Your pitch is making an assumption that the hacker news audience is not in your demographic. It reminds me of back in the day when the example incompetent user was "your mother" or "your grandmother". I am a competent grandmother - I have a few thoughts:
1. My friend Jeff Johnson has a book on designing for the older users. "Designing User Interfaces for an Aging Population: Towards Universal Design" He lives in San Francisco if you want to contact him. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B06WPBK2V4/ref=dbs_a_def_r...
2. The Bay Area seems problematic for this age group because of rising housing prices. My non-technical friends are moving out of the area because they can cash out. My friends who are staying largely are technical or married to someone technical. I would target an area that seniors are moving into and need to meet new people rather than an area where seniors are leaving.
3. I am not sure how this is different than meetup. You would have to sell me to pay $15 a month when meetup is free until you want to host an event. Then it is $10 a month. And young people and men can come!
4. Most women are better at making and keeping friends than men. I actually do regularly hang out with friends that I have collected over the years.
We definitely believe that all of our members are more than competent. Apologies if the tone of our pitch suggested otherwise! We're also aware that the mere fact that someone is a woman over 50 does not make her automatically someone who's interested in Revel. The demographic is a huge and heterogeneous group and Revel serves a need for some who are craving the company of their age group of women.
Will definitely contact Jeff Johnson -- thank you for the tip!
A small suggestion to help with marketing is to make your mothers the face of the company. Right now it appears as if you are doing this for your helpless mothers rather than with your awesome mothers. I am not sure how involved they are but mothers should be on the About page.
I would like the meetup question addressed as well. There are a ton of demographic focused groups on meetup and with a lot more members and active groups.
Granted, Meetup was purchased by wework so who knows where that is going.
Good point about Meetup being purchased by WeWork. Doesn't seem that there's much innovation going on there rn...
We've asked our members why they join us and not Meetup or Facebook groups or other things that are out there. We hear two main answers: 1) there is a lot more trust/safety from this being a group just for women of this age, 2) Revel feels like more of a community, whereas on Meetup so much of the organizational burden falls on the group's one host.
1. My friend Jeff Johnson has a book on designing for the older users. "Designing User Interfaces for an Aging Population: Towards Universal Design" He lives in San Francisco if you want to contact him. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B06WPBK2V4/ref=dbs_a_def_r...
2. The Bay Area seems problematic for this age group because of rising housing prices. My non-technical friends are moving out of the area because they can cash out. My friends who are staying largely are technical or married to someone technical. I would target an area that seniors are moving into and need to meet new people rather than an area where seniors are leaving.
3. I am not sure how this is different than meetup. You would have to sell me to pay $15 a month when meetup is free until you want to host an event. Then it is $10 a month. And young people and men can come!
4. Most women are better at making and keeping friends than men. I actually do regularly hang out with friends that I have collected over the years.
5. I prefer mixed age groups.
6. I prefer mixed genders.