We need a startup to fix online dating
techbyproducts.com
techbyproducts.com
The "browse-and-message" paradigm is fundamentally broken, not to mention a little dehumanizing (you're kind of shopping for people, which, let's face it, is pretty weird).
Our take is that the biggest problems with online dating are both the online part and the dating part --- it's hard to gauge chemistry online and it's cumbersome (and for women, potentially dangerous) to arrange a meeting. Meanwhile, labeling it as dating increases the pressure and the awkwardness for everyone.
Grouper Social Club sets up drinks between 2 groups of friends: 3 guys and 3 girls (or 3 guys, etc.).
There are no profiles or messages on our site. We match the groups together ourselves using Facebook info (which overcomes a lot of biases), then take care of all the coordination. Members pre-pay for their drink and the experience (the only fee), confirm a time, then we give them the place to meet.
We don't like labels, and don't think of Groupers as dates. To some they're similar, but the expectations are importantly different. Worst case: you're out with your friends and experience a funny story together, the average case is a super fun night out where there are some sparks between at least a pair of you, and the best case is, well, sky's the limit. Also, there's safety (and less awkwardness and more variety) in numbers.
We're live in 13 major cities in the US and Canada and growing quickly. 93% of members who go on a Grouper say they want to go on another one, and about half already have.
Our mission isn't to fix online dating, it's to end loneliness. Specifically, we want to help people get out from behind the blue glow of their computer screens and actually connect with people.
Social networks and online dating sites can be more isolating than social. But they don't have to be.
Shoot me an email at Michael [at] joingrouper.com if you have any questions.
Lot's of growth avenues, looking forward to seeing this grow.
Basically they aim for equal numbers of guys and girls but the protocol is that you spend equal amounts of time with each opposite.
So it doesn't just become an awkward pair off situation.
I agree that this is one of the worst aspects. Sounds like you've solved the ebay-for-people and only-as-attractive-as-your-profile issues. Nice work!
How much success are you having with facebook info? Is that enough data to define compatibility?
I also consider the Facebook requirement obnoxious - up until I decided to give Grouper a spin, my Facebook profile was minimal, not even a profile picture. But I was curious enough that I bit the bullet and gave Facebook way, way more information about myself than I'd normally be willing.
Which, of course, makes the vapor nature of the service that much more upsetting.
My experience could very well be an aberration - that said, I figure I'd throw out a warning to others interested in trying to service but are hesitant to give Facebook more personal information.
We use several techniques to filter out sketchy accounts, and your sparse Facebook information may have triggered our suspicions.
We need to use Facebook for, at the very least, making sure you don't know the other group.
Also, in terms of the allegations of vaporware, just search Instagram for the hashtag #groupergram. There are over 1,000 photos from recent Groupers. We've also collected our favorites on our landing page http://joingrouper.com and here: http://joingrouper.com/groupergrams
Some observations about the online dating industry. There's a market opportunity - money has traditionally been made from dating/introduction services. They seem very suitable to move online. And they would seem to scale: in most services people match themselves, or an algorithm matches them, without involvement from the site staff. You would also expect network effects to be strong (customers want access to all the candidates in their geographical location) therefore rapid growth and huge revenue seems a possibility in a winner takes all kind of way.
So tell me: why has the online dating market not been locked up (pace occasional disruption) since 1999? My suspicion is the existing sites just don't have any way to differentiate themselves from the competition that actually makes a difference.
Online dating, if it can be 'fixed', will be fixed when someone has an insight into the underlying social question and manages to implement something unique.
I think if there's an opportunity it's not one of one-service-conquers-all. Small niche dating services may be more effective. The main advantage is that members start with things in common, depending on the niche. A disadvantage is that unless the gender mix is fairly even it will die. However, you could combine different, but compatible, communities.
The only thing that online dating gets you is an opportunity to introduce yourself and, if it's a good service, to introduce yourself to someone who is likelier to be what you are looking for. It's not a magic get-a-date thing, just joining up doesn't guarantee a date, just like going out to a bar doesn't guarantee that you're going to walk out of it with a girl or a phone number.
Attractive people get more messages? Yes, of course.
The only girls on dating sites have baggage? No more than any other single girls (or guys) of their age. At least that's been my experience for the last year or so that I've been single again and dating.
I think an online speed dating service for business professionals, however, would do well. I believe that there are services like this out there but none of them have achieved a true following I would argue.
Imagine logging onto a site where with use of full audio and video you meet 10 eligible bachelors or bachelorettes over the course of 30 mins.
Hey, there's your startup...video speed dating! lol
eHarmony is on the other extreme end where their checklist is 250 questions and the process is very tightly controlled!
Speaking of speed dating, I did actually give this a shout a few years ago but couldn't get it off the ground. Important lesson: don't go into business with friends unless you have absolutely complementary skills.
Let people sign up without filling in much to just browse. But at each and every step, show them some possible candidates that will be unavailable to them unless they fill in a bit more information.
"This pretty woman? She won't let you message her unless you fill in your birth date and it matches her preferred age range. Guy over here? Cares deeply about your music taste".
It's no different from how a lot of these services will suddenly hit you with paywalls to do various things. Get you fired up about contacting someone first, and then demand just a bit more.
Out of all the online dating sites I've seen/used I think they are the best by far.
It would be like that South Park episode. Naked guy, naked guy, naked guy ...
Several of my past partners have been people who would have ruled me out for various reasons, including "big" ones like race and age that would be high up on the list of first things people would expect to filter by.
So while they' reduce the pool of messages, chances are good they'd also rule out the wrong people.
Right. High-status men and very attractive women get a lot of attention, and everyone else is often vying for the attention of those two groups.
The other "problem" with online dating mirrors regular dating: different people have different priorities. Some want relationships, some want hookups, some don't know, and many if not most conceal their "true" intentions. Having dating online before, I've seen the whole gamut.
Maybe there's a more polite way of phrasing it, but if you don't want to be raising a kid, then seeing one as "extra baggage" doesn't seem like a stretch to me.
Edit: As sfall points out, he wrote "extra" and not "massive"
If you don't want to be involved in the responsibilities of raising children, make sure your filter has "no kids" set. If you can't set a filter because you are so desperate for any contact that you "cast your net wider", the problem is you.
Feature, not baggage. Unwanted feature? Filter out the undesirable profiles.
In this case when you date someone (man or woman) who has a child it creates boundaries on a potential relationship. An imperfect example would be the adult w/o a child likes to take last minute trips (it is something they do enough, and they are not willing to give it up at this time) maybe reluctant to date another adult who has a child because they would presumably not be able to partake in this cherished activity.
It is not fair, of course, but it is the truth. Just as short guys like me are at a disadvantage, so a women with children, people with disabilities, ugly people, people who live at home with their parents, people who are unemployed, old people (but this bias is mostly against women), people who are addicted to drugs, people who have STDs, etc.
Again not fair, but the dating world is a market -- we all try to sell ourself for the best possible offer.
Single parent status is not baggage, it's a perk!
In terms of whether online dating needs "fixed", I'd be interested in knowing how the success rates for online dating are better or worse than current offline methods (going clubbing, dating co-workers, whatever). My own worthless anecdotal experience shows a much higher rate of success in online dating than trying to meet people IRL. ("Worthless" because I met my wife online, and we naturally hang out with people who tend to spend lots of time on computers.)
Also, from the OP: I had average success on this service, but the reason it probably wasn’t better had to do with the fact that the Q&A section tended to expose character flaws that turned me off.
I think it's interesting that the OP was getting too much information about his potential partners... or at least, too much too early. Most people have flaws, and one advantage of traditional dating is that you learn about their flaws more slowly and have time to learn good things that mitigate them before getting scared off.
However, I think it's more likely that people are going to have to adjust to knowing more, rather than using services that expose less: more and more we live our lives online, and it's very easy to learn "too much" about someone just by using Google. We're either going to have to accept that people are flawed, or it's going to get even harder to find partners...
We do charge people a subscription fee to be able to start conversations, but it does seem pretty unfair for people to have to pay to reply so we don't require a subscription to reply to messages.
I agree with waxman that the "browse-and-message" thing is kind of played out (winks are too), so we're working on some ideas to help people find partners and interact without requiring them to fill out a giant questionnaire or spend hours copy and pasting a message to every potential partner on the site.
But even though I received the highest response rate, I was still almost never able to get second or third replies. Once I got a response that I replied to, the exchange pretty much stopped dead in its tracks.
Women get tons of messages every day, as the article points out, and they don't bother to reply unless they're really interested. I got very few replies on dating sites when I used them, but almost every reply turned into a date. They had already made up their minds before they messaged me. Dating sites are not great and I would love to see something better, but the OP's experience suggests some failure of communication peculiar to his situation, not something from which to draw general lessons.
For what it's worth, in my experience, the women who wanted to meet me agreed after only one or two messages. They made up their minds before they messaged me. The women who wanted to chat back and forth were only there to chat; they weren't actually interested in me. Rich online interaction doesn't facilitate meeting in person. It competes with it. When it comes to efficiently deciding whether to invest time in getting to know somebody, meeting them for coffee or a drink risks less than an hour of your time and yields much more useful information much more quickly than trying to get to know someone online. Women follow the same logic men do: if they just want to chat, they chat. If they actually think you have some potential, they want to meet you ASAP so they can find out what you're like in person.
If I were trying to make money from an online dating site, I could certainly convince people of the opposite. It's so dangerous to meet someone in person before you really know them... why go out and meet one guy who's probably a dud when you could be talking with a whole bunch of cool people from the convenience of your own apartment... and when you finally meet someone in person, they should be a real person you have a relationship with, not an anonymous profile. I'd do everything I could to keep them on the site, making me money, instead of out in the world meeting people. For myself, I want exactly the opposite. I think once I've skimmed an expressive profile and seen a few pictures, I've already learned 90% of what is possible to learn online, and I want to proceed as quickly as possible to an in-person meeting where I'll learn more in twenty minutes than I'd learn in a week of chatting.
I'm not sure how a site could do better at that than Match or OkCupid, but I can't wait to find out.
I haven't tried any of them in years, but I don't know how you evolve the model from where it is. There are few social situations where you find a favorable girl to guy ratio except for a college campus.
http://gobigorgoho.me/post/5834417671/online-meeting
His startup aims to solve these problems and is set to relaunch in early 2013!
- Why the heck do folks use a service built by people who might not have been successful in love? Would I use an operating system programmed by doctors?
- How do dating sites overcome the personality shortcomings of having a hard enough time connecting in real life, let alone the computer. In the end the relationship is in real life.
- People are nickels trying to get dimes instead of improving themselves. (Analogy can be read here: http://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com/blog/why-wont-anyone-be...).
- How do you set the bar of the mindset you want to attract? Should dating sites be encouraging and attracting people, "Love me to validate myself and my worth of receiving love", or "I'm happy, work at being the best I can and would be even happier with someone"?
- People who come on a site, find love, and leave might not be profitable customers. It's like the startup stuff out there, does much of it keep you in a startup phase instead of moving into more?
- In some cases, the socially challenged geeks that build it who may have underdeveloped personalities themselves trying to help others connect. geeks compensate for in person skills by being behind a keyboard. ie., what does Facebook have that isn't transactional and is transformative, say, like a successful dating match might be?
As a society, too many folks don't work on connecting to ourselves, and through that to others. Too many don't know how to be a friend to ourselves, have a healthy inner dialogue, and instead want someone else to know them and love them more than they do themselves.
Maybe dating itself is the problem. Statistically fails 99% of the time. To some it's emotional baggage collection. Some people even display their emotional baggage in the large overpriced bags they carry. Not enough time spent on developing one's self into their best self.
Maybe dating sites should be about dating yourself to find and become your best self so you can connect with others doing the same and let the love happen as soon as you learn to remove the barriers to receiving and giving love yourself.
What do you think?
There seems to be a certain amount of self-effort, self-learning, self-development that is necessary to understanding and relating .. to yourself, and through it to others in a relationship.
What if a startup focused on development of one's self that in some way let those emotional and introspective sparks happen?
And nothing kills attraction like desperation.