

Rate my startup: Adore.ly - hobonumber1
http://www.adore.ly

======
RBr
You need to get rid of this error:
[https://img.skitch.com/20110209-rtu2pqwq6kqjqrdeuf34y6p2ep.j...](https://img.skitch.com/20110209-rtu2pqwq6kqjqrdeuf34y6p2ep.jpg)

I like the idea. The execution was well done. Clean, simple, easy. Your
initial landing / signup page needs some work. You did a good job of
instilling trust, but I didn't know what your service did. This will have a
negative impact on signups.

1) Make a video introduction. Do some grass roots stuff like sponsoring a rose
exchange at a few local schools (might be a bit late for Valentines day now).
Write a press release _today_ \- this is newsworthy with the proximity to
Valentines day and newsies are struggling for feelgood stories. Get some
testimonials. Find out when someone gets married after using your service and
do something huge. Take out some Facebook ads. Do some in-game sponsorships
with facebook games.

2) Users. Your product is built around users. Your product balances on trust
and if you monetize too early, you won't stand a chance of being trusted.
Switch when marketing is no longer a problem and something you do to continue
to push the product.

3) In order: Trust, scaling technology, competing services from people with
money, the "one off" usage case.

4) The design is well done. You start building trust on the first page. Inside
of the app, your product is easy to understand. It's fun. I didn't like the
error message above. The number of modal popups got annoying fast. There was
nothing to do "after" I sent my note.

~~~
hobonumber1
Great points!!!

1) WIP - we're only 2 devs and one business guy! 2) Agreed - its all about the
users. 3) Good points, we agree with this - we just wanted to see if there are
valid opposing viewpoints. 4) We'll fix the error message and figure out what
to do after you send the adore. Thanks for bringing this to our attn!

~~~
RBr
"we're only 2 devs and one business guy!"

You're in Waterloo? I'm local. If you'd like to chat x@y where: x = rob.brown
and y = gmail.com

------
hobonumber1
It started as an app for the University of Waterloo Facebook hackathon but
it's taken off since then. We launched 4 days ago. We have seen decent growth.
So what is it?

Adore.ly lets you adore a friend on your friendlist and your identity stays
anonymous unless they adore you back.

We're looking for feedback on everything from interface, to troll and creep
protection. Our questions are:

1) How do we keep growing? Is it launching features, or focussing on
promotional stuff? 2) Do we focus on users or focus on monetizing? When do the
priorities switch? 3) What are the challenges you think we face? 4) What do
you like about the app? What don't you like?

Thanks guys for your feedback.

~~~
petervandijck
\- Love love the basic idea.

\- Focus on promotion.

\- Get users, don't monetize until you're at least a year in.

\- Don't launch features. Make your existing feature better (by keeping the
creeps out, increasing its viral factor etc, all the backend stuff that's
actually really hard, versus adding comments and likes, which is easy.)

\- You can slowly add little interactions, but stay away from commenting,
private messages etc for a loooong time, that's not where your value is.

\- Again, don't add "standard" features like comments, profile pictures etc,
since that will just dilute your positioning.

~~~
vicngtor
"increasing its viral factor" Care to recommend a few?

------
dchs
I remember an email version of this app about 10 years ago - I loved it for a
bit surreptitious flirting at school!

The app looks really great and the signup process is straightforward with
clear CTAs. Alas the FB integration makes it rather slow (maybe I have too
many friends? ;). It seems to loads friends each time I open the page - could
this not be cached? It took me a moment to realise the grey box was a friend
selector; it might help to make it white and give it focus on page load. It
couldn't seem to grab my girlfriend's email address and asked me to type it in
(making me wonder why integrate with FB at all).

There's no way for me to share content on either FB or Twitter. I'd be happy
to post to my wall (and tweet) that "I just adored someone with adore.ly".

If you're trying to build up UGC then I'd happily rate a few anonymous adores
and I'd be interested to see the wittiest/cutest ones.

For user retention, consider email updates: 1. thank you for signing up, 2.
thank you for sending your first adore, 3. it's been a few days, time to send
another adore? And for the receiver: sending a second (and third) email a week
or two later if they haven't clicked through to the site. The option to opt-
out of emails is important but the granularity of notifications settings looks
good. I also hope you have a Valentine's day promotion lined up!

I'd forget about making money until you have say ten thousand users and I'd
remove the limit of three adores until then too. Then I'd limit adores (to 5)
and users could unlock more adores using a platform like SuperRewards or FB
credits.

If my girlfriend 'adores' me back then I'll get back with what happens...

~~~
vicngtor
Hey,

Initially, we had a "wall posting" feature. User signs up via facebook and it
will give them an option to post on their wall. However, I realized that if we
require wall posting permission right up the front, that would really put off
a lot of people. You see facebook doesn't allow us to change permission half
way and this is one of the drawbacks of the facebook API (even if you like it,
you can't force a permission change).

------
joshuamckenty
Love it, especially the naturally viral nature. Two thoughts:

1\. These things need to expire - or, I need to be emailed and asked to come
back and renew them periodically. I don't want this popping up 2 years from
now and killing my marriage.

2\. Make it easier to understand that it's okay to adore many people.

Bonus thought: Might want to warn people that adoring friends with a very
small number of facebook friends is DANGEROUS.

~~~
hobonumber1
1) Good idea, we have some other ideas on what to do with adores that just
"sit" there. I agree that something needs to be done with them.

2) True - a big counter perhaps.

Bonus: aww, that's the whole fun :P

------
dhbanes
I like the idea. One thing I found confusing at first was the explanation of
how the process works. I had trouble understanding how the system would keep
my adoration private while at the same time providing a meaningful way for the
other person to adore me back. It made more sense after reading the "How does
Adore.ly work?" and seeing that the other person is simply prompted to then
"adore" people from their list of friends, and then triggering only if you
were one of the "adored". Take that observation with a grain of salt, however.
I've never really gotten into Facebook applications.

Also, I'd agree with Peter's advice that you simplify the home page further. I
personally wouldn't put the "No wall posts", "Troll and Creep Proof" on the
front page. It seems to me you'd be inviting objections that weren't present
in the first place more often than not. If the Hacker News crowd was the
target audience, it would probably be different.

Great work and good luck.

------
nicklovescode
I feel like I've seen this idea before, recently. Did you used to have a
video?

Maybe I'm just mixing up startups though

~~~
jimboyoungblood
Not your imagination.

Posted four days ago: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2179649>

Of course, eCrush, crushlink, and many others did this years ago:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymous_matching>

~~~
hobonumber1
Do you really think we could push out an app like this in 4 days? Our
application has FB integration, and is significantly more complicated than
Secretpoke, which is essentially just a mailbot from what I can gather in the
front-end. I'm sorry, but it requires SIGNIFICANT imagination to map the
social graph to who you like and adore.

------
crux_
Counterpoint to a lot of folks here: I don't like the idea.

This sort of thing has been around for a very very long time, mainly as a way
of harvesting email addresses to spam. I remember receiving an email "crush"
that is exactly this as early as 1999.

How is this different at all?

~~~
hobonumber1
I think you are misunderstanding the concept. We don't want to spam you at
all. Our goal is to improve matchmaking by bringing in the social graph. We
are talking friend-to-friend matchmaking here. Its anonymous and there is a
degree of trust between mutual friends. That wasn't there in 1999. There was
only web + email. There was no social graph.

~~~
crux_
Me being a curmudgeon: I'd actually say that the narrow technocratic
definitions imposed by the "social graph" lead to generally _less social_
results. (For an example close at hand, I believe that I did an awful lot of
growing up by confronting fears of rejection and learning to _act_ on an
attraction.)

Me responding to your points: Of course there was a social graph, it just
wasn't reified in a database. Here's how it worked: You got an email saying
someone had a crush on you. Curious to see who it was, you then entered all
your friends & classmates email addresses in to see if there was a match. Not
a whit of difference in what's actually happening; you've just made it shinier
and removed some of the manual data entry.

The "Step 3: ??? that comes before Step 4: profit" was, of course, that all
your friends now received "someone has a crush on you!" emails too, and the
marketer running the site had a nice fat verified mailing list to sell to
unsolicited bulk email operations.

Perhaps it's a failure of my imagination, but I cannot see a way for you to
run this as a profitable business without similarly turning the 'users' into
the product.

~~~
jayzee
_Perhaps it's a failure of my imagination, but I cannot see a way for you to
run this as a profitable business without similarly turning the 'users' into
the product._

That is a criticism not only of this start-up but all other start-ups where
you are not paying a subscription fee. _If you are not paying then you are not
the customer, you are a part of the product._

------
lurkinggrue
Nice, but is it wise to put your startup in Libya's hands?

~~~
vicngtor
I agree.

I wanted to buy adore.me or adore.com

As you can probably guess, none of that was within my financial reach lol.

------
Geee
The design and UX is really nice. The launching page is also great especially
with those promises about privacy etc.

Couple of issues: 1\. "blockup popper", intentional? 2\. Why do I need to
submit the adore's email? I don't buy the explanation about traffic, it should
work without it.

I don't really see the reason why somebody would use (or keep using) this
service, there should be some deeper purpose and the adores would just act as
easy actionables which would initially attract users and keep users active.

Edit: I read the "how does adore.ly work" and it makes more sense! You should
explain this earlier. Well, I see it's there put I didn't get it.

~~~
hobonumber1
Could you clarify what you mean regarding traffic explanation? I didn't get
that part. Your other points are very valid, and we are working on features to
make people come back (multiple times a day) to our service.

Glad "how does adore.ly work" clarified matters, we will try to show that more
prominently!

Thanks so much!

~~~
Geee
I meant the part where it says 'Due to traffic, we need your friends email.' I
don't want to give it.

~~~
vicngtor
We are trying to work around that. Facebook DOES NOT allow us to obtain your
friend's email (without them explicitly agreeing).

~~~
Geee
Why do you need it in the first place? I'd believe there's way to make it work
without the email.

------
petervandijck
Excellent, I love the basic idea (just read it, didn't use it).

You should work on simplifying the homepage further, there's probably still
too much stuff in there. The "how it works" should perhaps be up front, not
behind a click.

~~~
alanh
That said, it’s already _really good_

~~~
yesimahuman
Yes, but remove the focus from what you _don't do_ (post on your wall, reveal
your identity, etc) and focus on what you will do. Put the tag line about what
adorly does above the privacy stuff at least.

~~~
hobonumber1
Through our user testing, we found that users have a bad taste in their mouths
when it comes to using FB apps. It's important to build that trust with them.

I agree with what you're trying to say - maybe we will do both? Then content
size becomes an issue though.

------
sfphotoarts
I don't have facebook so sadly cannot play, my girlfriend does but I don't see
any upside is showing this to her :)

from reading how it works, it seems that it might be a good idea to offer some
hints to bias the match, possibly with location or something that doesn't
identify you but hints at you. 'Someone in your state adores you...' that kind
of thing. Find something in common, analyze 'likes' for example. 'Someone who
also liked Twilight adores you...'

------
kilovoltaire
Cool, I've always thought this would be a good idea.

Do you ask for the adoree's email because you don't get permission to send
them facebook messages? That part seems sketchy / makes it much less useful in
the case where you don't know their email.

Also, a hover with full name on each friend would be very useful, to e.g.
distinguish between every "Ben" with an obscure artsy picture.

I like "blockup popper".

~~~
hobonumber1
facebook messages don't work because facebook doesn't allow applications to
send anonymous messages. The only scalable way is really through email (maybe
SMS).

------
r00fus
Wow. This is nice and great timing for Valentine's day. The concept is very
well done. Agree with RBr, trust is absolutely required.

Why do you need friend list data for the FB login?

~~~
Geee
It's needed so you can adore your friends. You can't do anything on the site
without the friend list.

------
andrewcooke
I can't work out where I turn off my popup blocker (assuming that's what you
mean). Why can't you just use an absolutely positioned div or a new page?

------
honm
If this site takes off, I'm going to be extremely annoyed because I had this
same idea a few months ago but didn't implement it. I'm an idiot.

~~~
dchs
The model has been around for a while - you should give it a go! Your
execution will be different and could be more successful. You'll learn a ton
in the process too.

------
atehleb2
really interesting..and nicely designed.. good luck with your startup! keep an
eye out for competition though..cuz theres a lot!

~~~
hobonumber1
We'd be more worried if there wasn't competition than if there is!

------
drivebyacct2
The "How does it work button"... doesn't work...

JS Console: "Uncaught ReferenceError: FB is not defined"

Disconnect is breaking your page before I even get a chance to give it a
chance.

~~~
r00fus
Are you sure you don't have facebook blocker? I had to turn off that Safari
extension in order for this site to work.

~~~
drivebyacct2
That's what Disconnect does. I think there's a bigger problem if using
Disconnect breaks all javascript on your website though. Especially if it
breaks the piece of text that is supposed to convince me to turn it off.
Additionally, I don't know my crushes/adores' email address...

