Show HN: Chatterrapp (YC SUS17) beta – Talk to people having similar interests

[pipipzz]

I am Amit, Co-Founder of Chatterrapp (https://chatterrapp.com). We are building a platform to let users have video chat with others sharing similar interests. Currently we are accepting sign ups for our Beta product.

We tried many of existing platforms similar to ours and came across some major flaws like:

    - annoying chatbots posing as real users
    - obscene/offensive behaviour
    - irrelevant matches
    - no regard for user’s preferences/interests
    - non-persistent user profiles

So we went ahead and surveyed as well as interviewed hundreds of potential users and found a common theme - users went to these platforms with some specific goals and expectations in mind and the majority (70%) said that they would want to talk to people outside their circle who share similar interests; but, no existing platform solves this problem.

People preferred talking about a topic with strangers because their friend/family circle don’t share similar interests (80%) or they were uncomfortable discussing that topic with their friend/family circle (67%).

In the survey, we also asked people to share their interests that they would like to talk about and some of the most popular ones were Sports, Game of Thrones, Music, Bitcoin, Politics, Startups, Diversity in Tech, etc.

So, I humbly request you all to sign up for our beta (it is crappy, I know) and share your interests so that we can start matching you with others sharing similar interests and let you talk your heart out. Promising you some really fun, exciting and serendipitous encounters.

Happy to answer and questions and looking forward to the feedbacks!

[PaulHoule]

Amit, I like the idea, also I like the survey results.

Some tough love here.

I don't find most of the concepts you list are relevant to me. These are largely broad in appeal, moderate in engagement, but highly competitive.

For instance, I like to talk about "Sports". For me this topic is a way to break the ice with people, mostly I talk about sports to "be social" as opposed being social because I want to talk about sports. If I wanted to talk about sports it is no problem finding a way to do so, certainly I could do so faster than signing up to some list and waiting for a reply; it is kindof sad to think somebody would be so isolated they could not talk about sports.

If I were you I would not solicit users for an app you describe to them as "crappy". It is one thing if you are not proud of your app, it is another thing to deprecate it in a disgusting way before critics have a chance at it!

[pipipzz]

First of all, thanks for your feedback. The interests that you want to talk about could be as broad as 'Sports' or it could be about a single match of Football. You are free to tell us your interests if they don't already exist on the platform. And I guess most of the popular interests among people within a particular area or geography would keep on changing based on current events. We believe people will use this platform to talk about those interests and passions which they can't talk about right now within their friend/family circle.

We are working very hard on actual product and the current MVP/Beta for which we are accepting signups is just a bare-bones version built to get few early adopters to try out the platform so that we can collect detailed feedback about what is working and what is not and update our actual product with these insights. But if it repels users from trying out the product, I will surely remove it. Again, thanks for your insights, it would help us a lot. And please sign up for our beta :)

[brudgers]

All I saw was an email signup, which dissappated whatever enthusiasm I had that caused me to click on the link. Typing an email address into the box would not gratify my curiosity nor create an alternative to the tools I use to chat with strangers today (e.g. HN, StackExchange, Facebook, Reddit, BBS's).

I suppose that suggests the hard problem...instant gratification via a competitive alternative. Waiting two weeks or a month or a year for is time that will be spent deepening my existing habits.

Good luck.

[pipipzz]

Duly Noted. After you enter your email address and click on the Notify CTA, we ask you to fill just the basic information in a Google Form. Once we have your interests and enough number of signups to match users, we will be sending you matching emails with details of the person you can talk to, including some ice-breakers for your common interest.

Another point, instead of the email and notify flow, if I show you a CTA called 'Get Started' and on clicking I open the google form to collect your interests, would that be better?

[brudgers]

To me, the basic user experience question is "does the user want to fill out a form?" If the answer is 'yes' then provide the user with the experience of filling out a form. If the answer is 'no' then give careful consideration to an onboaring process that requires filling out a form.

To me, the hard part of user experience is putting what the user likes in front of what makes life easy for the developer.

My advice: Pick one or two topics and just let the user pick one or the other or both or none and go from there. Some people will click on topics that they are not interested in, just to see what the platform is like. If a few people find the topics interesting then the platform can grow...and if no one finds the topics interesting then display some different topics.

It might even be worth picking some topics that the software team is interested in and having the team engage with users as users just to make the conversations balance when there is only one outside user.

In other words, my advice is to make simple experiments to see what works for a few people rather than trying to build something for 'everyone' before there are at least a few people who like to use the platform.