Comment by p1esk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by p1esk | Hacker News Reader

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Would be great if you could summarize your assumptions and conclusions here.

1. A 2017 survey of 1000 internet users over 18 reported that 19% are using online dating. Even that number seems to be high imo and might include those who are not using online dating at the moment [1]. I'm not sure how would this change your stated 50% of those who use online dating (after additional filters you have there).

2. There are fewer women than men on dating sites (e.g. 38/62 according to [2]). The total matches number for men will be smaller.

3. There are 8000 dating apps currently, and 1000 new ones are launched every year (!). Not saying you should be scared of that, but here marketing is a much bigger challenge than everything else. Are you a good marketer?

4. It's not even clear to me what is "dating outside your city". Seems like a significant obstacle to dating.

[1] https://www.statista.com/topics/2158/online-dating/ [2] https://www.datingnews.com/industry-trends/online-dating-sta...

Thanks for the comments!

1. I got a rough 40% from these sources [1][2][3]. I know for [1] it's not directly saying 40% of single adults use online dating but a decent proxy.

I don't really trust Statista as I was doing research on total users and it was pretty off from other sources. Do you trust that Statista? If so, why? I think it has good SEO because of how the site was made, rather than its accuracy. It doesn't even tell you the source of the data unless you pay. There's no decent way to see the methodology, so hard to say about the 19%.

I am already filtering for age and single, so I thought 50% would be fine. The 19% doesn't care about if they are single or married.

2. Yeah it isn't 50-50. But that would be across the board, and I'm trying to determine the effect of remote dating. https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-male-to-female-ratio-on-Ma...

3. Haha-- thanks for that number. I'm a product person and feel dating apps suck because of limited diversity and poor experience. (It's optimized for matching.)

4. That's what I'm trying to determine-- if the negative effects of the obstacle can be offset by the positive effects of greater exposure. It is interesting how people are open to jobs outside their city but don't really think about dating outside their city, especially given the increase in mobility and remote work.

So I did some polling myself and hired a research company to investigate. We found people are very open to dating outside their city, but can't be sure until we launch and see if people do what they say.

I'm going to ask a couple friends for feedback and then write a conclusion!

[1] https://qz.com/1546677/around-40-of-us-couples-now-first-mee... [2] https://www.eharmony.com/online-dating-statistics/ [3] https://www.surveymonkey.com/curiosity/dating-apps-and-sites...

How would this work? Say I have a match (I like her, she likes me). What's next? I'm guessing a few video chats, then a road trip/flight to see her. Then what? If we kind of clicked, but both have jobs we are not ready to give up? Long distance relationship? Compare this to a quick "Wanna get a coffee/dinner/drink tomorrow night?"

Check this out: https://www.latimes.com/home/la-hm-la-affairs-diana-dinerman...

I guess I'm also "open to the idea", but it would:

1. further shrink the pool of matches: what percentage will you assign to the row "open to remote dating" in your spreadsheet?

2. make me more selective: if normally I'd have marked 20% as "attractive enough" to meet, then now, keeping in mind 4 hour drive, I'd probably only select 5%.

The idea is people are hyper mobile now due to the changing landscape of work. I shared some data here: https://blog.fairytrail.app/2019/08/why-i-made-fairytrail.ht...

I re-did the calculation with a focus on intra-USA dating. For the average city, it increases by 26531%.

1. Open to dating range 25%. That's a guess though.

2. Regarding the 5% instead of 20% attractive, that's already factored due to the 25% open to long distance variable. We want to see how many people are open to dating, not 100% all targeting marriage. Turns out many people use dating apps because they want more fun and friends in their lives: https://www.toptal.com/finance/business-model-consultants/on...

That's an interesting article. The insight is every city has its own type of people and in LA, I guess that's the type.

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