Edit: Post ideas separately so that they can be voted on independently, please.
So, if you made them zany events -- like renting out a full restaurant and curating a list of 50 top matches where folks don't get to pick them ... all of the sudden that sounds fun. Or a first class at ball-room dancing. Or canoeing. Actually, I'd prefer even goofier stuff like the flash-mob-ish sort of things where you have groups that baked into their activity / assigned mission you have some reason for pairing them up.
If you can just create environments for people to do stuff that's fun and meet other people along the way without the baggage of calling it a date or the signaling of "I can't get a date", then it's cool, not desperate and attacks the largest part of the market: the folks that wouldn't use current dating sites even if they didn't suck.
The best way to do that is to focus on a specific untapped niche (dating for hackers/geeks/reddit users?) or a small geographical area you can take over. Once you have a manageable, highly targeted audience, it becomes a lot easier to reach them in a cost-effective way. Then:
1. Seed the site with some profiles to start. You NEED to do this. Everyone does this, and it works. Either work out a data sharing deal with a small niche dating site to cross post some(mostly female) profiles to your site or just make some yourself.
2. Males join many more dating sites than females. Since you already have lots of female profiles, you can start by targeting males in your niche. Male dating traffic is SIGNIFICANTLY cheaper than female dating traffic.
3. Spend $10K testing _interest targeted_ Facebook Ads. Don't just target all single males- you will get destroyed by better funded competition. Target by specific interests "Like WoW- Meet Gamer Girls!" and optimize for the highest CTR possible until you get cheap clicks. Once your CPC is below $0.30 or so, up your budget and scale.
4. Spend $10K on carefully targeted Plenty of Fish Ads. They have an excellent, powerful self-serve ad system that many dating sites use successfully. Think about it- everyone on POF is interested in online dating, so it's super relevant.
6. Spend $20K doing carefully selected direct media buys on community forums, discussion groups, etc. If I'm targeting WoW players, there are many forums happy to sell banner space at a cheap CPM. Same thing if I'm targeting athletes, fishing enthusiasts, etc. The general thrust is "Meet someone to do X hobby with". You can also do this on AdWords(content network).
7. Deposit the remaining $10K with a reputable affiliate network. If you offer an attractive payout and have high converting landing pages, you can get thousands of affiliates to promote your site on all of the niche traffic sources you don't have time to test. Pay significantly more for female signups to balance out the site. This is where you begin to get consistent growth every day and can presumably raise more money or start monetizing your users.
How do you use $50k to get attractive women, who can easily get dates in real life, onto your dating site? Offer them something they find valuable, but most importantly, wouldn't be embarrassing for them if their friends found out.
What might that be? What about a charity auction? Men bid on women's profiles and the highest bidder gets to take the woman on a date. 90 % of that money goes to charity (10 % to you, the owner of the site). Women can choose to either make their bid amounts public or private. They can also choose a charity of their choice.
Women don't have to be embarrassed about doing something for charity - in fact, they might drag their friends along for kicks (and among some groups of women - to see who can get the highest bid). They also get to go on dates with generous and/or wealthy men. Valuable + not embarrassing.
To set this up, start in NY. Throw events with the $50k where women get to set up profiles online and men bid on them, preferably with influencer type groups.
You can offer the reverse as well, so it's not sexist (although that sort of controversy mixed with charity gets you a lot of press) and because some women would delight in bidding on men.
Later, you can expand bidding to include other, non-monetary things: home cooked meal by professional sushi chef, help with moving, etc. So the less wealthy men can too have a chance at wooing the women of their dreams.
the cynical person would say show me the money.
another might say ... not sure.
However you don't just want attractive women, you want women that are looking. (Personally I would leave out the attractive since that is in the eye of the beholder.)
Ok so what are women who have recently dated and are looking to date - want. Hmmm.
Complain about bad dates Learn about the happening things New styles New restaurant theater reviews movie reviews
Look at that silly show Cougar town or Sex in the City
What do they want? Where are they? Who are theY? What do they read? What are they concerned with?etc
Start with that mindset.
A (free)mium dating site built on the Dropbox model essentially.
Would love to see this in action.
The one that we're sure has been used is simply scrape profiles from somewhere else. Someone just did that, scraping from Facebook, and it made quite a stir. At first you'd think that could not even have a remote chance of working, as the scraped people would certainly notice when you started matching them for dates!
If you were a bit smarter, though (and unethical people can be smart), you'd just use those scraped profiles to make your site look busy. You'd never match anyone to them. You'd only make matches among people who actually come to the site and register.
I've noticed on Google searches for OKCupid and Plenty of Fish that among the suggested completions are "OKCupid scam" and "Plenty of Fish scam". Among the results on those pages are plentyoffishscam.com and okcupidscam.net. Those are blogs, both slamming the dating sites they are named after, and both recommending cougarlife.com, ashleymadison.com, and arrengementseekers.com.
It's pretty apparent that these blogs are written by the same person. (Oh, I just remembered, there is also eharmonyscam.com, also clearly by the same people and recommending the same three sites).
There are also many other blogs that quote these blogs, and it seems likely that many of these are fake, too. I think I've seen them quoted on legitimate-appearing forums, too, so there is a real possibility the cougarlife.com people are spamming forums.
In other words you need a niche. I'd hit up – maybe even sponsor – something like book groups. (Pick a major metro and blanket it; that buys you the geographic proximity). Then, once you're rolling, use the success to knock over the surrounding geographies.
Edit: and start in NYC or one of the biggest cities in the world. A single sign-up in a high density city, is much more valuable as a search result because the population density is a multiplier for how many searches that new profile will be a result for.
1. setup profiles and 'meet' each other 2. Chapel of love 3. Profit!!!
:) I wonder if you'd get enough attention before that inevitably happened...
A big percentage of people go on dating sites because they don't have time to actually go out and meet people. But I believe there is a bigger percentage of people that just lack the know-how of doing things in real life.
Then get radio shows involved. Radio shows need new material everyday. Everyday do a mini contest with no prizes for different topics:
1. worst place to meet 2. worst pickup line 3. worst foobar 4. worst dressup etc.
do this every week before the contest ends.
make sure to get the nonprofits involved. Feature a nonprofit each week. Always make a story about how a specific person would specifically benefit from the charity.
Felix Denis in his book mentions selling beer on the island, donating a portion of the profits to the women and orphan fund.
Holding a contest for the winning cap. He describes in detail here: http://books.google.com/books?id=meKL68N5esEC&pg=PA261&#...