Hi,
I'm at an event in London for people that want to be part of a startup (Launch48.com). So basically attendees pitch their ideas to the crowd, the best ideas are voted,we form teams and work on them for the whole wknd. At the end of the weekend we present our work to mentors and investors.

Our idea is basically a platform for trading compliments!People buy credits from our website and use them to post pictures. Each picture has a bounty on it (eg. 10 credits) that is awarded to the best compliment! So you could even make money while complimenting people!we charge a small % on each picture hosted.

The inception of the idea came from Kuan-Neng Foo,walking down the road one day,a bum on the street asked him for 'a quarter for your thoughts?'. He thought it was a bit excessive but went for it after all. The bum said 'nice shirt man!'. He surprisingly felt good about it,even though he had to pay for the compliment! He ended up spending over a $1!
It didn't matter that the compliment was paid for. It was a real compliment from a real person, and that made him feel good.

The project is at its inception stage,but we tried to launch an mvp asap and see what the feedback we get on the whole idea,and iterate accordingly.
Please take a look at our website;

http://compliments.davidavs.com/

Any thoughts/comments/berating/complimenting (?) are welcome!
ty

[x] Web 2.0
[x] Chinese parable
[ ] 0.00% chance of making money from this in its current form
[x] Web 2.0 lol

This might work, big might, as:

- A dating site idea (revenue from advertising/memberships)
- A facebook/iPhone app or game

But only with brilliant execution. In its current form it is dead I think, the patheticness of paying for compliments and the size of the network effect needed to start bringing in money sinks you ever getting anywhere with this. As an idea (the power of compliments) it's weak to middling, but if you execute it well you might be able to turn it into something.

I thought this was going to be some twist on the good-ole fake-review-purchasing site, and I was expecting to give it two thumbs up, but I'm not too sure about this...

thank you for ur feedback,greatly appreciated!
we only got 1 developer in our team,this is the best he could do within the limited time frame he had to work with (few hrs).
this is only a days work essentially so we are considering a lot of ways to pivot from the initial idea.

facebook game app is def something in consideration.

another idea is to get in the marketing sector,and develop a platform that will allow businesses to reward useful reviews of their products (even if they are negative reviews).i believe such mechanism is not directly available to businesses yet (?)

this is not limited time, this is nothing. But I suppose you know that already...

sites like this, usually, must be really appealing and catchy to succeed. the whole payoff for you rests on the notion how simple and good the landing page is structured to have a maximal conversion rate....

similar from shark tank (imo, could be done far better)
http://iwanttodrawacatforyou.com/

you can also do a professional compliment site, the one that reviews something that user asks (take a picture of you and a fashion girl/guy gives a compliment and advice what is good or bad - prepare for dating or something). just an idea....

very true,landing page design is super crucial to startups in this sector.we just had to create a working mvp before the end of the day to do our presentation.
having an ugly landing page might probably skew our google analytics numbers as they will prob be a lot different than if we had something attractive (greatly reduce exit % (now around 45%)).

professional review is a great idea,prob something we can review in the near future.

thx for the feedback!

Landing page design isn't going to make your content viral.

Content and engaging your target audience is going to make your content viral. If you're going to be experimenting with anything, experiment with different ways to engage people and get people to share it.

Definitely make this a facebook app instead. So much easier to get this project "out there" when just a few people start using it and all their friends see it pop up on their timeline.

And Im sorry to say it, but the current design and layout looks like the websites that came out in the 90's. If you want a website for this, you definitely should hire a professional webdesigenr - even for the facebook app.

thanks everyone for ur feeback.this is all really helpful info.
im no longer working on this project as it was just a weekend thing for me,but part of the team is probably going to evolve this into something better.
pipstarter,we were aware that the site was super basic but it was the best we could do within a few hours.
facebook was the main platform we were considering because of the social network effects as well as the increasingly more popular facebook credits system.
i think the team will try to push this through pinterest though,but I'm not sure.