track that one down. Sorry about that and thanks for mentioning it.

Facebook: The entire backend is designed to work well as MySpace/Facebook/iPhone apps-- so that's soon on the radar. We wanted to start with the core site and build from there.

On opening the page: We saw that a bit in user testing, too-- so we added the "arrow" and some initial flash animation to encourage clicking. We'll be watching how people handle this and adapting-- thanks for mentioning.

Your other points I absolutely agree with, too-- we'll work on those.

Thanks again!

psyklic2• 17 years ago

I didn't realize I was receiving an activation email, but after I got it I realized you do have Matches/Messages/Share/etc. Perhaps you should make these pages available even before people activate, but mention that they'll have to activate before they become, well, active.

Great job so far!

sam_in_nyc• 17 years ago

What incentive do I have, as a user, to vote on matches? You'd better have some sort of system set up where I cannot view my matches until I rank 10 other matches "accurately," where accurately means I've voted on the most common answer. This is to prevent hitting "Yes!" on 10 really quick so I can continue with what I was doing.

It's a great idea that you crowd source the matchmaking... but I just don't see the users actively making matches unless there is some incentive... probably even points would do.

thorax9• 17 years ago

Yeah, the matchmaker problem we're attacking this way:

* Coming soon, stats/points/levels for matchmakers.

* Users ask their friends to matchmaker for them specifically, and we interleave other matches once in a while to spread out the love.

So far we've had a lot of non-single people who just loved to play matchmaker, so we're hoping that will continue/carry-over as well.

Thanks for the great feedback-- if you have other ideas on increasing matchmakers, we'd love to hear them!

rksprst• 17 years ago

How are you better than engage.com who also does the matchmaking thing?

okeumeni• 17 years ago

At first I went wow another dating site, then I looked at the concept: Original even though it is closer to hot or not. I think the challenge is now to sell your brand and a bit of luck. Congratulation on a lot of hard work and good luck!

vaksel• 17 years ago

congrats on getting covered on Techcrunch

Ask HN: Please provide feedback on our soon-to-launch dating site and widget

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