Everyone has had good/bad experiences while dating. Ever had a situation where you enjoyed being with a date but never heard back from that date ever again? Leaves you feeling down , a feeling of a vacuum in your core and wondering what went wrong? WotWentWrong, as the name suggests, is a website that allows you to elicit feedback for free and empowers you to remedy the situation and get a closure on your failed dates.

The concept is really rudimentary, in that you request for some feedback from your ex date and also answer some questions giving feedback on what you feel about him/her. Actually you giving feedback to him/her is the carrot to motivate him/her to respond with what he/she did not like about you. The website provided a variety of templates to structure your questionnaire varying from philosophical (where a quote from Benjamin Fraklin is actually added to the mail!), light hearted to cool (There are several more options available.).

The website also helps in constructing the body of the mail. For eg. It recommends where to place what text and also that you mention the fact that would not hold the honest feedback against them. In the next step you are required to answer some basic questions on a points scale about your ex date ; you can also answer your own questions that you feel would be relevant to him/her.

Once the ex date responds back to your email/sms(sms available only in Canada and the US), he/she is taken to a form on WotWentWrong where they can select from a variety of personal reasons that they did not like about you. This could range from physical attributes, life style issues to you having any bad habits. A minimum of 2 personal reasons have to be filled in by the ex date. In the next step your ex date can mention the positive attributes of your personality that he/she likes. It is generally advised to add some honest good qualities of the ex here as that kind of "helps to soften the blow". Then the ex date is allowed to read the feedback that you had sent about them.You can also see a video of how it works below:

WotWentWrong Explanatory Video from WotWentWrong on Vimeo.

Scott Piro, Vice President of Marketing for WotWentWrong was good enough to take sometime out of his busy schedule and do an interview with us. Read Scott's responses below.


Scott, please introduce yourself to our readers.

I’m Scott Piro, Vice President of Marketing for WotWentWrong – the breakup app for couples who never broke up.  We launched in January of this year.



Can you share with us as to what was the inspiration behind creating WotWentWrong?

I think everyone has, at one time or another, experienced a situation where they thought things went well on a date, only to never hear from the person again.  It’s happened to me, it’s happened to my friends, and it’s happened to WotWentWrong CEO, Audrey Melnik.

There definitely was a guy in Audrey’s life who helped ‘inspire’ her to create WotWentWrong.  A few years ago Audrey had a first-date with someone, who she’d actually known for a number of years.  He contacted her through Facebook a few months after ending a long-term relationship.  They had a great first date – drinks, dinner, and he invited her up to his place for a goodnight kiss.  He initiated all of it.  Then…he vanished.  No follow-up call, no more communication from him, nothing.

It didn’t make sense to Audrey – why would he invite her up to his place if he wasn’t interested?  She really wanted to know the reason, but there was just no socially acceptable way for her to find out.  She felt that she couldn’t call – unless she wanted a reputation as a stalker, and an email could have gotten forwarded to his friends and turned Audrey into a joke.  So, she wound up creating her own way to get this kind of information in these unfortunate situations.


Being a start-up what were some of the challenges that you faced during the inception of WotWentWrong?

The biggest challenge we’ve faced so far is finding the right creative people to be involved.  The website design we have now is actually the third iteration (and from our third designer). We didn’t feel the previous designs hit the mark.  And we knew it was important to get the design right.  When you have a new website, you can have the most fantastic functionality but if it doesn’t look good, people won’t want to use it.

We had a similar challenge with the explanatory video we created.  The first animator who was involved didn’t have the right aesthetic and we had to start from scratch with a new animator. Audrey actually found a great animator by posting a job ad at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and ended up employing a recent graduate from their animation course.

We learned that sometimes you have to come to terms with the fact that you made a wrong hire and the money you invested in them is a sunk cost, and you’ll need to spend that money all over again (and maybe more) to get the result you want.


Just curious, but don't you think that the feedback could be a bit misleading in the sense that one person’s dislikes could be another person’s likes? Hope you get the point I am trying to state here.

Hey, you’re right in that it’s a big world out there – and thank heavens we’re all not alike and have different preferences.  It’s also true that there really is no such thing as a wrong feeling.  Feedback reasons (aka “dislikes”) given by an Ex are valid, because the person feels that way. But that absolutely doesn’t mean the person requesting feedback has to agree.  The intention with WotWentWrong is to help the person requesting feedback become aware of their Ex’s decision to end things – not necessarily to understand it or agree with it.

Another point about how WotWentWrong handles feedback, by the way: we show people filling out a feedback report a tag-cloud of positive attributes to select about the person they’re answering. Everyone has some good qualities, and it’s just good karma to say something nice about a person, especially if you have information that might be hard for them to hear.  After they’ve completed and sent back their report, we show them the nice traits the sender selected along with the constructive feedback.































What percentage of your users have reported receiving positive feedback? Also how many of them have been able to get into a steady relationship subsequently?

Users have sent over 1,300 feedback requests since we launched on January 24th, and 400 Exes have answered those requests and sent back feedback reports – a little higher than a 30% response rate.

As for the second part – how many of them have been able to get into a steady relationship subsequently – it’s a great question.  And we’d love to know the answer. Currently, we don’t offer a way for users to share ongoing and updated relationship information…yet. I can’t really be more specific now, but I can let your readers know we’re hard at work on adding new functionalities to WotWentWrong later this year – and you’re heading in the right direction.


What has been the biggest compliment that you have received since you created WotWentWrong?

There are some people who may feel stuck and unable to move onto the next experience until they have a definitive answer about why the last relationship didn’t work out. Certain people just need to know to be able to move on, and I think we do a great service for them. Those people have expressed that sentiment to us over and over on Twitter.  We’ve posted some of that appreciation on our site at wotwentwrong.com/testimonials.


What activities do you enjoy when you are not working on WotWentWrong?

WotWentWrong is an early stage startup, so to say it keeps us very busy is…an understatement.  Personally, I’m pretty devoted to my dog and jogging outdoors with him for exercise.  Our CEO Audrey likes to do a lot of traveling, though a lot of it is in support of WotWentWrong.  In the last year she spent four months in Tel Aviv, visited the Philippines to recruit more developers, traveled to Austin for the SXSW Interactive festival and spent time networking in San Francisco.  Some activities she misses when she travels is playing netball, which she loves, and rowing on the Yarra River in her hometown of Melbourne.


What are on the top shelves of your inspiration library right now? This can be anything from blogs, books and magazines to vintage catalogues/manuals, etc.

We see WotWentWrong as being part of two different industries simultaneously – the startup industry and the dating industry.  To stay current in both, we subscribe to certain daily newsletters via email and have a regular diet of blog reading (e.g. TechCrunch, Mashable, DatingInsider), but we don’t always get a chance to read them.  So, there are a couple other things that we do to stay current:

• I listen to podcasts in both these industries while I exercise – Stitcher radio is an iPhone app that makes this very easy – no syncing with my PC required.

• Audrey subscribes to an entrepreneurial community called the Dynamite Circle – it gives her great advice about all sorts of topics related to WotWentWrong. (And she found out about this community from a podcast!)

What are your future plans for WotWentWrong? What new features/functionality do you plan to add to the site?

We’re hard at work, developing new functionality for WotWentWrong and business partnerships, too.  Like I already mentioned, there’s not a lot I can say about either right now, I’m afraid.  I can tell your readers we’re planning on introducing major new social functionalities this autumn, and there are more features in the works that will appeal to a broader audience.


What advice would you like to give to budding entrepreneurs/start-ups?

In the early days of a startup, unless you have a lot of funding, you have to limit the tasks that you outsource, or you will burn through money very quickly.  With that in mind, you need a multitude of skills so that you can wear many hats:

• Flexibility – for the many and varied tasks that arise

• Creativity – you can only lean on others creatively so much.  Good creative people are hard to find and if you have a vision, sometimes you need to execute it yourself.

• Desire to learn – You probably won’t be an expert in every task you tackle but if you have the desire and the ability to learn (hopefully quickly) you can manage to reduce unnecessary costs.

• Courage of your convictions – Every entrepreneur suffers from doubts at one stage or another and will hear negative feedback about their idea. 

• Focus – Without the regular 9 to 5 and a boss looming nearby, you need to maintain your own motivation and focus to stay on track.

• High Standards and Tenacity – People who you employ will most likely not care about your project as much as you do; and they may not produce the level of quality that you expect - but the quality of your project reflects on you, so you need to be tenacious to achieve the level of quality you can be proud of.

• Experience in Software Development – When developing a software product like a website, it helps to have an understanding of the software development process and the pitfalls that can come your way, otherwise you will be at the mercy of your development staff.