Don't get me wrong, I don't think you guys are out to swindle me or anything (quite the opposite), but honestly your website sets my 'dodgy brothers' sensor tingling. The main source of information, the FAQ, intermingles sales pitches with fragmented bites of detail about how the service actually works. Most of the FAQ is fluff, with the few facts hidden amongst it. I have several questions about how the service works. For example: When do you take your cut? What happens to uncollected funds? If I donate 10c to someone, am I going to be sent an email demanding payment 5 times a day? (I am not asking for a response on these questions here – I think this information should be on the website itself).

At the moment, if I use your service, I know what is going to happen in a general sense (and I had to read thoroughly to even get this far), but I don't know all the details. Because I don't know the details, I have to trust that you are going to do these right. But why should I trust you to do that? If you were trustworthy, wouldn't you be upfront in the first place? The more I have to trust you, the less willing I am going to be to trust you.

Also, be-careful of how you advertise yourselves. Quite a few statements in that FAQ are quite strange, like discussing passing on future savings to the tip receivers, and the whole money transfer service thing. Why are you asking for more of my trust, or my help? Me... help a company? You're supposed to be helping me! I don't want to trade with you because you're going to be help me in the future, I want to trade with you because you are going to help me right now. So you just need to sell your current rates and features convincingly. Don't get me wrong, slash your prices as soon as you can, but don't promise you will, just do it and let everyone know you've done it when you've done it. You can't tell me you're customer orientated; almost every company says it. Let your customers tell me (word of mouth style, not via your home-page :-) ).

I believe this trust to be an extremely important issue for you to deal with, because you aren't some website asking for my email address, you are a website dedicated to handling money transfers.

“If I were king of the zoo,” I would drop the FAQ format and split the information out into two separate sections. The first would be your selling page, something that compels customers to try the service. The second would be simple, no fluff, factual explanation of what happens. Screenshots, diagrams, and examples can make all the difference.

Sorry, I don't mean to be so negative. You guys have the opportunity to make something great; its excites a man such as myself!

Though I hope they find a way around the possible problem of people spamming tips or just frivolously IOUing. Ideally once the thing gets some momentum, people will have a small pool of cash in their account so that the proportion of IOUs goes down, and the benefit of using the site become clear. But they'll have to get to that point quickly enough sustain interest.

Do users get a reputation based on the proportion of tips they eventually pay out? Can you force users to tip (e.g. you must tip before you get to read this article, regardless of whether you're going to pay eventually).

And please make it multi-lingual! I'd love to try out a tipping-based business model, but just English won't cut it for me.

Nice to see another great idea in the winter batch, btw!

That being said, we're probably going to add a "safe for work" mode, which you can toggle to hide questionable content.

I'm very interested in giving more than the "top tips" page. I'd like to build a recommendation engine that give you want you want to see, based upon your past tipping behavior. That could entirely eliminate the other problems with other social news sites. We'll see.

A combination of recommendation engine, sock-puppet squelching, manual site curation, crowd sourcing, and tweaks to our hotness algorithm should be a solution.

As for criticism, I'm always reminded of this quote:

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; because there is not effort without error and shortcomings; but who does actually strive to do the deed; who knows the great enthusiasm, the great devotion, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement and who at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly. So that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.” ~ Theodore Roosevelt

You sound surprised...

I might make a suggestion though. While Amazon is great, I'd like to think, or home, at a few people getting tips would be basically able to live off them for a time, and that means they'd need to either get cash, or be able to use tips to pay for living expenses. It might be troublesome to get a deal, but I'd love to see grocery stores as a source of giftcards.

Many thanks, and a hearty congratulations, Kirigins!

Just kidding!

I think the real solution is clearly to put in the legwork to become a licensed money transfer service. We fully intend to, but simply can't afford it till we close a Series A. So not to sound like a broken record, but use the service so we can impress VCs :-D

Encourage other companies to put TipJoy on their sites (by letting them have a percentage of peer-to-peer donations) and everyone wins, especially you.

I know it's been mentioned by others, but I think your site layout needs a little work. In particular, your mechanism is pretty simple, yet you hide it in some text in your FAQ. Put up a "how does it work" page with a flowchart or something.

Oh, one more thing: what about mentioning the tip amount on the "Tip this" button? I know, it would make it marginally bigger, but I think it would help, psychologically. People are probably (well, I am) very wary to press a button that implies payment (if they've not signed up) or actually "destructively" affects their balance with no check-back confirmation. (if they have) Putting the amount right there would definitely put peoples' mind at ease.

I've not read your client-side code, but I'm guessing you guys have made a decent effort to avoid cross-site scripting fraud where embedded buttons are auto-clicked by a malicious script or something. Right?

In any case, keep up the good work!

It will be interesting to see if bloggers, et al, start playing to the gallery if they get used to "tips".

One suggestion: Allow a way for website owners to 'redirect' a portion of a tip jar's tip to the creator of a particular piece of content.

We intend on building this. The challenge will be making it clear that the button goes in part to both people. We really don't want to make users think too much about tipping.

Quick gripe: On the main page, you show sites sans subdomain, but you seem to be tracking money based on subdomain, so for example techcrunch.com has two entries.

I need to change the check to see if a URL is already in the system. I cut off the protocol part, but forgot to cut off the www, i.e. http://google.com matches google.com, but not www.google.com or http://www.google.com.

This will be fixed very soon.

Everyone please be sure to give me lots of money so they'll have nice stats to show on Demo Day.