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Ask HN: Please review my startup, skipscotch.com, our solution to online reviews

5 points by jhdavids8 ↗ HN
Landing page: http://skipscotch.com Live demo: http://skipscotch.com/home/underdev

Feel free to play around with the demo, although I can't promise speed will be great. The site can be largely experienced w/o a user account, although feel free to create a temp account if you like (fake email or not). I'll delete any accounts/reviews/etc created and hide the URL again after everyone's had adequate time to play around with the site.

Some background info: For the past 4 months, I've been developing SkipScotch, a starting point to increase credibility of online reviews. It's not the ultimate solution, but I'm thinking the structure is in place to get started down the right path. Some highlights:

- Reviews are given based on service experienced, and ratings are calculated per service offered. Currently, we are planning on the basic average of reviews to calculate ratings, but we have a more accurate weighted average designed that we'd love to implement (we'd need a decent amount of reviews for the weighted average to matter). Read about the weighted average at http://blog.skipscotch.com/2011/11/only-way-to-do-reviews-right-way-is-to.html (it's mentioned towards the end of the post)

- Reviews can be up-voted/down-voted by users. Points awarded for reviews contribute to a reviewer's 'wisdom' score

- Scoring reviews/reviewers based on quality should increase credibility of reviews in SkipScotch. We have plenty of future goals with these credibility scores, like utilizing them in a weighted average, review filter, reviewer ranks, and rewards for respected reviewers.

- Individual reviewers can be 'trusted', which provides a new trusted rating along with the public rating

- Events can exist per service and are searchable through the basic search. Examples currently implemented are trivia and karaoke nights

Reviews and ratings are randomly generated for demo purposes. Businesses and events are real and accurate. Reviews show up in each service's show page, simply so they can be experienced regardless of service visited. Our revenue model exists, but I won't get into it here. Just wanted to highlight that we haven't overlooked it.

There's 2 founders, but I'm the only developer. This has been entirely bootstrapped. I did not know RoR (what the site is built with) prior to developing SkipScotch, although I've been a full-time software engineer for 3 years. Design is also not my specialty, so I realize there may be issues with it.

I'd love any feedback you can offer, especially on strategy and product launch. I realize it'll be tough to solve the chicken and egg problem, but I have a few strategies in mind (if you have some, I'd love to hear them!).

Any signups we can get through the landing page will be greatly appreciated. Feel free to contact me directly at founders@skipscotch.com for any reason whatsoever. Cheers and many thanks!

12 comments

[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 47.0 ms ] thread
michaeldhopkins
I wish it was a startup related to scotch. Anyway...

Wisdom isn't a metric I trust if it's just users voting each other up. Seems like something a few spammers could easily game, right? Also, what does skipping to something do?

jhdavids8
Definitely a concern, as reviews likely have less exposure than something like Reddit and HN posts.

We have a few strategies in mind where users will either earn votes or have limited votes available. For example, users could only vote when above a certain wisdom score and/or could only vote, say, 10 times a day. These are strategies we'll have to emperiment with.

Skipping is a fun feature I added to try to evolve into a social feature. Many users use review sites to plan trips, so we added this. Basically, you 'skip' to any number of places you like, which forms a sort of itinerary with directions and ETAs. In the future, we'd love to expand this feature a bit, allowing users to share their 'skips' with friends,or possibly even advertise public and/or private skips (think of a bar crawl for example).

michaeldhopkins
Skipping sounds great! I'd love to socially plan a whole evening out with my friends using a site like that, factoring in drive times and everything. In my opinion that's more interesting than review quality, although reviews are of course also important.
jhdavids8
Awesome! So a strategy mentioned to us before is highlight the skip feature, pull in reviews from sites like Yelp, Google, etc, and focus on that. This way, we'd have ratings for each business, displayable via the map in the site, and the skip feature allowing you to focus on trip planning through third party reviews. Something we'll definitely have to consider, although breaking reviews out per service would be so much more helpful in trip planning, IMO
ffumarola
What are you hoping to improve over Yelp and Google Maps/Places/Hotpot? They would seem to be the biggest competitors. Is honesty / quality of reviews on Yelp honestly that large of a problem?
jhdavids8
Definitely our biggest competitors. We're trying to create a more credible and helpful review site. I liken us to the Rotten Tomatoes for food/entertainment reviews. We encourage quality over quantity with reviews. If you're an IMDB fan instead, then you may choose to stick with Yelp and others.

We break reviews out per service, which I've yet to see anyone else do. And I do indeed think quality is a major concern with sites like Yelp. Their shady filter and questionable business practices have been brought up many time before. Reviewers are held to no accountability, so you'll often see ridiculous 1-star reviews in Yelp.

Basically, we want to form a unique review site, one that knows intimate details on a business and one that provides extremely helpful reviews.

revorad
Just launch already.

It's not clear to me how your reviews are more trustworthy. Voting reviewers has existed for a while on Amazon, but I'm not sure that isn't gamed.

Apart from trust, the other problem with reviews is that their relevance depends on the type of reviewer. For example, being Indian, when I'm looking for Indian restaurants, I trust reviews of Indians more than those of Americans because my expectations are more similar to other Indians. If I'm looking for hotels to go on vacation with my kids, I want reviews from other parents, not 20-year old single dudes who hated some place because there were too many kids making noise.

jhdavids8
So you nailed what I've already argued to many others, which is reviews are relative to you. I completely understand your point, but it's hard to achieve what you desire w/o being intrusive. To highlight relevance, we'd have to get users to fill out a questionnaire about their race, age, interests, etc. This is a possibility down the road I suppose.

That's why I created the 'trust' feature though. If you spot an Indian reviewer, add them to your 'trust' circle. Later on, we can get smart and provide 'trust' recommendations for you, but that's a future feature to tackle.

Also, you're correct, voting reviewers have existed for awhile, but they're hardly highlighted by those sites as important. We feel like by encouraging voting from day 1, we can start a culture where it's widely used. Maybe that's a bit naive, but emphasizing how important it is to site functionality should hopefully encourage use (just like how it's used in Reddit/HN).

revorad
To highlight relevance, we'd have to get users to fill out a questionnaire about their race, age, interests, etc.

In case you haven't heard, someone already made a questionnaire and got 700 million people to fill it.

herrwolfe
Hi - Think you should require images of all businesses. Whenever I see a listing without an image, no matter what, I will skip it. Also, change the "occurring today" flag to something a bit less sterile sounding. Attractive product, though I am not sure I see the difference to google/yelp as well.
jhdavids8
Thanks for the input.

I agree about the images, and it's a definite goal but not an easy one to achieve with the team as small as it is. Some places we'd just have to go visit ourselves and snap pics of, which I actually plan to do eventually.

I'm thrilled you saw the "occurring today" flag honestly, and I'll modify it later. But it's features like that which highlight one of our goals: to provide everything you would ever want to know about a business to you. Google/Yelp take a disconnected approach: a business goes in and can be reviewed for any reason. We aim to know more, specifically what services that business offers, hours of each service, special deals/events going on, etc, all while providing helpful and credible reviews of each service.