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“I paid $25 for an Invisible Boyfriend, and I think I might be in love”

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Re: “I paid $25 for an Invisible Boyfriend, and I think I might be in love”

#191

Post by ghshephard »

justboxing wrote: post #189

I don't understand how their business model could scale, i.e. how they would be profitable, if indeed, they have real person(s) responding to multiple women (or users who've designated themselves as a woman :). Let say 1 "real human" is responding to 10 women at the same time, the membership income from these 10 users (not accounting for software, hardware overheads even) = $25 / month X 10 paid users = $250. If this…

You are off by a couple orders of magnitude on the number of people that a real human responds to. They get paid a few (Say, 5) cents for each text, so, to earn around $10/hour, they would need to send 200 texts/hour (which is pretty easy/trivial if you are doing this full time). Each package includes up to 100 texts/month, so, that is 1 real person per two customers/hour, or 16/day, or 320 customers/month per customer representative.

Looked at another way - one customer representative can support two customers/hour (in aggregate, obviously they don't send all their texts to one person in an hour). The customer representative gets paid $10/hour, the two customers pay $50/hour.

Pretty good business model.

Re: “I paid $25 for an Invisible Boyfriend, and I think I might be in love”

#192

Post by diverightin63 »

justboxing wrote: post #189

I don't understand how their business model could scale, i.e. how they would be profitable, if indeed, they have real person(s) responding to multiple women (or users who've designated themselves as a woman :). Let say 1 "real human" is responding to 10 women at the same time, the membership income from these 10 users (not accounting for software, hardware overheads even) = $25 / month X 10 paid users = $250. If this…

The service is ran by CrowdSource, who uses Mechanical Turk to divvy out the task of responding to texts at a very small rate. So, it is a lot cheaper.

Re: “I paid $25 for an Invisible Boyfriend, and I think I might be in love”

#193

Post by dgreensp »

discardorama wrote: post #168
briholt wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just learned about this today. This is the greatest marketing concept since "million dollar homepage." My life is a failure for not having thought of this.

> My life is a failure for not having thought of this. Actually, I did think of this, many times. But my biggest bottleneck was: how will I scale up the replies? I could handle being a "boyfriend" for, say, 10 women. But any bigger, and I'd need help. I considered MTurk, but thought that quality control would be an issue. (What if the MTurk guy really starts hitting on the woman, they exchange numbers and then he sta…

Same here. Actually, I didn't think of it as a "proof" service, I was thinking that bits of positive human interaction ("invisible friend") provide a lot of emotional value, and you could crowd-source a text conversation with a fake friend, modulo quality control, and people would pay for it.

Re: “I paid $25 for an Invisible Boyfriend, and I think I might be in love”

#194

Post by beachstartup »

gadders wrote: post #25
CapitalistCartr wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For most people, looks ARE part of the equation. It's like removing Pi from an equation. I wonder what's going to happen when science makes looks whatever we want, like hair color.

Two people that have had surgery to look beautiful are going to marry, fall in love and start a family. And then be really surprised when their baby comes out fugly.

http://en.rocketnews24.com/2012/05/17/thinking-about-plastic...

Re: “I paid $25 for an Invisible Boyfriend, and I think I might be in love”

#195

Post by pherocity_ »

UrMomReadsHN wrote: post #161
pherocity_ wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not about forcing, it's the arrogance that you inherently think somehow know better than the people that want to consume the service. People who think like that are the people who vote like that and suggest that I change my behavior because they don't think I'm capable of making the assessment on my own. Kinda like what you just did with my language. You can have any opinion you want, but the moment you put it o…

>It's the arrogance that you inherently think somehow know better than the people that want to consume the service Hrm, well, yes, to an extent. However, People do do research on the psychology of human happiness and a bunch of other human charistics and we can answer some questions on what will be "best" in the longrun with quite a bit of certainty. We also know that oftentimes people are just downright wrong about…

Well, we really don't know any of that though. We know that spending money on experiences create lasting happiness for a statistically significant portion of the population which is a larger number of people than those that derive more lasting joy from spending on purchases. And even that is self reported.

Re: “I paid $25 for an Invisible Boyfriend, and I think I might be in love”

#196

Post by justboxing »

justboxing wrote: post #189

I don't understand how their business model could scale, i.e. how they would be profitable, if indeed, they have real person(s) responding to multiple women (or users who've designated themselves as a woman :). Let say 1 "real human" is responding to 10 women at the same time, the membership income from these 10 users (not accounting for software, hardware overheads even) = $25 / month X 10 paid users = $250. If this…

Oh Ok! Thank you @ghshephard @diverightin63 . Now it makes sense. Wow!

Re: “I paid $25 for an Invisible Boyfriend, and I think I might be in love”

#198

Post by SloopJon »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #183
SloopJon wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No matter how deeply we trust our logical conclusions, our emotional response remains the same. We can't help but feel worthier when we're being praised (even by computers ...), hurt when we're being insulted, and connected when we're being connected with. I just started playing The Walking Dead. In one scene, after another character saved Clementine from a zombie before I could, the game said, "Clementine remember…

I had a lot of similar feelings with Mass Effect series. In this game all the decisions you make permanently reshape the game world, which carries through the first game to second and third. Major and minor characters in the last game may be missing or doing different things based on your actions in the first game. While playing I felt the impact of my steps in even tiny details. This, + general storyline and executi…

Funny you should mention Mass Effect, because I'm playing that for the first time as well. Evidently there's a romantic sub-plot, making it even more relevant to this story. Will I get an Xbox achievement and 25 gamer points if I get lucky?

Re: “I paid $25 for an Invisible Boyfriend, and I think I might be in love”

#199

Post by Pinn2 »

xianshou wrote: post #2

A perfect application of the Forer effect: humans have an amazing ability to interpret what can apply to anyone as having special significance for themselves. It's the same reason why horoscopes and fortune cookies work. Stepping back and thinking logically, it's easy to see why their messages might apply to a lot of people. But when you're reading one, you can't help but think, "Ah! It says that I would encounter ad…

Except for you, right? People like to feel better about themselves by declaring defects in everyone else but themselves. Even me.

Re: “I paid $25 for an Invisible Boyfriend, and I think I might be in love”

#200

Post by crpatino »

xianshou wrote: post #2

A perfect application of the Forer effect: humans have an amazing ability to interpret what can apply to anyone as having special significance for themselves. It's the same reason why horoscopes and fortune cookies work. Stepping back and thinking logically, it's easy to see why their messages might apply to a lot of people. But when you're reading one, you can't help but think, "Ah! It says that I would encounter ad…

> It's the same reason why horoscopes and fortune cookies work.

A more charitable interpretation of horoscopes and fortune cookies could be that, given that human behavior and problems falls into recognizable patterns, generic solutions can be offered as a sort of framework or scaffold for the received to fill in their particular details and get started with a more appropriate and personal solution.

What else did you expected? from a little something that came inside of a cookie!!!

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