Show HN: Dating Ring (YC W14) – We do the work, you do the dating
datingring.com
datingring.com
Another solid YC investment at work.
I actually think this is an interesting example of YC's investments, but not for the reason you seem to suggest.
YC's public persona is all about "hyper-growth" and building "very large" companies[1]. But if you go through the list of companies it has funded, a good number would have a very difficult time making a prima facie case that they fit the profile of a business that can achieve significant growth and scale. Dating Ring is the perfect example of that.
There are numerous challenges associated with breaking into the online dating space generally. First, the costs of customer acquisition are typically quite high because there's so much competition. That makes it very difficult for new services to gain traction without significant investment in advertising. Second, there's an additional level of churn built in to this market because when a dating service works, it loses customers. That produces a constant need for investment in the aforementioned user acquisition which is so costly.
More specifically, Dating Ring seems to be positioned in no man's land (no pun intended). It can't compete with the quantity and immediate gratification of online services that cost nothing or roughly the same, and it can't compete with the quality and exclusivity of matchmaking services which generally have costs signaling much higher value.
If the OP's comment is true, Dating Ring would ironically appear to be offering the worst of both worlds by trying to package users from the former as part of a service masquerading as the latter. Even with adjustments to its model, the odds that this company ever achieves "hyper-growth" or becomes a very large business are next to nil.
So, I'd hold off on insulting YC based on some publicity we've received. And .. all press is good press for growth for an early stage startup.
Given that 'feminist' and 'feminism' are used by many people to mean many different things, it would be nice to specify what being a feminist company means.
Is it just a company run by people who self-identify as feminists, maybe one that only hires other people who self-identify as feminists? If so, how do you enforce this? Or is the company's feminism defined by specific policies that are based in a specific meaning of 'feminism', and if so, what are they?
Being against the harassment of women is pretty fundamentally feminist.
Clearly, goals can belong in several umbrella categories at the same time. Most people would agree that "not harassing women" falls under "not being a bad person." But, at the same time, it is also a major goal of most feminists.
> Given that 'feminist' and 'feminism' are used by many people to mean many different things, it would be nice to specify what being a feminist company means.
Which feminist values?
I don't see how your company could describe itself and feminist while also making a campaign that relies on some of the structural sexism of the Valley and tech. How did that campaign challenge the existing power structures and stereotypes/mythology of tech?
That wasn't her goal with the campaign.
And by any measure, it was outrageously successful.
By accepting those women as adults who are free and intelligent enough to make decisions that may not necessarily line up with the common branch of feminism popularized by the media.
> If they identify with the feminist cause and support it, they don't need to prove it to you or justify how their campaign is or isn't feminist.
We've seen that many times organizations that claim feminism or feminist principles often don't act in a way that is supporting of women, so being critical is fully warranted when an organization says one thing but does something that seems to do nothing but perpetuate existing stereotypes and problems. Moreover, they made the claim, not me, so asking "why is what you are doing feminist" is important.
Is it a mythology if it is based on hard facts? I.e. this sounds a bit like saying that heat engine works on mythology of lower energy levels in a heat sink. Also note that just like heat engine equalizes energy levels between source and sink, such campaing seeks to equalize gender inbalance. Which I guess is as feminist as you can get.
I think it is actually beneficial for a person or an organization working toward women's right to disassociate themselves from the feminism movements and related labels lest they actually do end up spending all their time constantly justifying themselves.
My point is, that a) that campaign didn't foster a myth, it used a real, existing potential gradient and b) it is very much pro-feminist as long as they're letting things equalize and not actively trying to maintain that gender gradient.
ETA: of course I can compare a physical phenomenon to a social one, mathematical models don't differentiate between those. Still, I chose that example only to highlight that calling facts a "mythology" is weird.
would be my pick
Growth snacking? Snacking on some code?
(Then tagged and HI5 took the user base's email addresses and turned them into mailing lists for their spam email side companies...)
YC companies that think they're being clever and are more likely to employ these techniques successfully "Because AirBnB" shouldn't be disappointed when they fail.
Exactly. But every such campaign contributes to the erosion of trust on the Internet and generally makes the world suck more.
This is unsolicited spam. And likely against OkCupid's terms of use.
If it was just generic "come sign up for our new dating service!" messages, I'd agree with you, but that's not what they were doing.
If it were to become more common (not sure how common it is actually...probably very), that could result in an overall poor experience for OKCupid users who would associate using the service with receiving spam that never netted out to anything.
There is nothing wrong with OKCupid drawing the line on another service trying to get "free" marketing on its dime and at the expense of its user experience.
That said, if it never amounted to anything -- as in, I got Dating Ring spam promising dates that never materialized, I would be pretty pissed.
However my point was that it is not exclusively Dating Ring doing this. It is important to consider the overall signal to noise ratio when you factor in the messages from Dating Ring and any other company out there trying to use OKCupid's platform to promote themselves.
OkCupid, barring the creation of a program/partnership specific to this case, has decided that overall, it is worth filtering out. If they thought it added value based on the data they had, they would try to partner with Dating Ring. Heck, it would likely have been fine if Dating Ring purchased ad inventory on their site. As it stands, it seems they view this approach as spam per the OP. If it is against their terms, Dating Ring doesn't have much leg to stand on as that would make it a pretty black and white situation.
Part of me wonders if a Cease & Desist is en route to Dating Ring's office.
Such situations are exactly the kind where Kant's categorical imperative applies. If something is clearly wrong when everyone does it, it should not be OK for a particular company to do.
Just off the top of my head. And then consider that, by the context, they probably meant anyone who hasn't had a new message in a while. Yeah.
TL;DR: Lots of good reasons.
That's BS and you know it. If that were the case, OP's startup should've bought ads on OKC and OKC would be glad to sell ad space. I really doubt that OKC or its parent company will sell ads to a competitor dating site.
1. OKC is a listing of profiles where the lister is expected to manage the transaction 2. The management of the transaction is a huge friction and pain point for a significant number of people (as is writing a profile, taking pics, etc...for which there are also people that help). 3. this service reduces/removes that friction/pain point for okc. 4. this service is NOT a listing of profiles (as far as I can tell) 5. this service does NOT discourage people from signing up for OKC, Match, POF, etc...in my view it encourages participation in those services (whether implicitly or explicitly).
If I'm missing the mark on any of the above, feel free to correct me.
As far as I understand it from the copy on Dating Ring's web page, their service is meant to replace all those dating sites. It's a fire-and-forget product that frees you from the need of maintaining an on-line profile and visiting a dating site - discouraging people from singing up for OKC is exactly what it is meant to do.
I guess the better way to put it is that if your startup has to resort to paid advertising as the main user acquisition funnel, you probably already lost unless you have ridiculous conversion and LTV on each user.
The thing is, marketing is mostly zero-sum game; people are stuck in a negative feedback loop of throwing more and more money to one-up their competitors at attracting customers from the same limited pool. It's an unlimited resource sink, but it's a) what you have to do lest you get outcompeted by others, and b) profitable for those who facilitate advertising.
Weixiyen is also right that this "growth hack" is effective, but remember that "growth hacking" is mostly a fancy term for spamming / abusing trust. Every new way to trick people into buying something will work for a while, until everyone else starts doing the same and the ROI drops to zero.
Once upon a time, a pop-up banner was the clever growth hacking trick. As HN's idlewords tells the story,
"One of the first banner ads had a click-through rate of 78%. That's mind-boggling. Do you know what two words were on that banner ad?
"Shop Naked!" CLICK!
But banner ads turned out to be like poison ivy. People clicked them once, and learned never to touch them again. The industry collapsed in a flurry of pop-overs, pop-unders, and shame."
Yeah, from a prospective date, not a matchmaker.
A similar situation: posting a job ad and having a recruiter reply to it trying to sell you their services, rather than a prospective employee. If you've ever been in that situation you'd know that it isn't a comparable response, and is just irritating spam that results in an instant delete.
The downvote button is to the left....fire away.
That's exactly what a recruiter does, though.
For example, if you contact someone with a message along the lines of, "Hi, we're _____, and we've got someone who's perfect for you. Just sign up for our service at _______ to get started!" that's definitely spam. No question about it.
On the other hand, if the message is more like, "Hi, we're _____. We think one our clients, ________ would be a great match for you. You both enjoy _______, and in particular, he(she) like that you mentioned _________. Here's a link to his(her) profile. You can contact him(her) at _______." that doesn't look like spam to me at all. Effectively you're just acting as a proxy in that situation. The OKC user is indeed getting exactly what they're looking for.
So I guess my point is, it all depends on the message. If you make them sign up for your service, spam. If your message is generic, spam. But if you give them information about a real person, and a way to contact them - ie exactly what they would expect to get in a message directly from another user - that seems fine from the user's perspective.
Of course, OKC would likely still not appreciate your use of their service to facilitate competition. In that case, a better model might be to strictly act as the agent of your user; search OKC for them, and if you find a good match, help them create an account and message the user directly. Obviously this might require tweaking your model a bit.
I hope you realize that this is almost word-for-word what any telemarketer or spammer will say about what they do. They're just trying to help you!
I've never used it, but I'm guessing that people don't sign up for OkCupid because they want messages from Premium Matchmakers. You're spamming them. It doesn't matter how much you think you're helping.
We do our best to not spam and inspire trust by being available 24/7 to answer questions and personally interact with users. At the same time, we're constantly trying to grow so that we can provide the best matches. It's hard! Cut us some slack? No? Because it's HackerNews? Yea, I guess that's okay then.
Unless they're on OKC to look for dates, they have no business being there. The only messages that they could legitimately send on OKC would be to ask someone on a date.
Is this substantially different?
This isn't true. Some look for companionship on OKC. Why they use OKC for it, I have no idea but 100% of the user base isn't strictly for dates/hooking up.
The right way to go about helping out their clients without potentially spamming OKC users would be to message their client on their own site that they have found someone for them on OkCupid. They could then ask their client to sign up to OkCupid to view the account and message the user.
This is bait and switch and also poaching, same as if a realtor goes to another realtor's web site to find prospects and start soliciting them, plus using false pretenses in your case.
"So I went through the effort of making a profile and messaging them and they never replied. Now what?"
It's not civil to say "Please stop spamming." That's like saying "Please stop beating your wife." It contains an accusation, which is never a civil thing to say. There is no civil way to bring up how your conversational partner is beating their wife or spamming OkCupid.
Adding a "Please" is pretending to be civil.
There are just some conversations that cannot be had "civilly". If you think this is stupid ....I can't really help you. Try to go have a civil conversation about someone's weight gain with them.
I think here lies our disagreement. I do believe that you can talk about anything in a civil manner. Being polite is completely orthogonal to the topic discussed. In this case, "please stop spamming" is just a more polite way of saying "stop spamming", period. The difference is in tone, not context, and this is how the word "please" is supposed to be used. Also, what goodside said was not "please stop spamming", but "please tell your employees to stop creating fake profiles (...) and spamming our users". Which is a request, not an order.
Accusations have nothing to do with civility. Telling me "please stop beating your wife" when I'm beating my wife is valid, just like saying "please stop spamming" is valid here because they're spamming. If you believe goodside is dishonest about Dating Ring's employees spamming OKCupid, address that.
> Tell your employees to stop creating fake profiles on OkCupid and spamming our users.
Seems to be what the poster really means.
>Please tell your employees to stop creating fake profiles on OkCupid and spamming our users.
That means the poster is begging the person stop? Does that really make sense? It sounds like someone is directly telling someone something, but is adding "Please" to get themselves off the hook for being seen as directly telling someone something.
As a native English speaker, I cannot remember anyone, except maybe an old person at dinner saying "Please pass the salt", say the world "Please" at the start of a phrase where it wasn't an aggressively postured order. Like this obviously was.
Serious question: Could you tell me what I'm missing with that?
I sometimes find the English language to be quirky or frustrating, and I have some sympathy with efforts to change it for the better. I think in this instance you are tilting at windmills, and not offering sensible or sincere "life advice".
So in fact it doesn't make sense in some circumstances (though those circumstances are narrower and fewer than fubu seems to think).
For instance, "please" is clearly out of place in "please put the gun down on the pavement, or I will shoot!".
The civility-conveying meaning of the word is out of place in abrasive speech; for instance it is out of place in "please get off the f___ing road!" In abrasive language, if "please" appears, its presence is ironic. For instance, in a sentence like "please don't start with that bullshit again!", "please" doesn't have any connection to being civil; it doesn't function that way. Other such politeness words are also ironic in abrasive speech. "Kindly keep your mutt off my lawn!"
(There is even the usage of the word "please" by itself, or nearly so: "Oh, please!" or its variant "Puh-lease!" which expresses disagreement or disapproval.)
It conveys friendliness, the concept of "we're all friends here and we don't want anyone to get hurt, so let us sort this out without a mess"[0]. On the other hand one could argue that abrasive speech is very effective at bypasing various psychological bareers and delivering message straight to the target - after all, that's the reason for so much shouting and insults in the military. So there's a trade-off.
[0] - I guess I might have been watching too much Star Trek in my childhood, which gave me a deeply ingraned attitude that we can all see the bigger picture if we try hard enough.
"Please" is not a pleading word, it's a polite word. If you're going to give life advice, make sure it's right.
*No scientific evidence behind this statement, but this is the internet, so it's true.
You are such a martyr! Your parents must be proud.
The problem with OkCupid is that the experience is horrendous for women. While the men would love to have choice, and "unlimited" matches, in reality this only means one thing:
Spam. Spam spam spam spam spam spam. More spam.
The success of Tinder should be in large part attributed to the fact that the basic interaction model removes spam. Men will swipe right on the majority of "matches", making women the actual gatekeepers of conversation - and this model works, though you obviously lose a lot of nuance and depth along the way.
She talks about how easy OkCupid is for women, how she recommends her female friends to try it out, but how she also dissuades her male friends from trying it. Because the site is so difficult for men.
Which is a bit of a false freedom. You're presumably there to find promising dates, not take on a new part time job sorting messages.
It sucks for both sides, in different ways.
Exactly. I think Tinder's model is more aligned with how men and women meet IRL. As a guy, my modus operandi is to present myself as a high-valued man to everyone and have the women pre-select me so I can start the interaction.
How men use Tinder: like like like like "Oops, I wanted to see the rest of her pictures"
How women use Tinder: nope nope nope nope "Oops, he was cute"
Its the 80/20 rule-- 20% of the guys will get most of the likes from the girls.
With all that repetition, I think there must be an even better model for matching people up...
(EDIT: Before anyone asks, of course it's been done. HerWay comes to mind. The userbase is miniscule.)
That's quite suggestive. It's not perfect, but it's far from meaningless.
Also, just because it can be read as insulting doesn't mean it's not true. If we want to identify and address problems, we have to deal in truths. If it eases your conscience any, I can edit in verbiage to make extremely clear that I as speaking solely to typical behavior in the arena of online dating.
Basically, a site has to offer something to both women and men to do better than OKC. That proposal just puts a minor speed bump in front of men. As a group, men have few compunctions about abusing sites in order to get what they want. Multiple accounts to spam women is not a significant obstacle.
And now you have to work harder to manage that, reducing the probability that you'll be doing it.
Then I stopped to think about it and understood why.
"I, personally, discovered..."
However, when the statements are of the general form about the group as a whole, I think it is a perfectly appropriate response. If you say "All men are misogynists" saying "no we aren't" is perfectly valid, so is taking offense to the statement.
Now if you have evidence that your assertion applies to the majority of men on dating sites, feel free to post it. Then at least your stereotype will be an evidence backed one.
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Even a user who isn't particularly nefarious and say, sends 20 original (not copy-pasted) messages each session, it's still an overwhelming amount of messages for women to sort through.
It's important to note that when I say "spam" I don't just mean "bad actors who deliberately attempt to game the system". I mean that even what appears to a user as a "natural" amount of messages in fact makes the system nearly unusable. It's almost trivial for female users to end up with literally hundreds of messages per day - just managing the messages themselves is a chore, much less viewing the profiles associated.
Spam. Spam spam spam spam spam spam. More spam.
- Messages that are too short. E.g. "hey babe" doesn't mean much, when a women gets 10 - 20 "hey babe" messages in a day.
- There are men that get frustrated at the lack of response from women, and start turning their messages into "form letters" which don't show any level of having read the woman's profile.
- Initiating conversation with sexual propositions.
- Depending on the platform, sending unsolicited pictures of genitalia.
While some of these might not qualify as "spam" compared to a 419 scammers emails, I would say that wading through all of that seems akin to wading through one's spam folder...
The net result, is most any given man is going to see more success in getting responses - and dates - by spamming any woman within a hundred miles than by writing the kind of message women publicly opine to want.
This comes across as cynical towards the women on dating sites. The problem is that the women on dating site become a lightning rod for messages. If every message were of a kind that interested a particular woman, how would she respond to (e.g.) 10-20 messages from new people every day? She's likely not going to end up going on dates with multiple people at a time, and if she finds someone long-term, it's (more than likely) only going to be a single person. She likely will only be able to carry on a few meaningful conversations at a time, and the rest just get dropped. If she were trying to meaningfully respond to everyone then going on a dating site would end up being a significant chore.
Edit: Also, it's probably difficult to respond to someone that puts in the time to right a well-thought-out message, but doesn't come across as interesting (or expresses views that are contrary to your own -- e.g. an avid hunter messaging an animal rights activist). You don't necessarily want to be the bearer of bad news, so it's easier to not do it at all (or you convince yourself that you'll respond 'later' but 'later' never happens).
Real success is extremely hard to quantify, which is why i'm not suggesting that as the goal. The goal is to grade spam messages, and encourage people to not repeat known spam patterns. (And, if you show the score to the recipients, it also acts as a spam filter.)
Encouraging / forcing people to write less spammy messages might improve the overall message quality, just by increasing the cost, in effort and time, of sending the messages. It also provides some minimum level of feedback to the people who get zero responses from their messages.
IIRC, when the user disables/deletes his/hers OkC account, they can specify the reason: "met someone on OkC (they can type the other person username)", "met someone elsewhere", "not interested anymore", etc. So they probably have lots of good data on success.
lol
-Message that are too short get banned.
-Men that are frustrated should now that being funny and referencing something in their profile, or talking about something they both like are good conversation starters. Just as they are in real life.
-Sexual propositions is good, you can ban them or not, at least you know exactly what they want. They are bring honest.
-Send dick pics gets you banned.
This leaves you with a good set of people. The next step would be for the system to learn what the user wants, and start to filter these messages.
As simple as it seems, that is the primary driver of the success of Tinder, helped generously by a smart on-campus initial seeding strategy for the customer base.
Every other dating site allows members to contact other members at the initiating member's will. All it takes is a few people with a dearth of tact and an overabundance of time to completely blow up (mostly women's) inboxes.
Basic free-rider problem: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_rider_problem
As a result of this, female members are under a constant barrage of mindless messages, which is what's being referred to as spam.
While this is true that some people subscribe to this logic[1], the number of messages (good or bad) that women get seems to out-weigh the number that the men get. I've heard (anecdata alert!) that some men get frustrated and will start sending out "form messages" because they will take the time to craft meaningful messages only to get no reply[2].
[1] I heard a similar story of someone (a "dad's friend" of a friend a long time ago) that would basically ask every woman at a party for oral sex. He would get lots of slaps in the face, but he never went home empty-handed (allegedly).
[2] I would personally liken it to investing time into job-hunting (i.e. trying to craft a decent cover letter) and then just getting no response from the potential employer. Though depending on the situation one other the other might be more stressful (e.g. searching for a job while unemployed).
This was documented on the old OKCupid blog. I think the post was taken down after Match bought them.
Men grow frustrated and get tired of wasting their time, so they stop sending in-depth messages. Women are then even less likely to respond, which ultimately sends men into a downward spiral of desperation.
Can't speak to the male side of things, as I haven't used it myself. But I feel gross being lumped in with the things that friends have shown me.
Yes, it sucks to actually read profiles, compose thoughtful initial intro messages, and then be ignored. Just like it sucks to come up with a great startup marketing campaign and then not get the results you were hoping for.
Instead of that's too much work, let's change from rifle/targeted to shotgun/blast, I think you just have to keep iterating and changing how you target, change your marketing media (different sites/venues/ways of meeting people), etc.
I understand the "trough of sorrow" of shouting in the void. But I don't think the answer is to start doing what everyone else is doing - unless you want to get the same results as everyone else of course.
(Not meant to you specifically, Kalium; "you" is meant in a general sense above)
The copy-paste-spam method produces better net results that the thoughtful, targeted approach. The only other more successful method I've ever even heard of rests on data mining OKCupid's users, carefully crafting your profile for them, and so on. Described here: http://www.wired.com/2014/01/how-to-hack-okcupid/all/
EDIT: Also, getting meaningful data is nearly impossible here. Generally all you get is positive response/no response. When most of your iterations come up with a lot of no responses, you've really got nothing to go on. You cannot target without data. The blast approach compensates for that.
Imagine doing a dozen very different marketing campaigns and being greeted with an identical total lack of response from all of them. Hard to learn from that.
>http://www.wired.com/2014/01/how-to-hack-okcupid/all/
This had one really important piece of information, that seems counter to what a lot of people are suggesting in these comments: a short initial message is all you need (if the match is good.) He finally settled on a single initiating message “You seem really cool. Want to meet?” and it worked.
If more guys blamed OkCupid, maybe they'd be willing to try things like Dating Ring instead? That'd put pressure on innovators to innovate, rather than stopping at "men need to try harder."
I got on okcupid a few years ago after being alone for years and years b/c of depression and social anxiety and in a matter of weeks I was swimming in dates, and in a matter of months I met the woman who's now my wife.
There's a lot that's unpleasant and stressful about online dating, but with a few classes of exceptions it's not society, it's not women, it's not the site, it's not anything else but you that's keeping you back.
While the feedback on Tinder (where there is less investment required by both to start a conversation) early on was positive in my circles, it's starting to turn really noisy too. In the end, I think we'll see a successful model where you have the low barrier to conversation as per Tinder but a bit more info about the person as per OKC.
The difference is so large it is kinda of looked at by both genders with humor. (The side-by-side screenshots are pretty funny if you Google for them.) Also take a glance at http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/your-looks-and-online-dati...
> Men will swipe right on the majority of "matches"
Great stereotyping you have going there. Could you share some more insight into your "Women as the gatekeepers and men will hit on anything" life view? Maybe some men would prefer not to have to "swipe right" and face constant rejection? Maybe some women might prefer to approach men first instead of waiting on a man to present himself? Naw, what am saying? Gender roles were defined for a reason. Let's all just stay in our places.
This is a fact, not advice or a prescription. This also says nothing about how you behave or should behave, or how any particular person you know behaves or should behave. Recognizing this does not mean that you think that the behavior causes the expectation, as opposed to the expectation causing the behavior, the expectation and the behavior both being caused by a third thing or combination of things, or the behavior and the stereotype being a result of random coincidence. It also doesn't mean that other behaviors shouldn't be accommodated, even if it inconveniences the most common usages.
Unless you're a good looking guy. To which, I am not.
ETA: I ended up deleting my account, because even with finding a match, and sending a decent intro message, I still got radio silence from 70% of the matches, which was probably less than 1% of my right swipes.
He seems to have taken my description of general gender dynamics in online dating to be an endorsement of said gender dynamics. This is in no way true.
He seems to also have taken my description of aggregate gender behavior in huge user bases to indicate specific individual behavior - this is also in no way true. There are plenty of users on both sides who don't subscribe to the larger usage trends, but ultimately the trends are pretty overwhelming.
I for one am all for upending gender roles, but we're talking about how online dating works right now, not how it could hypothetically work in a society where gender roles as we know them didn't exist.
There isn't exactly the Gender Role Police sitting around going "NO! SWIPE RIGHT!" "NO, SWIPE LEFT!". These trends are voluntary from the participants.
This may be a bit tragic - i.e., people voluntarily disempowering themselves by reinforcing gender roles that work against them - but yet this happens. En masse even.
"It works" doesn't imply correctness. It just implies that it produces the desired result to a sufficient level of consistency/reliability.
If you're only open for business currently in NYC and SF, maybe mention that before you have me fill out the long form rather than waiting until after I've submitted it, OK? Because otherwise the user who doesn't live in one of those places feels like you just wasted a bunch of their time.
shkkmo is right that the reason we have you fill it out is so that we have the ability to launch new cities faster.
It is hard enough to get traction in one market because you don't have an email list to start necessarily. However if you collect all this great segmentation data and email addresses from people in other cities, suddenly you have a huge head start when prepping to launch in new markets.
I am not for one moment disagreeing that it is a poor user experience. Just saying that from a business standpoint, I can see where they may make the decision to frustrate some users initially who aren't in their active markets to get a leg up when they expand.
Sure you could argue that if they piss you off here, you'd be unlikely to consider them in the future, but then it becomes a numbers game. People who have a hard time finding a good date may still have that problem if this company grows into their market in the future, and may still be willing to give it a shot at that time since the chance for finding love probably outweighs that one time they had a less than ideal user experience.
Anyway, just thought I'd play devil's advocate here as you hit on an interesting lead generation point.
Am I missing something? Based on the (lack of) info on your website, your matchmakers really could be random people you pulled off the street.
You're completely right that we should have more info on the matchmakers featured prominently on the site. Appreciate that feedback and will be changing that soon!
(In short - they've been with us for the past year and matched thousands of people.)
Our matchmakers stay up to date on trends, have exceptionally high EQs, have experience matching thousands of people, and we accept under 1% of people who apply for the job.
I'd be interested in the odds of two people selected at random forming a relationship vs the odds of two people selected by a matchmaker forming a relationship. As well as two people selected by a computer algorithm vs two people selected by a matchmaker. And two people selected by some random asshole off the street vs two people selected by a matchmaker.
I'm guessing not.
You need to demonstrate with data your "service" is useful to convince people to use it.
The thing is, you don't.
All you need to do is to market the living shit out of this idea, and since no one can reliably answer whether it beats random chance people will use it. You get to earn the benefits for as long as it takes for someone else to actually do the studies that debunk you and then one-up you at marketing.
I've been doing a little googling (and I do mean a little) and it seems as these matchmakers will offer dubious value for predicting long term relationship satisfaction.
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2012/02/12/opinion/sunday/online-d...
>Because they gather data from singles who have never met, the sites have no way of knowing how two people will interact once they have been matched. Yet our review of the literature reveals that aspects of relationships that emerge only after two people meet and get to know each other — things like communication patterns, problem-solving tendencies and sexual compatibility — are crucial for predicting the success or failure of relationships. For example, study after study has shown that the way that couples discuss and attempt to resolve disagreements predicts their future satisfaction and whether or not the relationship is likely to dissolve.
>the information that they do collect — about individual characteristics — accounts for only a tiny slice of what makes two people suited for a long-term relationship.
>According to a 2008 meta-analysis of 313 studies, similarity on personality traits and attitudes had no effect on relationship well-being in established relationships. In addition, a 2010 study of more than 23,000 married couples showed that similarity on the major dimensions of personality (e.g., neuroticism, impulsivity, extroversion) accounted for a mere 0.5 percent of how satisfied spouses were with their marriages — leaving the other 99.5 percent to other factors.
Sure it will get you to meet singles, but there probably isn't anything special about it other than that. Adding someone who majored in theater arts is unlikely to add value for the cost involved.
To be honest, were I not in a relationship at the moment (and if I lived in SF/NYC), I'd probably sign up for this. For me, the primary value is not however their Premium Matchmakers beat random chance; it's taking away the work required to find a date.
After you finish high school, or graduate from university, finding a potential date gets incredibly more difficult. You no longer spend majority of your day with hundreds of people, many of whom could be your potential partners - you have to work to expand your social circle and meet people (most of whom are already in stable relationships anyway). I'd gladly pay Dating Ring for the sole reason of helping me meet people who are also looking for a date.
This PR has been a trainwreck. You're the conductor.
Give use access to your facebook and $20 a month. In return, you get ONE match a month. If they don't want to meet you, that's too bad. You paid $20 to be rejected.
The two things you would need to do to sell me are:
1) Allow access without facebook. I'd be fine scanning a driver's license for you that matches the name on the credit card I pay with.
2) If you don't provide a good match (i.e.) one that wants to meet me, you should provide another match.
[1] A big if. I'm skeptical about the whole thing, specifically about the "we match people, not profiles" claim, which makes little sense to me, since your profile is all they know about you. But my point is that the economics of it seem OK.
[1] We should explain this better, but when you sign up, you'll see you can tell your matchmaker a lot more about yourself, and we use feedback from each match / date to improve matches. Plus, of course, we're using all of the research we've collected on what makes people compatible. So it's definitely off of more than just a profile, but I get what you're saying.
As someone who's only matches on Tinder and OKCupid in the past few months have been camsites and escorts this is an actual concern of mine.
To me it just kinda says you will fault the user if their matches don't result in a date, but try to keep 'helping' them while you are getting paid.
As a further question how do you even out demand for the different matches. Assuming the number of matches contracted by men for women is not the same as the number of matches women for men? Do some people not get matches do some people get surprise double matches(in which case if they were only expecting one date a month won't they generally reject the lesser of)?
I mean honestly I would rather not be matched and not be charged than matched with someone who got extra matches all the same day they weren't expecting.
Even if I don't think they would be a good fit based on their profile, I'd always be up for having my expectations disproved. I also don't trust profiles to describe people very well.
"Your profile also gives our matchmakers a glimpse into what you’re like as a real person, but don’t worry - we don’t base too much of our matching on your photos that your friend took that one time at that party after a few glasses of red wine :)"
...really terrifies me. I need to trust that the people doing this selection understand the context of my pictures while not knowing me at all? If I'm serious about finding a match using this service, I will gladly spend a full hours filling out a form telling you more about myself, rather than giving you access to my FB account.
1 match per month at $20 https://datingring.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/202344714-H...
Policy on matches that don't want to meet: https://datingring.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/203302640-W...
1) It's now on our list to add signin without Facebook, since that's been such a popular request.
2) The problem there is that if you don't like your second match, then what? What's hard is that matchmaking isn't a common thing you pay for, so people aren't used to the risks involved. If you go to a restaurant, you generally don't ask to try out a meal for free, or ask for a second one if you don't like the first. If we were to provide two choices, we'd have to raise the price. We're the one matchmaking service where a personal matchmaker is going to send you a match for $20 .. most charge thousands.
Additionally, it's not so much about the business model as it is about trying to change the way people so quickly write one another off. If you know you only get one shot, and this person has been chosen specifically for you by a matchmaker, there's a much higher chance you'll give them a shot, which is what we want. People are far too picky and miss out on lots of great people. If you want 1,000 chances, there's always Tinder :)
And lastly, we're going to build a free match into the signup flow, so there's at least that :)
It is in the user's interest to pay their money, 20 seconds later get a perfect match that works out, and never use the service again.
Restaurants are not a good analogy. There are many to choose from, you can leave at any point in a meal, it is a well defined product, there are numerous reviews, you can browse the menus beforehand etc.
It would be far more interesting if you could find a way to get paid on success, and not much on failure.
The answer that I came up with: the company will charge less each failed date. This way, after a certain amount of dates, they will theoretically lose money by having you as a customer. This incentivizes them to get you a good match before then. On the flip side, the initial price should be high enough such that it is in the users interest to see if it will work out rather then giving up easily. Lastly, if the previous date request is months before the current one, the company can say that the previous date was a success and start over.
The only problem that I dont know how to deal with is the user whose goal isnt to get a date, but to harm the company. My guess is that some sort of feedback from the dates can asses whether or not this is indeed happening.
I most certainly do. I usually don't have to ask. When they come out and ask how the food was, I tell them the taste wasn't to my liking or wasn't what I expected, and they usually offer to comp the meal or bring a new one.
I'm not saying I expect you guys to do this, I'm just saying you should probably find a new analogy. :)
Although I think what OP is saying is that if you provide a match and the other person rejects it, you should provide another match, since obviously you didn't make a good choice. In other words, you should be guaranteeing one date per month, not one match. Not a successful date, but just a date.
It should be your choice. If you choose not to go on a date, thats on you, the dating ring's work has been done. If, however, you accept the date and they dont, there is nothing you could have done and should be set up with someone else. From the dating ring's perspective, that should be fine too because work was done for value (i.e. the party that declined the date got their value). This also goes well with your second statement.
That's actually very common, especially in states where you only have to pay for what you eat, so restaurants are all to happy to replace your meal if you don't like it.
That being said, I understand why you are doing it the way you're doing it, thanks to your explanation. As for the price, I don't think it's the price that people would balk at, but rather, the principle - the fact that they can flat out lose their money based on someone else's whim.
I think that if you figure out how to give them something for their money when a date falls through, then it would just make people feel better. I don't know what that could be though, so I'll leave it to you.
While I'm here, I'll add my vote to get rid of the Facebook requirement. I'm very single and ready to mingle, but I don't do social media.
And you're definitely right that it's the principle, and we should think about that more. I like the idea of giving something, and not paying $20 for nothing. It's a tricky scenario (we played around with the business model for months before releasing the new site) but we'll be brainstorming this a lot more.
It I would also suggest them to import all of their social accounts (instagram, pinterest, twitter) which makes sense since your role as a matchmaker is to gather informations as much as you can.
Re: restaurants - maybe not the best analogy. But just like a restaurant, we don't openly advertise it, but when people complain, we're always more than generous with credits / refunds.
I'm working on a blog post to explain this better, as it's much more complicated than I could gracefully express in a HN comment, but just because someone is rejected doesn't mean we didn't do our job well. Dating is a numbers game, and success is no where near 50% for any dating site. What we do - unlike most other services - is work behind the scenes to improve success rates for future matches, if we see that certain people are being rejected often.
For some people, though, the $20 model simply won't work if they find they're not getting enough dates. That's why we also offer Premium, which is a more personalized, tailored approach for a higher price point. Some people simply don't do well with photos, or for other reasons, and at $20, no matter how good we are at matching, it's simply not the perfect fit for everyone.
And lastly - this is our first week with this model, so we are taking all of these comments very seriously, and thinking a lot about how to make a sustainable business model that satisfies the most people. When it comes to dating .. you're unfortunately never going to make everyone happy, but we're trying really hard to make as many people happy as possible. What's interesting is that we've heard almost no complaints about the $60/month model, only about the $20/month one. So we're debating how to make that plan more enticing, or if such a low price point works for the amount of personalization that goes into our service.
Personally, when I was dating I would have looked at your model and dismissed it instantly, because I would assume from experience that it's damn near impossible to define what a good match is - therefore, at best, you're putting so little effort into your 'matchmaking' that the service is effectively worthless.
The existence of a premium alternative wouldn't be reassuring.
This may or may not be unfair. But I think it's going to be a common perception among a good proportion of possible users.
I might be persuaded if you could provide evidence of improved success rates compared to the competition AND that you're not using a simple matchbot AI to provide something that's standard on other sites.
Bottom line is that if I was rating your startup's prospects, I wouldn't be optimistic, because on the one hand you're saying dating is a numbers game, and on the other you're making the numbers as tiny as possible.
My guess is Tinder/OKC/POF will continue to eat your lunch because you're in an uncanny valley between the dumb-as-rocks experience they offer and the high-end personalised interviews-and-flattery experience offered by the premium matching services.
As it happens I met my partner on a dating site, so I know it can work.
I have a single friend who I'd recommend this to, except I'm sure she wouldn't want to spend $20 on a potential flop. You'd have to really change the perception of the value of your matches (vs dating sites).
Of course, how much is a guaranteed good match worth? To me? $500+ easily. I think your biggest hurdle will be managing expectations. Good luck :)
To my mind, yes it does. When someone is paying per match, if match that won't meet you, it was a failure. I don't mind rejection, but I don't want pay to be rejected.
It doesn't have to go on indefinitely, but it makes sense to me to retry a couple of times that month and then offer the person the choice of either a refund or a new match next month with some advice on how to improve their profile.
$20x2 per match is your baseline income per match here which I assume covers your costs.
1st try gets rejected, $20 bucks from the rejecter 2nd try gets rejected, $20 bucks from the rejecter 2rd try gets rejected, $20 bucks from the rejecter
So $60 a month should cover it, assuming that you have a 100% rejection rate.
$35 (.5 x 20 + .25 x 40 + .25 x 60) a month should cover it if you have a 50% rejection rate.
So assuming you have a 50% or less rejection rate, I would pay $35 a month for at-least a 7/8 chance of meeting someone every month.
$100/match to provide a guaranteed date would mean that your rejection rate is about 83%. Estimated using this forumula: (5 = x^1 + x^2 + ... x^n) and solving for x as the probability of rejection. I used an n of 29 for the estimate.
2) If you don't provide a good match (i.e.) one that wants to meet me, you should provide another match.
If I don't want to meet them, that's fine.
If they don't want to meet me, then I paid you $20 for nothing (besides being rejected).
If you don't think you can provide me a match that will want to meet me, you shouldn't take my $20.
But most people still think $20 is too much to spend at just a chance. If they were to pay on success, no matter how good we were, we'd be losing a lot of money. Some startups are fine doing that, but we wanted to create a sustainable business model from the start.
Also, I've heard the 'if you're good, you lose customers' comment a lot, but that is not the case with dating. People who are successful still go on a lot of dates, and the better you are, the more people they refer. Our goal is 100% to provide the best matches possible, so that people like us, refer their friends, and end up happy / in love / dating / having sex / doing what they want. If we had a crappy service that kept 'dangling' people in front of one another, a) none of us would want to work here and b) we'd have very high churn and die very quickly.
No thanks. I'll stick with OKCupid.
edit: since this is a YC company, I'll add some content to my criticism (even though most of this should be obvious).
1. This is a new service, and people don't know you yet. Asking them to sign up with their Facebook account is asking for too much, because there is no trust element established. Consider having a stand-alone sign-up mechanism that enables some bare-bone features with the option to hook up to Facebook for additional benefits (i.e. 5 matches per week vs. 2 matches, promise for more accurate matching, etc.). Users need to see some value out of the service before they volunteer their Facebook info.
2. Lots of people don't use Facebook, and even more of them are leaving Facebook. There are also lots of people who are cynical towards it and use it as little as possible. You are certainly alienating them by requiring a Facebook account.
We don't have anything that says "we won't post to your wall" etc, but most people use it anyway.
2) True, but when you are a startup it's better to focus on making your experience great for some people than making it OK for all people. You should definitely support non-FB users over time, but it's pretty reasonable to have a single code path at launch.
The biggest objection seems to be that OkCupid is like a buffet, and now they're being asked to eat at a restaurant where the chef interviews you and brings you what he thinks you'll like. If the buffet was working great for them, I can see why they'd object to the change.
OkCupid wasn't so great back when I used it though. I'd send out many messages (personal, customized ones -- not spam) and get next-to-no replies. It felt like I was spinning my wheels and going nowhere. Were my opening messages poorly written? Did my profile need work? Maybe. But that's why I think I'd benefit from having a professional matchmaker, who's a better writer than I am and can present me in the best possible light.
I guess your mileage may vary.
I don't consider wide options to be a positive for me in online dating, as the total number of potentials is particularly deceiving. OkCupid for me had the most results for people I could message but had the poorest ratio of time invested in messaging to time spent dating. eHarmony had significantly fewer results for me but had a much better outcome.
Personally, I'd rather have one potential match a week with a higher chance of actually going on a date, than messaging many people a week with little to no response. Granted, I realize I'm making the assumption that this service will actually provide a higher probability.
Is your algorithm/method so much better than any other site that you can afford to only send one match per week and hope to achieve the same (or, hopefully, better) results as other sites?
When it comes to dating, I don't think success/date matters as much to people as success/time.
Ask, the Facebook thing is uncomfortable.
We definitely realize that Facebook is problematic. The pros are that it helps some with security, we don't post to your wall, and it makes the signup flow much faster. But we're considering adding a way to sign up without Facebook since it's definitely the top complaint we've heard since the relaunch.
Instead of you both pay $20 and either one can reject the date and you're both out $20- whoever rejects the date is out the $20, and the person who didn't reject the date gets a refund. That would REALLY put the onus on the matchmakers to do a good job making matches.
People who are open to going on the date don't lose anything if there's no date, or end up going on a date. And if people continue getting bad matches that they reject, they won't pay the $20 for very long before leaving.
Otherwise, why would people stay on the site if they keep getting hit for $20 AND don't go on any dates?
2) https://www.datingring.com/premium[1]
https://datingring.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/203302640-W...
>You can also sign up for Premium Membership to get further date coaching and feedback, as well as two guaranteed dates per month.
How do you guarantee a date (or two)?
And then there is this allegation of spamming OkCupid users[2] (which didn't really get denied). This also leave another bad taste in my mouth.
Add to that the general tone of the founder's comments in this thread.
Each of those things are some what subjective. But, I would have a hard time recommending this site to any of my single friends. In fact, if any of them told me they were looking in to Dating Ring, I would actively try to convince them not to.
[1] http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/04/the-dating-ring-is-raising-... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8455138
Couldn't find any mentions of looks or wealth in the TechCrunch article. Did you see it mentioned somewhere else?
I think you'd find that the dating industry is filled with companies that are ethically-challenged (or have been at some point in their history).
It's also a little insulting to not even be the one selecting your date. I know we get set up by our friends now and then, but they are our friends, not some random service on the Internet. This service has not built trust, and its results seem to me fundamentally dubious.
If you do want to select your date, there are tons of these 'first wave' online dating websites to do that. But we wanted to provide a different experience, and use matchmakers to make the overall experience better. In other industries, it is accepted that you need an expert to help out. You wouldn't have a friend perform heart surgery on you. But societally, there's a huge stigma against needing professional help to find dates, which is quite silly, when it's one of the top drivers of life in general and when statistically, no matter who you are, it's really, really hard to find people you connect with.
In terms of building trust, that's what our relaunch is all about. If you sign up, we'll send you a promo code for a free match, and we do much more than any other service to gain our users' trust - from monthly parties with everyone who works at the company, to live chat through our site, to personalized notes about why each match was selected (plus, of course, email support). Creating a great dating site that people trust is a really, really challenging feat, and not one achieved overnight, but we're working as hard as we can to get there.
- Height in feet and inches
- Pretty limited locations
- I'm neither Democrat nor Republican
- It's called American Football and Football, not what you have (OK, I let that one slide)
- ...
I get that the non-English speaking world is harder to reach but on the other hand: English is not a problem for the higher educated in most of Europe and I see no real reason to limit this service to just the US. A profile is a profile.
Thanks so much for submitting your info! Right now, we're unfortunately only
located in NYC and the Bay Area. But we really appreciate your reaching out,
and we will let you know as soon as we expand to your city!
2. Why do you think the matchmaker will know who I'm seeking for, better than myself?
The more people using your service, the less work for each matchmaker. Most premium matchmakers spend most of their time recruiting. We don't need to do that since we have so many users. We also have a lot of technology that automates the non-personal stuff, like sorting through age, height, etc.
In terms of knowing what people are looking for - we met our first few thousand users and arranged a few thousand dates by hand. We learned a lot about what matters, and what doesn't - for instance, how active people are tends to matter a lot more than their political preferences. I hate to pull the whole 'proprietary' card, but we're not very public about how we match beyond that .. will try to add more info to the site soon.
Some tiny web page with a bullet point list of things to do or not do.
Unlike a lot of the other people on here, I like the Facebook integration, provided of course nobody else on my Facebook can see that I've added this app. It saves the hassle of having to upload pictures and lowers the proportion of fake accounts.
As a male (23 years old), I've completely written off online dating. Sites like OkCupid make total sense if you're a female because you don't actually have to do any work, but they absolutely suck for men. Women are inundated with messages and rarely respond, and thus as a male you have to spend hours and hours sifting through profiles and sending tons of messages. On top of that, very few of the women on dating sites are even attractive.
That's why I prefer Tinder, although it'd be nice to have a middle ground between the shallowness of Tinder and a dating site.
It's great that this site saves time on the user's part (mainly the male). The problem is that it doesn't seem like I can see what my potential match looks like. Being a male, looks are pretty important. That's why I stopped going on Groupers - my last one hooked us up with 3 unattractive women. It sounds shallow and fucked up, but that's just the reality of it.
Until a service comes along that hooks me up with women that I know will be physically attractive enough from the get-go, I'm not going to pay money for it. And since most hot women are already inundated with guys trying to ask them out in real life, I'm not sure if a site like that could ever exist.
For instance the "It is very important that my partner: " you have 4 options: No Preference, Wants kids now, Wants kids in the future, and Doesn't ever want kids
As someone who absolutely does not does not want kids 'now' but is indifferent to them in the future I really wish there was a an option called. 'Doesn't want kids now'
Here is our newsletter explaining the changes: http://us4.campaign-archive1.com/?u=7bc3b2bd2f03996c6dbee867...
The group dating piece: A lot of you wrote about missing group dates. Ah, we do too! While we are big fans of the magic of groups, we realized that we could either focus on compatible matches, or keep group dates -- but we couldn’t do both well at the same time. Since you expressed that compatibility with one person is more important than meeting three singles at once, we decided to focus on 1-on-1 dates. Scheduling 6 compatible people in cities like NYC and SF was just not as feasible as scheduling 2 compatible people.
I don't recommend this site to anyone, you would just be wasting your time. There are other sites that are a lot better when it comes to online dating.
Sure, they could do the work to let non-FB connected users in as well, but given the scale of FB and the value of FB data, it's really hard to justify that work until you've hit product market fit.
When you only have one path to sign up and register it's really easy to focus and make that path as high quality as possible. Later you can add support for the people that want to use your product but don't have FB.
Right now there's just a simple Wufoo form so I can gather input from users I can use to build the first version of my site...I have my own personal experiences with a lot of the free/paid services out there and ran into issues with fake profiles or being asked for credit card information so I'm working on an initial design right now, that should be nice and simple, won't require a credit card at all, and will have a healthy dash of security thrown in...but I'd love your input as well so if you have a few quick moments to share it that would be great :-): http://serradate.com/
The startup pivoted because, unsurprisingly, single dates are more popular.
I signed up for Dating Ring in NYC in like March, and have generally had a good experience. Probably been to a dozen dates/events. Of that I've only been on two "bad" dates. I define that as dates where I felt we just didn't have anything in common and/or they were completely not my type. Most were mediocre, but we had fun, mostly because I know how to be entertaining over drinks. A couple I was interested in but never really had a good relationship develop from it. In general, I had fun so it was money well spent.
I'm new to the city and the site was a great way to meet totally new people frequently without having to jump through all the hoops of stuff like OkCupid.
I have to say I am curious about this "pivot" in how you are approaching matchmaking. It is nice to have an "out" and not waste my time if it is clear that I won't find the person attractive mentally or physically.
Honestly I think I've stuck with the site out of curiosity, and not really the expectation of having a good date. Over the past year I've had much better success finding relationships using OkCupid in NYC than your service. Mostly because I can better select dates that are attractive and interesting. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯