Sometimes, you’re stuck between a few choices and what you really need is a some helpful advice from friends. But getting feedback isn’t always easy as it sounds, especially when it involves visual options or more in depth decisions. That’s a problem that former AdMob founder and CEO Omar Hamoui is trying to target with his new startup Maybe.
The company, which launched in preview mode today, gives people a simple polling tool that makes it easy to get feedback about a decision between different choices. Users can ask a question and supply images using bookmarklet tool, which also allows you to supply a price for that item. Or users can paste in a URL as another option. The question can then be shared to the Maybe community and also out to Twitter, Facebook and to friends via email.
When it comes time to vote, a user can easily choose between each option, add their own comments to a discussion forum or share it again as a “Re-Maybe.” There doesn’t appear to be a time limit. The results of the vote tallies are not displayed until a person votes.
Hamoui told me many people just resort to sending each other emails with a list of links to get feedback about what choices to make. That can be inefficient because people aren’t able to see all the choices side by side. Maybe is trying to simplify the process of making informed decisions.
“There are a lot of places to discover things and a lot of places to get more detailed information about stuff but the general process of making a decision isn’t documented anywhere or facilitated,” said Hamoui.
Maybe is still a work in progress and doesn’t have a mobile interface, which is a top priority. The site is also working to add research tabs, which will automatically pull in relevant online information about the question a person is trying to answer. That speaks to Maybe’s larger ambition to become a resource for helping everyone make any decision they need to make. So it won’t just be multiple-choice decisions, but other types of questions like putting choices in ranked order. And it will help people discover options in the first place, when they’re not sure what they should be choosing from. Ultimately, Maybe will try to provide people a way to understand the rationale and reasoning that goes into other people’s decisions, which can help guide a user’s choices.
I’m not sure how big it will be initially, but I think Maybe can find an audience. For a lot of decisions, you can still just get quick feedback by going to Facebook or Twitter or using mobile apps like Thumb. But those aren’t designed like Maybe to help choose between different options. Having something built around decision-making can be useful for people, especially as it evolves and takes on more use cases and provides more information and resources. Many people are piecing together tools to make good decisions, but they’re not always sure they have all the right information. It would be nice to have a place that provided more services to ensure people ultimately have confidence in whatever decision they need to make.
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