OP here.

This is the second "launch" of UnveilX, after a short-lived closed beta and a (late and failed) YC application last September. I've rebuilt most of the product in the time since, looking to learn what we read between the lines from the YC rejection and the more direct feedback from the first users.

UnveilX aims at creating a safe space for having the hard talks about work, be it from an employee, client or supplier point of view - anonymously.

Grounded in my own experience - left the corporate world 4 years ago, returned to Europe, started a company, taught myself to code a year and a half ago when my technical co-founders / investors didn't rise to the level of competence or ownership I was expecting of them (and that the business needed to survive), rebuilt that company from the ground up, (still) running 100% on code I wrote on the back of ~2-3 months of learning. Used that newly acquired knowledge to almost literally lock myself away from the world for a few months to build UnveilX.

In running my former company, had to deal with a lot of bad behavior, especially from corporations trampling over the little guy (delayed or refused payments, sheer incompetence in numbers, ending up taking the blame for their teams' lack of skill, interest, dedication or training, gatekeepers doing anything except their jobs and I could go on). Original idea for UnveilX came from a very dark place - wanted to build a "wall of shame" where I could at least list bad B2B behavior. That's after all else had failed - including, but not limited to, creating websites for global founder CEOs (one of which I'd spent 10 years working for), telling them what's wrong and how we can improve or hand-written letters delivered overseas, after having gone through all the formal and established processes.

Realized there's no place to get a heads up and learn from the bad decisions others make in business, the bad apples you spend months or years of your life chasing only to be disappointed at the waste of time. There has to be a better way!

Enter UnveilX, where you:

* create an anonymous profile defined by a callsign and 1 of 20 avatars

* optionally, set up a public profile that's different than your anonymous one (thought some will want to fully own their engagement on UnveilX, publicly)

* talk about the problems you have at work

* review the companies you work with on 3 values: Pursuit of Competence, Loyalty and Ownership and wearing one of 3 hats: Client, Supplier or Employee

* talk to other users in Lounges - think Slack channels grouped around companies, industries or created by other users; or talk direct to others when you end up following each other (audio, video, file and screen sharing)

* send anonymous tips to people and organizations you want to make aware of the challenges you face or opportunities you see; these are anonymous emails UnveilX sends on your behalf, useful for those who want to get the word out and drive change but can't do it direct, or public

* stand behind or against other people's or companies' posts; the equivalent of likes and dislikes, with agency, because they have a cost (more below)

* earn and spend gold - the currency on UnveilX

* gain experience and quality as an Unveiler, one of the ways to keep the conversation professional and civil by helping to spot bad actors

* buy gold to use certain features faster; will have to see how to balance over time as people start using UnveilX, as I want everyone to be able to make use of it for free, but need to keep the lights on too, and don't plan on monetizing via ads or anything that touches people's data, so gold is a product sold on the UnveilX store

Most of the philosophy is a tribute to Ayn Rand, who helped me articulate my own worldview for the past couple of years. Some of the mechanics are a tribute to World of Warcraft - thought I'd wasted 8-9 years of my life when I quit, amazed to see how it connected in my future.

Some technical details - coming from a non-technical person that taught himself to build it:

* backend is Flask, thanks to Miguel Grinberg's Mega Tutorial that started me on this path [1]

* real-time communication in lounges is socket.io and WEBRTC (frontend) and flask_socketio on the backend (again, thanks to Miguel [2])

* real-time content toxicity predictions using the Perspective API [3] from Jigsaw for text and Google's Cloud Vision API (SafeSearch) for images

* hosted on my gaming computer from 2008 and a 2011 Mac Mini server in my father-in-law's basement, both behind CloudFlare; given the sensitive nature of the conversations I expect to take place on UnveilX, I thought self-hosting is the appropriate approach to keep people's data safe, even if it means taking extra to learn as much as I can about setting up and managing my own infrastructure

The team is currently me and my wife. Just (re)launched a week ago with a few close friends. We're keeping it a closed community for the time being, invitation only, so we can give ourselves time to learn as well as control the quality of membership to set the right tone and expectations for the longer term. HN is the first group to learn about UnveilX outside of our immediate circle.

We have tons of open questions, but I would appreciate any insight, feedback and ideas you can spare on one of them: cold start problem - what can we do to get people comfortable enough to start talking? They (N=13) seem to understand the whole concept of anonymity, but for reasons they can't articulate, are not inclined to post

Lastly, apologies if I'm breaking etiquette. I know registration pages are annoying and I'm asking you to go through one. Couldn't think of another way to show you the product - you need to get in to experience everything, otherwise it would be just a landing page that isn't worth your time.

Thank you for your time to read through all of this, and to check out our product. I'll be happy to answer any questions.

[1] https://blog.miguelgrinberg.com/post/the-flask-mega-tutorial...

[2] https://flask-socketio.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

[3] https://www.perspectiveapi.com