Does anyone want to play tennis? How our startup was born | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone want to play tennis? How our startup was born

blog.shoutt.me

31 pointsneeharc46 comments

I sort of built something like this and i can give you all the advice in the world but it looks like you are on the right path. You are going to have a chicken and egg problem, I don't know if you've attempted this solution yet but you can lower the adoption friction of new users by letting them tweet. Then you can use the twitter api to, say, find all of the tweets with the #shoutt hashtag and process them. This way you can make use the the massive platform that is Twitter and users don't even need to signup or install an app.

Good luck.

djb_hackernews - we would love to get advice from you and hear about your experience (should we email you?). We're looking at Twitter/FB integration for that.

Thats super cool, some of the issues you may need to address before this becomes too cool.

1. Prevent people from advertising, ok this can be a revenue model also :P

2. Allow me to shout to places other than where I live, like suppose i am visiting a new place. It will be cool to shoutt at the new place before I reach. Though this is not necessary, just a thought.

3. Some kind of block list where I can block certain noisy neighbors whose shouts I dont like.

4. Someone shouting for needing security or SOS, can be highlighted, people around should receive these help requests on priority basis. Can help prevent robbery, protect women from potential harrassments.

Overall this can bring communities together, glue them. Wish you luck with the startup.

Thanks for your feedback. We've thought of these issues before and we are tackling them . Shoutting for help or security is a great use case but one that can be easily abused. We want to make sure we take precautions from people crying wolf too many times.

ya, that is a big concern. Maybe calling for help around can be made a paid feature, crying wolf wont pay but someone in need of help can pay. Well you can think of other things also on how to de-incentivize abuse of system. :)

> Maybe calling for help around can be made a paid feature

You might want to reflect on what you just said :-)

ha ha! I know, I didnt mean it directly paid like today's eCommerce shop and cart stores where in you can buy priority shouts. It has to be prepaid shout credits or pay later. Well in the end the idea is to pinch someone who is shouting for help. Pinching can be monetary or non monetary, but just enough to discourage cry wolfs and not to discourage genuine cases. The balance (ie intensity of pinch) is more difficult to achieve than what the pinch is.

just out of curiosity, where are you guys located, India? I assume Mansi rejected ISB Hyderabad!!

Haha yeah, I shuttle b/w hyderabad and the bay area..but Shoutt is located in the bay. Immigration laws are such a pain.

true! lots of Indians I see have to do that. If you get a chance to come to mumbai, lets have a quick chat on general tech and all.

I worry that you're trying to be everything to everyone. Just because your backend can handle anything type of "shout", have you considered effectively turning it into a white label, and creating dedicated "sport" brand, etc.

If you manage to get X number of people to sign up, currently they likelihood of finding someone who wants the same thing is significantly lower than if those X people all signed up to looking for a similar thing.

Though I should imagine there is some advantage to keeping it generic to a point (sport over tennis) as someone may just be after someone to play games with, and might also be up for badminton or basketball or whatever.

We were slightly worried about it too. The reason we chose to be generic is that we want to be the de-facto app to solve needs. We're trying to keep it narrow by the kind of communities we market it to.

My concern is simply that trying to be the de-facto app means you'll never really get the traction you need to become successful. I hate to invoke Facebook here, but even they started with a very limited market. Once there was enough demand, people were coming to them asking for access and they evolved.

I like what you're saying about keeping it narrow by the communities you're targetting. If it's truly useful, and generic, then people will start finding their own alternative uses.

I wouldn't have three different type of question on your front-page header;

1. Lost my Dog, if you spot it ... 2. Wanna play a game? 3. What is...

I'd pick one type (personally, the 2nd) and stick to that. 1. is only useful with significant localised usage and 3. is better left to something like twitter for now.

Whatever you do, best of luck.

Thanks for the feedback!

Isn't this what BlockChalk [1] and many others have attempted before? How are you going to solve the chicken & egg problem? How are you more than a GPS centric twitter?

I'm genuinely interested. I actually created and submitted this exact type of application when Android first came out and had their app contest. Of course, the market has grown a bit since then. ;) I've since moved on but it always did seem like a good idea.

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2010/01/08/blockchalk-location/ (Deadpooled)

There are many flavors of location based social apps. Unlike the other apps, shoutt aims to solve people's everyday problems by connecting people based on what they need. So it puts you first. With respect to the chicken and egg problem, we plan to start city by city.

I want to know what you're going to do to attract the every day user? Why would someone choose this over meetup.com or posting on craigslist or reddit, etc.

There're a fair number of ways for people to interact with their local community nowadays (even beyond their local social circle), and I can't see anyone adopting this as just one more way to do so. Perhaps I'm missing something.

I'm not sure whether you had the chance to look at the video but we address this point in it. The video is available here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0LC54QaMf4

Checked out the video, well made! However, it is incredibly vague in terms of answering my question. The video says you're looking for "My neighbors, coworkers, classmates, my community" why aren't these people on your already existing social media sites? They sure are on mine.

Two friends of mine made a similar app called spotvite [1], It's great for pickup sports. I find these type of apps only excel in popular areas.

[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.spotvite.a...

You're doing what 100 other startups are trying to do right now, connecting like-minded people through activites, just to name a few: Spontacts, Woofound, spotvite, aka aki etc.

They have all failed because if you're trying to be everything for everybody, you just end up being nothing for no one.

We are not about connecting like-minded people. We are trying to help people solve their everyday problems....connecting people is a consequence of it.

It doesn't matter what you do beforehand, the goal is to connect them. I've built an entire app like this too and it's a great problem to solve, probably the greatest of all, however you will hit a wall in 2-3 months once you figure out that you can't market it and that you can't raise money from investors, because they have been pitched this 100 times before and they know the problems.

Just go for one use-case, really. :)

Speaking specifically towards tennis, this idea has been tried before. There is a definitely a market here some how though; just last week I got a text message from my old tennis coach/boss, "what about a website where people would meet to play tennis, is that profitable?"

Yeah, there is a market for people looking to start pick up games, find tennis/squash/chess partners, but these are the subset of the larger problem that we want to solve. Irrespective of what your need, you should be able to find the right help/person around you.

Very nice! I've been wanting something like this for a couple years now.

I don't live in a city though, so the value of this (people I don't know using the service) is low. Have you thought about how people like me can help get the word out easier?

Hi, I am one of the cofounders. Shoutt works better with your friends around you, this is because your friends are more likely to help you. When you shoutt if your friends are around, we'll let them know first.

Right, but what I meant was triadic closure.

I can tell my friends to use this, but since I can already communicate with them through existing services (which may include geolocation like fb's find friends nearby or highlight) there's no real value there for me.

The value comes from talking to people who may not be on your social network (e.g. all of the use case examples on your page should be directed at as big a local audience as possible).

The point of Shoutt is to find what you need, not just to connect with people you don't know. Whether a person is a friend or a stranger is secondary. It's just that friends are always more likely to help.

Not that I'm offended, but you might want to find a replacement for 'retarded' on your launch page. Sure, it gives a colloquial vibe, but it comes off as a little immature.

Thanks for pointing that out. I thought I changed that earlier

Update: We just uploaded an introduction video - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0LC54QaMf4

Are you focusing on a specific location, to start off?

We are planning to start off in san francisco bay area for our beta testing.

Cool! How is this different to Jig.com?

Unlike Jig, our objective is to connect you to the people around you.

People who share the same location often share a similar set of problems and that's precisely why they are the best people to connect with.

do you see every shout nearby you in real-time or is there some filtering going on?

Yes you see every shoutt around you. But we sort the shoutts by popularity. In addition to that, when someone shoutts, we find the people who are most likely to respond and send them a push notification.

lol I was at the SF Tennis Club while reading this - would be pretty useful.

Great idea!

A more personally useful idea would just be a niche tennis matchmaking service. Or basketball.

I don't think this is necessary for basketball. Having played quite a bit of pickup basketball in SF (and other cities), if you want to play basketball just go to the court with a ball. If there is nobody there, you just shoot around until enough people are there for a game to start. However more often than not on a weekend or other prime times there are already people there and you just join a random group and get in line.

It would be good to get people of similar skill to play together. I hate playing with the total scrubs and I hate playing with the ex Varsity athletes. Also it would be nice to meet someone else who has to use contrived situations to make friends.

Tennis was an example of why you wanted to reach out to people around you. Expanding on that thought, we believe there is tremendous value is connecting with the people around us. Right from asking question, advice, recommendations and borrowing stuff to finding people who live/work around us and share a similar interest - like jamming or something else.

That's precisely the idea behind a friend's startup! http://tennishub.com/ (TennisHub)

(Thanks @chrisabrams - fixed)

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