We Banned Pitching “Yelp For People” At Our Comedy Hack Day For All The Wrong Reasons
We run Comedy Hack Day, a hackathon that pairs comedians and developers and the whole goal is to make the funniest possible tech products. It challenges people to use apps, sites, and Chrome extensions as vehicles for comedy. At three of our first six events someone pitched “Yelp for people.” It became the poster child of a bevy of “pass judgement on people” ideas that reached such a critical mass we actually banned pitching “Yelp for people.”
We thought that ban made sense because the perpetual pitching revealed its simplicity. Even as a joke it felt too basic. But above that, the idea always seemed predicated on the inevitable cruelty that would occur. “You know how Yelp reviews get crazy and mean and out of control? Wouldn’t it be funny to apply that toward people?” Unless you mean some dark, dystopian sci-fi form of funny, then no. It would not.
Now I realize the error in our ways. We weren’t wrong about “Yelp for people” being a bad idea for our event, but boy were we wrong about why. The reason a “rate humans like objects” app idea didn’t work in a comedy context is clearly because it’s too viable of a product idea. It’s now so obvious that the idea is completely worthy of actual funding and development. Thus, it could never be taken as a joke.
As background for those who haven’t already heard, an app called Peeple has been the focus of some news this week and the whole premise of the product is exactly what we heard at three CHD events: “like Yelp, but for people.” It’s reportedly received millions of dollars in funding, and it most certainly seems to have a pair of co-founders uniquely positioned to corner the superficial judgement market.
After reading all the news about Peeple, I have to admit we feel pretty silly. Here a million dollar idea kept popping up right under our noses, and we were so caught up in the ethical quandaries around objectifying one’s peers that we couldn’t see the idea for what it really is: too brilliant to waste in a comedy setting.
It reached a point this past January where, in a resource created to acclimate and inspire our CHD participants, we provided the following verbatim instructions:
It’s worth noting that certain ideas/types of ideas are pitched at every CHD so we recommend you avoid them. They include: Yelp for people, disguising your activity (Gawker looks like the NYT, Shazam looks like Twitter), goofy voices/personalities for GPS directions, and almost anything that’s Tinder for _____. Ideas about decreasing time on social media come frequently and offer ripe territory, but they demand extra inventiveness (we’ve had a lot of low-hanging-fruit ideas on this front and none have ever made the finals).
DO NOT PITCH YELP FOR PEOPLE.
Looking back now, it’s clear that our choice to list “Yelp for people” first in the list of ideas not to pursue then repeating that “DO NOT PITCH” message in its own bold, all-caps paragraph stemmed from a place of ignorance. We assumed the idea invited cruelty and mostly hinged on reactionary judgement — all things the internet already has in abundance.
But it turns out, it didn’t work as a joke because it’s a good idea! And like any good idea, it was only a pair of self-proclaimed empathetic entrepreneurs and a misspelled word away from becoming a lucrative business. I see now the flaws in our logic. It wasn’t that “Yelp for people” was too morally confounding of an idea to get developed in an event previously won by a social network for people on the toilet. No. It was far too practical of an idea to be debuted alongside the likes of Shit Talk.
I suppose it boils down to one of those things where your instincts are right, but for the wrong reasons. We were right to dissuade people from pitching this idea at a comedy event, but we should have been encouraging them to pitch it to VCs instead. To anybody who pitched or even thought about pitching “Yelp for people” at Comedy Hack Day I would like to take this opportunity to apologize. If we led you to believe it was a bad idea, we’re sorry.
To think, if only we’d encouraged “Yelp for people” then some lucky CHD contestant could have received everything these Peeple co-founders are getting now.
