We attach our happiness to a physical or an emotional event. If I can get that job, if I can get to date this person... all these things are attached on an external factor. Getting a job depends a lot on the company you are applying to, dating has it's own factors. So do you deal with this and still be happy and get a happy outcome.
Positive Attitude
- In the Biography of Steve Jobs, Einstein referred a term called Distorted Reality. It actually works atleast for me, if you think that you'll get it, chances are that universe will conspire in favor for you and make it work.
- In the case of getting the job, assuming you are not lazy, with a positive attitude you'll be in a better mode of preparing for interview.
Positive Energy
- With positive attitude comes positive energy. Positive energy brings smile on your face and attracts other humans towards you.
External Validation - the 30 sec rule
No one gives a shit about what you do and what you have done after 30 seconds of the introduction. So why care for what other people think about you, no one has time to think about you - everyone is dealing with their own set of issues. Living in the society have made us slaves towards other people's opinion on our actions. You don't need that, just chill out and do what you like to do the most.
One of my friend once said "it's extremely hard to make money on internet now a days"
I think he hit the bullseye with this comment, making money only doing virtual thing is hard since most of these things have already been built and already have huge user base, taking for example Facebook, gmail, twitter, Dropbox etc. This doesn't mean that there won't be a billion dollar virtual company coming in future and I think secret.ly is getting close to it since they are inventing a new communication protocol but they are one in thousands startups who are building the next generation online communication protocol.
The companies making money on internet right now are the ones that are bridging the gap between the virtual world and the physical world some examples being uber and airbnb.
It's on the new age entrepreneurs to keep looking for disruption around their physical surroundings. Take out your headphone when you are walking, take public transportation instead of driving your car; hop on a train ride from LA to SF, instead of flying. You'll find opportunities everywhere. Be aware of your surroundings.
Why am I saying all these things? Because I am disrupting one of these industries right now. Good luck guys, I know you'll do it.
I recently went to Tate Britain and saw this painting by Patrick Heron (1920-1999) called Azalea Garden. I also develop a bit of front end for my start up and time over time I get stuck with choosing the right color pallete. Sometimes, I think black over white is good, sometimes I feel red color font will be better to catch attention, sometimes I think changing the font will be good... I like the experimentation but all my finished product lacks that polish factor.
After standing in front of this painting for about 5 mins, it made perfect sense to me that red and orange side by side with white background look pleasant to eyes. Each and every color in this painting is right in it's place.
Lession learned: Instead of taking a course in design, go visit art gallieries and choosing the right color pallete will come naturally.
I recently launched a new service and in all excitement of getting more users, I bet with my cofounder that if we can't get 30 orders on a single day next week, I ll take him for a dinner.
Thought I did say that last night, today in the morning I realized that if I can't hit that number, I ll be sad and would put doubts on the whole idea of our new service. This led to the thinking of the idea of what I consider success in life/business.
We humans want to conquer the world as soon as possible and if we don't do that "in time" we feel that we are loosing the race where everyone else is just killing it. This thinking is also fueled by the likes of Hacker News/Twitter with hockey sticks stories and billion dollar valuations of a year old companies.
The case in point is why do I have to get 30 orders in a day? Why not 20 or 10? Every quarter when the earnings statements come out, companies fret about getting only $1 billion in profit when the projected was $2 billion. What is extra $1 billion dollar will do? Make the employees of the company more happy because they might get good bonus? I don't know.
Anyhow, I am fine with 5 orders per day and growing my business to a point where I am able to work on something I am passionate about every day. Even if we don't hit the billion dollar market cap, we are still able to provide a quality service to our users and that to my mind is the most important factor of a successful business.
I want to be happy with my creation and sustain a good lifestyle for me and the people around me.
Truffle is a mobile dating web app that is geared towards providing a beautiful dating experience to a working professional. It simple. Every 3 days, I open www.truffle.io on my browser and get 3 matches from a designer at Zulily to a Sales Manager at Amazon. I invite the designer at Zulily for a coffee and that's it. I have a date.
There is no online messaging. Trust among the Truffle users is established by only allowing people in your same class i.e having similar educational and work background. You either sign up via linkedIn or you need to have an access code given by us.
For each founder, please list: YC username; name; age; year of graduation, school, degree and subject for each degree; email address; personal url, github url, facebook id, twitter id; employer and title (if any) at last job before this startup. Put unfinished degrees in parens. List the main contact first. Separate founders with blank lines. Put an asterisk before the name of anyone not able to move to the Bay Area.
pacifi30; Nishant Singh; 29; 2009; Arizona State University; Masters of Science in Computer Science; nishant@truffle.io; nishant.posthaven.com; http://github.com/3tokens; nishant.singh; @nsingh28; SDE at Amazon.
sunshineo; Gordon Sun; 30; 2008; University Of Toronto; Bachelor's of Science in Computer Science; gordon@truffle.io; n/a; http://github.com/sunshineo; gordon.sun.14; @sunshineo; SDE at Amazon.
agathayu; Agatha Yu; 21; 2013, University of Sydney, (Double Degree in Bachelor of Commerce (Finance) and Law); agatha@truffle.io; http://agathayu.cc, n/a, im.agatha, @yuagatha; Designer at Palantir.
chenyuwang1988; Chenyu Wang; 25; 2012 June, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities; Master of Science; cy@truffle.io; n/a; https://github.com/chenyu-SAPE; chenyu.wang.1088; n/a; SDE at Amazon
Please tell us in one or two sentences about the most impressive thing other than this startup that each founder has built or achieved
Nishant: Until the age of 23, I had a bad stammer. The combination of moving to a new country, getting scholarship at ASU, dressing well, and working harder to achieve my goals, gave me the confidence I lacked. Consequently, with my effort and luck, now I give speeches at Amazon. To help others overcome this problem, I also run the Seattle Stuttering group.
Gordon : I was a regional champion of Physics Olympiad Competition in junior high. While at IMDB, I built new ranking system where I reduced the rank generation time from 10 hours to 1 hour using Hadoop and Amazon Elastic Map Reduce.
Chenyu : I was a fat little boy and failed all the sports exams. The summer before high school I decided to learn breakdance, I exercised night and day. Within 3 months, I won the school's dance competition and started my own dancing club. I also became the president of the Art and Performance department at the student union.
Agatha: I was among the 0.1 percentile of the high school graduating class in Australia, and was awarded a full scholarship for law school. I also designed the sales tool interaction for Australia's national telecommunication company, yes I had to go through a lot of approvals for my design.
Please tell us about the time you, pacifi30, most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage
I wanted to advertise Truffle on LinkedIn, but the ad got rejected on the grounds that LinkedIn doesn't advertise dating sites. I tweeted Jeff Weiner, CEO of LinkedIn, about the rejection, and the next morning the ad was approved.
Please tell us about an interesting project, preferably outside of class or work, that two or more of you created together. Include urls if possible
Gordon and I(Nishant) created Suppermate http://suppermate.com, a mobile app for dining with your friends of friends. We organized 98 dinners in Seattle over the period of 2 months.
How long have the founders known one another and how did you meet? Have any of the founders not met in person?
I(Nishant) met Gordon through a mutual friend in 2010 and since then we have been coding on side projects. Gordon created the necessary infrastructure enabling us to easily integrate new features.
I(Nishant) met Agatha at YC School reception in Oct 2012. She got so excited by the idea of an exclusive dating app for people like her that she designed the landing page for Truffle next morning. From the first design to bringing in the women perspective in Truffle, Agatha has become one of the pillars of Truffle.
Gordon and Chenyu have worked together at Amazon since 2012. Gordon introduced me to Chenyu in Jan 13. Ever since Chenyu has not only been an intensely driven dev for us, he also comes up with creative marketing channels like distributing Truffle access cards through food trucks.
Why did you pick this idea to work on? Do you have domain expertise in this area? How do you know people need what you're making?
Love excites me! It excites me to see two people holding hands and walking down the Broadway Ave. I want to spread love, so I built Truffle, and opened it for all the working professionals ready to fall in love.
I moved to Seattle in 2010 and I found it difficult to meet girls. I tried okCupid, match.com and often I would end up sending tens of messages before getting a response. Even after connecting online, it was still a challenge to meet in person because conversations would just die.
I spend hours surfing online dating websites, tried things like including work/education info in my dating profiles and send straight forward coffee request messages to girls. Eventually, I was able to meet 30 girls from okCupid, eharmony over the period of 3 years but only ended up dating 2 of them primarily because one of my criteria was to date someone who had a similar education and work background to my own.
The idea of Truffle came to mind when most of the girls I met liked the straight forward meeting at cafe approach I took and insisted that they agreed to meet me because I worked at a good company and looked presentable.
We talked to over 150 people who have used or are using eHarmony and match.com. Over 60% girls responded that they don't trust the men and have fear of getting stalked. Whereas an overwhelming 77% of the guys complained about the delay in getting an in person date. 43% of the people feel that they are paying $53 a month just to look at the image catalogue because rate of landing a date is low. 20% out of 280 users on Truffle are from okCupid, eHarmony and Match.com.
Working at Amazon also gave us an opportunity to talk to other amazonians and out of 200 singles in the age group of 23 - 29 we talked to, 80% of people will like to go on a coffee date with someone they have seen at the amazon campus.
We have organized 63 dates since we launched so people are liking it.
What's new about what you're making? What substitutes do people resort to because it doesn't exist yet (or they don't know about it)
We offer four novel things
1. Exclusive user base of working professionals.
2. Per date pricing.
3. No messaging online to encourage users to communicate in person.
4. A new experience. Instead of a message about "How you doing", you get an invitation for a coffee date.
Currently, 33% of people using traditional online dating loose hope and close their account. People tend to have the following pattern in the use of existing dating services.
1. People tends to start with eharmony and Match.com but no face to face dates lead them to the location based apps.
2. Location based apps like Tinder are quick but are more of a fun game then finding someone you may want to develop a relationship with. After a couple of matches with 18 somethings, our target audience drop off.
3. Lastly, people resort back to look around for potential partners in their friend circle that is first of all small and second doesn't give them the opportunity to meet new people.
Who are your competitors, and who might become competitors? Who do you fear most?
There is a tiered hierarchy of dating apps
1. Match.com and eHarmony : These services provide a poor quality of dating experience that usually make people quit or inactive on these platforms. Over that, the high subscription cost with no results make it even harder to trust these platforms.
2. okCupid : Users have range of options and a free communication online platform. However, the conversations online don't lead to anything meaningful.
3. Tinder: This is more of a fun way to gauge your hotness meter. People like each other but only few take it to next level and go on a date. Tinder is tailored towards to teenagers and college students.
Companies like Vice and the subreddit like r/singles can become competitors since people on these communities have similar interests and tastes. Grouper shares our DNA as they facilitate offline meetup. One day if they decide to start organizing one on one dates, they will be a threat to us.
What do you understand about your business that other companies in it just don't get?
80% of what happens on a dating site is ineffective. No filter on the quality of the people as well as the online messaging creates too much noise.
I don’t need to know which movies you like or what food you eat when I want to meet you the first time. If you are good looking and we are in the same class, everything after that needs to happen face to face. The decade old model of writing about yourself in 1500 words and answering 100 questions to test the compatibility does not guarantee a meet up or a relationship. Instead focussing on meeting first and then asking questions to each other have a higher chance of successful companionship.
Moreover, the primary purpose of online dating is to meet someone in person who is not in your social circle but “can” be a part of your circle. And the way you extend your social circle is when you get an invitation to a house party from your co-worker and not by answering questions about if I currently like dogs or cats.
At Truffle, we are opening this window of opportunity to date the person you have seen in the elevator during lunch hours. On other dating websites, you get a “how you doing” email message but on Truffle you get an invitation for a real date at a cafe at a particular day/time.
How do or will you make money? How much could you make? (We realize you can't know precisely, but give your best estimate.)
#Singles/2 * #dates per month per user * cost per date
[Usually men ask out, hence /2]
According to harmony numbers, out of 20 million singles, 14 million users earn 50k and above. Match.com and okCupid have a total of 29 million singles out of which 10 million are working professionals and earn above 50k.
Total user base for Truffle in US = 24 million
Average number of dates per month = 10
Cost per date = $10
Net singles market = 24/2*10*10 = $1.2 billion
We will also provide boutique packages for the "couples" who want to take their relationship to the next level.
#Couples/2 * #packages per month * commission on each package
Number of successful date packages per month per person= 5
Average Commission per package = 20%
Average value of the package = $100
Net couples market = 24/2*5*20 = $1.2 billion
Total addressable market = $2.4 billion
If you've already started working on it, how long have you been working and how many lines of code (if applicable) have you written?
We started working on Truffle in September 2012. We wasted 2 months of our time by building a phone gap application that had latency issues so in Nov 2012, we started building Truffle website and as of now have written 90k lines of python, html and jquery code. We have deployed our code 548 times on the development and 152 times on the production server.
How far along are you? Do you have a beta yet? If not, when will you? Are you launched? If so, how many users do you have? Do you have revenue? If so, how much? If you're launched, what is your monthly growth rate (in users or revenue or both)?
We launched Truffle in May 2013 for Seattle and have 280 users based in Seattle and 100 users outside of Seattle. We have organized 63 dates with the gross revenue of $190 (we gave away most of the first dates free to our first adopters)
Our user growth is 25% in each of the last 3 months.
If you have an online demo, what's the url? (Please don't password protect it; just use an obscure url.)
We have video that shows Truffle user experience
Also this is the URL for our demo App (It might take some time to load the app since its running on free heroku instance that remains idle if there is no activity )
truffleapp.herokuapp.com
Things to try:
* Sign up via LinkedIn and select your city as Seattle
* Click on one of the matches and ask them out
* Credit card details are already provided
* Choose a date and place. You have sent a date invitation
* I ll accept the date and we can have a coffee in Seattle :)
How will you get users? If your idea is the type that faces a chicken-and-egg problem in the sense that it won't be attractive to users till it has a lot of users (e.g. a marketplace, a dating site, an ad network), how will you overcome that?
We know our user base is concentrated in hubs like South lake union in Seattle to Soma in SF. We used guerrilla marketing and hired taskrabbiters to give priority access cards to our target users located in SLU in Seattle. Average cost of acquisition is around $2 per user.
We also run promotions with the businesses near these hubs. Food trucks are our primary distribution channel at this moment since they visit the dense neighborhoods during lunch hours. Average cost of acquisition is $5.
Our recent targeted advertising on Facebook gave us an acquisition cost of $10 per user.
Also from the start we have advertised Truffle on our okCupid and match.com profiles. So far we have successfully converted 57 "other" dating service users into Trufflers.
If you had any other ideas you considered applying with, please list them. One may be something we've been waiting for. Often when we fund people it's to do something they list here and not in the main application
Batch Dinner Delivery : Finding quick and cheap dinner is a challenge for single people. I don’t have time either to cook or sit at a restaurant every day or do an expensive delivery. I would love a service that everyday at 2PM messages me the one dish they can deliver at 7PM for $10 at my neighborhood. By making a huge batch of orders for a single dish and delivering at once to a neighborhood, it is possible to reduce the cost of delivery. Other benefits includes better inventory planning for restaurants because of the order ahead capability as well as making the location of the restaurant irrelevant since any restaurant will be able to deliver it's food in bulk to a far off neighborhood.
Calmix : An Outlook like scheduling assistant that gives the invitor a preview to invitee's availability even when they have different exchange email servers or different calendar clients or the invitor doesn't even have a calendar. We want to use this service for giving matches on Truffle based on the availability and location.
Octave: A mobile app that teaches singing with a set of minigames. Grow as a singer while pursuing achievements in those games, and connect and share with other singers. https://www.facebook.com/OctaveApp
Please tell us something surprising or amusing that one of you has discovered. (The answer need not be related to your project.)
I have discovered an elegant way of cutting an avocado. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WB56T2S4dmA
Scheduling service for online dating companies to recommend coffee shops dates based on the user's calendar and their frequent locations.
We[bold emphasis]
Make it happen
- Dating websites should not just be a platform for discovering new people, they should take the pain out by organizing one on one dates.
Make it better
- Dating websites should give their users date recommendations based on their time slot and location.
Make it connect.
- Start a relationship with your users, connect with them and connect with us via web view from your website or your app.
Two Versions
Mobile Web app
Used by dating apps or websites to render our website as an web view or in the browser. Users get the options for emailing the final meeting location details. Also recommended location/times are sent back to the website in the response.
Native app(Future)
Used for personal use to schedule events/parties with your friends.
UI flow(Native and web based app)
Open our website as an web view if you have a app or open the url if you are a desktop app.
Give us their email and a redirect url of your website.
We will take them to Sync your calendar page.
After syncing, we ll ask them if they want to add/update their location
We will show simultaneously the progress of the other person on the top bar of the website
Wait till both users are finished importing calendar and location
Recommend them the local cafes with the distance from their location at one of their free time slots.
Redirect them to your app/browser with the recommend time and slots in the response body.
Data Model
User
userId [Type : String]
userName [Type : String]
userEmailId [Type : String]
freeTimeSlotIds [Type : Array of timeSlotIds]
Location
locId [Type : String]
locName [Type : String]
Location [Type : int]
Latitude[Type : int]
Time
timeSlotId [Type : String]
time [Type : Json array of String]
locId : [Type : locId]
ResultObject
userName [Type : String]
timeSlotStringName [Type : String]
locationName [Type : String]
distance [Type : Int]
Backend API
Create/Find API : Create or find the user with the given email and user's name
Fetch Google Calendar API : Call the google calendar API and get the calendar slots for the next 1 week.
Save the calendar API : Convert the data into a array of free time slots with each free time slot linked to a day.
Save user location API : Make an api that will store the array of locations from the users.
Get the longitude and latitude API : Give a address, get latitude and longitude from the
Matching API : Input parameters will be two user's emails Ids.
Get the free time slots array from the userIds
Get the common timeSlotIds
Fetch the locId from the timeSlotIds
If the locId is same, call Yelp API to get at most 3 cafes
If the locId is different for the timeslotId, call Yelp API for the locId and get at most 3 cafes for each locIds.
Yelp API : Call yelp api to get the cafes near a location, takes longitude and latitude as an input parameter and return list of cafes. Persist at most 3 cafes in our location object.
Distance API : Given two locId, get the walking/driving distance between them by calling google map API
Test Data[User]
User 1
User 2
User
userId : goog1234A38
userName : Jake
userEmailId : jakeblade@gmail.com
timeSlotIds : {112,223,523}
free timeSlotIds : {123,124,132}
Location[Work]
locId : googPla1287E3
locName : SLU
location : 24
latitude : -123
Location [Home/Neighborhood]
locId : googPla1287E3
locName : Belltown
latitude : 26
longitude : -124
TimeSlot[Busy]
timeSlotId : 112
time : {2,3}
locId : googPla1287E3
Time [Free]
timeSlotId : 123
time : {5, 10:30}
locId : googPla1287E3
User
userId : goog32414B98
userName : Lily
userEmailId : lilykim@gmail.com
timeSlotIds : {897,210,421}
free timeSlotIds : {123,223,984}
Location[Work]
locId : googPla5648D3
locName : Fremont
location : 39
latitude : -143
Location [Home/Neighborhood]
locId : googPla1287E3
locName : Belltown
latitude : 26
longitude : -124
TimeSlot[Busy]
timeSlotId : 210
time : {2,3}
locId : googPla1287E3
Time [Free]
timeSlotId : 123
time : {5, 10:30}
locId : googPla1287E3
Test Data [Yelp Places]
Location 1
Location 2
Location 3
Location
locId : googPla4279F9
locName : Cafe Cesura
latitude : 26
longitude : -123
Location
locId : googPla5687M9
locName : Cafe Presse
latitude : 29
longitude : -123
Location
locId : googPla1007I3
locName : Cade Ladro
latitude : 34
longitude : -145
Test Matching API[For the start up weekend, everything comes from the test data]
Match API : Input (user 1, user 2)
Output (array of ResultObject)
[Test data from DB]Get free timeslots for userid1 and userId2. Common time slots is 123
[Test data from DB]For each free common timeSlotIds and userId, get associated location. locId for the common timeslot 123 for both user1 and user2 is googPla1287E3
[Test data from DB] Call Yelp API and fetch places near the locId "googPla1287E3". Returns a bunch of locations with latitude and longitude.
[Mock]For each of the returned cafe locations, call google Maps API and calculate the distance between the cafe location and the locId "googPla1287E3". Make a simple distance calculations and fill the result object with location name, distance and user name.
Return an array of resultObjects as below.
Test ResultObjects
<----- Tuesday [2-3 PM] --->
Jake
Lily
Recommend Places
Cafe Ladro
Distance from your location : 5 mins walking
Cafe Cesura
Distance : 10 mins walking
Recommended Places
Cafe Ladro
Distance from your location : 5 mins walking
Cafe Cesura
Distance : 10 mins walking
<----- Friday [7-8 PM] --->
Jake
Lily
Recommend Places
Purple Cafe
Distance : 10 mins walking
Din Tia Fung
Distance : 30 mins driving
Recommended Places
Purple Cafe
Distance : 30 mins driving
Din Tai Fung
Distance : 5 mins walking
Data Getters
Make wrapper for all the getters. Getters should obscure the source of the data, this will help us in mocking the API calls, the data can either come from the test database or from the third party APIs.
Startups are like real time schools that gives you learning experience at each and every process. Below are some skills that I am experimenting with these days while running Truffle.
Coding
Chances are that no matter what your idea is, it will involve some kind of web presence and for that you'll need to code. I always been a back end developer mainly coding in Java and Python but since there was no one in the team that knew front end I jumped in and started doing developing our front end, the interim result is not bad. Truffle.
Event Organizer
Again this depends on the nature of the business that you are running but chances are that you'll need to organize some promotional event that will increase your outreach to the customers
Marketing
In the past one year, I started from knowing just Java to steering a team of 5 people together towards a vision, building a relationship with my users, knowing some of the smartest people, getting my proirities right and making sure I am building something that has a need. This is not bad for a year.
Running a dating platform means that I have accounts on all the dating websites not limited to eharmony, match, okCupid etc. That also means that I keep looking around on their websites for new features, functionality etc. Recently I was trying to delete my account on coffee meets bagel and to my horror I can't really delete my account.
This is what they give me if I try to delete, "I can only cancel my membership"
I thought it's only coffee meet bagel that has adopted this horrendous technique so I went on to other dating websites.
This is what match.com tells me when I try to delete my account. Really? So you'll keep my info for a year....
I wanted to see what eharmony does but seems like they decided not to are not up and running today!
I hopped on to see what the good guy okCupid does when I try to cancel my account. Good guy okCupid gives you both the options, you can delete your account or deactivate it :)
I really don't understand why as a user of match.com and coffee meets bagel I am not allowed to remove my information from their servers.
Is it because....
1. Their number of users will remain the same because technically they haven't deleted my account?
2. Or they are looking forward for me to come again?
As a user of their services, can't I demand to delete all the information about me from your servers?
At Truffle, one thing we want is to make sure that we do things ethically and so this is how we deal with removing the account
Yes, in big bold red color, "delete your account". Once you click delete account, everything is gone.....
Often hacker news have articles on how to work in a startup or how to open your own start up. I thought since I currently juggle between amazon and truffle, it would be nice if I write my story on how to excel in big corporations as a developer. This is part I for the fresh out of school graduates who are just going to join companies like amazon, microsoft, google etc.
In part II I'll focus on things that a senior SDE can do to improve his/her standing in his division.
1. Your manager is everything in the initial days If you have a good manager, you will get promoted faster, you just need to keep up doing good work. Keep pressuring him about what things you need to improve upon. In part II, I'll discuss things that you can do if your manager is quite unhelpful towards you.
2. First impression Not just for big corporations but your first project can expedite or delay you promotion. Try extra hard to complete the project before the deadline, don't try to over engineer it from the start. The problem in hand is to complete it. Before submitting code reviews, read them on your own and make sure you are doing any silly mistakes.
3. Have regular 1 on 1 with your manager. 1 on 1 is your time to open up to your manager. I am pretty sure every manager has a agenda for his 1 on 1 but below points will get you rolling - blockers - vacation - feedback for you - feedback for manager - career growth - any other point that you want to discuss
4. Get involve in things outside your team. Talk to the devs outside your team and learn what they are working on. Often times in big corporations, projects spans multiple teams and your knowledge of the other team's system will give you a huge leverage.
5. Occasionally bring some food for your team A bag of blueberries will do a lot of good to your health and as well as relationship with your team mates. Happy stomach kills most of the animosity.
Well congratulations on your first job and keep things rolling. By the way, if you have joined amazon or microsoft or are new to Seattle, try Truffle and meet some cool people :)
Alternatively, you can reach out to me at nishant@truffle.io for anything Seattle or dating!
