Show HN: Dating website where ladies get paid | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Dating website where ladies get paid

11 pointswiradikusuma14 comments

Happy new year fellow HNers! This is my first Show HN... and it's a dating website. The crowd here is not my target market, so I'm not looking for SEO/traffic, but looking for feedbacks. Lots of it. I'm fully prepared that I'll get bashed due to the nature of my product.

What: An online Indonesian dating website where the ladies get paid if their date sucks. That "paid" part is just a gimmick (the feature is not fully implemented) which seems to work. So far nobody questions the lack of implementation. If people do need it, I'll implement it.

Why: I want to quit my job and "do startup" but I don't have any good idea. Dating website is (saturated but still) easy to get traction. I also use this as a learning vehicle (Scala, CoffeeScript, AngularJS, Google App Engine).

When: I'm doing this after hours and weekends.

Where: http://www.ngajakjalan.com

How: Most likely you don't want to create an account, so please login with demo/demo. It's a real account, so please don't send message to other members from there :)

Stats so far: Landing page for 2 months, then 2 months running. 8k members, 85% male, 100k pageviews/month. Spending $10 daily for FB ads to get female members.

Specific questions: I'm thinking of raising seed money so I can quit my job and work on this fulltime. Given my situation (single, employed, solo founder) and my website progress, (1) Is this a good idea? (2) What would it take to get me there? (3) If not good idea, what are the alternatives?

Another thing to think about is dating is local so I would concentrate my marketing on one town to add more value to your users. You might want to think about partnering with a daily deals site and cross marketing dating type deals to your members. You might be able to become an affiliate. review the deal and then only forward the good date deals.

I think of dealing with daily deals site, but I don't have leverage yet (not incorporated, small userbase). Thanks for the "review the deal" idea, I didn't think about that! (I was simply thinking to pass everything). Regarding locals, I pinpoint the capital city (Jakarta) in my FB ad.

I think in genral too early to tell

some questions: what's your cost per female aquisition cost? what's your cost per male member aquisition cost? Look at montlhy active users(how many users from last month logged in this month)

Test other advertising avenues to get costs via those channels

Do two tests(not at the same time): 1. setup up something like adsense for a couple of days maybe for like 10% of the male users. 2. stop advertsing for a month, does the site still grow?

if I were going to invest I'd like to know how are you going to make money. how much are you going to make per user. how much does it cost to get a user? so, if I pay for X number of users how long do I need to wait to double my money.

I don't use AdSense because I think, "Why would anyone search for dating websites?" as dating is more like "as you go" kind of thing. Thanks for your advice regarding how I'm going to make money, I haven't really thought about that. I just keep on developing and spending ads (for growth) without thinking the other end.

You should trial some adverts, hunches are great, but testing is relatively cheap these days and can make a big difference.

Always test your assumptions.

How is the conversion rate of your FB ads to get female members? Or what are your costs per female subscription?

Regarding your questions 1,2: Raising money for dating is quite hard. Still everyone believes online dating is broken and there must be something better but looking back at dating deals and exits (there are very few) I doubt that you are able to raise any money with dating

Roughly $10 gets a dozen per day, so lets say it's $1/female signup. I dont really care about males now as they seem to come "free" and I might need to close registration for them to maintain balance.

This is an after-thought but... I heard that dating is a billion dollar industry in the US alone, how come it can be hard to raise money for this kind of website?

It would be easy for some, hard for others.

Also, how big is the market. Invests want you to be able acheive revenue of >$20 million. If we assume you make as much as facebook per year per user at something like $1 per user then you'll need 20 million active users. If you look at your current advertsing channels can you get there.

I'm thinking of advertising in magazine/tabloid, like a small box in the corner, anyone have experience with this kind of offline-to-online marketing like this?

People have become blind to these kind of mass-marketing advertisements. If you let a few people read a newspaper with a full page advertisement somewhere hidden inside, everyone will just skip the ad and go to the next page. To make things worse: nobody will even remember what the advertisement was about.

Plus it's impossible to accurately measure the results of your campaign.

How do you verify that a member is female or not?

This is a wild guess, but a pair of radio buttons on a registration form is a good start.

Fraud in this area is not a major problem. Participants who misrepresent their gender usually do not find dating success.

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