Launch HN: WittyThumbs (YC S17) – We help improve online-dating conversations

>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.

I'd disagree with this. A failed experiment is valuable to the extent you're able to draw the correct conclusions from the failure, and there's not magical guarantee that people will be able to do so. I'd argue that many people, especially those who may use this service, don't really have the experience and context to place their failures into. I'd bet most would blame themselves for their failures and withdraw further into their own projections of what made them fail, such as their lack of money, good looks, etc.

>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

I think this is the most pernicious dating advice I typically see. Besides the fact that people have many different facets of their 'self' and have no idea as to how to present their best attributes, it essentially tells people who are looking for reasons as to why they're failing "no, this is your fault". Much better advice would be to exercise, socialize more, take an acting or improv class, go to counseling - in short, don't just 'be' yourself, change who you are to become a better person.

> 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.

>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.

Totally agree with your points!

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.

> Do you plan to expand this to a dating coaching service?

We currently are the world's most affordable source of high-quality dating coaching, that's basically our revenue model. You can ask our experts any dating or relationship questions at https://wittythumbs.com/chat

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

Aha, Twitch to our Genius :) Emailed you.

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

> 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 - 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.

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.

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

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 :)

Hermes was our temporary name, we're going under the name WittyThumbs now.

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

Yes. Hermes was our temporary name, we're going under the name WittyThumbs now.