Essay on online dating (solve online dating and you'll get into YC, I promise)

My startup (not launched yet) is a dating site and one of the features we have is showing the response rate of the users (with some tweaks that solve the problems that I talk about in the next sentence). However, you need to be careful in how you present this data to the user. Because even if a girl's response rate is only 20% it might simply be that she's attractive and has gotten all the guys to contact her and she just can't respond back. So the response rate is not a really accurate way of telling the user "you have a 20% chance of getting a response".

By asking the user for criteria and then saying "20% of users that met her/his criteria received a response" is not a good idea. A lot of users of online dating sites are frustrated with the perfection that they need to achieve. Not everyone can be perfect and fit your criteria, and just because the user doesn't fit the criteria doesn't mean that they can't be a perfect match for the user.

Facebook has already solved online dating. My housemates and I got bored last week so we decided that we would each ask out a girl to lunch on Facebook. We had a 100% success rate. Facebook works because it leverages the power of networks and the strength of weak ties. With match.com and plentyoffish there is no identy, no reputation-- that is, no shadow of the future. Facebook has effectively solved this.

It's not obvious to me that solving online dating is profitable enough. I just met a lead architect on a major personals site, and he noted that none of their success stories are repeat customers. Perhaps the ideal (evil) business model is to find people with a steady income and lots of hope but prevent their success.

There's an overlap with job hunting ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=131870 ).