

TipJoy Launches (YC winter 08) - jamiequint
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/02/10/tipjoy-a-better-tip-jar-for-content/

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murrayh
Fantastic, I look forward to seeing this service take off. However, I think
you have a major (and seemingly hidden) issue: trust.

Don't get me wrong, I don't think you guys are out to swindle me or anything
(quite the opposite), but honestly your website sets my 'dodgy brothers'
sensor tingling. The main source of information, the FAQ, intermingles sales
pitches with fragmented bites of detail about how the service actually works.
Most of the FAQ is fluff, with the few facts hidden amongst it. I have several
questions about how the service works. For example: When do you take your cut?
What happens to uncollected funds? If I donate 10c to someone, am I going to
be sent an email demanding payment 5 times a day? (I am not asking for a
response on these questions here – I think this information should be on the
website itself).

At the moment, if I use your service, I know what is going to happen in a
general sense (and I had to read thoroughly to even get this far), but I don't
know all the details. Because I don't know the details, I have to trust that
you are going to do these right. But why should I trust you to do that? If you
were trustworthy, wouldn't you be upfront in the first place? The more I have
to trust you, the less willing I am going to be to trust you.

Also, be-careful of how you advertise yourselves. Quite a few statements in
that FAQ are quite strange, like discussing passing on future savings to the
tip receivers, and the whole money transfer service thing. Why are you asking
for more of my trust, or my help? Me... help a company? You're supposed to be
helping me! I don't want to trade with you because you're going to be help me
in the future, I want to trade with you because you are going to help me right
now. So you just need to sell your current rates and features convincingly.
Don't get me wrong, slash your prices as soon as you can, but don't promise
you will, just do it and let everyone know you've done it when you've done it.
You can't tell me you're customer orientated; almost every company says it.
Let your customers tell me (word of mouth style, not via your home-page :-) ).

I believe this trust to be an extremely important issue for you to deal with,
because you aren't some website asking for my email address, you are a website
dedicated to handling money transfers.

“If I were king of the zoo,” I would drop the FAQ format and split the
information out into two separate sections. The first would be your selling
page, something that compels customers to try the service. The second would be
simple, no fluff, factual explanation of what happens. Screenshots, diagrams,
and examples can make all the difference.

Sorry, I don't mean to be so negative. You guys have the opportunity to make
something great; its excites a man such as myself!

~~~
ivankirigin
Don't be sorry for good feedback! Thanks.

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dood
Very interesting, the most promising implementation of the micropayments
concept I've seen yet. I love the ruthless simplicity of their approach, just
looking at the url-entry box conjured up a half-dozen sites I had semi-
subconsciously intended to tip as soon as the right solution comes along.

Though I hope they find a way around the possible problem of people spamming
tips or just frivolously IOUing. Ideally once the thing gets some momentum,
people will have a small pool of cash in their account so that the proportion
of IOUs goes down, and the benefit of using the site become clear. But they'll
have to get to that point quickly enough sustain interest.

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mdemare
What a fantastic idea! You've created not just a start-up but a social
experiment. I have no idea if it'll work, but I love the idea of separating
the act of tipping and the act of paying.

Do users get a reputation based on the proportion of tips they eventually pay
out? Can you force users to tip (e.g. you must tip before you get to read this
article, regardless of whether you're going to pay eventually).

And please make it multi-lingual! I'd love to try out a tipping-based business
model, but just English won't cut it for me.

Nice to see another great idea in the winter batch, btw!

~~~
ivankirigin
Eventually we're going to open up an extremely configurable API. It will allow
you to create your own micropayments engine, and determine the distribution
model of your content. Internationalization is also on the roadmap. Maybe
we'll tip users who help out :)

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henning
Suggestion: rel=nofollow for ranked sites. The spammers are already tipping
sites that they want to jack up the pagerank of.

~~~
tipjoy
Hi, Abby from Tipjoy here. One exciting aspect of tipjoy is that the ranking
is determined by the amount of PAID tips something has received. Right now
nothing’s yet been paid (except for a little bit we’ve put in ourselves), so
the top tip list has the spam you've mentioned. However, as people begin to
pay for their tips (by hitting the ‘pay’ button in the upper right corner of
tipjoy.com when signed in), the most popular tip list will start to evolve to
reflect what’s really worth money to people.

That being said, we're probably going to add a "safe for work" mode, which you
can toggle to hide questionable content.

~~~
henning
I'm glad you're aware of this. I don't know much about blackhat SEO, but if
Tipjoy becomes an "authority site" such that getting a link from you would be
the difference between page 2 and page 1 of a SERP, they'd gladly pay more
than a few dollars for big-revenue keywords relating to gambling, porn, and
finance.

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imsteve
TC commentors are a//holes. Well I think this is a decent product. This
problem area has definitely been in need of a decent solution.

~~~
nickb
First of all, congrats to Ivan & Abigail! It's a great product and they did a
great job.

As for criticism, I'm always reminded of this quote:

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong
man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The
credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred
by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short
again and again; because there is not effort without error and shortcomings;
but who does actually strive to do the deed; who knows the great enthusiasm,
the great devotion, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best
knows in the end the triumph of high achievement and who at the worst, if he
fails, at least he fails while daring greatly. So that his place shall never
be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.” ~
Theodore Roosevelt

~~~
far33d
"In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little yet enjoy a
position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment.
We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the
bitter truth we critics must face, is that in the grand scheme of things, the
average piece of junk is more meaningful than our criticism designating it
so." - Anton Ego

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tolmasky
This is really cool, it feels much more personal than being stuck with an ad.
Hilariously though, on TechCrunch this has become a moral discussion over the
virtues of tipping at Starbucks.

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DaniFong
Hi TipJoy! Great concept! I was thinking about similar ideas, but didn't come
up with two of your clever solutions: aggregation of micropayments to increase
efficiency, and giftcards to avoid regulation. But I didn't want to give up on
it, because I thought it would be good for the world. I'm glad to see you guys
have already built it, and I'm very impressed with the execution!

I might make a suggestion though. While Amazon is great, I'd like to think, or
home, at a few people getting tips would be basically able to live off them
for a time, and that means they'd need to either get cash, or be able to use
tips to pay for living expenses. It might be troublesome to get a deal, but
I'd love to see grocery stores as a source of giftcards.

Many thanks, and a hearty congratulations, Kirigins!

~~~
ivankirigin
Do you mean a gift card to a grocery store? Does this work for you?
[http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html/ref=gw_br_gro?%5Fencodi...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html/ref=gw_br_gro?%5Fencoding=UTF8&node=16310101)

Just kidding!

I think the real solution is clearly to put in the legwork to become a
licensed money transfer service. We fully intend to, but simply can't afford
it till we close a Series A. So not to sound like a broken record, but use the
service so we can impress VCs :-D

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thorax
I really want to see this allow sites to integrate TipJoy between their own
users. If you offer a small, tiny cut to sites who do this, I think this will
grow by leaps and bounds across the net. Imagine if you could leave a tip for
some of the crazy cool comments people submit here on TC. I know I'd do it.

Encourage other companies to put TipJoy on their sites (by letting them have a
percentage of peer-to-peer donations) and everyone wins, especially you.

~~~
ph0rque
Sounds like a call for an API.

~~~
ivankirigin
Tipjoy is actually just the first user of a system I'm calling Millipaid. It
will be a completely customizable micropayments solution. Before then, we'll
release Tipjoy Platform. The site owners get a cut, and the content creators
get a cut. It will be up to the platform to decide the distribution. Video
sites could really benefit from it. So could sites like thesixetyone, twitter,
etc.

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pmjordan
Best approach to micropayment yet. In fact, this one may well succeed. I can't
think of a way to improve the mechanism - sure, it'd be nice if the tips were
cash redeemable, but I realise it's not your fault, and you've made the
situation pretty clear.

I know it's been mentioned by others, but I think your site layout needs a
little work. In particular, your mechanism is pretty simple, yet you hide it
in some text in your FAQ. Put up a "how does it work" page with a flowchart or
something.

Oh, one more thing: what about mentioning the tip amount on the "Tip this"
button? I know, it would make it marginally bigger, but I think it would help,
psychologically. People are probably (well, I am) very wary to press a button
that _implies_ payment (if they've not signed up) or actually "destructively"
affects their balance with no check-back confirmation. (if they have) Putting
the amount right there would definitely put peoples' mind at ease.

I've not read your client-side code, but I'm guessing you guys have made a
decent effort to avoid cross-site scripting fraud where embedded buttons are
auto-clicked by a malicious script or something. Right?

In any case, keep up the good work!

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mynameishere
I can't come up with any big objections to this, and I usually don't have
trouble with that (except for the usual: It's purely speculative whether it
will gain traction or not.)

It will be interesting to see if bloggers, _et al_ , start playing to the
gallery if they get used to "tips".

One suggestion: Allow a way for website owners to 'redirect' a portion of a
tip jar's tip to the creator of a particular piece of content.

~~~
ivankirigin
Lots of blogs are really good at finding the best things on the internet, and
delivering them to readers. The content creators clearly should get most of
any tips, but the "finders fee" is also an important part.

We intend on building this. The challenge will be making it clear that the
button goes in part to both people. We really don't want to make users think
too much about tipping.

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plusbryan
Awesome idea guys. Unfortunately, no matter how hard I try, I can't get it to
work with my site (mobmov.org). Also, it screws up my layout with that inline
iframe you inject, which limits my options as to where to put it. Can't wait
for the next iteration though, keep up the good work!

~~~
tipjoy
It could be because we originally weren't allowing people to tip themselves,
which was causing a slew of problems since (of course) people wanted to try
out the button on their site. That was just a big UI oversight on my part;
sorry. We've pushed a change out there now, so if you try to tip yourself the
button says 'thanks' but instead of 'give more' it says 'you own this!' to the
left. Hopefully this will solve your problem. Please email us if it doesn't.
Regarding the layout, we'll work on improvements to that and will announce an
update on our blog once it's ready.

~~~
plusbryan
that was it, thanks for the quick response and resolution. :-)

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garbowza
Awesome concept and execution. This has alot of potential!

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Alex3917
It would be cool if there were a way to leave a tipjar in the
comments/threads/diaries of social sites.

~~~
ivankirigin
That is an excellent idea. We'll have to think about how to do this correctly.
Thanks

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aston
Cool stuff.

Quick gripe: On the main page, you show sites sans subdomain, but you seem to
be tracking money based on subdomain, so for example techcrunch.com has two
entries.

~~~
ivankirigin
We changed the domain display to include subdomains. Just a different regex.

I need to change the check to see if a URL is already in the system. I cut off
the protocol part, but forgot to cut off the www, i.e. <http://google.com>
matches google.com, but not www.google.com or <http://www.google.com>.

This will be fixed very soon.

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barns
Nice experiment. A couple bug reports: The Tip button doesn't work in IE. And,
I found TechCrunch on the list of the sites twice!!! One with www. and one
without it.

~~~
mdemare
I also have a few bug reports: \- while signing in it said that my email-
address was already taken, and did I left my pwd blank. Highly unlikely and
no. \- in safari I can't move my cursor around in the email-address field
because you jump to the end at each keypress.

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mattmaroon
Congrats Ivan and Abbey. I'll be adding it to my blog immediately.

Everyone please be sure to give me lots of money so they'll have nice stats to
show on Demo Day.

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Prrometheus
Ay, financial regulations suck, which is why banks haven’t changed a whole
hell of a lot in the last 100 years.

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tx
Finally! The need for a service like this has always been around. Your
execution is excellent too.

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ivankirigin
Thanks all! back to bug fixing...

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dbrush
Many congratulations to you both.

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nostrademons
Congrats, Kirigins!

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immad
congrats guys

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boredguy8
So, I get to have an ADDITIONAL amount cut from tips (beyond what PayPal does)
-AND- I don't get cash...

~~~
ivankirigin
People don't really tip online because PayPal is a pain. Amazon's micropayment
system takes 20%. We take a few percentage points. As we get more efficient at
the financial operations, we'll pass on savings to the content creators.

