Hacker News Reader

Comment by inklesspen | Hacker News Reader

Like you, I also read PG's list of startups he'd like to fund. The "dating" item ends with this: "So if you want to do a dating startup, don't focus on the novel take on dating that you're going to offer. That's the easy half. Focus on novel ways to get around the chicken and egg problem."

I'm not seeing your solution to the chicken and egg problem here.

View on HN

The chicken and egg problem is alleviated by the model. We needn't supply each user with a huge pool of profiles from which to choose - we only need to supply each user with ONE other person also willing to go on that date.

In theory, the site could function with just two users.

Potentially it removes it altogether because you could do a more traditional "scale up". Picking a few dates a week in a small region initially you only need a few users (sub 100 probably) to fill up the slots.

Then with luck the membership should grow by word of mouth.

Matching people DOES require a huge amount of people to stand the chance of finding a geographical and personality match. This idea of date oriented meeting seems to nail the first problem perfectly.

@OP: I think it's got legs, serious legs. Though I see a problem with no-shows (I guess the 3 or 4 "couples" per date fixes that somewhat). The question is how do you monetize?

Membership fees are possible, but I get the sense that users would balk at paying "entry fees" for their dates.

It's also possible that local restaurants/attractions could sponsor certain dates (i.e offer kickbacks), but the site would have to be sending a LOT of dates per week to any given place for those kickbacks to materialize.

A third idea might be to take the community of active daters you have created and host paid events periodically. For example, for users who enjoy nightlife, you could have a blowout bash with a cover charge. For users who enjoy classic movies, you could have a wine tasting and a screening of a classic movie.

I'm sure there are better ideas out there for paid events, but you get the idea.

You could monetize by creating "packages" that those setting up the date could buy, straight from the site. You could also set up deals with venues and restaurants for sponsored dates.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com