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So Tinder for parents is a terrible idea. (Full disclosure: my wife's a Peanut member. She's been meaning to uninstall it for a while.) Think about the key o

So Tinder for parents is a terrible idea. (Full disclosure: my wife's a Peanut member. She's been meaning to uninstall it for a while.) Think about the key observations that made Tinder take over the dating space: people are basically superficial and judge who to go out with based on looks alone; people have spare time to flip through photos; people want to be casual and not invest too much in a date before getting to know them. These are the exact opposite qualities that you want in a mom-friend. When you're a new mom you're probably not looking your best, and putting up a profile picture isn't high on your list of things to do. You don't give a shit what your mom friends look like, and once you're reading through text it's more like "Facebook for moms". You have very little free time to swipe through profiles, and when you do, you want your mom-friend-relationships to count. There's a lesson there for people who want to phrase their startup idea as "X for Y". You should ask how similar Y is to the userbase that originally made X popular, and whether you are capturing the qualities they have in common or just randomly cargo-culting a successful product. "Flickr for video" works because a photo-viewing community and video-viewing community are substantially similar: they both have similar casual interactions around shared multimedia, and they both benefit heavily from recommendations, discovery mechanisms, and social sharing. Similarly, "Google for China" works because people in China have information needs too yet actual Google has an antagonistic relationship with the CCP. "Uber for laundry" and "Uber for housecleaning" are both terrible ideas because Uber's value proposition is that you can get transportation on-demand and it can be done by unskilled people as long as they get you safely to your final destination, while both housecleaning and laundry are stuff you do once a week, on a planned basis, and you really want to trust the people who are doing it. "Uber for grocery delivery" (Instacart/UberEats/DoorDash/Postmates) is a decent idea, though, because grocery delivery is also something you want on-demand, do regularly, and can be done by basically anyone.

greggman2 7y ago
me being stupid but I actually thought flickr for video would fail because video takes more work than photos to create and because it takes more time to view them. clearly I was wrong
- rhizome 7y ago
  The part that gets me with video is the upload time. Do people just have faster connections than me, or is the secret to create a phone app that restricts the files to greatly reduced resolutions? Seems like flickr for video would require greater bandwidth or time requirements, but I might simply be clueless.
  - jlokier 7y ago
    Mobile data has been fast enough for many years now, depending where you live. My 2 year old phone has 20Mbit/s upload and 79Mbit/s download on a good day. I don't upload videos, but if I did I expect that's fast enough in the background. The phone upload is way faster than my "fiber" connection at home was, when I still had one.
    - rhizome 7y ago
      I think common speeds are enough for 15-120sec of video up to pretty large resolutions, but for 30min or more? YouTube commonly has multi-hour videos, do people just let their uploads run for a week or three? Families especially would probably not appreciate Dad filling the upload pipe with last week/s baseball games all the time. It may be obvious at this point that I don't know a lot about the producer side of internet video, and I'm sure there are 15 years worth of tools and techniques out there, but I'd be curious what the tolerances and expectations of users. YT probably pays a lot of money for focus groups to get that data, though.
      - jlokier 7y ago
        At 20Mbit/s upload speed, the upload is 2x faster than real-time at Youtube's recommended encoding settings for 1080P (what was called "Full HD video"), and equal to YT's recommended encoding settings for 1440P. So at that rate, Dad can fill the upload pipe continuously, with 24x7 real-time streaming at 1080P and there will still be half a pipe left over for everyone else. The family might not even notice. However, at some ADSL upload speeds (say 2Mbit/s, which is a bit slow for ADSL in 2019), the upload is considerably slower than real-time. It might take 5 hours to upload a 1 hour video in 1080P. That's tolerable enough for a committed long video producer. I'm sure video producers have been doing multi-hour or overnight uploads for years. They don't need to run for weeks.
snegu 7y ago
Oh yes, I agree, Peanut is terrible. I recently moved to a new area and left all my mom friends behind, so I was desperate for a way to find new ones, but it's useless. There needs to be an OK Cupid for moms.
dkarl 7y ago
I found the best thing about Tinder when I used it was that by stripping down information and interaction to the bare minimum, it gets people face-to-face quickly with few established expectations, which is the best way to get to know anybody. There is so much about a person you can't learn through a web site or an app, and conventional dating sites worked very hard at getting you to invest a lot of time and work into interactions that only gave you a false sense of knowing someone. With Tinder you just showed up thinking literally only "I have seen a couple of okay pictures of this person and they thought my pictures and two lines of text seemed acceptable as well" which really set expectations appropriately and let you schedule a lot of dates without feeling disappointed about the outcome. I can see that making a lot of sense for parents. The last thing they need is another high-pressure, high-judgment thing in their lives. Much better to meet someone and feel like it's no big deal if something doesn't click on either side. At least that sounds plausible to me.
- nostrademons 7y ago
  It doesn't work with the reality of being a parent. There's no such thing as low-stress, low-commitment way of meeting people when you have an infant or toddler. At the very least, you need to arrange for a spouse to take the kid or deal with their retinue (car seat, stroller or baby carrier, snacks, water, milk, bib, baby wipes, and diaper). At worst, you need to arrange for a sitter, schedule everything, communicate all the baby's needs to the sitter, and be available in case anything goes wrong. The closest to a low-stress outing for parents is "I'm going to be at this playground in this park for an hour on Saturday morning, and whoever wants to join me is welcome to come." You're at a playground anyway, so if nobody shows up it's an ordinary Saturday morning with the kid. It's time-boxed so you can often get away without the snack/milk/diaper/mealtime accouterments. Scheduling is what you'd have to do anyway, and similar to what other parents have to do. This is how my wife actually meets and hangs out with most of her mom friends. They're usually organized over Facebook though; there's no need for a separate app for it.
  - luckydata 7y ago
    I have a different perspective as an immigrant and parent of a toddler: Americans make it a lot harder than it needs to be. My friends in Europe do all kind of things with their little kids, constantly meet friends... Americans have a LOT of excuses but at the core they just don't prioritize social life above other considerations.

greggman2 7y ago

me being stupid but I actually thought flickr for video would fail because video takes more work than photos to create and because it takes more time to view them. clearly I was wrong

rhizome 7y ago
The part that gets me with video is the upload time. Do people just have faster connections than me, or is the secret to create a phone app that restricts the files to greatly reduced resolutions? Seems like flickr for video would require greater bandwidth or time requirements, but I might simply be clueless.
- jlokier 7y ago
  Mobile data has been fast enough for many years now, depending where you live. My 2 year old phone has 20Mbit/s upload and 79Mbit/s download on a good day. I don't upload videos, but if I did I expect that's fast enough in the background. The phone upload is way faster than my "fiber" connection at home was, when I still had one.
  - rhizome 7y ago
    I think common speeds are enough for 15-120sec of video up to pretty large resolutions, but for 30min or more? YouTube commonly has multi-hour videos, do people just let their uploads run for a week or three? Families especially would probably not appreciate Dad filling the upload pipe with last week/s baseball games all the time. It may be obvious at this point that I don't know a lot about the producer side of internet video, and I'm sure there are 15 years worth of tools and techniques out there, but I'd be curious what the tolerances and expectations of users. YT probably pays a lot of money for focus groups to get that data, though.
    - jlokier 7y ago
      At 20Mbit/s upload speed, the upload is 2x faster than real-time at Youtube's recommended encoding settings for 1080P (what was called "Full HD video"), and equal to YT's recommended encoding settings for 1440P. So at that rate, Dad can fill the upload pipe continuously, with 24x7 real-time streaming at 1080P and there will still be half a pipe left over for everyone else. The family might not even notice. However, at some ADSL upload speeds (say 2Mbit/s, which is a bit slow for ADSL in 2019), the upload is considerably slower than real-time. It might take 5 hours to upload a 1 hour video in 1080P. That's tolerable enough for a committed long video producer. I'm sure video producers have been doing multi-hour or overnight uploads for years. They don't need to run for weeks.

snegu 7y ago

Oh yes, I agree, Peanut is terrible. I recently moved to a new area and left all my mom friends behind, so I was desperate for a way to find new ones, but it's useless. There needs to be an OK Cupid for moms.

dkarl 7y ago

I found the best thing about Tinder when I used it was that by stripping down information and interaction to the bare minimum, it gets people face-to-face quickly with few established expectations, which is the best way to get to know anybody. There is so much about a person you can't learn through a web site or an app, and conventional dating sites worked very hard at getting you to invest a lot of time and work into interactions that only gave you a false sense of knowing someone. With Tinder you just showed up thinking literally only "I have seen a couple of okay pictures of this person and they thought my pictures and two lines of text seemed acceptable as well" which really set expectations appropriately and let you schedule a lot of dates without feeling disappointed about the outcome. I can see that making a lot of sense for parents. The last thing they need is another high-pressure, high-judgment thing in their lives. Much better to meet someone and feel like it's no big deal if something doesn't click on either side. At least that sounds plausible to me.

nostrademons 7y ago
It doesn't work with the reality of being a parent. There's no such thing as low-stress, low-commitment way of meeting people when you have an infant or toddler. At the very least, you need to arrange for a spouse to take the kid or deal with their retinue (car seat, stroller or baby carrier, snacks, water, milk, bib, baby wipes, and diaper). At worst, you need to arrange for a sitter, schedule everything, communicate all the baby's needs to the sitter, and be available in case anything goes wrong. The closest to a low-stress outing for parents is "I'm going to be at this playground in this park for an hour on Saturday morning, and whoever wants to join me is welcome to come." You're at a playground anyway, so if nobody shows up it's an ordinary Saturday morning with the kid. It's time-boxed so you can often get away without the snack/milk/diaper/mealtime accouterments. Scheduling is what you'd have to do anyway, and similar to what other parents have to do. This is how my wife actually meets and hangs out with most of her mom friends. They're usually organized over Facebook though; there's no need for a separate app for it.
- luckydata 7y ago
  I have a different perspective as an immigrant and parent of a toddler: Americans make it a lot harder than it needs to be. My friends in Europe do all kind of things with their little kids, constantly meet friends... Americans have a LOT of excuses but at the core they just don't prioritize social life above other considerations.