

Ask YC: my just launched startup needs your comments - btw0

There are so many times when I wake up in the morning after a fantastic dream during the night I feel so deep a need to write the dream down, it's just a pity to let it pass away, it can get forgotten in less than an hour. So I code this tool just for that, keep your dream journal.<p>http://keepdream.com<p>I am a one-man team wearing so many hats, currently a graduate student in Shanghai.<p>Give my startup some comments or suggestions. Thank you.
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ALee
That's cool, but the YC app question about "What do you know that your
competitors just don't get" applies here. The core functionality seems
twitter-like (and with a twitter API, you could get everyone's twitter dreams
displayed on this site too).

You need something that is unique and distinct about this dream journal
compared to the world of microblogging. I do, however, like being able to read
about other's dreams in Chinese though.

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vlad
I disagree. Every startup, except a few, can only hope to target maybe 5% of
anyone who ever stumbles on the site. So, the only opinions that matter are
those of the 5% who sign up and use the service. Everybody else is just
thinking up reasons that this is either not needed, takes too much trouble,
already has a better alternative, too busy to look into the site further and
then forgets about it, doesn't feel the site is safe or secure, doesn't feel
they know the author, think it costs too much money, thinks it costs too
little money, or thinks the idea is too simple and therefore must be put down
because, who do these people think they are, writing free web apps for the
public--Mother Teresa? They can do the same in three seconds!

~~~
ALee
So, let's say someone creates a service that creates an online store
application only for shoes (let's call this shoestring) compared to an online
store application (lets call this Viaweb).

Although, the 5% who sign up do matter in determining Shoestring, it still
matters that this application have something that bests Viaweb, whether it is
a better interface for shoes, or whatever the one key ingredient is in
differentiation. All I'm saying is that this app should have that key
ingredient. It may be better as a FB app that can be sent to your friend
("hey, you wuz in my dreamz thinking of foodz").

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bmaier
Isn't there a difference between startup and random web-based tool?

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mechanical_fish
One Google ad.

In all seriousness, even those of us who are veteran native speakers of
English (which our Shanghai-based contributor may not be) sometimes have
trouble with the distinction between a "startup company" and "a fun new
website". Entire issues of _Fast Company_ and _Wired_ have been known to miss
this distinction.

This is a charmingly simple idea and the tool is correspondingly charming and
simple. And, for the moment, blissfully free from ads. Well done.

~~~
btw0
Thank you for your praise. :)

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maxwell
Too Twitter-y. You need clever fresh terminology (i.e. not "Following") and a
slightly different design. It looks good, but I get an "I've seen this before"
feeling. If you're targeting English and Chinese speakers, it could be cool to
incorporate that into the design, probably to the extent that non-Chinese
speakers can safely parse the characters as "icons" though.

You definitely need something that makes it standout. Why shouldn't I just
write down my dreams or post them on my blog? I could see some cool text
pattern recognition features encouraging me to post a dream; that is, who else
had a dream like this last night/ever? You mention natural language
processing, so perhaps you've already got something like that in mind...

Being able to reply to individual dreams might be annoying, though maybe we
could post "interpretations" (in the Freudian sense).

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derefr
Indeed, I was thinking almost the same thing--I'm reminded of [that music app
I can't think of the name of at the moment] where you sort of explore a "web"
of songs.

This could be quite similar, but with a "cloud" of dreams (heh) with a sort of
haunting, serene element, perhaps with vector animations of recurring nouns
floating about in silhouette... for convenience _and_ impact, it would ideally
be a screensaver. At any point, you could hit a certain key (probably Enter or
Space) and instead of dumping you back to the desktop, it would pop up a text
editor for entering your new dream, which would then float away into the
"cloud."

I could even see adding a sort of MMO element where each person gets a little
avatar that slowly explores the "dream world" for them, being moved to a new
dream's location on the cloud whenever one is entered. The little avatars
could bump into one another and tell you in the morning of who you "met" in
your dreams.

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DaniFong
This is a pretty cool idea. I guess that your success will depend on whether
or not it's an interesting place to go to read about other people's dreams,
though: in most communities there is a real gap between personal use and
people who contribute.

So you should allow people to sort by language, for example.

It is much more in the nature of a social experiment than a tech startup, but
I think it's pretty cool.

~~~
btw0
Twitter, delicious etc all haven't got this feature, but it's great idea to
try.

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JayNeely
I'd recommend adding a simple client, that syncs with the site. And think
about the situations under which someone wakes up:

Are they definitely going to have internet access? Nope. Better have an
offline mode.

Is their computer going to be on already? Maybe not. Better give it an
automatic start-on-startup option, and make sure it's lightweight enough to
open in a flash.

Are they going to wake up with _their_ computer around them? Probably so,
really, or at least the majority of the time. So a desktop client's a good
call, because it doesn't have to be portable, and you can store detailed
settings, because they're not going to be changing them over multiple
computers.

Also, you're a grad student in Shanghai? Wouldn't an SMS interface be well-
received? I sense potential twitter partnerships!

If you want to talk about this anymore, I hang out in #startups on
irc.freenode.net a lot. I like your idea, I'd love to help you brainstorm
more.

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btw0
>Think about the situations under which someone wakes up

I haven't think about it, accessibility is essential here. Thank you.

>Also, you're a grad student in Shanghai? Wouldn't an SMS interface be well-
received? I sense potential twitter partnerships!

Yeah, I am in grad school in Shanghai, everybody gets a mobile phone here, but
I wonder if SMS is too cumbersome for dream input, after all it's a long text
to type with the tiny keyboard.

>If you want to talk about this anymore, I hang out in #startups on
irc.freenode.net a lot. I like your idea, I'd love to help you brainstorm
more.

Thank you for your interest, I definitely would contact you when finish my
paper reading homework. :)

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davidw
Kind of cool... you probably want to add some things like tags so that people
can look through them, and maybe also filter on languages.

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btw0
It's a good idea, but I plan to add some natural language processing to auto
tag the meaningful nouns/verbs in the text, I wonder if this is a better
approach than adding tags manually in a dream describing text.

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r7000
Tags would be much too unwieldy for this. Keep it very simple. How about a
short-list of categories selected from a drop-down? This would need more
thought but a very short-list like: 'falling', 'lucid', 'nightmare',
'premonition', 'embarassing', 'funny' etc.

Nothing more is needed and it makes browsing by category fun for the random
surfer.

~~~
btw0
I agree, a drop-down is great in the post page. Thank you for your suggestion.

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bhb
Kind of cool. I could see it being a bit hard for the casual browser to find
dreams of interest to them. I've seen others suggest tags or categories,
either of which could prove useful. But you might also want to include a
simple reddit-esque up/down vote for dreams people liked reading. That way
people can just view the most interesting dreams.

~~~
btw0
Great idea, a karma/vote system and a popular link are necessary in such a
site.

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trevelyan
If you're going to be displaying Chinese content for an English audience, you
should look at integrating some sort of translation support. I'd recommend the
Adso plugin:

[http://adsotrans.com/blog/adsotrans%e7%9a%84%e7%bd%91%e4%b8%...](http://adsotrans.com/blog/adsotrans%e7%9a%84%e7%bd%91%e4%b8%8aapi%e7%9c%9f%e7%9a%84%e5%8e%89%e5%ae%b3%e5%be%b7%e4%b8%8d%e5%be%97%e4%ba%86/)

Once users click on text the content gets semantically analysed and annotated
with pinyin/english popups.

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rms
I like it.

Don't expect to get huge, but this is a cool app for your portfolio and if you
start pulling huge traffic you could make a couple hundred a month in ads.

Try making a facebook app with the same functionality? Sometimes those get
lucky and get huge and making facebook apps is a decent skill to learn.

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johnrob
The revenue model is to tell people what the dreams mean :)

~~~
btw0
I will have a carefully thought on this revenue model. ; )

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webdiva
Have you checked this one out? <http://www.dreamjournal.net>

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chaostheory
probably doesn't hurt if you try integrating this with facebook/open social

maybe some icons that quickly classify (like right next to the title) dreams
would be good too (nightmares, happy, sexual, weird, mundane, ....) (in
addition to tags)

