

Ask HN: Please provide feedback on our soon-to-launch dating site and widget - thorax
http://www.yumbunny.com

======
falsestprophet
I think this a pretty interesting concept. But, I think your branding needs
work.

Forgive me for being so blunt, but the name yumbunny is way to creepy and
awkward for a dating website. I think it a catchy name that could definitely
work for something else.

But the second I loaded the page and saw that guy looking down lasciviously at
that way to eager girl, the name became way too much.

yum...bunny. Bunnies are an awful lot like cats (you follow). I just showed
this to my roommate's girlfriend; she said, "ew".

A dating website's biggest challenge branding. I am pretty impressed with the
branding on downtoearth.com. I think you will be much more successful if you
can tone down the creepiness to a basal level like match.com or better achieve
negative creepiness like downtoearth.com.

I'm sorry I am not offering other suggestions. If I think of any today, I will
post them.

~~~
msluyter
Agree with you on the name -- "yum" conjures up something delectable while
"bunny" makes me think "Playboy Bunny." It connotes a sort of superficiality
that would lead me to choose a different dating site.

~~~
echair
If a dating site wants to succeed, it probably doesn't want to aim its message
squarely at us...

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psyklic
I love dating sites!

In general: Very nice UI! You bill this as a "dating site," but it seems more
like Hot-or-Not. If you want it to be a dating site, you'll need to add
location, and try to match closer people first. I also think that you should
add things like age and only match people similarly.

\+ I'm not sure whether your business model will work well ($2.99 for
unlimited chatting with someone). I've tried a number of sites, and the
chances of a particular person working out is not good -- plus, a lot of
people just won't reply after I contact them. More importantly, I'll need to
know if someone is CLOSE to me to determine if I'll pay you. Also, your site
falls into one of those that I'm distasteful of -- I sign up for the site, and
then LATER, I find out there are hidden fees when they aren't initially
mentioned.

\+ I also feel like there's nothing to "do" on your site. You should have a
page where I can see how many people have seen my picture, how many voted
yes/no, maybe even to whom they voted yes/no on -- that would be interesting
yet not too invasive.

\+ Make it clear that the more I vote, the more my picture will be seen -- in
other words, if I rate x people, I need to see a noticable increase in the
number of people seeing MY picture. This works very well for Facebook apps
like Compare People.

\+ You may want to approve pictures before they're published. I already saw
one in the queue that is non-human, and you could also get pornographic ones.

\+ This would be a cool facebook app. Although apps are less prominent
nowadays, here's how some current successful ones work -- periodically send me
an email about x people voting me as a match or not. Provide a link to your
facebook app page in the email that immediately asks me to rate people (more
ratings, more views), and a side link to see my stats. This works on me at
least!

\+ When I first open the page, the larger upper box looked to me like a popup
flash ad, and i totally didn't realize that the items on the right were
clickable until i accidentally ran my cursor over them.

\+ When entering my profile, if I sporadically decide to change my pic midway
through, the form forgets everything I entered so far. And maybe the tab order
should be both things I like, then things I dislike.

\+ I'm not sure what "Loading...please vote to enable this user's queue"
means. You should provide a countdown if it matters whether I vote.

\+ I also agree with other posters -- "yumbunny" doesn't sound like a dating
site haha

~~~
thorax
These are some great comments. Thanks so much for your time/review/thoughts.

The site is more of an introduction/matchmaking site. I only billed it as a
"dating" site in the link I submitted to HNYC because that's kind of the niche
it fits in.

Business model: We're testing this out initially to see how it goes. We will
be adding location/nearness, but that's not used initially until we reach a
critical mass. We definitely weren't trying to hide our messaging costs-- we
just didn't want to dissuade people who are just curious from at least getting
on the site and seeing matches. I don't want people to get confused and think
it costs any money whatsoever to use/match/vote with our site or widgets.
We'll keep that impression in mind and do our best to find a better
middleground.

Moderation: I 100% agree. We're definitely going to be moderating these
pictures before inclusion (a day or two after launch). If you saw a nonhuman
it was one of our left-over test images-- we have to track that one down.
Sorry about that and thanks for mentioning it.

Facebook: The entire backend is designed to work well as
MySpace/Facebook/iPhone apps-- so that's soon on the radar. We wanted to start
with the core site and build from there.

On opening the page: We saw that a bit in user testing, too-- so we added the
"arrow" and some initial flash animation to encourage clicking. We'll be
watching how people handle this and adapting-- thanks for mentioning.

Your other points I absolutely agree with, too-- we'll work on those.

Thanks again!

~~~
psyklic
I didn't realize I was receiving an activation email, but after I got it I
realized you do have Matches/Messages/Share/etc. Perhaps you should make these
pages available even before people activate, but mention that they'll have to
activate before they become, well, active.

Great job so far!

------
Jasber
Matching people based on looks alone is pretty superficial. I think you're
going to have a tough time getting people to adopt this model.

One cool way you could spin this idea is by letting people play match maker.
Imagine a Facebook application where a person could set-up two of their
friends on a blind date. I think something like this could spread fairly
quickly; not to mention people are more willing to accept a friends suggestion
rather than a complete strangers.

~~~
Harkins
Humans are superficial. Hot or Not was a ridiculously huge success for this
reason.

Looks like a good site idea to me, as long as they design to keep down their
customer support costs.

~~~
Jasber
I disagree. Hot or Not was a huge success, but not in the dating market. They
launched a dating extension to the website that never really took off
(<http://meetme.hotornot.com/>).

Look at their stats:
<http://siteanalytics.compete.com/hotornot.com/?metric=uv>

People used HotorNot for fun, not for finding real dates. I suspect the case
will be the same here.

~~~
bemmu
I don't know how huge a success has to be to qualify, but they had revenues
$5M - $10M / year at one point, I'm assuming that is from meet me. It's not
match.com, but not too shabby:

[http://www.startup-review.com/blog/hotornotcom-case-study-
mi...](http://www.startup-review.com/blog/hotornotcom-case-study-mixing-free-
and-premium-services.php)

------
Angostura
It's interesting, particularly the crowd-source matchmaking approach.

I suspect the "people who would look great together" meme will put quite a few
people off simply because it seems superficial and they won't want to be
_seen_ to be overly influenced by looks alone.

You do already expose other information about likes and dislikes, so maybe you
could replace "look" with "be"?

On the other hand, I'm not the target demographic. It could be that you will
appeal to a rich vein of people who _are_ interested in looks alone, and are
happy to be thought of in that way.

Personally, I would be tempted to do some multivariate testing, one with the
"be" messaging and one with the "look" messaging and see how results compare.

~~~
thorax
Great feedback-- we can definitely do that. We went with the more superficial
approach to catch people's attention initially and try to raise some eyebrows.
I do think I would also prefer to date on a website not exactly termed this
way, too-- but we're definitely going to be doing a good bit of testing to see
what resonates best. This is our first best guess. :)

------
sam_in_nyc
What incentive do I have, as a user, to vote on matches? You'd better have
some sort of system set up where I cannot view my matches until I rank 10
other matches "accurately," where accurately means I've voted on the most
common answer. This is to prevent hitting "Yes!" on 10 really quick so I can
continue with what I was doing.

It's a great idea that you crowd source the matchmaking... but I just don't
see the users actively making matches unless there is some incentive...
probably even points would do.

~~~
thorax
Yeah, the matchmaker problem we're attacking this way:

* Coming soon, stats/points/levels for matchmakers.

* Users ask their friends to matchmaker for them specifically, and we interleave other matches once in a while to spread out the love.

So far we've had a lot of non-single people who just loved to play matchmaker,
so we're hoping that will continue/carry-over as well.

Thanks for the great feedback-- if you have other ideas on increasing
matchmakers, we'd love to hear them!

~~~
rksprst
How are you better than engage.com who also does the matchmaking thing?

~~~
thorax
Great question!

We're much more focused on leveraging the
widget/facebook/myspace/iphone/social-site dynamic with Yumbunny. Engage has
somewhat stagnated and we hope to leverage a few different things:

* A fresh approach to the concept

* Leverage embeds heavily

* Leverage our speed and performance as much as possible to keep people engaged when they otherwise wouldn't stay hooked.

* Aim to produce leaner and meaner software without requiring the millions in funding they needed to get where they are.

But if you have any additional ideas, don't hesitate to share them. ;)

------
auston
Personally, I think your widget thing will go over really well with teens and
some early 20's.

I found it fun - good luck.

As far as feedback goes - maybe ask people for there myspace/facebook profile
as well - and think about creating a facebook/myspace app that recommends
people (after a threshold of votes) to other people that are single.

------
okeumeni
At first I went wow another dating site, then I looked at the concept:
Original even though it is closer to hot or not. I think the challenge is now
to sell your brand and a bit of luck. Congratulation on a lot of hard work and
good luck!

------
falsestprophet
How does your matching algorithm work? This seems like a very exciting
problem.

~~~
thorax
There are lots of fun problems in this-- our matching algorithm at the moment
is not super complex. Once we have more feedback/data, we will constantly
tweak, but the starting plan is to make more successful matchmakers weighed
slightly higher over time. And obviously if by random chance two people
recommend each other for each other, that'd get a pretty strong rating.

We send matches to the users every week, so we're expecting we don't have to
be spot on perfect each week.

Some of the more interesting problems we solved was trying to make this widget
as fast and scalable as possible. It's fed entirely from Amazon SQS queues and
so has no database access what-so-ever. The entire architecture is designed to
scale easily over multiple servers in stages as we need.

Fun stuff all around. Thanks for the feedback!

------
jakewolf
How are you going to prevent rampant abuse from rapid clicking? I was able to
click no constantly. Liked how fast new couples load up.

What about a point system for popular accuracy of a users choices?

~~~
thorax
We want rapid clicking to be fast. Abuse isn't going to be super common
because people are going to be bored.

Also "No" doesn't count against anything in our matching algorithm. It's
basically just not recommending them for a match. Spamming yes/maybe would end
up being averaged out.

We definitely are going to keep track of the best matchmakers in a coming
version so we can weigh their pieces better (and also give them some rank/etc
to encourage them to make matches).

Thanks for the kind words and great feedback.

------
thorax
We're finishing up the last few key bugs that we've uncovered over the weekend
and wanted to get your input before we start publicizing it. What do you
think? Like/dislike?

Thanks, as always.

------
vaksel
congrats on getting covered on Techcrunch

