[jwise0]

I talked to a friend who was considering building this kind of startup recently. The two 'hard questions' that I found were:

1) How do you plan to deal with abuse? Connecting anonymous Internet users to people who are at their most vulnerable seems like a recipe ripe for disaster.

2) How do you plan to differentiate from, for instance, 7 Cups?

[yshajahan16]

Hey, jwise. I'm gonna call you Justin wise.

Seems like everyone suddenly is having this idea now lol. Hopefully you don't delete your comment after I respond like the last two guys.

Well, Justin 1. It may seem like a recipe for disaster and we won't say that every interaction will be golden. That's why we have a review system to make sure there's no trolls and everyone is being nice. And we also have a key feature on our current build, which is 'find help' or 'help'.

2. We think 7 cups isn't doing it efficiently. They are chat based and their listeners have to go through a sign up process that takes too long. We want things on demand. And voice.

[jwise0]

Well, you can call me that, but that's not my name :-)

I'll not delete my comment. I'm worried, really, about two categories of abuse: 1) Abusers who are not persistent, but who create multiple accounts rapidly (i.e., aiming to get a quick laugh). They use Tor or VPNs to create accounts for 'easy' harassment. 2) Abusers who will take advantage of vulnerable users (i.e., "the long con") over multiple sessions, or who will act in bad faith over the long term.

Do you have data that indicates that people are unhappy with the level of service that 7 Cups provides?

[yshajahan16]

With any product created, you'll have the potential of having trolls. I'm sure even 7 cups has it too. And generally trolls don't attack vulnerable people to the point where they're using proxy or VPN's. Let alone on voice calls.

There's not much data of how unhappy 7 cups members are (maybe they're happy).

But neither of those reasons are good enough to NOT try something. Because you won't know if you're gonna have trolls or if your users will have a better experience from a competitor unless you try it.