The 2-month-old website Dudepins.com (slogan: "Man up. Sign up. Pin up.") is what you might end up with if you grabbed Pinterest by its grosgrain and calico corners, shook it free of all the wedding cakes, cute kittens and arty crafts, and then restocked it with photos of mustaches, man caves and Maker's Mark.
The brainchild of two 25-year-olds from Vancouver, British Columbia, Kamil Szybalski and Colin Brown, Dudepins manages to be both a spot-on sendup of the oh-so-popular P-site and a humorous way for disenfranchised bros to indulge in a virtual version of time-honored traditions like showing off that LeRoy Neiman painting of Larry Bird or a maroon 1984 Cadillac Seville without being forced to wade through terabytes of braiding-twisting techniques.
The site, which is still in beta, has been live since mid-June, and prospective Dudepinners currently must enter an e-mail address to request membership, according to Szybalski. Although he won't say how many members have signed up, he says: "We don't have tens of thousands of users yet, but we do have thousands of users." And the site is at least popular enough for the start-up to announce that it recently recruited a chief technology officer from San Jose, Sohail Suleman.
And just how did two cross-border bros hit on the idea?
"Honestly - and I'm not overexaggerating - we were sitting on Colin's balcony in Vancouver having Scotch and a cigar," Szybalski said. "We started talking about Pinterest, and we figured out that men really can't use Pinterest. Well, they can, but it's not built for them. So we decided to throw together something that caters toward dudes and men to see if it would fly."
Catering to that dude demographic meant a few rules. Posting of male-oriented content ("dude stuff") is encouraged, and "dude stuff" is defined at the Dudepins website as "something that injects enough testosterone to tickle your sub-cockles."
Szybalski is less oblique: "We're strictly about cars, cigars, Scotch, style, man caves, bacon - all the good stuff. And we don't allow women on our site."
No, dude, Szybalski so did not say what you think he just said. He's not hanging a "No Girls Allowed" sign on the door of the virtual tree fort - the site actually has several hundred female members. What he means is that, despite what you might expect from a man-centric social media website, images of naked women and scantily clad bikini bodies are verboten.
"We don't allow any women or nudity because our users have told us they can't look at it at work if there are naked women on the site," Szybalski says. "And men won't want to look at home if their wives think they're looking" at those kinds of sites.
But that's not 100 percent accurate; a check of the site turned up some tasteful "pinned up" photos of a tank-topped Marisa Tomei, a bikini-bottomed Hope Solo and Anne Hathaway in a curve-hugging Catwoman costume.