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A dating site is only worthwhile if other people are on it. Obviously it's possible, but you need people on it to attract more people.

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Apparently dating websites are notorious for having high churn. See: http://andrewchen.co/why-investors-dont-fund-dating/

Doesn't matter. No matter what your churn is, if you currently have a thousand times more members then your competitors it will be drastically easier to attract new members. In other words, your competitors have a much higher customer acquisition cost. It's still a big barrier.

Well, the whole point of most dating websites ('finding life partner' ones) is to have high churn.

The churn is so high on dating sites that everybody is constantly re-acquiring customers. One test for anti-trust is also how they think the market would respond to a price increase.

Yes, you need a critical mass of people, but what this means can be very different for different people. Some dating sites have a warm body approach where you probably need lots of people because the set of matches is terrible.

However if you had a dating site for swedish people living in miami who only wanted to date swedish people even having 40 people on there might be plenty.

What's funny, is I think there's a company that does a lot of those hyper-local sites... iirc,roadside guerrilla marketing was involved.

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