Rate My Startup: Hangchillparty.com

[drewsing]

Hangchillparty answers who’s free to hang out. Right now. It's Twitter for hanging out.

When people want to hang out in the immediate future, they text or call friends. This is inefficient since you can only personally contact one person at a time, and you must then wait for a response. You don’t know who won’t respond or is unavailable. Social networking sites don’t alert you when a friend wants to socialize. They are also cluttered with irrelevant statuses.

Instead of tweets, we have “signals”. Users signal a green, yellow, or red light, which represents their social availability. These can be sent to facebook, twitter, email, and text message.

Users can join their friends’ signals to create real-time social groups, which does not exist on the web today. Or one user may update for his friends who are with him at that moment.

In the U.S, there are 43 million people between 16-25. This is our initial target market.

hangchillparty.com, we opened it up a few days ago.

Thanks, I appreciate your thoughts and feedback. -Drew

[apsurd]

I have a hard time believing users in your demographic (16-25) are really going to label themselves as "not doing jackshit".

I remember when I was in high school I would always be on AIM Friday and Saturday night, because naturally I had a curfew and that's what I did - go online. Funny thing is NOBODY was ever online Friday and Saturday night. Everybody was on for hours on end during the weekday of course, but come Fri/Saturday - not a soul. The point is, you know damn well everybody else had a curfew too and everybody else was doing jackshit online too, and everybody else was at most doing jackshit "over at someone else's house", - but nevertheless, it was an unspoken rule (apparently) that you make it look like you are out and about having a great time by not being on AIM.

[drewsing]

Aspurd, I remember those time in high school too (I'm 21). A huge part of Hcp is flipping "not doing jackshit" into "I'm down to have a good time", which means the same thing, but is less desparate. Today, I notice many of my friends are on facebook on weekend nights because online social norms have changed a ton the last few years, and I'm sure they wish they knew a few more social options. Good question, it's one we get a lot.

[pedalpete]

I think you've found an interesting idea, though I'm concerned you may have overcomplicated it.

The 'green-yellow-red' was totally lost on me, and do users want to show their 'social availability'? or do they want to find what's going on when they are available. Why would I update that I'm not available.

Also your 'signal' button and even the concept is a bit to abstract. I didn't know what 'signal' meant. I don't think it is easy to understand.

A demo video would be really good. Some of the questions i'm wondering is if I say 'I'm free to hang out' how long is that status active? What are the next steps? How do my friends find out? You haven't made this apparent. The most I can gather from your site is that it's like a status update. Not that that is a bad thing, but I don't sign-up for these sorts of things until I know what it does. I'm sure i'm not the only one.

[drewsing]

Thanks Petalpete. I appreciate your feedback. I'm curious, purely for feedback sake, how old are you? We're noticing interesting differences in feedback depending on age. We will continue gathering info and make the necessary changes.

[khandelwal]

I think you've found an interesting problem to solve.

However, it seems like the opposite approach would work better. Users would signal that planning an activity, and their friends would be notified (somehow) and could click a simple 'yes' or 'no'.

I think something more like a real-time evite would make more sense (at least to me).

I'm 31 though - so perhaps out of the target market.

[drewsing]

Interesting. It looks like we need to provide more info on our login page. What you stated is how it works. A user can choose to be emailed or texted when a friend has signaled a green or yellow. You can then join these signals within hangchillparty, which allows for the real-time evite aspect you are talking about.

[woodall]

I left a comment on your Jobs page. The input in the "about me" boxes isn't sanitized and it broke everything for me.

[drewsing]

Thank you, we've been so busy with things, so we'll try to get it soon.

[friendlyhacker]

http://hangchillparty.com