
Show HN: A platform for women to crowd-source advice in confidence - sanchitasaha
https://shello.com
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sanchitasaha
Creator here: as a female tech founder since 2009 I found it tough finding a
network of women to share my experiences with. More recently but for a while
now I've been a member of a bunch of women-only groups across FB, linkedin and
a couple forums too and trying to stay on track with whats going on on each
platform has got out of control.

So I created Shello to cut down on time spent across multiple plaforms and
where women could ask questions on any topic from a single app experience, get
great advice and build new female connections in the process. You can find out
more about it at: [https://www.shello.com/about-
us/](https://www.shello.com/about-us/)

Please let me know any questions, we're just starting out so any feedback as
well would be super helpful.

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blueadept111
I don't get it, what problem is this app solving by excluding men from giving
or asking for advice as well?

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sanchitasaha
Hey blueadept11, women have very different experiences and challenges to men
when it comes to most aspects of their lives, from careers, to body matters
and relationships. So the advice we look for and share is often only relevant
to other women. The way we talk in person with other women can be different to
how we talk in public, much more personal way. So Shello aims to be bring that
intimacy and freedom to talk and ask questions openly online and the only way
we can do that is to make it just for women.

~~~
blueadept111
That's quite a leap from saying that certain topics are only relevant for
women to saying that it's about freedom. Nobody is preventing women from
talking about these topics in any other forum. You're saying that the
advantage of perceived intimacy is greater than the disadvantage of losing the
broader perspective that includes men. If I was in a bad mood, I'd say it's
classic ingroup/outgroup psychology, which is latently ugly.

But I'm in a good mood, so I'll only say that there's nothing intimate about
an environment where everyone is anonymous.

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sgslo
I don't understand the purpose of your comments here.

The author is creating a platform for one group of people to discuss their
common issues. In this case, that the common feature between people in this
group is gender.

Other platforms exist for discussion between people with common attributes. An
example is cancer survivors. Discussion in a cancer survivor group should
probably be limited to cancer survivors. Do you think that people who have not
experienced cancer first or second hand would have a good reason to post their
problems in that group? I can imagine the posts now - "I haven't had cancer or
experienced it in any form but here's how you should deal with chemotherapy."
That's probably not appropriate.

~~~
blueadept111
How about a "no African Americans allowed" forum, for fostering "intimacy" for
people who need a place to freely talk about issues limited to those who
aren't African American?

I'd say that kind of group is latently hostile because it seeks exclusion
rather than to encourage a broader perspective, and discussion topics probably
center around the excluded group (ingroup/outgroup). Seems like a good litmus
test.

~~~
sgslo
I know what you're trying to get at here, that forming a 'women-only' group is
selecting against men by allowing them to join, and that selection isn't fair.

Cmon, be real. There are discussion groups that select against other parties.
Some of these groups are socially acceptable (cancer survivors, people in
debt, _women 's issues_). Other's might not be socially acceptable (excluding
people based on their skin color).

In this case, a group to discuss women's issues is socially acceptable to a
majority of people. If you're unhappy with this standard then go campaign
against it somewhere else, don't try to poo-poo the OP's app.

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mediocrejoker
How does this differ from something like eg.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/AskWomen/](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskWomen/)

~~~
sanchitasaha
Thanks for the question. A key difference is that we use real names and
photos, and as Shello is only app-based the conversations stay private behind
a login. Also, on Shello we have topic groups and you can sign up to see
questions and posts just to those topics that interest you. Other than that
there is a lot of similarity in that its a community of women responding and
conversing with other women on issues that matter to them.

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seapunk
Hey, good work I think to have everything in one place is better. I saw it’s
not your first startup you built another app before (citysocializer). Two
questions: How many members do you have on Shello and do you think your
crowdsourced advices could be available on the web soon or you plan to keep
them in a private sphere?

~~~
sanchitasaha
Thanks seapunk, yes my passion and background is building communities. We just
came out of closed beta last month and have a couple thousand users who are
highly engaged. Good question and something we’re still thinking about. If we
do release our content on web it will be just that ie. no user data exposed
and no planned web experience.

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jirenandcell
Nice Work! Where did you get your first users? Does the platform cater for
non-english speakers?

~~~
sanchitasaha
Thanks jirenandcell. We invited some of our female community from
citysocializer initially, then got a whole bunch of new users from product
hunt and then it's been through word of mouth referrals. Right now its only in
English and majority of our userbase is US and UK, but we will look to
implement more languages as we grow.

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juliankeenaghan
Looks cool. It is all forum based advice or can you message privately?

~~~
sanchitasaha
Thanks Julian, yea you can message privately for one to one conversations.
It’s something being used a lot and helping women to connect more personally

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rinchik
Is it only for biological women? Can someone who identifies as a woman use
this platform? I don't see any information on the site. Does this platform
foster inclusiveness or exclusiveness?

~~~
sanchitasaha
Hi Rinchik, we have an LGBTQ group on Shello so we welcome anyone who
identifies as a woman.

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gitgud
It says you can remain anonymous, so what's to stop men from joining? Is it
moderated?... Just seems like a sexist forum...

~~~
sanchitasaha
Hi gitgud, you can choose to post your questions anonymously but you still
have to sign up with a real and validated profile. We find that only 20% of
posts are anonymous and the remainder women are posting openly as themselves.
We only allow the person posting anonymously to stay anonymous in that
conversation. But no-one is allowed to answer a post anonymously. We use real
names and real photos too.

