daniel splittgerber (.com)

It’s neither the chicken, nor the egg – Thoughts on disrupting online dating business models

10 June 2009 with View Comments

Online dating still sucks.

Several years ago the user experience was horrible. Nowadays, it’s still very bad – despite dozens of millions going into commercials, development and even new startups! Soon it may be a $ 1 billion market (= it’s a huge market). And what is the user experience like?

Are users still required to ‘enter’ their personality into predefined categories? Do you still have to describe what you’re looking for in 100 words? Entering your data into yet another site (probably with limited exposure to your target audience) in order to gain entrance to yet another walled online garden? This just doesn’t seem right.

I thought dating in itself was difficult enough already, why must it be even harder online? Wasn’t technology supposed to make life easier?

Well, online dating could be so easy, if it weren’t for what Paul Graham called the ‘chicken and the egg problem‘ – no one wants to use a dating site with only 20 users. So sites have to spend heavily on advertising to achieve critical mass so that users think their site is worthwhile. They have to invent yet another supposedly scientific method on how to match people – do people want to feel like they and their quirkiness can be ‘matched’ by a computer?

In order to disrupt online dating, you have to get around the chicken and the egg problem.

To do that, let’s look at how dating works in the real world.

How it certainly doesn’t work is by going into a predefined building – sometimes even with an access fee - and only finding potential partners in there. Instead, it mostly works by living your life, going about your work and your hobbies and falling in love with 2nd degree acquaintances on parties, with friends of co-workers at social gatherings etc. The largest percentage of people (I know there are studies on that as I read one some months ago, I just couldn’t find any links – please email me if you can!) get to know their partner via their circle of acquaintances. They meet friends of their friends on parties, they get to know their sport mates – what have you – and then they find out that they have things in common, talk about stuff, and may start dating.

People are most likely to fall in love with someone they could have known before because he or she was ‘close’ to them or their circle of friends, but just didn’t know yet. Technology has to replace those real life chance encounters. This feature is what you can monetize.

What online dating sites do is try to simulate meeting random people who have things in common with you. But what they currently do not do is to take advantage of your already existing social network.

Nearly everyone nowadays already has an online profile within a social networking site where they share a lot of personal stuff with the world – where they went on holiday, which sports they like etc. Which is just what you need in order to find things two people have in common. A disruptive dating site has to take advantage of that!

Here’s how to do it in theory:

You enter your facebook (any huge social network should do; it’s easily scalable and works in any nation) name and password into a form and you let the dating site collect your profile data.
You select which of your already existing facebook profile data should be used to find similarities with other people. Hobbies and city may be suitable, your company name may not be.
The dating site then selectively grabs specified profile data from your friends and their friends from facebook and cross-checks them with the data you specified as important to you.
It provides you with a list of people you don’t already know (as indicated by friendship status – for 2nd degree acquaintances – or amount of contact – for 1st degree acquaintances), but should know (as you are ‘made for each other’) based on things you have in common.
You select the person you have taken an interest in and contact them – and immediately have something to talk about and you have built-in social proof (as you have common acquaintances or knew each other before but just didn’t realize they had similar hobbies etc.; so don’t come across as desperate)

Of course, there are several obstacles. Many of which have to do with social networks having to allow data grabbing (and legal hurdles). Well, why should facebook allow that in principle? Because this will provide them with additional revenue as a percentage of the revenue of the dating site is shared with the data providers.

How can you avoid the pitfalls of having to talk social networks into sharing their data? By making online dating an extension of facebook or any other social network.

Social networks are desperately trying to find ways to make money. Online dating may be it. Because:

Online dating is an extension of your already existing online social activities – just like it is in real life! The first dating site who truly abides by that principle or the first social network who truly integrates dating into its site will in my view disrupt the market.

Disclaimer: This is a conceptual idea. It may be ahead of its time as it may not yet be or might never be technically feasible – I wouldn’t know for sure, as I am not a programmer. It may be totally off. But feel free to steal the idea anyway and be successful with it. Also feel free to contact me and work on it with me. I would love some feedback on this!

jeannieheroux

I think classmates.com sort of grabbed that idea but I don't think they do it; I think they connect with yahoo personals or something - classmates is a perfect venue tho
Yumbunny.com

This whole blog was really encouraging to us because it is pretty much exactly what we're doing. I wrote a blog responding to this and laying down how we're doing it step-by-step:
http://blog.yumbunny.com/2009/06/how-yumbunny-gets-around-chicken-egg.html

We also avoid some other pitfalls other sites get into (like making people sign up for things, install apps, etc) so I hope you'll take a look at the blog if nothing else.
Daniel Splittgerber

Quite an interesting concept and you certainly nail one possibility of doing
the matchmaking angle. Great to see!
Your sign-up process may impede faster user growth though - why not use
Facebook connect or some similar service in order to speed up the sign-up
process (which is an undervalued hurdle and has a silent evidence-problem:
you never hear from users who would otherwise complain about your lenghty
sign-up process, as they just leave)?
Yumbunny.com

We're working on it! =) We've already started experimenting with Facebook Connect and want to get it online soon so people can use that instead of having to sign up with us. That's one of the very next things we'll be pushing out because you're right that making the sign-up process as simple (and painless) as possible is essential- the last thing people want is yet another login.
Steve Quezadas

Yeah, funny, I was thinking of a similar principle. However, mine is slightly different. You match people using collaborative filtering techniques based on your social network profile (bayesian filtering, for example. . .). Then you via gps on your cell phone. IE, if two likely matches happen to be geographically close to each other, the cell phone tells both of you "hey, you guys would be a good match . . . would you like to hook up at a nearby coffee place?". If both say yes, the cell phone will allow you to meet at a local coffee place (or whatever).

The point is is to have a weird excuse to interact briefly. Just by a brief encounter one can know if that person is his/her type.
Yumbunny.com

Personally, I wouldn't meet someone like that. As a woman, even in a public place, I would be very leery and feel extremely uncomfortable. I think most women like to do a little research on the guy first. But this may be a very popular application within certain focus groups (like gay males, for instance, who may not feel as vulnerable).
Daniel Splittgerber

This is a great idea - do you believe it is technically feasible within the
next two years or does it require more of an local aware smartphone
adoption? There may also be another element at work. People may like to be
disrupted by people making dating advances to them online or when browsing
online social networks. It might take a while for people to get acquainted
with location-based smartphone services on the one hand and constantly being
targeted by a dating app while on the run, at work, with friends etc.What do
you think about that?
Guest

try heyhello.com (or apps.facebook.com/heyhello)
Kevin (@astartupaday)

Good idea, this is definitely the problem that needs to be solved. One addition to this idea is to use the "matchmaker" concept. Instead of targeting people who are looking for dates, instead target their friends. For example, if Alice is single, target Alice's friend, Betty. Betty thinks that her friend Charlie is a good match for Alice, so Betty makes the connection between them. With this approach, you don't need to build a big, existing pool of potential mates to wade through, you are stitching together the existing little pools of potential mates that naturally exist in any social graph.

I actually have some ideas on how something like this could potentially be very profitable once Facebook rolls out its virtual currency / dev payment platform, feel free to shoot me a mail if you want more details.
B.Vandgrift

no need to steal the idea, we're already running that app. flowmingle.com integrated facebook connect several months ago, for a lot of these reasons. there are other big problems with online dating. the toothbrush dilemma, the lack of any kind of introduction process, sites overrun with bots, and a general failure to provide a method to get to know another person. we think we've largely solved these problems.

the reason we went with a cocktail-party like process is that small groups foster conversation, especially when the topics are guided. introduce 20 people. throw out a few topics for conversation, and let people express their opinions, ideas, dreams, etc. let them interact in an environment that's easy and fun to use, and where they don't have to worry about the traditional dating pitfalls, or barriers to communication. we WANT you to exchange email addresses, phone numbers, and IM information, for instance.

i invite you to take a look and see what our potential is for disrupting the modern online dating market. i think it's solid.
delano

There are other ways to identify connections between people. You could analyze their software / internet usage to build a profile of interests for example.

Wakoopa (http://wakoopa.com/) puts this to use for suggesting software, tools, and games that you may have not otherwise heard about. I imagine it would also be possible to (but likely very difficult) to match people based on similar and complimentary interests.
Daniel Splittgerber

I agree, it would probably be difficult but a possible path. It may be
difficult though to get people to accept some kind of data gathering about
their behavior? Although, just as with bonus miles, you may be able to offer
them something in exchange for their data: suggesting people who share their
interests.
The main difficulty
probably lies with the step of installing some kind of software for
data gathering. It provides
a hurdle you need people to overcome.. Do you see a solution to that?
Barrett

Have you seen Zoosk? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoosk gives some information but there are already cross social networking dating applications that can give the main Zoosk site the 20 million member number

on a side note, to respond to your last paragraph, to me online dating is a way for my members to break out of their circle of friends that might connect them with dates currently. the idea is that your circle might not be the place where you will find that special person
Daniel Splittgerber

Thanks for pointing out Zoosk! Would have been surprised to see that someone
hadn't already thought of my idea. Will check that out.
And your second point is absolutely valid. I think there are several niche
markets left in online dating, where one definitely is finding people out of
your current circle or within a specially defined niche. Whether it is a
niche or whether the mass market wants such a breaking out of current
circles is a good question!

It’s neither the chicken, nor the egg – Thoughts on disrupting online dating business models