3 ms·
Ask HN: Please review my startup, skipscotch.com, our solution to online reviews
Landing page: http://skipscotch.com
Live demo: http://skipscotch.com/home/underdev
Feel free to play around with the demo, although I can't promise speed will be great. The site can be largely experienced w/o a user account, although feel free to create a temp account if you like (fake email or not). I'll delete any accounts/reviews/etc created and hide the URL again after everyone's had adequate time to play around with the site.
Some background info:
For the past 4 months, I've been developing SkipScotch, a starting point to increase credibility of online reviews. It's not the ultimate solution, but I'm thinking the structure is in place to get started down the right path. Some highlights:
- Reviews are given based on service experienced, and ratings are calculated per service offered. Currently, we are planning on the basic average of reviews to calculate ratings, but we have a more accurate weighted average designed that we'd love to implement (we'd need a decent amount of reviews for the weighted average to matter). Read about the weighted average at http://blog.skipscotch.com/2011/11/only-way-to-do-reviews-right-way-is-to.html (it's mentioned towards the end of the post)
- Reviews can be up-voted/down-voted by users. Points awarded for reviews contribute to a reviewer's 'wisdom' score
- Scoring reviews/reviewers based on quality should increase credibility of reviews in SkipScotch. We have plenty of future goals with these credibility scores, like utilizing them in a weighted average, review filter, reviewer ranks, and rewards for respected reviewers.
- Individual reviewers can be 'trusted', which provides a new trusted rating along with the public rating
- Events can exist per service and are searchable through the basic search. Examples currently implemented are trivia and karaoke nights
Reviews and ratings are randomly generated for demo purposes. Businesses and events are real and accurate. Reviews show up in each service's show page, simply so they can be experienced regardless of service visited. Our revenue model exists, but I won't get into it here. Just wanted to highlight that we haven't overlooked it.
There's 2 founders, but I'm the only developer. This has been entirely bootstrapped. I did not know RoR (what the site is built with) prior to developing SkipScotch, although I've been a full-time software engineer for 3 years. Design is also not my specialty, so I realize there may be issues with it.
I'd love any feedback you can offer, especially on strategy and product launch. I realize it'll be tough to solve the chicken and egg problem, but I have a few strategies in mind (if you have some, I'd love to hear them!).
Any signups we can get through the landing page will be greatly appreciated. Feel free to contact me directly at founders@skipscotch.com for any reason whatsoever. Cheers and many thanks!
- jhdavids8 15y agoClickable links: Landing page: http://skipscotch.com http://skipscotch.com Live demo: http://skipscotch.com/home/underdev http://skipscotch.com/home/underdev
- michaeldhopkins 15y agoI wish it was a startup related to scotch. Anyway... Wisdom isn't a metric I trust if it's just users voting each other up. Seems like something a few spammers could easily game, right? Also, what does skipping to something do?
- jhdavids8 15y agoDefinitely a concern, as reviews likely have less exposure than something like Reddit and HN posts. We have a few strategies in mind where users will either earn votes or have limited votes available. For example, users could only vote when above a certain wisdom score and/or could only vote, say, 10 times a day. These are strategies we'll have to emperiment with. Skipping is a fun feature I added to try to evolve into a social feature. Many users use review sites to plan trips, so we added this. Basically, you 'skip' to any number of places you like, which forms a sort of itinerary with directions and ETAs. In the future, we'd love to expand this feature a bit, allowing users to share their 'skips' with friends,or possibly even advertise public and/or private skips (think of a bar crawl for example).
- michaeldhopkins 15y agoSkipping sounds great! I'd love to socially plan a whole evening out with my friends using a site like that, factoring in drive times and everything. In my opinion that's more interesting than review quality, although reviews are of course also important.
- jhdavids8 15y agoAwesome! So a strategy mentioned to us before is highlight the skip feature, pull in reviews from sites like Yelp, Google, etc, and focus on that. This way, we'd have ratings for each business, displayable via the map in the site, and the skip feature allowing you to focus on trip planning through third party reviews. Something we'll definitely have to consider, although breaking reviews out per service would be so much more helpful in trip planning, IMO