Your new iPhone app is brilliant, but the Flash intro on your site is so 2005. And what’s up with that neon, floral-print shirt?

Niles Toh thinks people need more honest assessments like those — unvarnished opinions from folks outside your trusted friends, from voices beyond your inner circle.

Toh is so passionate about this belief that he has cobbled together a website that aspires to give people what they need rather than what they want to hear. The site — ineedtruth.com — launched in beta in mid-July.

Toh, a 20-year-old entrepreneur from Singapore, says the site “will enable the community to interact and give useful opinions to others who really need truthful thoughts. There is no worry for any biased opinions when all you need is the truth.”

It currently hosts two areas specifically for generating feedback on new business ideas and new products. For example, before quitting your day job and betting the farm, it’s now possible to see the the unvarnished views of the ‘crowd’.

If only these people had visited his site first.

The Comfort Wipe

In fact, in the not too distant past, we dedicated an entire post to products that could have benefited from the cold, hard truth (Here: Anthill’s Top 10 Most Brainless Consumer Products).

In a media release, he describes how he scrambled to get the site together before beginning a two-year conscription with his country’s National Service in late July. He had no programming experience, so he outsourced the code chores to India. He says no IT companies were willing to form a partnership because of his National Service obligation, so he “decided to bootstrap it himself, running the company alone.”

It’s an inspiring tale of resourcefulness and determination. But we’re sure that Toh, of all people, would appreciate some unvarnished truth — one would charitably describe ineedthetruth.com as a work in progress.

Based on a Facebook API, the site encourages people to post business ideas, products, fashion choices and art, among other things, in the hope that visitors will weigh in. At this point, the posts feel incomplete and disjointed, and the responses, not surprisingly, are few.

Ah, but remember that the site is in the beta-testing stage. Toh posted on Twitter that a “total changeover” should be expected sometime in August.

Will young Mr. Toh’s online venture eventually help us dump that cheating partner, ditch that dopey venture or simply pick out a better tie? Only time, and truth, will tell.

Image by Diana Gurley