Y Combinator Challenge #8 - Dating
astartupaday.wordpress.com
astartupaday.wordpress.com
However, I'm not so sure about the dating on Twitter thing. I think people want to do their dating in private. This is why dating applications on Facebook are not doing that great. People have a hard enough time plucking up the courage to ask out the object of their affection. Letting a bunch of other people know about it as well would be way too embarassing.
I'm still a little skeptical how a web app would replace 2 phone calls and a blind date. I also have no problem being proven wrong.
Fundamentally, the matchmaker idea doesn't solve the chicken-and-egg problem of dating -- you still need to have people on the site with whom to make matches. While you could try to match people with non-users, this is really just a dressed-up form of email invites, which most people have learned to tune out. It seems that in order to really crack the chicken/egg problem of a new dating site, one needs to provide a value that is independent of the dating problem itself.
Instead of trying to reinvent the wheel regarding dating sites, why not create a webapp that helps people create good custom profiles for themselves to increase their chances at finding someone?
Perhaps have it so that it can export the blocks of information which are customised for the main dating sites - to make it an easier process, and also allow for data portability across multiple dating sites.
That would be one of the ways I'd approach this kind of problem.
It was easy to see why women were turned off. I'm sure if the guys realized how desperate and needy they came across, they'd be able to do a better job of hooking up.
I think there is still a stigma attached to online dating that people are scraping the bottom of the barrel- amongst women especially. In fact, while researching dating sites (I was thinking about building a competitive dating site for Australia in 06/07) I've often come across the phrase "I cant believe I'm doing this" as the first sentence in a female's profile.
You can have the best dating technology in the world, but the reality is that there are a significant number of people just dont have profiles that are any good or a real judge of a person's character. I think this problem is compounded when you consider that often people dont have very descriptive profiles when writing something about themselves and often write about tastes that are seemingly universal but non specific. EG, if I wrote I liked movies, as opposed to writing I liked Tarantino and Kubrick films.
Often I seen profiles (of both men and women, so this problem is not gender specific) where people are just trying to meet minimum word counts. Any kind of matching technology based off keyword matching in this kind of situation simply fails.
I think for a technology like this to have any decent chance, there would need to be a couple of core components.
1) Point and click profile writing, where people can click on hobbies and it can attempt to write something for them. You would also have to ensure that profile's dont look like canned responses.
2) Photo touching up - Often when I've touched up photo's in photoshop for others, I find myself using the same techniques, with often very similar settings on the sliders - if there was a way you could automatically detect and touch up photos, then it would be fantastic. I'm not sure if there are any sites out there that currently have this feature, but it would make a great standalone site too, especially with photo sharing sites and social networking sites being popular.
3) Profile exporting. If I've written a profile for say match.com and I want to goto eharmony.com, I dont want have to rewrite significant chunks of it to match the new format, especially given a large number of people have trouble writing even one profile.
The crowd then chooses couples, and votes on results, and hence couples are connected/introduced by crowdsourcing.
hotornot + crowdsourcing + topic of common interest to break the ice.
The side effect of this would be that shy people could still keep photo's in private galleries, but still get taken into the overall equation and potentially matched up with someone who might find them attractive.
Fortunately (or unfortunately? Depends how you look at it I guess) we had no real interest in starting up a dating site at the end of the day.
Very cool idea. :)
Talk is cheap but life, sadly, isn't.
And I agree, family is more important but you can use it to your advantage - get your kids started early. May I suggest some bed time stories?
It hinges on whether matchmakers can work their magic only on people they actually know (which limits the number of people they could match up), or if they could do it simply by looking at profiles of people they don't know personally.
Even the most outgoing people I know have less than 1,000 friends on Facebook. How many matches could they possibly mine from that group?
The "bounty for a successful match" idea is interesting, though...maybe a payment model where the successfully matched people pay to unlock the mutual contact info, and 90% of that would go to the matchmaker? Hmmmm...
Dating profile portability? Dating site messaging federation? Pay per message that crosses networks?
Otherwise I do not really see what makes it so different from the other Me-too dating sites.
Gender balance is the biggest problem with dating sites. Women get flooded with spam winks/emails and get bored sifting through the haystack of low-quality leads. Men have no way of standing out amid the spam and get very little attention.