
Launch HN: WittyThumbs (YC S17) – We help improve online-dating conversations - bored
Hi HN, we are the founders of WittyThumbs (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wittythumbs.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wittythumbs.com&#x2F;</a>), a place for people to learn how to improve their online-dating conversations. We started this company because it’s the resource we wish we had years ago.<p>The two of us had that sinking feeling in our early 20s that we’d missed our best opportunity to date because while everyone seemed to have thriving dating lives in high school and college, we were preoccupied by more “nerdy” endeavors. Having focused on career at an early age, we were relatively clueless about dating.<p>We spent years dissecting dating and learning the skills piece by piece, like it was an engineering problem. The skills and confidence eventually clicked for us. We discovered rules we could follow to help us navigate the messy world of modern dating. Looking back, we saw no reason why it had to be a grueling 10-year process. We started blogging about texting techniques and Lior coached dating professionally for in-person clients.<p>Having earned a reputation among our friends for being dating and texting gurus, it got to the point where tons of friends were asking us for advice every time we’d hang out. Liron wrote some custom chat software that organized all the shared texts and screenshots of various men talking to various women. Suddenly we were all hanging out in these chatrooms and analyzing one another’s texts. So we’ve seen signs that many people really need this kind of dating advice.<p>On WittyThumbs, you can post anonymized online-dating conversations you’ve had and get feedback from our team of experts and the user community. You can also request a private 1-on-1 chat with an expert to get realtime advice about a conversation, or about any dating subject.<p>We’d be happy to answer any questions you have about us, our company, or plans for the future.
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robterrin
Thank you for creating something and trying to help people in one of life's
most important activities. I want you to know that everything after this is
coming from a place of genuine respect and support. My preemptive apologies
for being blunt.

"The two of us had that sinking feeling in our early 20s that we’d missed our
best opportunity to date," is a bad sign.

First, you were in your early 20's! Grow, learn, break a heart, get your heart
broken, travel, read, get fired, start a nonprofit, experience life. Why were
you so caught up in finding your optimal date while some of the best (i.e.
most painful) growth opportunities were passing you by? I am not sure you have
the perspective or life experience to be counseling people on something like
dating.

Second, dating is not a game you can "win." One of my favorite professors
ever, a statistics genius with possibly a touch of Aspergers, explained to our
class one time how dating is like science. A "failed" experiment is knowledge
gained about the world! A "failed" relationship is a chance to learn about
yourself, others and relationships. The only way is to try.

Third, this is creating an arms race of banter instead of allowing people to
genuinely connect. There's a famous OK Cupid article demonstrating why being
your most authentic self is actually beneficial to your dating life
([https://theblog.okcupid.com/the-mathematics-of-
beauty-51bd25...](https://theblog.okcupid.com/the-mathematics-of-
beauty-51bd25ae9a75)).

There are a number of other reasons I think this is not a good way to spend
your time, as a business, as a life pursuit and as a thing that detracts from
the world, but I'll stop here so I don't sound like a complete jerk. I would
strongly urge you to reconsider. Mostly, I think you just need time. Again,
kudos on making a thing.

~~~
Liron
> A "failed" relationship is a chance to learn about yourself, others and
> relationships. The only way is to try.

Sure, you can use that logic to argue that any skill should be self-taught in
order to appreciate the "journey" of trial and error. But if you just want to
learn a skill as efficiently as possible, in this case dating skills, it's
nice to have access to expert advice.

~~~
kowdermeister
What's your conversion ratio as an expert?

~~~
oliv__
Yeah I'd love to read an expert post about how you maximize your ROI and
reduce churn.

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gorpomon
Just shared this with a friend who could use some help in this dept.

I think with products like this, the first instinct is to play up the
potential "ick" factor, or to view it as Silicon Valley enabling the idea of
privileged people looking at prospective dating partners like objects instead
of people. However, I'm really for these services! I think they're fun, and
they can really help people who for whatever reason have issues with social
interaction.

We don't berate people who get help with diet and exercise (or who try and
automate it), so why throw shade on people who get help with how to talk to
prospective partners. From years of online dating, I can attest that changing
up your approach and trying new things is exactly what gets you some success.

I wish all people were more open and empathetic online, but the truth is some
people (yes, mostly women) are absolutely bombarded with messages that are at
best emotionally vacant and at worst misogynistic, and that shuts down
openness. Try going on a ladies OKCupid for a bit, you'll see how bad it is.
Anything that can help set you apart from those messages, and elevate your
conversation is in my view a good thing.

As long as they don't get weird and pickup-artisty about it down the line. :-)

~~~
dgudkov
>the truth is some people (yes, mostly women) are absolutely bombarded with
messages that are at best emotionally vacant

That's true, men are not bombarded with messages. They would love to be
bombarded with _any_ messages but they aren't. There is a huge disproportion
between who makes the first step -- in 99% of cases it's the men. I understand
that women would prefer to receive only well-written, thoughtful messages with
a bit of personal touch. The problem is that when men write such messages,
they end up in the waste bin with roughly at the same rate as "emotionally
vacant" messages. No equally thoughtful, polite response, no any response at
all. You might think that in theory the response rate should be higher but in
reality it's pretty much the same. Therefore, switching to "emotionally
vacant" messages is a logical behavior strategy, because it optimizes time and
emotional investment per response. If making more effort produces the same
poor result then why bother?

Online dating is a horrible experience not only for women, but also for men.
In a different way, but hardly less embarrassing.

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craze3
Congrats on the launch guys! I've been tinkering around with similar ideas for
some time now, and I gotta admit your guys' execution is awesome. Feels like
Tinder meets Genius.

I assume you guys are running OCR on the uploaded screenshots? Do you plan to
expand this to a dating coaching service?

One last nit-pick: Your website looks rad, but the Disqus style comments kinda
kills the vibe for me. Makes it feel a little tacky or spammy... Is that just
me? I think a custom commenting system would be best, but even the Facebook
comments plugin would be a step above this.

~~~
Liron
Thanks!

Your feedback is basically describing our exact discussions about what
absolutely has to make it into the 1.0 release.

We got away without implementing OCR yet. We'll add it pretty soon in order to
make the posts searchable.

Having our own comment system would be nice. We did write our own annotation
system (modeled after Google Docs UX). The Disqus comments were one of the few
instances where we managed to force ourselves not to scope creep the 1.0 :) we
couldn't help spending a couple hours to integrate their SSO feature though.

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NumberCruncher
It may not be the mainstream opinion but I have to put this [1] here as a case
against text communication in dating.

[1]
[https://therationalmale.com/2011/08/26/buffers/](https://therationalmale.com/2011/08/26/buffers/)

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brad0
Firstly I agree with the posts below talking about actually having human
connection. This is the most important thing.

I also want to point out that this is actually pretty damn good. I know I was
clueless when I first started dating and this would have helped.

I think this could be a great first step for people who want some feedback
about what they're doing right and wrong. The problem is when these people
meet face to face these same issues will come up. Again, they're going to need
some feedback. That might be a good avenue to move into later if this takes
off?

Primarily though - work on yourselves and understand who you really are. Once
you do these things the rest should fall into place.

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dominathan917
I made something similar that crowdsource tinder responses, got 7000 unique
visitors in the first week but I got tired of maintaining it

[http://sharpmagazine.com/2016/04/06/this-guy-built-an-app-
to...](http://sharpmagazine.com/2016/04/06/this-guy-built-an-app-to-
crowdsource-his-tinder-replies-and-its-working/)

I still have the code that actually allows you to directly connect to Tinder's
API... so your users could just sign in with facebook instead of having to
take screenshots. Don't know if you're interested but shoot me an email if you
are

nathan.mh@gmail.com

~~~
arenaninja
Is this "you" "anybody on HN" or "you WittyThumbs"? Because it sounds cool as
heck, but I'm not associated with WittyThumbs

~~~
dominathan917
It was you "WittyThumbs" because I think they'd put it to better use but I'm
open to having someone else start it back up.

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christopherslee
Is this like [http://www.evolveapp.com/](http://www.evolveapp.com/) (Techstars
Boston '17.)

~~~
Liron
Hm, looks like they're building a CRM to track your dates, while we're giving
you advice about how to date better.

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dollardude1
Few questions:

* What's your traction like? How many active users and what's the weekly growth rate like?

* When did you launch this product?

* What are your monetization plans?

* How has the YC experience been so far?

Good luck!

~~~
Liron
> When did you launch this product?

Before today, we've been quietly testing various iterations of a live dating &
relationship advice service on the web. We think dating advice is a big need
that has many use cases (e.g. texting to get a first date, how to act on a
date, how to read signals/hints, how to define a relationship, how to handle a
breakup, how to get your ex back). For YC S17, we decided to double down on
the use case of texting on dating apps in order to get a high-quality first
date.

Today is the first time we've gone live with WittyThumbs, a dedicated site
around this use case, and the first time we've built annotated posts (like
Genius's song lyric annotations) to showcase the kind of advice we give.

> What's your traction like? How many active users and what's the weekly
> growth rate like?

Our experts have given live advice to over 1,000 users on various topics and
have had good repeat-usage numbers. The most encouraging thing is that some of
our users are extremely passionate about the service and _really_ appreciate
having us on call. We ourselves would have been such users only 5-10 years
ago, so it's nice to validate that we're not the only ones.

> What are your monetization plans?

It's basically what you see at
[https://wittythumbs.com/chat](https://wittythumbs.com/chat) \- we charge for
our experts' time giving you live advice. Professional dating coaches usually
require setting appointments and paying ~$200/hour, so we're high quality and
affordable. In fact, you can use us to get 5 minutes of advice here and there
(e.g. help me interpret this text I just received), and only pay for the time
you use.

> How has the YC experience been so far?

We got into YC on April 27 and the first day of the batch is actually
tomorrow, so it's early in the game. I will say the biggest thing about
getting into YC, or any incubator really, is that it's really nice to have a
support network of smart people who you know are there to help you.

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Fragoel2
Nice idea overall, something fresh and that some people will find really
useful (I can manage alright myself :) )

It seems to me that all advice is given by your experts, which is nice but
also time consuming. Since you're gathering all this data, have you considered
using machine learning instead?

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pgt
Wow, this is amazing. How will you scale it past the initial founder experts?

~~~
Liron
We've already scaled it to 15 experts internationally, which is how we're able
to offer 24x7 live advice.

It turns out there are a lot of talented dating coaches out there and we
haven't had a problem finding them through various channels. It's a matter of
screening, monitoring and additional training to ensure that the quality bar
stays high.

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oregondan
This definitely sounds like a service a lot of people could benefit from, and
I wish you the best of luck, but my mind went straight to White Christmas
episode of Black Mirror...

~~~
Liron
Haha I know what you mean, we're fans of the show and really enjoyed that
episode.

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isoskeles
Where does an application like this fall in YC's "request for startups". Is
that list just a bunch of fluff to project lofty morals?

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jcsnv
\- Are you worried about using the name of a high-end clothing brand? \- Can I
get a link to Hermes? \- How is WittyThumbs associated to Hermes?

~~~
dang
We replaced the name Hermes with WittyThumbs above. The OP asked us to do it
right after posting but I didn't see the email till now.

Using an older internal name can be a hard habit to break :)

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adamqureshi
You know there is a luxury brand who's been in business , like forever: called
[http://www.hermes.com/](http://www.hermes.com/)

~~~
martinald
This is also the name of a very, very, terrible parcel delivery service in the
UK.

~~~
adamqureshi
Really? also, ask any HNWI and they'll instantly recognize hermes as the ultra
luxury brand with exotic skin handbags selling for $100K. :-) can you imagine
the confusion and i bet its trademarked.

~~~
martinald
Yes.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermes_Group](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermes_Group)

