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Comment by shalmanese | Hacker News Reader

Here's the real reason why online dating sucks:

1. The only good sites are the ones your potential mate is on. Size is a bigger feature than any you can design.

2. If your site sucks, then people get frustrated and everyone leaves. If your site is great, then people get paired off and everyone leaves.

Online dating doesn't just suffer from network effects, it suffers from second order network effects. Unless you're getting a constant stream of new customers into your site every day, your site will fail.

All innovation in online dating comes from the customer acquisition side, not the product side. If you manage to figure out an innovative new form of customer acquisition, you can make a go at creating a viable new entrant to the market. If you can't, it doesn't matter how good your product is, you will fail.

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There's a solution to that problem - peer to peer - as in file-sharing. Create software that sits on each persons computer. This is freely downloadable. Users input as much information as they want into it, and it reaches out and grabs other users' data like file-sharing, and filters it to any sort of criteria.

This solves the chicken and egg problem.

People can make money on this by offering hosting services. It can be a hassle for the average user to run and update the software on their computer so many might opt to pay for a cloud service.

This model can also be used for business discovery. Google and ebay can only do so much, you might want complex querying and reporting.

edit: The software solution can be as simple as publishing rdf data. The Protege ontology editor (open source) is already available. Users could simply start publishing their data profile right away, and conventions would form around what you should be putting in it. Protege also has querying facilities built in already. This was actually the semantic web vision.

That's not a solution, that just pushed the problem one step up the chain, how do you convince people to download and install that piece of software?

Same as how people are convinced to find dating sites, create a profile, and spend hours/months/years finding the right person. Downloading a program and having it automatically do complicated filters to find the right person is a cake-walk in comparison. People are motivated by money and sex, they'll climb any hurdle to get to it. Installing desktop software is not a big one.

no you still missing his point. people were convinced to created their profile because other users were already in the network. your idea does not solve chicken-egg problem. I will not sign up for profile or download your software UNLESS you have a database of couple thousands men/women to go through. Unless you have a 25,000 single friends that you can eblast and beg to fill out the form or pay each a dollar for their time, you will fail. it wont matter whether it is profile registration or software download the value is in network.

It is different to regular dating site. It isn't a couple of guys. The software would be open source, I suggested starting with Protege. Since there is no single authority, a whoie bunch of entrepreneurs could pursue this, potentially in the thousands, seeding it with all their friends. Also, the functionality you get over traditional dating sites (and this also applies to business networking/sourcing such as linkedin/ebay) can be immense. You can run multiple queries over the profile data, whereas a site such as plentyoffish can't afford to. That alone should convince many people to contribute to this. I recall similar projects about a decade ago, such as rdf foaf, music brainz, but they didn't take off because their wasn't enough bandwith and computational power at the time (downloading millions of rdf pages wasn't possible then - now users routinely download gigabytes of video).

fascinating, thanks for this insight. this rings very true. do you have any good ideas for customer acquisition?

my only devil's advocate response would be that if a site delivers very well and people start hearing about people who successfully met on that site (and there isn't a stigma admitting it), then this could drive new users....

crawl facebook?

this is actually pretty tough. facebook has really tightened things up with regards to privacy and it's api - certainly a good thing for users but you'll notice you rarely see apps all over people's walls like a few years back - it is much harder to do and always requires onerous permissions.

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