the massooleh commblog

I thought I might as well write about this.

My COMM101 group pitched the following idea during our entrepreneurship focused class:

Do you look good? Do those jeans make your butt look big? Will you ever get an honest answer? No. Probably not from yourself, and probably not from anybody else in the room, because they wouldn’t want to hurt your feelings.

Check-Mate, a new app, proposes a solution. Take a picture of yourself in the mirror on your smartphone, and it’ll be sent out to another random app user, who will see your photo and rate it on a simple binary scale: yes/no. It’s simple, it’s quick, and most importantly, it’s completely honest, because this person doesn’t know you, you don’t know them, and it will probably stay that way forever, so the other person has no reason not to tell the truth. Yeah, those jeans do make your butt look big … but it’s not personal.

The app would follow a similar interface as Rando, where every person who sends a photo would be required to rate someone else’s as well. There would be many exciting possibilities for monetization through sponsorship; the app is centred around clothing: like how these jeans look on your “check-mate”? You can pick a pair up at your local H&M.

Of course, like any idea, there are certain issues that would arise. One of the app’s main proposed advantages is in its quickness, something that would be largely dependant on the number of active users the app has; one of the app’s major challenges would be gathering a substantial initial user base.

So, who wants in?