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Show HN: my new project, an anti-snub dating site
- bjonathan 16y agoHi 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 http://www.SecretPoke.com
- namityadav 16y agoNot 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 16y agonah man, I love the song. I was able to follow just fine with it.
- Joshim5 16y agoI would also be interested in finding out how you made the video...Thanks!
- bjonathan 16y agoI will post next week a blog post about how we made the site (design+video+copy+testing+user feedback) . For the moment, we are 100% focus on how to improve the product and build a momentum thanks to the feedback we are receiving :)
- bjonathan 16y agoThanks all of you. For the curious a screenshot of the live map of our visitors: http://i.imgur.com/UfXT0.jpg 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 !
- dkarl 16y agoBefore 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.
- TheSOB88 16y agoYou 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.
- dkarl 16y agoI've seen people do equivalent things plenty of times. A group of people at my dorm (guys and girls) conned some poor kid on IRC, got him to reveal embarrassing sexual things about himself, and passed around screen shots. In high school, a girl would go to a guy and say that some other girl wanted her to tell him that she liked him, just so people could be entertained by the consequences. People lose their taste for that as they grow up, but for every kind of growing up there are people who never do. They just become more sophisticated. I've had people reveal private things about other people to me that made my blood run cold at the cruelty required to spread such information, and only for a trivial social advantage. Adults who act that way are apparently rare and not well-liked, but odds are you know a few. You teach a child to be wary when approached by a stranger offering unsolicited favors, but not to be afraid of approaching strangers when they need help. The same principle applies when you are contacted anonymously over the internet and asked to reveal intimate emotional secrets. I agree that becoming withdrawn and inhibited is not the best defense (the best defense is simply being someone other people will stick up for) but the site is targeted at people who cope with social fears by being extremely risk-averse. If you have to be comfortable with the risk of exposure and ridicule in order to use the site, then what's the point, except to be a fun flirty thing for cool people for fifteen minutes? The target users need some assurance that the site delivers on its promise of a less-risky way of revealing their feelings about somebody. Perhaps you're right that they shouldn't, but they do, and that's what matters.
- shadowfirebird 16y agoWell, 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 16y agoIt 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.
- bjonathan 16y agothank 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 http://de.secretpoke.com/set-locale/en We are gonna fix that ASAP thank you !
- bjonathan 16y agoOk it's automatically redirecting to the english version now. Thank you !
- draz 16y agoAn 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.
- bjonathan 16y agoThank 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 16y agoThat 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 16y agoI 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.
- francoisdevlin 16y agoEh, 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?"
- draz 16y agoI 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.
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- michaelcgorman 16y agoWhat happens if I have more than one email address and my crush enters a different one than I did?
- bjonathan 16y agoWe 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 16y agoman some big money was made off this in 2003
- bjonathan 16y agolove to hear that :) Do you remember the name of the website back then?
- Tutorialzine 16y agoI 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.
- tomkarlo 16y agoYeah, I was thinking the same - the site right now looks like something from the pre-social-networking era. I'm not sure if it's possible given FB's privacy/spam controls but that issue aside, doesn't this seem like it would work way better in that context? People usually have crushes on someone already at least in their wide circle of FB friends.
- hncommenter12 16y agoHere's a whole story about them from 2002: http://dir.salon.com/story/tech/feature/2002/08/07/crushmaster/print.html http://dir.salon.com/story/tech/feature/2002/08/07/crushmast...
- bjonathan 16y agoThanks a lot !
- draz 16y agocould 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 :-) )
- sankara 16y agoIn case you didn't know, orkut had this feature for quite sometime. I'm not sure if it's still active though.
- bjonathan 16y agoOh ok I didn't know, I gonna take a look. Thank you for the tips :)
- slig 16y agoNot 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.
- jaredsohn 16y agoBoth 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.)
- marquis 16y agoMay I use this to flirt with my boyfriend?
- bjonathan 16y agoYeah sure! Lot of our users are sending 1 crush, and we are guessing that it's at their loved one .
- pdaddyo 16y agoI 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!
- marquis 16y agoI would hope that my boyfriend would continue the ploy! Though, more than likely he'll send me an email saying someone is flirting with him and, is it me. Not very romantic but he'll get the picture at least that I'm thinking about him.
- axod 16y agoEntering multiple crushes seems a crappy thing to do to me. Be interesting to see how many do that.
- swombat 16y agoWorth pointing out it's just been covered in TechCrunch EU as well: http://eu.techcrunch.com/2011/02/04/not-sure-if-she-likes-you-just-send-her-a-secretpoke/ 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...
- bjonathan 16y agoYeah 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 16y agoNice design and video but the problem with these services is that anonymous mail notifications are generally disregarded as spam by many people.
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- sequoia 16y agoI'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 16y agoI 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 16y agoI 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 16y agoWhat 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 16y agoThis 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.
- mustardhamsters 16y agoI 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.
- mustardhamsters 16y agoMore 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 16y agoThose custom crush messages are just begging for trouble: Hint - "I shagged one of your parents."
- dangero 16y agoThere 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 16y agoVery 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 16y agoLooks like a re-hash of eCRUSH, launched on Valentine's Day, 1999.
- Herald_MJ 16y agoLooks like someone's been taking some of Gabriel Weinberg's advice... (http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2011/02/if-i-were-starting-out-i-would-clone-threewordsme.html http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2011/02/if-i-were-starti...)
- chegra 16y agoOk, 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.
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- mahmud 16y agoPlease DON'T do that. Don't type people's email addresses into whatever forms you come across online.
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- sbov 16y agoAs 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.
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- stefanobernardi 16y agoThis webpage has a redirect loop
- johnrob 16y agoThe 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/ 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.
- bjonathan 16y agoHmm 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 ;)
- dkarl 16y agoI 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 16y agoThanks 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 16y agore: '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 16y agoTypo in first sign-up input box, should be "Your" name.
- bjonathan 16y agoWow 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 ^^)
- vessenes 16y agoI 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.
- Splines 16y agoIf 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 16y agoThere'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.
- vessenes 16y agoThis 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:"
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- nollidge 16y agoIn "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 16y agoYou're unlikely to read it anyway. The ToS uses the most lightest grey text and it's in français.
- perlgeek 16y agoRight now I either get infinite redirection loops for the front page, or internal server errors. Seems somebody hasn't expected so much traffic...
- joshfraser 16y agoI 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 16y agoIm 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.
- mitcheme 16y agoI 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 16y agogreat 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 16y agoThis is very similar to http://www.messageunicorn.com http://www.messageunicorn.com
- BoppreH 16y agoWhat 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.
- AgentConundrum 16y agoI 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.
- jellicle 16y agoHasn'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 16y agoThis 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 16y agoI would never use it, but that video is the cutest thing I've ever seen. Good idea nonetheless.
- ciupicri 16y agoI'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 16y agoI 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.
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