Funder

Create your own parody slogans for "world-changing" startups

3 followers

Create your own parody slogans for "world-changing" startups

3 followers

Writing assistants

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Startup communities

Launch tags:iOS•Web App•Funny

Launch Team

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Promoted

Cassette

Maker

Hey Product Hunt My cofounder and I are Stanford alums and our team has previously built several apps that were featured by Apple. I'm excited to be revealing Funder. We describe it as "Startups are silly. Let's make fun of them." and I think you'll love it. Funder is the first app from Lemonade.io, a team on a mission to measure and improve creativity. By playing this game, you are contributing to the world’s largest research dataset for creativity assessment and education. Here's some more information about the app: Not buying the Silicon Valley hype? Create your own slogans for those “world-changing” tech companies to tell the real story. In this satirical social game set in the fabled Valley, use your wit and creativity to disrupt the industry and climb the ladder from Intern to Keynote Speaker to VC and beyond. Start by 'investing' in the most hilarious startup taglines with a simple upvote, and you'll unlock the ability to write your own. Write some parody pitches, and soon you'll be creating your own companies and raising funding like Elon Musk. Win over hearts and minds with a clever pitch, and it may even blossom into a Unicorn. Invest in hilarious content from people you know, and grow your bottom line by supporting their vision with stacks of seed-funding.

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11yr ago

Spok

@preetangad How do you guys plan on using this for creativity assessment and education?

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11yr ago

Cassette

Maker

@matthui Great question! Other people have tried to use ML to understand creativity but are limited because there is very little data in the world about how creativity works. Through engaging consumer apps, we hope to crowdsource a dataset that is orders of magnitude better in size and quality. We're working with leading academics in the field to leverage the data from this app to further human understanding of creativity. Because software is eating all non-creative jobs, we think creativity is the most valuable skill for the 21st century. Therefore, knowing how to measure and improve creativity is one of the most important problems out there for enterprise, education and individuals.

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11yr ago

@preetangad Unlocking levels by upvoting and pitching is addictive. And so much fun :)

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11yr ago

Cassette

Maker

@ipranav @preetangad I'm happy to hear that you're enjoying it!

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11yr ago

Wow I'm loving this - wish I could search for companies - wish the company list didn't refresh to the top every time I tap a company - doesnt featuring the same pitches in the home screen sorted by most votes become a self fulfilling profecy? - wouldn't that make bandwagoning the best "investment" strategy?

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11yr ago

Funder

Maker

@gerbz We LOVE user feedback. You rock! There are a ton more features we want to build, and your input helps us to prioritize. Please keep it coming. You can continue to comment here and/or email feedback@lemonade.io

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11yr ago

Cassette

Maker

@gerbz Glad to hear you like it Greg! Thanks for the feedback. Totally agree with you, but here are my thoughts: 1. Company search is definitely on our list, and hopefully we'll sneak it into the next update. We just had to leave out some features to build the first version quickly. 2. I agree the list refreshing is really annoying, but it's mostly because of how Swift does paging. We'll look for a fix to that. 3. The Global Feed on the homescreen is All-Time for now but we plan to change it to Daily, similar to PH. We always imagined it being daily but we made it All-Time so new users would see the best content and get the hang of it. Also, we imagine people using the Following Feed as their main feed and we're making it the default in the next version. 4. The way we reward money does a pretty good job to protect against that. The very best way to make money is to write pitches and get upvotes on those pitches. You do make money when other people invest in pitches you invest in, but that amount is much smaller. Also, it's set up so that people who invest early in pitches get way more points than people who invest later on.

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11yr ago

@preetangad @dawncardon - cool - I certainly have more feedback/ideas/questions for you =) Completely understand the need to prioritize and LAUNCH. And glad you did. - Before pulling the trigger on making the following stream the main stream, seriously look at how people are using the app. Me personally, I haven't followed a single person, and don't really plan to. This app seems more about collective creativity than individual based. - Consider adding a stream of new pitches, sorted by newest at the top. I personally would enjoy flipping through that, especially after seeing what's trending today. Reddit figured this out. Its how discovery happens. Also, this would be a fun way to be the "first money in" and award people for being the first investor =) - Why the conscious decision to not give any insight into how much money you're making for each action? Difficult to come up with an "investment strategy" without knowing what earns what. - For the leveling to be more effective, I need to know what actions to take to reach the next level. - Didn't realize that I "own" the companies I added. I thought I was just contributing to the list. How do you deal with duplicates?

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11yr ago

Cassette

Maker

@gerbz Love how deeply you're thinking about this, and I totally agree with you. 1. The following feed is much cooler than simply pitches by people you follow. If you write a pitch for a company, you'll see every new pitch for that company in your feed. If you follow a user, you'll see all the things they invest in. Technically, new users are supposed to automatically follow @FunderGame on sign up but Parse has been unreliable on that so we're fixing it. We're using the @FunderGame account to upvote things that are new and noteworthy, so highly recommend following it. 2. The feed has been the heart of the discussion for us and I agree it's a lot of work to get right. We didn't just want to add a 3rd feed because we think people simply won't check that many feeds to it's about covering it in 1-2 feeds. We looked at the "New" feed on Yik Yak/Reddit/Twitter and decided against it but will consider it again. 3. We think giving away the detailed breakdown of how to make more money or how to level up takes away from the fun of writing and investing in pitches and just becomes about optimizing for getting more money. Once you write a few pitches, we found that people were coming back to actually write and read pitches and the money is not the main incentive anymore, which is ideal. That said, if you really want to figure out how much money each action is worth, it's pretty easy to do. As for levels, once you get past the first few onboarding levels, it's just based on how much money you have. 4. The "owning" companies element is something we've focused less on after our beta testing and we definitely want to deemphasize it. There's a sweet new feature coming in the next version that replaces that space on your profile with something much much cooler! For now we deal with duplicates manually, but we can always build a feature that guards against that.

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11yr ago

@preetangad Deep, you haven't seen deep... =) - I was wondering why I was seeing new pitches in my following feed from people I wasn't following. The fact that I'm auto following the companies I pitched helps make sense of that. - Consider every pitch starting with 1 vote from yourself, otherwise I just upvote my own pitches, why wouldn't I? - Ideally, I still feel like if I'm making all this money, I should be putting it to work. I could have a Net Worth & Cash amount. Investing in a pitch should ding my cash. Otherwise... why not invest in EVERY pitch? - If upvoting is investing, then is downvoting stealing a startup's lunch money?

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11yr ago

Cat Shake

This is a solid idea, Angad. The ecoystem seems a little convoluted though. Shouldn't you have to invest some of your money in the pitch, otherwise, why not upvote everything? I think there's a lot of opportunity for this to be game-ified and go viral, but the system of rewards seems like it needs some clarification.

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11yr ago

Funder

Maker

@bencbernstein Thanks for the feedback! We thought long and hard about whether to make an investment 'cost' users and decided against it because we didn't want to penalize this core form of engagement. Please keep the product input coming. I'd love to know what you mean by convoluted. Could you give an example? You can continue to comment here and/or email feedback@lemonade.io

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11yr ago

Cassette

Maker

@bencbernstein We realize that intuitively you would expect to sink some money every time you invest in a startup, but we don't want to disincentivize people from voting. People upvoting everything is obviously not ideal from the data collection perspective, but we can easily identify users who do that in our data analysis. On the other hand, there's nothing wrong with rewarding users who are engaging with the app, and giving love to other users :D

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11yr ago

@preetangad @bencbernstein I actually didn't realize that voting was investing until I received a notification mentioning it.

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11yr ago

Cassette

Maker

@gerbz @bencbernstein Yeah, we used to explain that in the onboarding but no one reads the onboarding anyway, so we used notifications to teach that behavior :D

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11yr ago

@preetangad just downloaded the app. Such a great way of collecting data. What's the vision for the app?

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11yr ago

Cassette

Maker

@mossibat We want everyone to know what it's like to be a Thought Leader :D Jokes apart, the app is based on the Consensual Assessment Technique by Teresa Amabile (Stanford/Harvard), which is considered the gold standard in creativity assessment. It showed that creativity is not as subjective as we think it is, and there is a high amount of consensus when people are asked to rank creative output by others. If Shakespeare wrote everything in Google Docs and we could see his "Revision History", think about how much we could learn about how his brain worked that we can't know from just reading the finished product. The data in the app could show us some amazing patterns about how people create. For example, are people who read lots of pitches by others more or less likely to create good stuff themselves? Are there people that are consistently more creative than most, and what patterns are predictive of that? How does the ability to consistently identify creativity relate to the ability to be creative? Does your creativity go up on average as you continue to use the app for practice, inspiration and feedback? Eventually, can we replace the need for the crowd to vote and teach a computer how to assess how creative something is? Our future roadmap is to build apps that help people and organizations improve creativity. The data from this app will help us build intelligence so we can go in the direction of a less crowd-based and more individual/group based interaction.

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11yr ago

@preetangad haha. You're doing a great job at that. How are you crunching the numbers in the backend?

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11yr ago

@preetangad from the current results you seem like a spray and pray investor whereas @jakedoering is a portfolio operator vc 😂😂

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11yr ago

Cassette

Maker

@mossibat Until now, the focus has been on making the app as awesome as possible. @dawncardon is doing data analysis for now but we're planning to recruit a full-time ML expert soon, if you have any recommendations. We're also considering letting some academics have access to our data so they can write papers about it.

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11yr ago

Cassette

Maker

@mossibat Haha I'm just more prolific than @jakedoering. It's all about going upstream and sourcing deals early a la YC :D

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11yr ago

Medium

These are great. People are wonderful! A few thoughts: 1. It would be great to be able to riff off of other pitches. I think some of the best commentary--the stuff that's the most unexpected and delightful--comes as a bit of a back and forth. 2. I am maybe just a dummy but how do I actually write a pitch? I can't figure it out for the life of me

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11yr ago

Cassette

Maker

@_tessr Hey Tess! 1 is a great idea. We're working on a feature that's similar to forking on github so people can do that! Before you can write pitches, you first have to upvote a few pitches to unlock pitching.

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11yr ago

Medium

@preetangad thanks! Slowly getting the hang of it.

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11yr ago

Cassette

Maker

@_tessr yeah we did some experimental stuff with unlocking features slowly instead of explaining everything onboarding. It seemed to work well in user testing but we're closely watching the data :)

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11yr ago

FoodSelfie

The Design and the coding skills used in this app , should go to public so other devs learn to create clean code like you have

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11yr ago

Funder

Maker

@ilyashassani you're right that we have an awesome team! @jakedoering on design and @teddynewell and @rock_starr_0 on dev have made for an amazing app!

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11yr ago

Just For Today by Fred (Not Freud)

"Funder: An app that is really fun, but only if you have an iPhone." #NotBitter #LooksFun #OkALittleBitter

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11yr ago

Cassette

Maker

@avizuber Hey Avi, thanks for the compliment! Sorry we're iPhone and iPad only for now, but you can follow the action on the web at funder.lol or steal a friend's iPhone :D

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11yr ago

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