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The company incentives aren't aligned with the user incentives. It is in the company's best interest to keep dinging people for $20/mo indefinitely and not having them match, but dangling the prospect of one (eg near misses). See the allegations against match for fake/zombie profiles.

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.

I agree with you about the incentives thing. Therefore, the question you posed has been sitting in the back of my mind: how do you align the incentives of the customer and company in this case?

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.

> f 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

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.

> 2) The problem there is that if you don't like your second match, then what?

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.

> or ask for a second one if you don't like the first

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.

Thanks, this is a great comment. Moving signin with Facebook way up on our list.

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.

You should give a 25% discount credit for every failed match, which is not usable until they reach 100% discount. Meaning, 4 failed matches gives a free match credit. If a match occurs before 4 consecutive failed matches, then the aggregate discount is cleared.

You could get rid of Facebook signup but incentive your users after the signup to connect their Facebook account for "a better matchmaking" and to not meet their friends or grandma.

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.

Thanks for the replies, all.

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.

You're going to get different demographics for the $60/mo and the $20/mo models.

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'm not the person you replied to, but you've definitely thought this through, and thanks for explaining. I would sign up after reading that explanation. I think you'll need to find a way to express these things during conversion.

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 :)

> but just because someone is rejected doesn't mean we didn't do our job well

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.

If we did that, we'd have to charge $100/match. That's why we have Premium - it's a higher price point for a guaranteed date. But in order to personally match people and provide great customer service, you can't guarantee a date for $20. At least not yet, unfortunately.

That $100 pricing doesn't make sense to me.

$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.

Using a similar formula,

$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.

How'd you derive that formula?

Poorly, I apparently missed the first term of X^0 $100 = expected cost of matches $20 = cost on this side per match X = probability of rejection (which leads

expected cost = cost of first match times probablity it is needed plus cost of second match times probability it is needed... plus cost of nth match times probability it is needed.

100 = 20x^0 + 20x + 20x^2...20x^n 5 = x^0 + x^1 ... x^n

The actual number is more like 72% :/

Thanks for responding, but you didn't read my second question.

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.

Thank you for writing this explanation - I think the presentation of this idea needs to be clearer (and pitched as a positive thing). Bring the humanity aspect back to the online matchmaking service experience.

Of course. HN has been super helpful today and I'll definitely be working on providing a better explanation - and making other changes people have suggested as well.