Why We Think We Can Prevail in the Notoriously Crowded Online Dating Space

There are a few core problems here.

The first is that dating sites typically don't care about people actually finding a good partner, because there's a negative economic incentive for it. If you find your perfect man/woman, you won't come back to the site and keep paying.

The reason why women typically get loads of spam is because many sites are expressly designed to encourage this. A common pattern is where it is not made clear whether or not a profile is active. Since only a small percentage of profiles on the site are active, it's hopeless for a guy to try to send detailed, personalized messages -- odds are, they'll all fall on deaf ears, inactive accounts.

This is intentional -- because it lets the site appear as if they have far more profiles than they actually do. Once they've suckered someone into paying to send messages, they find that they get almost no responses, and end up finding themselves forced to send hundreds just to reach a few live people.

Which of course leaves the recipients flooded by spam... so they leave. Adding to the glut of inactive accounts.

Combined with the general sleaziness of the industry and the type of people who use general-audience dating sites (read: the type who tolerate all these problems), it's no wonder the entire industry is a disaster.

There are definitely niches available for matchmaking sites not built around the typical model, that try to pair up people for long-term relationships based on what actually matters instead of providing sex-starved 20-somethings with people of the opposite sex to ogle. But it's hard to market such a thing, even in a specific niche, because the entire industry tarred themselves with their own brush, leaving a huge number of possible customers permanently turned off from the idea of ever using such a service.

>The core problem is that women get tons of spam messages and men get very few responses. This means the matching algorithm is broken.

This matching algorithm has carried us, humans, through millions years. Various opinions and statements can be made about this algorithm, yet it is definitely not "broken" :)

Most women I know who use dating sites don't pay much attention to the unsolicited messages they get. Instead, they browse the available men and send the ones they like PMs.

To be honest, its a lot like recruiting - the people sending their resumes to every company on monster rarely get hired for the best jobs. Those jobs instead go to the "good looking" people on LinkedIn, who are approached directly.

No reason this app can't work the same way.

And don't forget, Hot Or Not was an insanely successful dating site.

But this app only lets users chat--not send out messages. You can copy+paste a generic message to 3 dozen women, but about the only thing you can use generically in conversation is "hello"--plus you have to be actively involved in a conversation. Also, the app insulates against spam because you can only chat with people who have mutually liked each other.

My friend wrote greasemonkey scripts for POF and OKCupid, all it does is repeatedly search for his "type", builds a list of users and then messages them just after they come online. Same thing if someone views his profile. There's a 15 minute delay for that one so he doesn't come off as creepy.

Yeah it's spammy, but surprisingly effective, I'm encouraging him to write an A/B testing module for it so he can test the effectiveness of different messages.

Contrary to what one might think he's just using this for LTRs.

The 6 most important metrics in online dating is gender, location, age, children, active site user, and attractiveness. After that many guys just start spamming accounts.

Thanks for your feedback. I've rewritten this bit to hopefully make the point better. I agree this is NOT what users actively do on these sites. But I think this is what the service is essentially doing under the hood in many cases.

I agree that there are people who prefer the time-saving methods used with many of the major online dating services, and they will certainly continue to use those, but we feel they may be missing out on people that they didn't expect.

All of that data is also crucial if you want to sell advertising against your user base.

More than that, there is social proof, with dating sites you have to establish social proof by yourself, where as in person you're usually introduced, or know others at the event.

You know, we discussed many ideas that have such public elements, like "Where you are" public statements, but we ultimately decided against it because we felt it might be susceptible to stalker behavior. And I don't think a lot of people would be comfortable putting that kind of information out into the world publicly. We kept coming back to the realization that a private chat is where information has to be exchanged.

We also feel that the simplicity will help encourage new users as the months and years go by. We think most people stay away from online dating because of the unnecessary complexity, when really they just want to be able to start chatting with people who like them, that they also like.

We'll keep you posted!

I encourage everyone to spend 10 minutes on hotornot.com, and then try date.fm for 10 minutes. Once you've done that, I think you'll see just how different it feels. While our monetization strategy is a simple ad banner, we think it's much better than a complex system of paid accounts, credits and other upgrades that most sites rely on for revenue.

We'd love to hear how you got on.

>the things that happen between deciding to go on a date and agreeing you're in a relationship

...are those which 99% of people don't want to outsource to technology. That's the fun part of dating: the fluttery-chested, "why can't I breathe right oh god does she notice I'm not breathing" excitement. Let's not make An App For That™.

Would you want to expose people to your entire social world when you're still experimenting with whether or nor your even compatible with them? Dating experiments often go sour, or you might find out that someone is truly crazy. That's why we decided on a completely separate ecosystem that doesn't integrate with any other social platform. When things go bad, we think users would rather be able to quarantine the experience. In Date.fm, users can simply swipe and delete a match from their list, and it's removed on both sides. Neither can bother the other beyond that.

We totally agree about the online dating stigma, but we've got to be identifiable in some way.

Also friend of friends with similiar interests or letting the user match two of his/hers friends that he/she think might get along, etc. I quite surprised that they didn't get into that yet.

A number of reasons:

It's to guarantee a certain quality in the user base. Uses GPS to get general location and new iOS 5 face detection to guarantee 1 clear face in the profile pic. So we shouldn't get people just showing their eyeball or a group photo were you don't know who you're liking.

We're also native iOS developers. We're a two man band and have done everything in-house, iOS, Rails and Node development. We've done the promo video and composing of music in-house too. (Wife did the voiceover :)) All to minimise costs.

The revenue from our other iOS apps will be subsidising server costs.

If and when we launch on other platforms, we'll be native and use the APIs to guarantee a certain level of quality both in the App and in the user base.

Generally speaking, depending on how much income we generate will determine expansion on other platforms. We'll have to react to demand.