RankPic (https://www.rankpic.info) is an app to help users crowdsource their best photo. I've been building over the past 3 years & it's grown into a lovely community of people who help each other pick their best pictures for dating apps, professional photos etc.
I've seen some pretty fun novel use cases, such as (multiple!) people using it to pick out glasses, wedding invites & so on.
I recently completed a leaderboard function that cross compares photos from different tests using Claude, which was really impressive and scared me for my day job..
Hey Ben, this looks like a neat project/app! I'm always curious with apps like this about how financially viable it is. Seems to be a fair solution to be able to generate credits yourself by ranking and then buying more credits to get ranked, do you have any numbers or insights you are willing to share? (or have shared somewhere else before?)
That's a great question. It is not making anybody rich, but I cover my costs and make a few hundred extra a month. I think on the order of $500+ MRR.
Besides buying credits there is also a pro membership where people choose which demographics rank them (age, location, gender), can have more tests, larger test sizes and always be at the front of the queue for ranking.
Hi! Sorry for the late response, went to bed and forgot about this post. Thanks :)
We check to make certain people aren't ranking formulaically, and if they are we invalidate their votes and ban them automatically. We also check how close people's rankings are to the consensus retroactively and do some fancy anti cheating patterns there as well.
Would you mind to tell a bit more about the exact logic and algorithms you use for those checks? I'm working on project in a totally different space (offers) but it shares the same idea where users vote on other users submissions and get credits for doing so (to incentivize participation and keep it fair). I haven't really worked out how to prevent abuse, so I'd be curious to learn from others. If you can share things (even just resources) I'd be super happy. Feel free to shoot me a mail to [email protected] in case you don't want to make things public.
RankPic (https://www.rankpic.info) is an app to help users crowdsource their best photo.
I've been building over the past 3 years. It's grown into a lovely community of people who help each other pick their best pictures for dating apps, professional photos etc.
I founded a startup based on this idea. Track purchases with credit cards and sum things up on a monthly basis. Unfortunately couldn't find a grocer to take me up on it mid pandemic, but I want to try it again in a few years if no one has made it work yet.
Thanks for asking! The community is about 15,000 users, maybe 100-300 DAU, tests complete in as little as 10 hours for 20 ranks or up to a couple days if you have a lot of niche filters set for your rankers (age, sex, location).
The best ROI I have found is on Apple and Android app stores. I tried Facebook, Tiktok & others and have found them very expensive with little return (though I admit I'm not marketing expert).
As for Photofeeler.. I actually created this app because I found the way it rated me 1-10 fairly harmful to my mental health. RankPic has users rank your photos best to worst, so it's just against yourself. Additionally you can get more mileage out of each test as you can upload up to 6 photos at a time.
Interesting, that is a good size userbase!
And good argument regarding the ranking vs rating - did not consider this.
I have a site, app.rapidata.io/compare which has a related feature, allowing you to have 100 people vote between two images based on a question (it was made as kind of a demo for our underlying product, but maybe you find it interesting). These are mostly random people though and it does not as detailed filtering as you have.
I've been building over the past 3 years & just recently monetized and crossed the $500/m mark through a Pro subscription. It's grown into a lovely community of people who help each other pick their best pictures for dating apps, professional photos etc.
I've seen some pretty fun novel use cases, such as (multiple!) people using it to pick out glasses, wedding invites & so on
I got all my friends to go on it and spent lots of time ranking people myself.
I also started things off with "fake" tests so that people had other people to rank at the beginning, otherwise folks would just see a dead app and drop off.
It was a really big moment 9 months in when someone's test completed entirely without me ranking. It was a lot of work & I'm really glad to be at a point now where I get to watch people rank each other without me.
How did you design and build your homepage? I find that building the landing page and making it look like a professional, beautiful design is one of my biggest hurdles. I'm an experienced web developer but without a design to work off of - and especially accounting for mobile and dynamic sizing - I really struggle with this part of the work so I'm wondering what other people's workflows are for it.
I used fiverr to make assets, and then either use fiverr to make a design that I can easily build with one of the website building tools (wix, etc.) or I try to build it myself.
The easiest way is to find a landing page you think looks good and use it as inspiration with your own colors, assets, etc.
In case you're looking for a designer, I can help you with the design especially mobile as I have worked on mobile apps that are live on app store and play store. feel free to check out my work : https://monadile.framer.website/
You can also reach out via email : monadile.design(at)gmail.com
Thank you, but I probably will do this myself. For what it's worth - and I'm saying this constructively, not to offend - your website is illegible due to contrast issues. White titles and light grey text against a light blue background. I was sure it must be some kind of error but I turned off all my extensions and loaded it incognito in chrome and nothing changed, so, I don't know what conclusion to draw there. It just doesn't make a very good impression for a designer.
Thanks for asking! I also used photofeeler and found the way it rated me 1-10 fairly harmful to my mental health. RankPic has users rank your photos best to worst, so it's just against yourself.
Additionally it allows users to get more mileage out of each test, when you can do 2-6 photos instead of just one at a time.
Anecdotally I've also heard it is a more fun experience for the rankers.
Without any offense to you, the creator of this app. It's obvious a lot of care went into it and you wanted to create a better product than what is out there. Even considering the mental impact such ranking could have.
However, I genuinely feel that the need for this app is what's wrong with society.
I personally would prefer a randomly selected load of strangers to vote on, say, my best corporate headshot to display to the general public rather than my friends who are a small and biased group.
I guess the people that self-select to go on a photo ranking site may not be representative of the general public, though are probably better than the (all male) 10ish engineers and 3 accountants that I socialize with on a regular basis.
No offense taken, I also have many qualms about the role looks and photos play in our society. The destruction & gamification of social interaction by tech is a genuine harm.
Unfortunately it's what we're dealing with right now, and people need feedback to be able to play the game.
RankPic - www.rankpic.info (available on Android and iOS, website is.. meh)
App that lets you crowdsource people's opinions on your photos. Unlike other websites out there, it doesn't rate you 1-10 but instead ranks your photos against each other so you don't have to feel bad about yourself :). Very useful for dating apps and other social media, esp. if you don't have easy access to friends' opinions.
I've had lots of friends and users tell me it's super useful, but I'm in a slump on building it right now.
My email account that is associated with it doesn't work as they shutdown my domain, so I can't have missed any feedback, and there isn't anyway I can see to switch it without access to the email.
I don't know what to do, I wish they had someone to talk to. I pay them and can't even reach someone it's crazy, they're losing thousands of dollars a month from me and they can't even give me someone to talk to for 15 minutes and sort this out.
If you've been on HN for more than a couple of months, surely you have seen the horror stories that people post regularly. Having Google as a single point of failure for one's business seems risky. There are oodles of DNS providers out in the world that have real support mechanisms for escalating problems. At the bare minimum, when you choose to use Google for your domain's email and other services, keep the DNS off Google so that you have a path for recovery that isn't an empty void in the fabric of space and time.
Like.. did you read the article? Gloating about how all of America's labor and corporate leaders came together to save democracy? Such a conspiracy that citizens from opposing camps were so concerned about Trumps unfounded election lies that they opposed them uniformly.
Not sure if you are sarcastic or not, but unifying labor and business interests has been the (successful) strategy of the Democratic Party for 30 years. Bill Clinton was the trailblazer of the strategy, and maligned for it from the more anti-business left.
> A large group of the country's richest and most powerful people colluded to change voting rules all across the country for the purpose of achieving a specific desired outcome in an election.
Like redrawing electoral districts, no one changes election laws because they are a good person. Everyone who redraws electoral districts and changes election laws claims it's because they are a good person.
Ah yes the ole regime change by way of getting more people to vote and making it easier to vote. Very sneaky tactic. Very undemocratic and nefarious. Very scary.
That's a ridiculous re-writing of history. Russia has documented interference in the election [1]. Also, most Democrats protesting not my president and stolen elections do so because Trump was elected while losing the popular vote. Republicans just made up lies and then tried a coup on democracy, that was just barely prevented by republicans with a backbone. It's crazy how close we came to dictatorship, helped enormously by people like you love to be contrarian and say "both sides"
I've seen some pretty fun novel use cases, such as (multiple!) people using it to pick out glasses, wedding invites & so on.
I recently completed a leaderboard function that cross compares photos from different tests using Claude, which was really impressive and scared me for my day job..