Why investors don’t fund dating | Hacker News Reader

Why investors don’t fund dating

andrewchen.co

232 pointsandrew_null185 comments

The thing about dating services is that they work a lot better when they're not explicitly marketed as dating services. Facebook started out as a thinly veiled dating service, where the primary activities were looking up people you might want to date and communicating with them. But the product was marketed as a more general tool, even keeping the meaning of the "Poke" button rather cryptic. Instagram is in the same vein - a large use case is showing your friends and acquaintances how cool and attractive you are, with the goal of raising one's dating status. And Instagram is marketed towards making sunsets and pictures of flowers look better, allowing users to realize for themselves that a Gaussian blur might make their selfies look better too.

Huge numbers of products are marketed towards increasing one's attractiveness in some way, whether shampoo or automobiles or clothing, and outside of Axe body spray, very few of them are explicit about it. There's no reason that websites wouldn't follow the same script.

Dating services probably have difficulty getting traction unless they can attract women, and it might be harder to attract women to a dating service if you are purely and overtly offering a dating service.

That depends on the age group, on sites targeting 30+ / more serious dating there is usually balance or more women

Very interesting analysis.

It seems that as a general rule leveraging sexuality and power to promote something is effective as long as that association remains covert.

I think that has more to do with how publicly one has to use/consume the product. E.g. most people don't like to tell their friends that they have a sexual toy at home, or that they like to binge eat, or watch porn or do something else that is considered shameful once exposed publicly.

However as long as it's not a social product (e.g. porn sites or the axe deo), it's fine, since they do it privately. The problem with online dating is that it exposes one's intentions more publicly.. The embarrassment factor is somewhat declining though - according to Pew Internet's online dating survey it was 21% in the US in 2013 vs. 29% in 2005.

However one has to keep in mind that what Pew measured is agreement with statements such as "Do you agree that online dating is a good way to meet someone". So you might say yes since you have a friend who did it, but you may still not register yourself. The latter has some strong support if you look at how many people use online dating, which is only 11% of the population and something like 40% of singles if I remember correctly. These numbers contradict to the notion that it's ok for the majority to date online, but the tendencies seem to go in that direction [source: http://www.pewinternet.org/2013/10/21/online-dating-relation...]

Very good analyst. Marketers will say "you can market based on sex, fear or greed - and sex sell the best."

Here's my dilemma: My startup (https://fpvracing.tv) users are literally 98% male so it would seem obvious to target this demographic with images of sexy female models, but I'm concerned about the ethics of doing so. I don't want to perpetuate the gender disparity.

No help on the advertising, but I must say your front page video is amazing. I desperately was looking for a link like "Fly now!", "How to race!", or something similar. Join is a big fat wall to make an account. Might be worth AB testing the main page. Pilots and Photos were not what I wanted to see, I wanted more videos and a big fat link to the guide section. Maybe worth AB testing the order of the links with the Guild and Video on the far left too.

In the guide it would be worth mentioning that the Hubsan X4 only records video from what it looks like, it doesn't transmit. It also mentions that there are ready-to-fly quadcopter, but doesn't have any links. While it isn't much, having a good resource center with affiliate links can bring in some extra cash while you get your startup off the ground while at the same time teaching the user base.

Edit: After thinking about it what was missing was a call to action page that showed if I followed steps A-G I could fly in a race too. Along the way I would need to make an account to find others in my area, start a local group, learn about regional races, etc. I am guessing that guiding new players is your primary challenge for long term growth?

Edit2: The events page should have a form so you can be notified when there are local events. I am guessing your larger market will be those that want to watch/goto the events so providing them with a way to get involved is funnel #2.

This is very useful feedback. Much appreciated!

The front page is also broken on Safari (7.1.5). The video won't run and when I right click it my browser crashes.

Why not contact some of your 2% female users and ask them to be in normal, non-sexualized advertising for your site? It will help you attract both male and female users to show that FPV racing can be enjoyed by everyone, and it's not duplicitous because you're using real FPV racing enthusiasts.

Couldn't agree more, 'selling' how much fun being in the community is, will be much better at building a brand.

I'd seriously avoid going down the sexy models route, if you're site featured girls in tight tops holding RC 'stuff' on the front page I would have clicked away almost immediately, it cheapens what you're promoting.

Simply using professional photo/video people for imagery will help more than slapping on some tacky model shots.

I don't see what your site has to do with sexy female models, so I would be concerned how you expect that kind of advertising to result in "conversions"

> I don't see what your site has to do with sexy female models, so I would be concerned how you expect that kind of advertising to result in "conversions"

Then I think you might have missed the context of this discussion. The parent comments were talking about the fact that sex sells. Motor racing, especially, has a long tradition of employing sexy female models in marketing. Do a Google search of "Formula One promo girls" to see what I'm talking about. And several of our users have suggested putting "babes" on the site.

Having said that, I'm not comfortable with it. Which is why it's a dilemma.

And the umbrella girls are not without controversy in racing either.

A world championship level rider in Moto3 is Ana Carrasco - female. She came to the races recently with an umbrella boy. Not sure if it was a protest or a PR opportunity. http://i.imgur.com/xu25bOM.jpg

There's a lot of ways to appeal to a mostly-male demographic without resorting to sex, even if sex sells best.

BTW, I love the sharp video on the landing page.

If you don't dilute your content... why is this an issue? 98% of your users are male. (You're also assuming they would respond favorably to the models) Your goal is to serve your customer, not someone else's ideas of what your customers should be.

If being decent--and "not sticking pandering eye-candy on there for clicks" sure sounds like being decent to me--and serving the customer are in opposition, doing the latter is real problematic.

This is cool! It's like the perfect nerd fantasy in concentrate form.

Cool!

PS: I'm usually a cynic.

Thanks! Sign up if you like. We'll be adding more content for beginner pilots and spectators very shortly.

Have any of your teams experimented with machine learning navigation?

Not to my knowledge. Flight controllers will undoubtedly get to the point where a completely autonomous quadcopter can beat any human pilot, even through an unfamiliar course. At that point we'll need to impose regulations on the level of autonomy that people can use in races. I've got no idea when we'll reach that point though.

The 5% churn = 79% annual churn is incorrect. Churn doesn't compound, because after churn your user base is smaller and 5% of that becomes a smaller number.

It is actually 0.95^12=0.54 (5% churn/month = 46% annual churn).

That formula is more correct, but only assuming you don't replace any churned customers – or at least, replace them all at once at the end of the year, which seems like a pretty unreasonable assumption to me.

If you replace customers every month then the number leaving per month is constant, so you end up churning 0.05×12 = 60% of your userbase per year.

Edit: The 12x model is also pretty coarse, but you can take the limit of continuous replacement, and you end up churning

    -12log(1-x) = 0.616

× your customer base per year.

ya'll are total nerds. Have some upvotes!

edit: subtle sexism

Churn doesn't compound, because after churn your user base is smaller and 5% of that becomes a smaller number.

There's a more fundamental flaw: Not all users are equally likely to be lost. If 10% of your users have a 50% chance of finding mates and leaving the dating site each month, while 90% of your users are hopeless losers who will never find love, you'll have a 5% monthly churn rate, but only a 9.9998% annual churn rate.

The even more corrosive case in dating is that there's no "happy path". For a SAAS product, you might have incredibly churn for users who join just to kick the tires and leave quickly afterwards but you can sustain yourself on a core of extremely long terms customers who will almost never leave and keep paying reliably month after month.

With dating, there's no equivalent case. Even hookup apps, your users eventually get tired of the hookup lifestyle or they age out or they get enough casual partners to satisfy themselves.

Dating is one of the few services where your customers get unhappier the more money they spend on you.

You're assuming no replacement.

I think the calculation runs like this as per[0] 5% => 1/.05 = 20 months average lifespan = 1.67 years => 1/1.67 = 60% yearly churn.

[0]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Churn_rate#Churn_Rate_of_a_Cust...

Thanks. I did totally botch the math, I typed this up in one go and mixed up the formula, thanks for pointing it out. Updated to be more accurate.

Realistically you are adding more users each month. A business that is not adding new users each month is going to be out of business.

The problem is, founders tend to try to solve problems they've experienced and understand. For the twenty-somethings that are the public face of "startup founders", they may not understand international trade or enterprise health care or other big problems, but they understand dating. So they write dating apps.

And then, by the time they've acquired enough real-world professional experience to actually understand some interesting and high-value problems, they have a mortgage and kids and don't want to eat ramen like they did when they were 22.

Despite the echo-chamber of SV and tech media, most successful founders are older, with real world industry experience.[0]

This data probably doesn't reflect the insane number of 20 somethings chasing ideas in markets like the dating space right now. Most of them fail.

I work in the senior care market and I'm shocked there aren't more businesses being started around that market. It's absolutely huge with endless opportunity. But I guess that kind of proves your point...

[0]https://hbr.org/2014/04/how-old-are-silicon-valleys-top-foun...

Yeah, you're right. But if you look at the really big companies, nearly all were started by young founders (Facebook, Google, etc.) And that's what kids (and the media) focus in on.

IMO experienced founders are great for building a cash cow business worth $1 billion or so. That takes hard work and a billion dollars is a fucking lot of money, so it's nothing to scoff at. But it's not primarily what VCs are interested in: the VC model is built off of small equity stakes in $10 billion+ IPOs.

To have a $10 billion+ IPO, you need to invent a market, and young kids are great at that because they don't see the limitations the market has placed on us. Most don't have the fucking slightest about finance or money, which can be an impediment if you're trying to create a product in an existing market, but if you're building a new market or category, short-term viability matters less.

That said, there are a lot more ideas that can turn into successful $1 billion companies than ideas that can become $100 billion companies. So your odds are a lot better at starting a successful business if you learn how first.

And to your point about senior care... most VCs who don't focus on health care avoid it entirely for similar reasons they avoid dating apps. You can either go the medical device/biotech route and spend hundreds of millions on lawyers and regulatory approvals, or you can go after the provider side of things. The healthcare IT space is pretty saturated and very fragmented, so it ends up scaling like a consulting business (which VCs are also not fond of).

All good points. For the record, I was more talking about any product or service aimed at the 65+ crowd (not necessarily healthcare specific). It's a very underserved group of individuals who also happen to have all the money!

Where are these 10 billion dollar ipos and these billion dollar businesses that investors don't want to touch?

What are these magical markets invented by oh-so-spry out-of-box-thinking unburdened-by-reality type of kids?

I think they're talking about things like WhatsApp, Instagram, and SnapChat.

If you had asked me about each of them before I'd heard of them, I would have told you that they are all solved problems. That SMS, email, and the existing photo-sharing apps are "good enough".

However, these companies are apparently solving people's problems (hence the large userbase for each), even if I personally don't use them and don't quite understand the value proposition that each provides.

Except that WhatsApp was started by a 30something experienced founder pair.

This.

My startup is part of the ATDC Select program/incubator in Atlanta. There are roughly 30 companies around various verticals. I'm in my early 30's and I'm among the youngest of the founders. Many of these people are in their late 30's/40's/or more and been through multiple startups.

(funny enough maybe 20% of the companies are healthcare related, so maybe there are doing what they know)

Maybe in other places startups are a only-kids game, but not here.

Minneapolis is a bit like that, too. I think the real interesting angle here is the enterprise. We are to Fortune 500 as Silicon Valley is to startups - there are more Fortune 500 HQs per capita here than anywhere else in the world, including the Bay area, NYC, London, and Tokyo.

It's still a fledgling movement, but I think we will see more and more startups here emerging from the corporate giants, developing new tools to meet their needs.

See for example http://academicvc.com/2013/07/05/startups-for-grownups/ regarding the idea that Atlanta startups aren't just for kids.

> This data probably doesn't reflect the insane number of 20 somethings chasing ideas in markets like the dating space right now. Most of them fail.

Without being ageist, I think that you see a disproportionate number of younger founders simply because their current situation better allows for taking risks. When you have a family and are are responsible for at least 1/2 the household income, that choice becomes a lot harder.

My theory is that age is only a proxy for success, given that most businesses fail because they run out of money. Older founders may have access to larger war chests than younger founders.

Older founders' main contribution is a larger war chest of experience to draw from, even if they also have larger personal networks and some personal savings to make them less dependent on the seed-stage investor. I personally believe that if investors were more willing to make the startup calculation reasonable for stable adults, we'd have far better results at the macro level. 20-somethings are cool, but they are still very young and very naive. It seems most non-tech industries have already internalized that. Tech will eventually mature into that realization as technically-adept generations age.

Being naive - in the sense of looking the world through the eyes of a child - is one of the best qualities in a founder because startups are so counterintuitive.

How many grown-ups with lots of industry experience said no for young Microsofties, Googles or Facebooks?

- A social network for college students? What a stupid idea!

Look at it this way... older founders may be less likely to create a unicorn, but they're more likely to create a business.

I'm more interested in starting a business that has a 90% chance of being worth $10M than a business that has a 1% chance of being worth $1B.

A business that has a 90% chance of being worth $10M isn't suitable for VC.

Perhaps I'm missing something, but the expected value is higher on the 1% chance for 1B

As a founder, you only get to invest in one business at a time, so the high chance of $10M is worth more than the longshot chance of $1B. Even if the latter has higher EV, the former has higher average quality-of-life EV.

Working as an employee vs owning a $10M business is a BIG lifestyle jump. From $10M to $1B, not as much.

>Being naive - in the sense of looking the world through the eyes of a child

This is not the sense that I meant. I meant naive in the sense that they're ignorant of many subtle but important behavioral practices in both corporations and people, and that they often haven't developed much personal discipline. It's not their fault, of course; they're just young. Youth is good for its zeal, but corporations should generally not be run by zealots, they should be run by mature, calculating, and sensitive persons (and very few young people qualify). Zealots belong in the marketing and sales departments.

By the age they become founders, I think most people have had most of the child-like wonder beat out of them, and in fact I think the early and mid 20s are a dark time for a lot of people, with the pressures of exiting the scholastic world and entering the professional world, frequently with a beast of debt on their backs, and the rejection and failure incumbent in trying to date and find a lifelong companion.

Founders aren't children. They are typically post college graduates. And they typically must include one that has an engineering degree, hopefully with some pedigree to it.

Microsoft invested in Facebook 3 years after it was made at a 15 billion dollar valuation and everyone laughed.

I feel that pain. I just spent months building the alpha of my own software, making no money with grownup expenses. Then my wife got laid off, so I had to jump in and get another dayjob so someone would be making money.

I don't really have access to any sort of a larger war chest. What I do have is a much better idea than Snapchat for Drunks, because I have a lot of real-world professional experience, and I know how to actually build complex software, because I've been doing it for decades.

My killer is overcoming the cautious nature of too many years in the enterprise. It's easy to overbuild and not be lean.

>I work in the senior care market and I'm shocked there aren't more businesses being started around that market. It's absolutely huge with endless opportunity. But I guess that kind of proves your point...

Senior/health care is heavily regulated, making it hard to innovate and undercut legacy providers. "Uber for old age homes" just doesn't work.

Transportation is fairly heavily regulated as well. Someone could probably do an Uber for old folks that ignores laws and pushes the liabilities onto "independent contractors".

Maybe. But a few scandal stories will kill that idea.

Everyone wants a cab. No one wants a geriatric care home - not even when they're living in one.

Having said that, I recently discussed some possibilities with a couple of local care home owners. Currently there isn't enough smartphone take up to make some obvious ideas viable, but that will start changing soon, and then there may be some very rich pickings to be had.

This is the real reason Apple etc are piling into health apps. The biggest buyers won't be marathon-running twenty year olds, but scared-of-death >fifty year olds.

Hey, I'm interested in chatting with you about the opportunities you see... I'm not in SV and would be happy creating a sub-$1bn company.

What's a good way to get in touch with you?

I'll gladly chat about that market over email. It's always interesting to learn about such things. Where should I email you?

> they have a mortgage and kids and don't want to eat ramen like they did when they were 22.

Not only that, it's very tiring being an old fart and being told that you don't "get it" by a 27 year old VC who does want to fund an app. Maybe even a dating app. OR being told you don't "get it" by a young Stanford grad that really thinks it would be cool to rebuild an entire 3M patient record data set in MongoDB and access it with something written in Javascript on NodeJS. Fun times.

I remember some years ago, talking with a couple of experienced co-workers about a young and frustrated manager we worked with. He was very talented, but also hotheaded. Someone suggested that what he needed was a good death march... without the experience of being expected to do something actually impossible, he just didn't know why we would all drag our feet on things so much.

He's since had a failed startup, which I hope tempered him some. So very talented, but not sufficiently scared.

Most dating sites also end up being a very one-sided battle. That is, most of the women are sitting around waiting to get a torrent of messages and most of the men are sending messages to basically every girl that they see. They play the numbers game, and it's all about how big of a net you can cast. I don't foresee any dating site being more successful than the current heavyweights until they can get rid of "fishing" so women aren't unmotivated to go on the site and men aren't wasting their time sending the same message to 1,000 different people.

And at that point, they're competing not against automation, but the very human process of "Wouldn't those two make a cute couple?"

I like setting up my friends. Lots of people do. I've had some success at it, too (a couple of marriages, even). And I suspect, although I have no evidence, that friend-driven setups and blind dates are more likely to succeed than dating sites are.

fwiw, Grindr got around that particular problem by focusing on gay men. But that's a large niche, really.

Beyond the problem of men drowning women in messages, there's a question of the quality of those messages. The crap I see my female friends get online from dating sites is appalling. So many men have no idea how to approach women and make themselves appear attractive - and many of them have no idea just how much competition there is. Meanwhile, women have to plow through dozens of dick pics, hoping to maybe find one guy worth talking to. Their odds aren't any better, but for different reasons. Sigh.

Hi. I am a male. I have seen how abysmally low the typical message quality a woman receives is. I learned from it.

Sad to say, what I learned is that given the sheer quantity of low-quality messages, investing in message quality is a poor decision. The quality may be significantly higher and there may be an elevated chance of a response... but the odds of the message being read at all are quite slim.

The chance of an unread message getting a response is, obviously, zero.

Well I wish I had a friend who tried to set me up. Instead I spent about 6 frustrating years getting nowhere with online dating, then eventually lucked out with the right girl, and only now do I get the 'cute couple' comments.

There's a wrinkle that makes it worse. Specifically, sites that deliberately invert the power dynamic run into the problem that when women must initiate all communications, you don't get a lot of communications. Tinder avoids this by requiring blind consent from both parties.

What do both have in common? Women feel they have the power. In the case of Tinder, women have the power, don't get spammed, and men devolve to the common case of spammy behavior.

It's the best of both worlds. Or worst, since users tend to be exactly as shallow as their technology allows.

I'm sure you could solve that by "spam filtering" people's inboxes, just with a slightly tweaked heuristic model. People would get fewer messages but they'd be of a much higher quality. To be honest I'm surprised sites don't already do this.

Co-founder of a relatively new service (http://www.meshbetter.com) that incorporates this via our unique "Mismatch" technology, while it protects women and gives them better experiences, our data shows that Men don't necessarily learn from this.

OKCupid tries something similar with its filters. Men lie their asses off to get around it.

I'm talking more about filtering on the message content than filtering based on account settings. For example, if a message is 90% the same as the previous 3 messages the user sent just silently redirect it to /dev/null. Users would quickly learn that a cut'n'paste approach gets rapidly diminishing returns. That alone would slow down a lot of the men who just spam messages to every woman on the site, improving the experience for them while leaving the genuine men on the site unaffected. But I'm sure OKCupid could do much cleverer things.

Users would quickly adapt. Something simple like spinning syntax would address that. I agree, OKCupid could be more clever, and build systems much harder to get around.

That said, I don't think the incentive is there for them to do it. Even if they removed 100% of all spammy behavior, I don't think it would solve the problem of message volume. If we assume that skimming a profile and writing a personalized message takes five minutes, a "genuine man" user is able to churn out a dozen messages an hour. Women would get less than the hundreds of messages they get today, but still far too many to work with.

From what I've seen, there's a basic contradiction at the heart of online dating. In general, women only want to be contacted by men who they are attracted to and interested in. Also in general, men live in fear of being ruled out and missing their chance with a woman they find interesting.

No spam filter can help you there.

Do you mean the multiple choice questions? Or do they actually have message filtering?

Last I knew - and it's been a while - you could set filters on criteria such as age to avoid getting messages from users you wanted to exclude.

But yes, the multiple choice questions are subject to the same problem.

Here are the choices for message filtering (they updated it over the past year or so): gender, age range, whether they are located nearby, whether they are single, match %

Also, if the user pays for A-list they can filter on: how long the messages are, hide if it contains certain words, filter by attractiveness.

As someone working on International Trade, I will say Dating is an interesting and big problem. Partly caused by the rise of online dating, but also because The world is moving in one direction, and effective dating is still stuck in the old way of doing things.

The problem is, the only part of dating that can be obviously optimized is meeting new people - increasing the size of the pool, and increasing the quality of the pool (and in the case of Tinder, increasing the accessibility of the pool by optimizing the mobile experience).

I've been married for 22 years, and introduced couples who wound up getting married themselves. Relationship chemistry is difficult and tricky business. Large parts aren't quantifiable. For my own marriage, it really boils down to my spouse keeps me stable, and I make her take risks. We're better people together than we are individually. That's not something you can solve with an app.

It may be true, generally speaking. I am 25, have mortgage, and am not working on a dating app. Although, I did give an SMS-based dating service a shot for a day and then put it aside.

There are also many free alternatives which are very good. I'm not suggesting something like Tinder or OkCupid are perfect, but both of them are fully usable for your whole dating lifecycle without ever having to pay a cent (both of them have premium options, but they are entirely optional). Maybe IAC will change that at some point, but they haven't thus far.

Dating is also always going to require work that can't be replaced with money. I can throw money at my laundry, my meals, my house cleaning and completely outsource them. But with dating, regardless of how good the site or matching is, I'm still going to have to meet the other person and have to do most of the "dirty work" involved with dating myself. So I'd think that fact limits the upper bound of money they can charge and upper bound of money a dating company can make.

There will always be some work component for the user, but a site that is so good at matching that every date you go on is a great match- that site is worth a lot of money, because a great date doesn't feel like work.

No one knows how to do it yet, but it would be very valuable. Much like a perfect movie recommendation engine.

another problem with dating is simply throwing money at the problem actually decreases the quality of the results!

it's easy to go out on tons of dates with gold-diggers, or the male equivalent, moocher deadbeats. unfortunately people get tired of both very quickly even though on paper it sounds like a lot of fun (dating exciting, interesting losers).

Is there any reason the term gold digger can't apply to both men and women? I do agree they are to be avoided as I have yet to meet one even slightly interesting.

There seems to be a lot of explanation from a business-y POV as to why dating startup is hard, but I'm curious from a different POV: does dating company/apps actually solve any problem that people are having? To be more precise, dating is hard, but the difficulty is multi-facet, and I can't see an app potentially solving any of them for me. I'm a single 20s-something, so firmly in the target audience for most dating app. And I fail see the benefits of using almost any dating service from a startup out there.

I am not exactly in the target market at 37 years old but I definitely see it as solving a problem.

If you live in a Rural area for instance, and work near your home your chances of finding a mate are pretty slim. Especially in those small towns where everyone pairs up in their late teens and stays together. There are people who can go for months at a time without meeting anyone new.

Then there are the people who just can't strike up a conversation or pick up on people. I don't say this disparagingly, approaching someone of the opposite sex can be downright terrifying. Hitting on a taken/married person is not only a bit embarrassing but it's a subtle reminder that you are alone and everyone else is taken (at least that's what you tell yourself).

Finally, on the other end of the curve are those folks looking for casual sex. Dating apps like Tinder are fast and easy, they become a buffet table of human beings you can peruse anytime you want. Without laying any judgement on it you have to admit that it is a problem being solved.

Your first point is a very good one. I live in a rural area and while those FarmersOnly.com ads are funny, there's also a lot of truth to them. It would be pretty difficult to meet someone in such an isolated, low density region. I can also see how someone who doesn't understand farmers and their responsibilities would have difficulty getting along with one.

I've been married for many years, but I can easily see myself using Tinder back in my single days. Once you get out of school, meeting people is a lot more difficult.

All online dating does is give you a huge channel to meet new people that you'll know you have some baseline compatibility with. It doesn't replace most aspects of dating, but if are having trouble meeting people you are interested in, online dating is a good way to augment the pool of people you meet in your normal life.

My experience with online dating wasn't that it "solves" dating, nor does it make dating fun all of the sudden, but the people I met via online dating were better matches than the people I was meeting elsewhere. I've had friends who had the opposite experience. I'd say online dating is worth trying if you are single just to see what it is like.

And, in SF at least, there is certainly no stigma associated with it. Most people I know who are actively dating at least casually use one dating site/app.

> some baseline compatibility

ie. willing to and expecting to data

    does dating company/apps actually solve
    any problem that people are having?

Yes. Meeting people you're potentially compatible with. I met my current girlfriend on OKCupid a couple months ago. I'm in my early 30s, never married, and have an increasingly stringent set of requirements for a potential mate[1]. Meeting people I find interesting is challenging.

[1] Half-jokingly, you could summarize this as a rabidly liberal ivy-educated tenure-track professor, as those are the people with whom I've had the most chemistry.

My experience showed that online dating still is a numbers game.

Even with OKCupid. Women get >10 messages a day and men maybe 10 a year if it's a good year.

I think Tinder is the most innovative one in this sector, because it acknowledges the number-game thing and doesn't bother with unneeded fluff.

Tinder brings to the mainstream what the gay population had since 2002 [1].

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20020903191409/http://www.adam4a...

Edit: changed to reflect actual date of a4a going live.

Probably merits a NSFW.

This is exactly it. It's fundamentally a numbers game, and then there's a lot of romanticizing from people who prefer to believe otherwise.

That, and Tinder understands that people prefer being shallow. So it optimizes for that.

Yes.

But I think Tinder could be optimized for real (long-term?) dating.

I mean 90% of the women on Tinder have nice pictures. But My experience has shown that I have a specific taste, that doesn't have much to do with looks. So if I first choose by photo and later by, lets say, character similarities, Tinder is wasting my time.

Something like the matching of OKCupid would be nice. So I don't "like" 90% of the women there just to find out that only 5% of them were what I wanted.

Attempting to do so creates a system that incentivizes dishonesty and spamming. It's what happened to OKCupid.

Plus, as OKCupid demonstrated pretty well, people really choose almost entirely based on photos. Add in decision paralysis and an overwhelming number of choices, and optimizing around anything but incredible shallowness starts to seem silly.

Incidentally, I've tried a series of other dating sites that try to optimize around different things. In general, the userbases are quite small.

Sure, I wouldn't choose people with "bad" photos, but as I said, the amount of women with good photos is much much bigger than the amount of women with a good match.

I've seen all the Tinder-Swipe Apps, because of this. "Just swipe all women in your area right and choose afterwards"

At the end you sit there and have to talk with 20 women just to find out that only 1-2 of them don't think you're a weirdo. :D

That's much better than the alternative scenario. There, you talk to five women just to find out that all of them think you're a creeper weirdo.

They didn't think I was creepy, just weird :( ;)

I didn't have the impression that people I talked to cheated on the OKCupid questions.

But I had the impression that most questions are irrelevant.

Totally agree. What I found to be most effective with OKC was spending the money on A-list status and only messaging women who favorited my profile (or liked, or whatever the terminology is). The response rate I saw was well above 50%.

Spending money on A-list isn't even really necessary -- OKC bumps those who have liked you to the top of your "Quickmatch" queue -- from which you can like them back (or not) and discover if you are a match.

Huh, interesting. Thanks for the info. Hopefully I never need it :)

It seems to be an engagement issue. Populations that don't message or participate or show interest should be encouraged to in some way - like "your profile will only be viewable for x number of days unless you start messaging other people"

Unengaged users are an immensely valuable asset. Show a guy that there are three thousand women in his city, and he'll be very interested. Show him that only three of them have logged in in the past week, and he'll be a lot less interested.

Rabidly liberal = professes to care a lot about the poor and disadvantaged, but finds the prospect of sleeping with one of them unthinkable.

Please don't make acerbic swipes at other users. If there's a general point you want to make about dating and social class, that's easy enough to formulate without being snarky or personal.

I'm not entirely sure what you're trying to say, but it sounds kind of like an unnecessary personal attack.

How is it a personal attack if he likes their 'rabid liberality' (to paraphrase Seinfeld)?

It's not really a personal attack. Many people wish to date only within or above their social class. I'm just questioning whether this attitude is compatible with being "rabidly liberal".

(Unless what you're saying is that while you personally are not rabidly liberal, you want to date someone who is.)

I'm still not clear on what your original reply to me was supposed to mean, except that you seem to be making some unfounded assumptions about someone (or two people) you don't know.

I'm just going with what your post says. Your criteria, even making allowances for half-exaggeration, clearly rule out anyone who is poor or disadvantaged as a potential partner. And although you don't explicitly say that you regard yourself as rabidly liberal, it's reasonable to assume that you do given that you want to date someone who is. (But of course, you may be a conservative who wants to date a liberal, in which case, feel free to correct me.)

> even making allowances for half-exaggeration

You might want to loosen that allowance a little bit. I'm sure they meant "intelligent", not literally a professor.

I was going more with the "Ivy-eaducated" part, but sure, if none of that was meant at all literally, then my point doesn't apply.

Finding dates is a near-universal problem. If you're relying on people you know, you're limited to your social circle - professional contacts (which can be fraught with peril), blind dates set up by friends, blind dates set up by your mother...

The fact that dating apps were one of the first popular uses of the internet for ordinary people (the big players mostly date back to the dotcom era) says a lot about the value proposition. The problem is, it's very hard to increase the value beyond what the current players already offer.

edit: The "blind dates from your mother" strikes home with me. My own kids are 21 now. It's very tempting to set them up! I was really excited when my daughter got her first professional-in-her-field job recently, just on the off chance she'd meet someone who really shares her interests. Sigh.

I've tried various dating apps and websites throughout the years. Result: I haven't even made a friend from any of them. Every experience with one of these apps I had was kind of depressing and humiliating. (I also have a very small potential dating pool anyway, so that certainly doesn't help.)

Here's an idea for a dating app: Successfully identify what people want in a relationship, match based on that. Alice might be looking for a monogamous relationship, Bob might be looking for a one-night stand. The system should not match the two together unless one of them changes their minds.

OKC does just that -- if you take the time to answer the match questions they offer.

For example, regarding a relationship vs. one night stand, there are the questions "About how long do you want your next relationship to last?" and "Say you've started seeing someone you really like. As far as you're concerned, how long will it take before you have sex?". Assuming both parties have answered those questions (and done so honestly) it's pretty easy to get a good idea of what each side's intentions are.

Also, I believe that if you pay for their A-list feature, you can actually filter out profiles based on answers to these questions, rather than needing to compare answers manually.

I answered over 1000 questions honestly on OKC and the matches were all pretty terrible. That could be simply that there is nobody I'm compatible with.

A lot of the questions are pretty terrible, it forces one to cram their opinions into 2/3/4 choices. The moral quandries with "this is wrong / this is right" are the worst

Your described feature sounds like something that isn't too hard to find. In okcupid people can specify a subset of something like friends, long term dating, short term dating, and casual sex, then filter on what others are looking for.

I don't mean what they'll lie and say they want, I mean detect what they actually want. It's not nearly as easy. ;)

Maybe it's just Orlando, but most of the gay folks I've talked to were very NOT monogamous, but many pretended to be for the sake of managing perceptions and increasing their chances of being contacted.

Well, I don't use one personally but if I were dating I'd consider using an app because it does automatically does one big thing for you: lets you know whether someone is actually looking for a relationship.

It's difficult enough to meet people for me, but even after that you have to find out if you're single and if they're looking to date at all.

On the other hand, I also like the idea that relationships should be natural, but I can definitely see the appeal of using a dating app if you have already decided you want to be in a relationship.

> I also like the idea that relationships should be natural

I find this really interesting, as it's a meme that I think most adults still share. I'm interpreting your use of 'natural' as meaning something like 'meeting someone by some degree of chance, in-person, in a scenario where finding a relationship is not, nominally at least, the primary reason for being there.

Looking to meet complete strangers on the internet with the intention of starting a relationship vs looking to meet complete strangers in-person, be that at a bar, work, night-class, sporting activity etc, with the same intention is fundamentally the same concept. Only the implementation details differ.

But there's a big, obvious, cultural difference. I wonder if that difference stems from the fact that one cannot mask one's ultimate intention when going the online route. In the in-person scenario, you always have the convenient social get-out that you were just there to enjoy whatever the activity is, and it's just a happy coincidence that you happened to meet someone whilst doing it. It's coy, relies on chance, and fits in with a traditionally romantic narrative.

With online dating, you admit straight up that your sole intention is to meet people and find a relationship - it's therefore explicitly implied that there's a degree of trial and error, and from the outset it's acknowledged that it's a numbers game with certain attributes - shared traits, hobbies, interests - feeding into a formula that defines whether or not we think a relationship is worth pursuing. I think it's simply this directness, and this exposure, that's seen as course and not fitting with our social/cultural model of how romance 'should work'.

I wonder if it'll always be this way? I'd propose that in the future it will be to some degree, but we'll just be somewhere else on the curve. Perhaps with tomorrow's dating services, we'll look back on today's online dating apps and view them as quite lo-fi and quaint - with their low-accuracy matching algorithms leaving so much to chance, making you do so much of the work, etc - i.e. just how we compare online dating vs meeting people in bars, today.

I guess we'll see how that concept of a 'naturally occurring relationship' evolves over time as societies and cultures shift.

While I see what you are saying and find it interesting, I find the idea of going anywhere with the sole intention of meeting strangers for romance to be very unnatural as well.

My reasoning has little to do with romance and more to do with practicality. To me, people end up in good relationships because they can't imagine themselves without that person. On the other hand, people who are only looking to cure their loneliness usually end up with poor relationships.

I speculate this is because people who are lonely are more likely to "settle" whereas people who aren't looking but happen to find someone can always just leave the relationship with little difficulty and so if the relationship lasts it's due to compatibility.

I hope that didn't offend anyone, I have no issue with people going to bars or whatever to meet other people. This is just the way I like to live my life.

So don't settle. Just because you're using online dating to find a partner doesn't mean you have to take the next remotely viable candidate that comes along.

Personally, I find the lack of ambiguity about intentions to be a plus to meeting people through dating sites.

"So don't settle."

That's much easier said than done. Maybe it's easy for you, but from most of the people I've seen, including myself, when you have emotional involvement with something it's difficult not to be biased. It's easy to make excuses and convince yourself that you are doing the right thing. I think it was Stephen King who said it best, "We lie best when we lie to ourselves"

Maybe I'm just being stupid right now and misinterpreting something you said, but how is that different from in "natural dating"?

I'd actually say that you're way more likely to settle too early for someone you met "naturally" in real life than someone you matched with online or met due to dating purposefully. By purposefully dating you'll meet and "discover" many different people too find the one you're super-compatible with, by waiting to meet someone naturally you're more likely to settle with the first one that you "click" with.

Hey you are definitely not being stupid; it's my fault for not being more clear.

Indeed this is also possible with "natural dating", if we consider natural dating to be the equivalent of online dating. I was trying to say that I'm against the idea of people thinking "I feel like I need to be in a relationship so I'm going to attempt to find someone to fulfill that need."

I think I am just against the idea that everyone needs to find someone or get married. From my experience, when two people who were not even thinking about relationships decide their lives are just much better if they are partners, they have a much higher chance of a lasting relationship or marriage.

Of course, I am fortunate because I am still young, and for people who are sure they want to start a family and are older, I can see why they would feel pressured to find someone, and all the power to them.

Hopefully that made sense. I actually agree that if someone were looking for a relationship, doing it online is much more efficient, especially with all the sites that use some scientific means of pairing people.

My takeaway from this article is that Ashley Madison is a great investment. No churn, comprehensible to investor class, generally high disposable income customers. Hmm.

There's talk of an Ashley Madison IPO in the near future:

http://www.bbc.com/news/business-32746405

Unfortunately there's some morality clauses in many investment funds that keep them from investing in something like that. Same class as porn, gambling, etc. Might be great for an individual investor though.

Dating belongs to a category of industries that also includes jobsearch/careers, education, fitness, and socializing. The characteristics of these industries are:

1. They are broad, holistic consumer problems where a success metric might be clearly defined (find a spouse, get a job, earn a degree), but the steps to get there aren't.

2. There is a social status component: people (rightly or wrongly) make status judgments about your life outcomes.

3. Success means you don't need a product.

There's a big mistake that many rookie founders make with these industries (and I'm speaking from bitter experience founding a career-guidance startup): You can solve people's problems, but you can't rob people of their problems.

I met my fiancee on OKCupid. I met her on OKCupid. But I did the hard work of living an interesting life and adjusting my expectations to reality on my own. We did the hard work of earning each others' trust and respect, building a relationship, and overcoming our differences together. We deleted our OKCupid accounts about a month after meeting.

Similarly, someone who gets a job through LinkedIn gets the job themselves, LinkedIn doesn't get the job for them. They have to do the hard work of building the skills and meeting the qualifications themselves. They need to build their network themselves. They impress the hiring manager and interviewers themselves. LinkedIn is a tool for managing this, but it is not and cannot be the reason for their success.

A lot of founders look at hard problems like dating or unemployment thinking "This sucks. It shouldn't suck. I'm not going to rest until everyone has the perfect spouse, perfect job, perfect skills, etc." They don't realize that this is not a problem they can fix. If they could fix it, it would rob their customers of their humanity, of a lot of what makes them real. The reason we choose people as employees, as spouses, and as friends is because of things they do and challenges they overcome, not because of products they use.

Successful companies in these spaces realize this and focus on one individual sub-problem they can solve to make people's lives easier. Tinder won't get you into a relationship, but it shows you people of your preferred sex. Indeed also shows you options, but getting the job is your responsibility. Google has done wonderful things for self-education by making the whole web available with a few keywords. LinkedIn and Facebook started out as great rolodexes, but then (IMHO) have been steadily ruining their products by trying to creep into more and more of my life.

> you can't rob people of their problems

This is a remarkably insightful phrase (I'll be stealing it for my own use ;-) and I thoroughly enjoyed reading your comment.

I think its core message goes way beyond the dating domain and even the wider domain of similar services you describe - it's actually a great perspective on the general startup scene and speaks to a very deep philosophical question - at what point is solving what we may naively define as 'problems' actually to the detriment of people's ultimate quality of life? In fewer words: if everything's easy, what's the point?

I won't attempt to discuss that here, because I'd need to think a lot about it before I do :-) But thanks for the comment and giving me a new perspective to think about.

True, there is currently no app or web service that can do all the work of getting you a job, or getting you a girlfriend, or whatever, from start to finish, but that doesn't mean it's impossible. It only means that particular app doesn't exist yet. Whoever cracks a nut like that can name their own price.

What would it mean if such an app existed? Would you be employing the app? Dating the app? Where's the person when the machine does all the work?

(This assumes that we don't have a dystopian future like in Terminator or The Matrix where the machines take over, which is not a given. But then, if we did, whoever wrote that app would likely be too busy saving the world from their creation to name their own price.)

> It’s super hard to get a dating product funded by mainstream Silicon Valley investors

Huh? I've seen quite the opposite. Anecdote: The League [0]. $2mil in funding without the existence of a product or a team (when it was funded). There's some very mainstream investors on that list too.

Investors who don't invest in dating apps don't do it because they know the problem never gets fixed. Investors who do invest in them, know they can sell to IAC. As I've heard from a prominent VC who is friendly with the Match.com board (paraphrased) "The whole dating app market knows that at scale finding someone on a dating app is statistically no different than finding one at a bar. We simply making going to the bar easier".

[0] - https://angel.co/the-league-date-intelligently

that's one data point. Not saying it never happens, and in fact, Dating Ring raised $500k or so. But here's a lot more commentary on the topic: https://www.cbinsights.com/blog/dating-startup-venture-capit...

So Shasta, IDG, Cowboy, XSeed, Khosla, Lowercase, etc are not mainstream?

Here's some more data points. According to AngelList

https://angel.co/online-dating ~38,000 investors

https://angel.co/cryptocurrency-2 ~989 investors

https://angel.co/travel-tourism ~1,082 investors

Yet the market for Travel is $300b (online) and the dating one is $2b (online).

How does that constitute as investors not wanting to invest into dating startups when there's 38x as many investors (by absolute numbers) as travel and yet the market is 150th the size? Seems like it's quite the opposite, no?

If anything the talking point here should be "why are so many people investing in dating apps when their returns aren't great?"

It'd be also helpful to define what you consider "mainstream" before drawing a conclusion...

You're being pedantic. I'm not saying that literally no dating products are getting funded - in fact, I'm an advisor to CoffeeMeetsBagel which is on that list. Just that there's major resistance (which that article talks about) and there isn't very much funding for the category compared to a "hot" category like SaaS/on-demand/messaging, etc. My point is that it's an uphill battle, and I gave the reasons why for investors are skeptical.

Travel is a misleading outlier as it has historically terrible margins and a large portion of the market volume is in airlines which historically generally lose money. On the other hand the market cap from online dating is pretty much entirely captured in online dating and isn't dominated by companies that own airplanes or hotels. "Revenue" that includes directly passed on fees is highly misleading as an indicator of relative market size. I'd rather own a company that made 1/4 as much than a company that passed 90% of revenue to other companies.

Expedia's 1.1B EBITDA alone last year [0] was nearly half of all of the revenues for online dating services...

[0] - http://www.wikinvest.com/stock/Expedia_%28EXPE%29/Data/EBITD...

Not saying I disagree but travel is the poster child of structurally disadvantaged startup ideas:

Travel planning software: The most common bad startup idea

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8419658

So maybe it is not surprising to find few investors in it?

For the record, I'd heard of none of those companies, and I've been around HN a while.

He botches the math. 20% monthly churn means you have to replace your customer base 2.4 times over a year, not 8 times. But the conclusion is the same: CAC > LTV.

I assume his formula (1+monthly_churn)^12 – 1 was based on a misremembering or misunderstanding of annual churn = 1 - (1-monthly_churn)^12.

OP here. You're right, I'll update for math.

The criticisms made against dating startups could be levied for many other market segments as well. I imagine that if investors are shying away from dating startups, it's for no other reason than Dating Startups are no longer in vogue (because dating is complex), and the heard tends to stick together. Dating is a common problem, and investors have gotten "dating app" fatigue.

Here are some counter points.

> I’ve heard [Churn] numbers as high as 20-30% monthly

Making an argument based on hear-say.

> Dating is niche and has a shelf-life

So is the market segment for weddings, and newborns. Underserved niche markets are ripe for "disruption" which follows with it--investment.

> Dating products have historically depended on paid acquisition channels to build their customer base,

Source?

> City-by-city expansion sucks

It's an extra challenge, but ubers, and airbnb's and many other marketplace as a service have figured it out.

> Demographic mismatch with older, married investors

While there are investors whose methodology precludes them from investing in markets that have not bearing on them, it's probably safe to assume at one point in their life, they had to date.

A more obvious reason that dating sites don't get funded is that they're uniformly terrible. No one understands dating well enough to create a service that works reliably, and according to Pew Research fewer than 1 in 4 online daters actually find a long-term relationship online. So the sites become an exercise in hand-waving, and I can understand why investors are reluctant to invest in what boils down to pure marketing, the service equivalent of a Pet Rock.

Curious to point out that Tinder & clones found a solution to the dating churn problem:

- Don't target people for whom success in the app will make them want to churn = people looking for a public committed relationship.

- Target people for whom success will make them want to use the app more = people looking for secret private hookups!

The churn argument overlooks the fact that there's a lot of repeat business. I know plenty of people who have been using one or more of these services literally for years. IAC seems to have figured out something the other investors have not, which is how to capture that segment of the market and keep them coming back. It seems to have something in common with slot machines and other casino and freemium games: you have to give people enough wins to keep them playing but not enough that they actually get what they want.

Really interesting analysis. I always wondered if the general quality of online relationships is less than those formed elsewhere. I mean, if you found your partner on a dating site I wonder if you are more likely to break up because you know there is a whole pool of singles just waiting to message. If you don't have a buffet of potential partners to choose from you may be happier?? I am reminded of Dan Gilbert's research - seems it may apply.

I know that online dating was a horrible experience for me. I felt I was becoming way too picky and judgemental trying to pick people to go on dates with. I also knew I couldn't judge chemistry and compatibility through someone's profile so the whole thing was pretty frustrating. I ended up meeting the person I married totally randomly one day when I wasn't looking.

Obviously I am not saying all relationships that were formed online are terrible or anything - I'm talking generally.

Are you a man or a woman?

This is a great analysis although the Silicon Valley jargon is heavy at times. Even as a fairly-regular HN reader, I didn't recognize some of these, like IAC and ARPU, and they aren't defined or linked in the piece.

ARPU is "average revenue per user", but I can't for the life of me figure out IAC. Maybe someone else can help???

IAC has basically stopped treating its name as an acronym and now just calls itself IAC, but it originally stood for InterActiveCorp.

IAC is a company who owns a lot of dating sites. Source: the article.

Thanks so much! I have absolutely no idea how I missed that...:)

IAC Interactive which is the parent company of most large online US dating sites (among other online properties).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IAC_%28company%29

Pretty sure IAC is the massive holding company (iac.com) that owns multiple dating sites, and not a business acronym. Weirdly, a quick perusal of their site doesn't indicate what it stands for.

IAC is a company: http://iac.com/

IAC is the name of a company. ARPU = Average Revenue Per User

google is your friend.

Dating apps should have a bright future here in the US thanks to the sterilization of the American work force. We have women like Ellen Pao to thank for that. Men are rightfully too afraid of the legal consequences of hitting on female co-workers with HR policies like "no unwanted sexual advances." How do you know an advance is unwanted until you try?

Too bad this write up showed up after this episode: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9523431

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8456100

I offered similar thoughts when Dating Ring first launched:

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.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBYhVcO4WgI

None of this means that the founder hasn't experienced sexism, but she seems far too eager to ignore the inconvenient fact that some early traction and an impressive team don't necessarily mean you have an investable business.

i think part of the problem is the bad taste anyone would have in their mouth after using any of the obviously fake dating sites that have existed to date. as the majority of dating sites are littered with vast amounts of fake or ancient profiles, after a person has been through a few, they usually write them all off as fake or poor quality. its just an industry, much like adult, that collectively has not done itself many favors in the eyes of the general public and past customers.

the other issue with growing a date network is the fact that it is a hyper local focused market, so unless you have a good regional marketing and roll out plan, traction will be hard to gain.

these two problems coupled make it a pretty tough nut to crack. reeducating, recreating trust and moving market by market is going to a cost a bit. the good news is, members tend to stay around a while, in fact often times for a few months after they have found a new person to date. If you want MRR, dating is even better then porn.

one thing that was good for the market was the disappearance of myspace and aol, both of which allowed for searching via zip, dating status and age... making them free places to find possible dates.

source: used to work in the web based dating industry.

Isn't considering churning in dating bad kind of like saying that a supermarket or restaurant shouldn't give much food to their customers otherwise they'll be sated and won't eat anymore?

It seems to me that it's the opposite, mating for humans is such a basic instinct that there will never be a shortage in the market, considering also that new humans that want to date pop up at a pretty much constant rate.

The problem is not at all like restaurants. If a restaurant gives someone good food, they'll stop eating and buying today, but will probably be back tomorrow or later in the week.

With a dating site, if you're successful, you probably won't be seeing that customer again for at least several months, possibly forever. Sure, new people are entering the dating pool all the time, but the marketing effort required to constantly replenish your userbase at those levels of churn is incredible.

I wonder if there's a market for angel investing (w/o followon) in dating startups SPECIFICALLY to become friends/familiar with great early-in-career founders, to try to invest in their second, presumably non-dating startup.

i.e. throw down $25k on whatever valuation purely to build a relationship with 10 teams/year, with the hope one might survive as a business, and one or two might be stellar teams who fail for reasons specific to dating, but will come to you first when they do their next startup. $250k/yr isn't that expensive, and you could pre-screen by just investing in 100% of the YC dating-or-adjacent companies.

Extra points for going out of your way to be helpful vs. maximizing your return, and being super helpful during inevitable wind-down.

While these are all reasonable and valid points it's missing a key one: margin.

If you look at successful SaaS businesses users who pay <$50/month are pretty much always loss leaders. Almost all the money in SaaS is in enterprise and large customers.

It's very hard to make subscription work for consumer SaaS businesses simply because the margin between CAC and LTV is so small. Gaming (ala World of Warcraft) has shifted away from subs to IAP because it's easier to lower CAC through making a product freemium than to increase LTV.

Commercially successful dating sites have become so through increasing LTV by locking customers into long term contract and reducing CAC via shady tactics to increase conversion. Neither of which many investors want to be associated with.

I actually specifically talk about CAC and LTV and why enterprise/SaaS can drive higher revenues over time. There's a whole section for it.

Dating has always been a game of breadth first search and sampling with rapid feedback. The "promenade" (a town or two would meet up, single boys circled clockwise around a circle of anti-clockwise girls) was commonplace in eighteenth and nineteenth century Europe.

In the end though, most business and consumer interactions at least begin with something very similar to dating. So solutions found in "proper" dating sites ought to be translatable to sales and marketing apps

Even advertising is a weird form of one sided dating, with the most promiscuous and least picky self selecting for paid exposure to man y many potential new partners.

I doubt that. As soon as your product has momentum investors will shit you with money. The problem is the hen egg problem. Same with ebay clones.

You don't have users and new users are turned off by the fact that you don't have users.

Uber is dating for drivers and riders.

AirBNB is dating for owners and renters.

Facebook is dating for content and readers.

Amazon is dating for supply chains and consumers.

Tinder is for hookups.

Dating is a massive business. A major part of our economy thrives around dating. People who don't believe you can charge for it are not creative. It's true that we don't like to pay for membership, but the service can charge for activity tickets such as events, movies, dinners etc.

I wrote about this last month.. with dating sites, losing is losing while winning is losing bigger:

http://caseysoftware.com/blog/working-for-a-dating-website

Outside of deliberately "tainting" matches, I don't really see a big problem with what you said on your blog.

Back when I was in the dating pool, it would have been nice to get matches on all checkboxes, but life doesn't really work like that. Nobody's perfect and if you go onto a site expecting a perfect match (yeah, I'm sure many, many do so!), you're going to be sorely disappointed.

e.g., I hate cigarettes, but I married a smoker. In this case love made me see past something that would have been a dealbreaker. I'm an atheist, but I've dated religious people.

But to the point about losing customers, that's an interesting one. One the one hand, the successful matches will probably send business your way, but will they make up for the ones you lose due to "success?" I don't have data, but my gut tells me that even with great matching software, it will take people so long to meet someone who causes them to stop using the site, that you're better off giving them great matches to keep them coming back until that happens.

To me the main points seem to come down to market size. My impression is that the points made are valid, but that the market is still big and unsaturated enough for there to be a ton of opportunity.

Funny thing is that dating as a primary use case led to the creation of social networks in the first place: Friendster -> Facebook (poking, checking out classmates) -> $223 billion market cap.

I don't get the 'shelf life' argument. Most people are constantly on dating sites to keep meeting other people (maybe under fake names if they are already married).

Your experience doesn't line up with my own. The majority of my friends who use dating websites and start a relationship stop using the dating sites early in the relationship.

That must be another plus of living in an atheist post-Soviet world :)

> Most investors who can write checks (as opposed to associates) are older, married, and kids.

Amusing word omission.

But dating services can go viral. Network effect.

And what are the odds of that, in a field already saturated with both successful, established competitors (OKCupid, Tinder, EHarmony, etc) and a thousand other would-be viral newcomers?

And even if you could overcome the competition, you still have all the other problems Andrew Chen wrote about... how do you make money? How do you grow without spending a fortune? How do you exit?

Keep in mind that Tinder is only 2.5 years old and entered what was already a crowded market.

But they had a new take on mobile dating and managed to find room in the market.

There's always room for one more!

Once thought about doing a match making business:

(1) There are lots of singles, and the number is not going down. Sure, each year some get married, but others come of age.

(2) Potentially there is a lot of money in the match making business at least in the sense that most young people, especially the women, are highly motivated to get a match.

Let's support this claim: The women are motivated by ballpark $10,000 to $60,000 a year and are spending that now. How? Sure: College.

It's still the case (blame Mother Nature) that heavily women go to college to get their Mrs. degree and otherwise their teaching certificate or RN. Feminists, aside, that situation won't change soon. Maybe some people like this situation and maybe some don't, but, still, blame Mother Nature.

But college is a poor place for young women to get their Mrs. degree: Why? The male students are nearly all too young, too poor, and unemployed.

Other main competition: Bars. Bummer. What Mr. Right wants to meet his Angel in, what, what the heck, a, what, a bar!

Look, guys, neither the bars nor the colleges are on the way out of the match making business from customers getting married. So, why conclude so soon that a match making service has to be on the way out of business from losing customers from making matches?

Match making better than college and bars: The woman can be pretty and the man, older, ready to be good as a husband and father, that is, someone the woman will have a super tough time meeting otherwise. This is a very old story, not going away soon.

I remember: In college, the girls wanted nothing to do with me. But nine years later I drove my new, high end Camaro back to my college to look up some stuff in their library, and walking from my car to the library, for the first time, from 60 feet away, I got a really good look from an undergrad woman. That's the truth, guys: The car and my age, and that was enough -- I passed the first two filter questions on her list for Mr. Right. Blame Mother Nature.

Fathers? They would be better off saving on college tuition and getting some really good match making for their daughters.

Big, untapped, totally natural market, very poorly served otherwise: Start with the women younger. Example: Lady Di. When she was 15, she decided that she would marry Prince Charles. About five years later, she did. Mother Nature says: Girls 12+ are thinking about husbands. So, by age 15-16 they might be ready for a Sunday dinner at home with a candidate Mr. Right, late model car paid for, house bought, cash in the bank, good job. Then 2-4 years later, she gets married.

In human history, this is not nearly a new idea, but a good match making service -- and it would have to be really good -- can be one of the best ways to make this work for the girls/women, their fathers, and the men.

(3) How to get new singles to replace the ones that get married? Sure: Go to singles groups; the standard is church youth groups. Churches are smart enough to invest in the future -- have married members who make more members.

Another way? Sure, hold singles parties, eventually invitation only. So, meet "the best people". So, much cheaper than a high end country club or yacht club but with potentially even better results.

(4) Barrier to entry. Sure, match making is necessarily nearly a local business. So there is a geographical barrier to entry. So, get the best collection of singles in one area and have close to a natural monopoly.

Of course, the software doesn't have to be local.

I don't care how good your article is, if you pop up a subscribe box over the content I'm not going to read it.

http://tabcloseddidntread.com/

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