Please tell your employees to stop creating fake profiles on OkCupid and spamming our users. Behaving like that doesn't inspire much confidence in your service.
From the same outfit that brought you that weird crowdfunding campaign to send women from New York over to woman-starved Silicon Valley: https://www.tilt.com/campaigns/working-on-it
I actually think this is an interesting example of YC's investments, but not for the reason you seem to suggest.
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.
Nothing about that campaign itself was sexist. But mix women and dating, and you get a ton of outcry from the media that the women are prostitutes. As a feminist company, that wasn't fun for us to be associated with, but there was little we could do about that. The trip was mostly a joke, and also because we honestly thought a few people may end up having a good time. And one woman ended up falling in love and is now moving to SF.
So, I'd hold off on insulting YC based on some publicity we've received. And .. all press is good press for growth for an early stage startup.
Given that 'feminist' and 'feminism' are used by many people to mean many different things, it would be nice to specify what being a feminist company means.
Is it just a company run by people who self-identify as feminists, maybe one that only hires other people who self-identify as feminists? If so, how do you enforce this? Or is the company's feminism defined by specific policies that are based in a specific meaning of 'feminism', and if so, what are they?
I feel you are being disingenuous in your disagreement - that you're deliberately trying to be combative as opposed to engaging in honest discussion.
Clearly, goals can belong in several umbrella categories at the same time. Most people would agree that "not harassing women" falls under "not being a bad person." But, at the same time, it is also a major goal of most feminists.
> Given that 'feminist' and 'feminism' are used by many people to mean many different things, it would be nice to specify what being a feminist company means.
feminism = social political and economical equality between women and men. A company culture with feminist values means equal maternity and paternity policies, thoughtful consideration for hiring 50/50 men and women, providing health care that covers birth control, etc. Just thinking about equality in every business decision.
> As a feminist company, that wasn't fun for us to be associated with, but there was little we could do about that.
I don't see how your company could describe itself and feminist while also making a campaign that relies on some of the structural sexism of the Valley and tech. How did that campaign challenge the existing power structures and stereotypes/mythology of tech?
So what was the goal then? It seemed like a legit campaign that was raising actual money. How does one reconcile their company as feminist with how that campaigned operated?
The goal was free marketing via the press who zeroed in on what appeared to be an ongoing SV story - Bubble 2.0 + gender imbalance + hapless engineer stereotypes.
And by any measure, it was outrageously successful.
> How does one reconcile their company as feminist with how that campaigned operated?
By accepting those women as adults who are free and intelligent enough to make decisions that may not necessarily line up with the common branch of feminism popularized by the media.
You don't have to spend every waking moment of your life, nor every resource or effort of an organization you belong to, to prove that you're worthy of associating with an ideal like feminism. If they identify with the feminist cause and support it, they don't need to prove it to you or justify how their campaign is or isn't feminist. It wasn't intended to be a feminist campaign, and it doesn't invalidate the rest of who they are or what they identify with.
I'm not saying that they have to constantly spend time justifying themselves, but it is important to look critically at the work a company does when it claims to be feminist. In regards to the tilt campaign, I don't see how that campaign challenges the status quo and pushes for women's rights. I do see how it could be viewed as promoting or exploiting the mythology of male culture the Valley to raise money, which to some may be anti-feminist in nature.
> If they identify with the feminist cause and support it, they don't need to prove it to you or justify how their campaign is or isn't feminist.
We've seen that many times organizations that claim feminism or feminist principles often don't act in a way that is supporting of women, so being critical is fully warranted when an organization says one thing but does something that seems to do nothing but perpetuate existing stereotypes and problems. Moreover, they made the claim, not me, so asking "why is what you are doing feminist" is important.
> I do see how it could be viewed as promoting or exploiting the mythology of male culture the Valley to raise money, which to some may be anti-feminist in nature.
Is it a mythology if it is based on hard facts? I.e. this sounds a bit like saying that heat engine works on mythology of lower energy levels in a heat sink. Also note that just like heat engine equalizes energy levels between source and sink, such campaing seeks to equalize gender inbalance. Which I guess is as feminist as you can get.
I think it is actually beneficial for a person or an organization working toward women's right to disassociate themselves from the feminism movements and related labels lest they actually do end up spending all their time constantly justifying themselves.
You can't compare a physical phenomenon to a social one, especially when the existence and magnitude of the latter is heavily contested by people with agendas that rely on the phenomenon's existence and magnitude.
Just like the utility of heat engines is heavily contested by us making sure heat sink never averages with the heat source. That's why you have a radiator in your car.
My point is, that a) that campaign didn't foster a myth, it used a real, existing potential gradient and b) it is very much pro-feminist as long as they're letting things equalize and not actively trying to maintain that gender gradient.
ETA: of course I can compare a physical phenomenon to a social one, mathematical models don't differentiate between those. Still, I chose that example only to highlight that calling facts a "mythology" is weird.
Do a version replacing "growth hacking" with "spamming" and "marketing" with "lying", and I'll very happily install it (and wire you two beers worth of money, if you have a donate button or sth.).
For every company that successfully uses gray and black hat techniques to spur growth there are literally hundreds that don't achieve the desired result.
YC companies that think they're being clever and are more likely to employ these techniques successfully "Because AirBnB" shouldn't be disappointed when they fail.
> For every company that successfully uses gray and black hat techniques to spur growth there are literally hundreds that don't achieve the desired result.
Exactly. But every such campaign contributes to the erosion of trust on the Internet and generally makes the world suck more.
Sorry. My comment was not positive. I love YC and what they are doing. But the fact that they are turning a blind eye to these kind of practices has been a sore point for me. First AirBnB, then Rapgenius(now genius) with their black hat SEO and now you. I though YC was about helping geeks succeed without making compromises to their moral principles.
Also, to clarify, while I did personally message a ton of people during our early days (CEO in her pajamas at 3am doing anything to get a site off the ground) - this is not at all what we do now. Our Premium Matchmakers will contact someone if they have someone they want to set them up on a date with. You're on OkCupid for dates, right? So we're trying to help :)
Spam is in the eye of the receiver. Someone with an empty OkCupid inbox would probably be glad to get a "I know someone you'd be perfect for!" message. Maybe that's still against OkCupid's ToS, I don't know, but if I was the recipient I wouldn't really care.
If it was just generic "come sign up for our new dating service!" messages, I'd agree with you, but that's not what they were doing.
The problem with this is that every dating site out there looking to grow their user base might see that as a viable strategy.
If it were to become more common (not sure how common it is actually...probably very), that could result in an overall poor experience for OKCupid users who would associate using the service with receiving spam that never netted out to anything.
There is nothing wrong with OKCupid drawing the line on another service trying to get "free" marketing on its dime and at the expense of its user experience.
I agree with your last paragraph. If I were OkCupid, I would try to prevent people from doing this. If I were Dating Ring, I would try to do this. And if I were an OkCupid user, I would feel gratitude towards anyone who arranged a date for me, Terms of Service be damned.
That said, if it never amounted to anything -- as in, I got Dating Ring spam promising dates that never materialized, I would be pretty pissed.
If it did amount to something, sure, users would be happy.
However my point was that it is not exclusively Dating Ring doing this. It is important to consider the overall signal to noise ratio when you factor in the messages from Dating Ring and any other company out there trying to use OKCupid's platform to promote themselves.
OkCupid, barring the creation of a program/partnership specific to this case, has decided that overall, it is worth filtering out. If they thought it added value based on the data they had, they would try to partner with Dating Ring. Heck, it would likely have been fine if Dating Ring purchased ad inventory on their site. As it stands, it seems they view this approach as spam per the OP. If it is against their terms, Dating Ring doesn't have much leg to stand on as that would make it a pretty black and white situation.
Part of me wonders if a Cease & Desist is en route to Dating Ring's office.
> However my point was that it is not exclusively Dating Ring doing this. It is important to consider the overall signal to noise ratio when you factor in the messages from Dating Ring and any other company out there trying to use OKCupid's platform to promote themselves.
Such situations are exactly the kind where Kant's categorical imperative applies. If something is clearly wrong when everyone does it, it should not be OK for a particular company to do.
Edge case 1: You're the first to send them a message!
Edge case 2: They just deleted everything in their inbox.
Edge case 3: They have a particularly polarizing outlier property (e.g.: a very intense fetish for something most people would find disgusting).
Edge case 4: Some quirk (or maybe even a bug!) of OKCupid's matching algorithm is pushing that user far far down in most people's priority / match % lists.
Edge case 5: OKCupid's matching algorithms are functioning well, but the person is just that peculiar of an outlier in that algorithm that there's just very few active users who are going to be matched well with them.
Just off the top of my head. And then consider that, by the context, they probably meant anyone who hasn't had a new message in a while. Yeah.
There's an entire ecosystem (though possibly not very robust) around providing services to people on dating services like helping with writing their profile. I've heard from a few people that it would be awesome to have someone just manage their dating profile for them. This service seems in some ways to add to that ecosystem and fill the need. I would think that OKC, etc. would in the end benefit from their contribution.
> I would think that OKC, etc. would in the end benefit from their contribution.
That's BS and you know it. If that were the case, OP's startup should've bought ads on OKC and OKC would be glad to sell ad space. I really doubt that OKC or its parent company will sell ads to a competitor dating site.
OkCupid does have big ads for PlentyOfFish on their logout screen. They do allow ads, but of course, PlentyOfFish is paying for that ad space. Many niche or competitor dating sites advertise on other dating sites, but since it's paid advertising, the benefits outweigh the possible loss of users (think of it as shared users?).
Ignoring the fact that you're calling me dishonest for a moment, here's how I see it:
1. OKC is a listing of profiles where the lister is expected to manage the transaction
2. The management of the transaction is a huge friction and pain point for a significant number of people (as is writing a profile, taking pics, etc...for which there are also people that help).
3. this service reduces/removes that friction/pain point for okc.
4. this service is NOT a listing of profiles (as far as I can tell)
5. this service does NOT discourage people from signing up for OKC, Match, POF, etc...in my view it encourages participation in those services (whether implicitly or explicitly).
If I'm missing the mark on any of the above, feel free to correct me.
> 5. this service does NOT discourage people from signing up for OKC, Match, POF, etc...in my view it encourages participation in those services (whether implicitly or explicitly).
As far as I understand it from the copy on Dating Ring's web page, their service is meant to replace all those dating sites. It's a fire-and-forget product that frees you from the need of maintaining an on-line profile and visiting a dating site - discouraging people from singing up for OKC is exactly what it is meant to do.
Did you seriously just say that "paid advertising rarely works?" Really? You believe that the entire 50 $billion Internet advertising industry is just wasting its money?
I could have been more specific, but paying for advertising on OKCupid for this startup in particular is just not going to work. It's not cost effective and very few people will be clicking through on those ads.
I guess the better way to put it is that if your startup has to resort to paid advertising as the main user acquisition funnel, you probably already lost unless you have ridiculous conversion and LTV on each user.
I think that "paid advertising rarely works" is actually true and yes, the whole (Internet or not) advertising industry is really wasting tons of money - and more importantly, fuel and labor.
The thing is, marketing is mostly zero-sum game; people are stuck in a negative feedback loop of throwing more and more money to one-up their competitors at attracting customers from the same limited pool. It's an unlimited resource sink, but it's a) what you have to do lest you get outcompeted by others, and b) profitable for those who facilitate advertising.
Weixiyen is also right that this "growth hack" is effective, but remember that "growth hacking" is mostly a fancy term for spamming / abusing trust. Every new way to trick people into buying something will work for a while, until everyone else starts doing the same and the ROI drops to zero.
Once upon a time, a pop-up banner was the clever growth hacking trick. As HN's idlewords tells the story,
"One of the first banner ads had a click-through rate of 78%. That's mind-boggling. Do you know what two words were on that banner ad?
"Shop Naked!" CLICK!
But banner ads turned out to be like poison ivy. People clicked them once, and learned never to touch them again. The industry collapsed in a flurry of pop-overs, pop-unders, and shame."
Hmmm...that's a curious definition of both "unsolicited" and "spam". If you post a profile on a dating site, are you not soliciting responses? As for spam, if someone contacts me for the very purpose which I have solicited responses for (in this case, finding someone to date) I would hardly call that spam.
A similar situation: posting a job ad and having a recruiter reply to it trying to sell you their services, rather than a prospective employee. If you've ever been in that situation you'd know that it isn't a comparable response, and is just irritating spam that results in an instant delete.
I'm getting tons of downvotes but I have karma to spare so I really don't care and will continue to express my opinion. Those two things are not remotely close to the same. The recruiter is a nuisance; someone that moves you closer to what it is that YOU WERE SOLICITING for in the first place would be a welcome response. In fact given that people are shy, someone acting as a middleman would add value to the experience.
No it's not. The recruiter hasn't matched you with a specific job at the time they send you the message....they're just spamming you. A matchmaker would have already done this and is bringing you precisely what you were asking for. Gigantic difference.
If you're a prospective employee a good recruiter will act much as a matchmaker by talking with you and establishing that you might be a good fit for the position they're advertising for.
There are plenty of international recruiting firms that just spam short to mid length contract jobs in places nobody wants to move to at hourly rates nobody would take. Those are the ones you want to ignore.
I'm talking about a recruiter approaching an employer. Sometimes they will e-mail with a specific candidate, sometimes they won't. In either case, they won't show you until you agree to pay them.
You're soliciting responses for a date. If someone responds with "we have someone we want to set you up with"....that gets me to my goal of finding a date. I don't think real users looking for dates make the distinction that you are.
@Minimaxr - Calling us a direct competitor is a HUGE compliment. Thank you! I've talked to people at OkC and they could care less about us now. We're peanuts compared to them. Also, they have really good spam filters etc, so they can (and do) kick us off whenever they want.
"You're on OkCupid for dates, right? So we're trying to help"
I hope you realize that this is almost word-for-word what any telemarketer or spammer will say about what they do. They're just trying to help you!
I've never used it, but I'm guessing that people don't sign up for OkCupid because they want messages from Premium Matchmakers. You're spamming them. It doesn't matter how much you think you're helping.
I think part of the problem here is that there isn't a lot of information on exactly what you're offering the people you contact. Given that goodside referred to it as spam, the default assumption is going to be ... it's spam. And indeed, asking for some "slack" isn't going to get you any sympathy on HN, nor should it honestly. However, what might help is to explain in more detail exactly what you're doing, and be open to suggestions on how to improve it, while hopefully still maintaining some marketing benefit.
For example, if you contact someone with a message along the lines of, "Hi, we're _____, and we've got someone who's perfect for you. Just sign up for our service at _______ to get started!" that's definitely spam. No question about it.
On the other hand, if the message is more like, "Hi, we're _____. We think one our clients, ________ would be a great match for you. You both enjoy _______, and in particular, he(she) like that you mentioned _________. Here's a link to his(her) profile. You can contact him(her) at _______." that doesn't look like spam to me at all. Effectively you're just acting as a proxy in that situation. The OKC user is indeed getting exactly what they're looking for.
So I guess my point is, it all depends on the message. If you make them sign up for your service, spam. If your message is generic, spam. But if you give them information about a real person, and a way to contact them - ie exactly what they would expect to get in a message directly from another user - that seems fine from the user's perspective.
Of course, OKC would likely still not appreciate your use of their service to facilitate competition. In that case, a better model might be to strictly act as the agent of your user; search OKC for them, and if you find a good match, help them create an account and message the user directly. Obviously this might require tweaking your model a bit.
When I receive spam or people abuse services I run, I don't care what position they hold within a company or what time of morning it is. Play fair or don't play.
Our employees don't have fake profiles on OkCupid, although the Premium Matchmakers do occasionally use their real profiles if they find someone that is exceptionally good for one of their clients. This is a pretty common practice overall in the matchmaking industry - do whatever it takes to find a good match for clients who are paying you a good amount of money for the search.
We do our best to not spam and inspire trust by being available 24/7 to answer questions and personally interact with users. At the same time, we're constantly trying to grow so that we can provide the best matches. It's hard! Cut us some slack? No? Because it's HackerNews? Yea, I guess that's okay then.
> Premium Matchmakers do occasionally use their real profiles
Unless they're on OKC to look for dates, they have no business being there. The only messages that they could legitimately send on OKC would be to ask someone on a date.
I have a friend in NYC who is a old-school matchmaker (sole proprietor). If she told me that she was doing a search for a client and looking on dating sites for prospects, I wouldn't blink. I guess that I trust she is trying to act in the best interests of the two people in the potential match.
The interests of the clients are irrelevant. If you owned a business and your competitor used your business's facilities to promote his to your detriment, you'd understandably be upset. That's precisely what the poster is being accused of.
I think it depends - would your friend message the prospects on okcupid/POF, or tell her client "here are some great profiles, you should message these people"? Those are very different; I suspect dating sites would have a problem with the former and not the latter.
> Unless they're on OKC to look for dates, they have no business being there.
This isn't true. Some look for companionship on OKC. Why they use OKC for it, I have no idea but 100% of the user base isn't strictly for dates/hooking up.
The right way to go about helping out their clients without potentially spamming OKC users would be to message their client on their own site that they have found someone for them on OkCupid. They could then ask their client to sign up to OkCupid to view the account and message the user.
> Premium Matchmakers do occasionally use their real profiles if they find someone that is exceptionally good for one of their clients
This is bait and switch and also poaching, same as if a realtor goes to another realtor's web site to find prospects and start soliciting them, plus using false pretenses in your case.
How about you have your employees contact their clients saying that they have found a good match on OKC and send the profile with that message. Then if the client is interested, that client can reach out on OKC personally, making an OKC account if necessary.
Off topic life advice: When you tell someone to stop doing something, don't start out with the word "Please". It doesn't really make any sense as it's a pleading word used as an order. It comes off passive aggressive and abrasive. Same thing with "I'd really appreciate it if" and "Would you mind". If it really is a simple request, then by all means, but when it's an order or a direct request, just say it without the weird prefix.
The phrase "Please tell your employees to stop creating fake profiles on OkCupid and spamming our users." is standard English. There is nothing wrong with the please in that sentence. Your advice is weird and wrong. Please is just a word used to convey politeness and civility with a request.
As a native, English, English speaker, I don't see anything at all wrong with goodside's phrasing. I think they successfully expressed what they were trying to express, succinctly and with appropriate tone.
As a native English speaker I agree with the comment parent. "Please x" is just passive-aggressive. You see it a lot on hacker news because people want to be "civil" without actually being so.
Please tell me (pun intended) how the hell you're supposed to be civil if being civil leads to you being accused of pretending to be civil for ultelior motives? This is stupid.
It's not civil to say "Please stop spamming." That's like saying "Please stop beating your wife." It contains an accusation, which is never a civil thing to say. There is no civil way to bring up how your conversational partner is beating their wife or spamming OkCupid.
Adding a "Please" is pretending to be civil.
There are just some conversations that cannot be had "civilly". If you think this is stupid ....I can't really help you. Try to go have a civil conversation about someone's weight gain with them.
> There are just some conversations that cannot be had "civilly"
I think here lies our disagreement. I do believe that you can talk about anything in a civil manner. Being polite is completely orthogonal to the topic discussed. In this case, "please stop spamming" is just a more polite way of saying "stop spamming", period. The difference is in tone, not context, and this is how the word "please" is supposed to be used. Also, what goodside said was not "please stop spamming", but "please tell your employees to stop creating fake profiles (...) and spamming our users". Which is a request, not an order.
Accusations have nothing to do with civility. Telling me "please stop beating your wife" when I'm beating my wife is valid, just like saying "please stop spamming" is valid here because they're spamming. If you believe goodside is dishonest about Dating Ring's employees spamming OKCupid, address that.
> Tell your employees to stop creating fake profiles on OkCupid and spamming our users.
Seems to be what the poster really means.
>Please tell your employees to stop creating fake profiles on OkCupid and spamming our users.
That means the poster is begging the person stop? Does that really make sense? It sounds like someone is directly telling someone something, but is adding "Please" to get themselves off the hook for being seen as directly telling someone something.
As a native English speaker, I cannot remember anyone, except maybe an old person at dinner saying "Please pass the salt", say the world "Please" at the start of a phrase where it wasn't an aggressively postured order. Like this obviously was.
Serious question: Could you tell me what I'm missing with that?
The idea that "Please" means "I beg you" is archaic. It's a prefix added to convey civility. It is not contradictory to use it while also being firm or even abrasive.
I sometimes find the English language to be quirky or frustrating, and I have some sympathy with efforts to change it for the better. I think in this instance you are tilting at windmills, and not offering sensible or sincere "life advice".
When you add "Please" to a request, it makes that request less of an order. The word is there because part of being civil is not ordering people around abruptly. (Even if you have the authority to give them tasks.) So in fact, when it is used for civility, it does mean "I beg you". Or at least, "I softly order you".
So in fact it doesn't make sense in some circumstances (though those circumstances are narrower and fewer than fubu seems to think).
For instance, "please" is clearly out of place in "please put the gun down on the pavement, or I will shoot!".
The civility-conveying meaning of the word is out of place in abrasive speech; for instance it is out of place in "please get off the f___ing road!" In abrasive language, if "please" appears, its presence is ironic. For instance, in a sentence like "please don't start with that bullshit again!", "please" doesn't have any connection to being civil; it doesn't function that way. Other such politeness words are also ironic in abrasive speech. "Kindly keep your mutt off my lawn!"
(There is even the usage of the word "please" by itself, or nearly so: "Oh, please!" or its variant "Puh-lease!" which expresses disagreement or disapproval.)
You made a very accurate description, though I'd argue that depending on situation and culture, "please" in "please put the gun down on the pavement, or I will shoot!" might not be that much out of place.
It conveys friendliness, the concept of "we're all friends here and we don't want anyone to get hurt, so let us sort this out without a mess"[0]. On the other hand one could argue that abrasive speech is very effective at bypasing various psychological bareers and delivering message straight to the target - after all, that's the reason for so much shouting and insults in the military. So there's a trade-off.
[0] - I guess I might have been watching too much Star Trek in my childhood, which gave me a deeply ingraned attitude that we can all see the bigger picture if we try hard enough.
Context? If you're at dinner with friends you don't say "would you mind passing me the salt". With a stranger you met for the first time you certainly might.
"Please" is not a pleading word, it's a polite word. If you're going to give life advice, make sure it's right.
True - I was using an extreme example to make a point.
It would be more accurate to say that I don't have to, and that I sometimes don't. I'd be more likely to say "Can you pass me the salt?" or "pass the salt, will you?", which strikes me as a middle ground between "Please can you pass me the salt" and "Pass me the salt."
On Topic death advice: when giving someone advice, don't start your sentence with "Off topic life advice", as you will drop 30% of your readers* when vision hit the "off topic" part.
*No scientific evidence behind this statement, but this is the internet, so it's true.
It's okay. If only one person reads it and stops the passive aggressive, office speak?, whatever that bizarre stuff is, I've done the rest of the normal sane people a favor. I'll take plenty downvotes to save just one person from having to listen to that weirdness even once.
I see some pessimism in these comments, but IMO one needs to consider the problem from both genders (assuming we're talking about straight dating exclusively for a sec).
The problem with OkCupid is that the experience is horrendous for women. While the men would love to have choice, and "unlimited" matches, in reality this only means one thing:
Spam. Spam spam spam spam spam spam. More spam.
The success of Tinder should be in large part attributed to the fact that the basic interaction model removes spam. Men will swipe right on the majority of "matches", making women the actual gatekeepers of conversation - and this model works, though you obviously lose a lot of nuance and depth along the way.
She talks about how easy OkCupid is for women, how she recommends her female friends to try it out, but how she also dissuades her male friends from trying it. Because the site is so difficult for men.
I think the reality is a bit more complex. Women have "more choice", expressed in the form of an avalanche of messages that would take a part-time job just to cut through.
Which is a bit of a false freedom. You're presumably there to find promising dates, not take on a new part time job sorting messages.
Except women on OKC can just ignore the spam messages, look at a couple of profiles and send their own messages. Their messages won't be buried in piles of spam. The best interactions I had on OKC worked that way.
It is really taxing for women to have to deal with the spam, though, and that can really burn users out of even using the site. Too many messages and too few messages are both problems for different (sometimes overlapping) groups of people.
I think you're missing the idea that women can just ignore all incoming messages, and get a much better response rate for outgoing messages than men do.
I've dated several women that I've met on OKC for various lengths of time and they all agreed that for the most part OKC was a good experience. I could see how people without a thick skin could be turned off by the spam, but that hasn't been the case in my experience. The women I've met have mostly seemed to treat the spam similarly to YouTube comments, it's just accepted that most of them are garbage.
One of them described the experience with something like "It's Amazon for boys, for negative money." which seems like a pretty positive review to me.
Sifting through messages from people already interested in you and sifting through profiles trying to come up with a clever attention-grabbing first message to send to a girl who will respond maybe 10% of the time are not even remotely on the same level in terms of time commitment and inconvenience.
"one needs to consider the problem from both genders"
Exactly. I think Tinder's model is more aligned with how men and women meet IRL. As a guy, my modus operandi is to present myself as a high-valued man to everyone and have the women pre-select me so I can start the interaction.
How men use Tinder: likelikelikelike "Oops, I wanted to see the rest of her pictures"
How women use Tinder: nopenopenopenope "Oops, he was cute"
Its the 80/20 rule-- 20% of the guys will get most of the likes from the girls.
With all that repetition, I think there must be an even better model for matching people up...
That's a bit of faulty induction going here. Just because one site didn't work doesn't mean it will never work. There are all kinds of other variables involved, maybe it was just the execution. It is certainly insulting to say that women don't want to be in charge or make the decisions.
I've looked at sites that try the empower-the-women-depower-the-men approach. With depressing reliability, they all wind up re-introducing the ability for men to initiate contact.
That's quite suggestive. It's not perfect, but it's far from meaningless.
Also, just because it can be read as insulting doesn't mean it's not true. If we want to identify and address problems, we have to deal in truths. If it eases your conscience any, I can edit in verbiage to make extremely clear that I as speaking solely to typical behavior in the arena of online dating.
Yeah I've heard total horror stories from women. It's like men on OKCupid took the idea of "numbers game" way, way too far. Consequently I also didn't want to be on there and be lumped in with those guys either.
A seemingly obvious solution is to limit the number of women that men can contact, something like 2 every 24 hours. That way men are incentivized to put some effort into their messages, and women actually have an opportunity to read them due to reduced spam. It should be a win-win for everyone except the spammers, but I haven't heard of any sites that do it.
Now I have N accounts and message whoever I like with those N accounts.
Basically, a site has to offer something to both women and men to do better than OKC. That proposal just puts a minor speed bump in front of men. As a group, men have few compunctions about abusing sites in order to get what they want. Multiple accounts to spam women is not a significant obstacle.
Nah. Someone writes a script. It becomes a browser extension. Now it's zero work. Women abandon your site, because the experience is no better than OKCupid. Men follow suit, because they tend to go where the women are.
Basically, your approach is the functional equivalent of DRM. With all the problems that go with that.
That still takes effort beyond just signing up. I think you're overestimating the willingness of the average guy to either script something up or go out of his way to find a browser extension. Most people's knowledge of browser extensions begins and ends with AdBlock anyway.
> men discovered that being a well-behaved actor is a losing strategy on dating sites.
The entire seduction and pickup community is based on the idea that women say they want a guy who's nice and plays by the rules but that that isn't what they respond to. They respond to assholes, bad-boys and dominant men. Obviously not every woman, but there are plenty of independent scientific studies to support this theory.
I'm aware of those studies, but skeptical of some of their methods and claims. I'm especially skeptical that when they claim causation and not correlation.
In any case, there's a big difference between 'spammer' and 'bad-boy' as well as a big difference between demonstrating the success of a strategy and demonstrating it's prevalence.
Edit: There may be some good studies demonstrating causation but I am not familiar with them.
So I went and googled this "#NotAllMen" tag you keep mentioning (I don't use twitter). The "but we're not all like that" response is inappropriate and unhelpful when one is talking about particular bad actors, a group of bad actors or even about a general form of behavior.
However, when the statements are of the general form about the group as a whole, I think it is a perfectly appropriate response. If you say "All men are misogynists" saying "no we aren't" is perfectly valid, so is taking offense to the statement.
Now if you have evidence that your assertion applies to the majority of men on dating sites, feel free to post it. Then at least your stereotype will be an evidence backed one.
I don't think so. While most spammers aren't particularly sophisticated, it doesn't take a genius to figure out you can copy-paste formulaic messages to hundreds of women in only a few minutes.
Even a user who isn't particularly nefarious and say, sends 20 original (not copy-pasted) messages each session, it's still an overwhelming amount of messages for women to sort through.
It's important to note that when I say "spam" I don't just mean "bad actors who deliberately attempt to game the system". I mean that even what appears to a user as a "natural" amount of messages in fact makes the system nearly unusable. It's almost trivial for female users to end up with literally hundreds of messages per day - just managing the messages themselves is a chore, much less viewing the profiles associated.
Women receive more messages from men then men receive from women. From complains that women leave in their OKCupid profiles I would say that a lot of these messages are not from people trying to intelligently converse with the women that they are trying to connect with. Seemingly common things:
- Messages that are too short. E.g. "hey babe" doesn't mean much, when a women gets 10 - 20 "hey babe" messages in a day.
- There are men that get frustrated at the lack of response from women, and start turning their messages into "form letters" which don't show any level of having read the woman's profile.
- Initiating conversation with sexual propositions.
- Depending on the platform, sending unsolicited pictures of genitalia.
While some of these might not qualify as "spam" compared to a 419 scammers emails, I would say that wading through all of that seems akin to wading through one's spam folder...
Broadly speaking, this is what happens when the effort/volume tradeoff runs into low response rates and low read rates. The effort required to write a better message does not correspond to a sufficiently high chance of a response. Couple that with strong evidence that profiles and messages don't matter nearly as much as photos.
The net result, is most any given man is going to see more success in getting responses - and dates - by spamming any woman within a hundred miles than by writing the kind of message women publicly opine to want.
This comes across as cynical towards the women on dating sites. The problem is that the women on dating site become a lightning rod for messages. If every message were of a kind that interested a particular woman, how would she respond to (e.g.) 10-20 messages from new people every day? She's likely not going to end up going on dates with multiple people at a time, and if she finds someone long-term, it's (more than likely) only going to be a single person. She likely will only be able to carry on a few meaningful conversations at a time, and the rest just get dropped. If she were trying to meaningfully respond to everyone then going on a dating site would end up being a significant chore.
Edit: Also, it's probably difficult to respond to someone that puts in the time to right a well-thought-out message, but doesn't come across as interesting (or expresses views that are contrary to your own -- e.g. an avid hunter messaging an animal rights activist). You don't necessarily want to be the bearer of bad news, so it's easier to not do it at all (or you convince yourself that you'll respond 'later' but 'later' never happens).
Very astute observation. I agree, it's absolutely not worth it. No one should expect anything but a short canned message. Regardless, why should it matter anyway? If you like the person--something you'll know mostly from pictures--who sent you the message go out on a date! What a novel idea. If not, move on. To publicly opine that you want detailed messages tailored to your profile is presumptuous.
If OKCupid has all of these messages, couldn't they algorithmically rate your message (based on sender patterns, receiver patterns, and/or site wide patterns) before you send it. While it wouldn't be perfect, it would act like the minimum reading level from most grammar checks. (This feels like something that must have been tried, or dismissed, before.)
I believe it will increase message quality but maybe not in a good way: now it's easier to train oneself in sending message that score well but are still a bad conversation starter. What gets measured, gets improved. Unfortunately, measuring real success is quite hard because successful stop using the dating site.
> Unfortunately, measuring real success is quite hard because successful stop using the dating site.
Real success is extremely hard to quantify, which is why i'm not suggesting that as the goal. The goal is to grade spam messages, and encourage people to not repeat known spam patterns. (And, if you show the score to the recipients, it also acts as a spam filter.)
Encouraging / forcing people to write less spammy messages might improve the overall message quality, just by increasing the cost, in effort and time, of sending the messages. It also provides some minimum level of feedback to the people who get zero responses from their messages.
> Unfortunately, measuring real success is quite hard because successful stop using the dating site.
IIRC, when the user disables/deletes his/hers OkC account, they can specify the reason: "met someone on OkC (they can type the other person username)", "met someone elsewhere", "not interested anymore", etc. So they probably have lots of good data on success.
Thing is that people who comment on HN are used to writing longish form text with correct spelling and grammar. There are also many people who have a lower education level but still want to use OKCupid and might be a good match for someone.
-Men that are frustrated should now that being funny and referencing something in their profile, or talking about something they both like are good conversation starters. Just as they are in real life.
-Sexual propositions is good, you can ban them or not, at least you know exactly what they want. They are bring honest.
-Send dick pics gets you banned.
This leaves you with a good set of people. The next step would be for the system to learn what the user wants, and start to filter these messages.
As simple as it seems, that is the primary driver of the success of Tinder, helped generously by a smart on-campus initial seeding strategy for the customer base.
Every other dating site allows members to contact other members at the initiating member's will. All it takes is a few people with a dearth of tact and an overabundance of time to completely blow up (mostly women's) inboxes.
Tinder is considered a success? I've used it and maybe I'm just a loser, but my experience and I believe the general consensus is that it is mostly for hookups. I am highly doubtful that women are meeting men that are actually interested in a long term relationship. There are a lot of issues with Tinder that have already been mentioned in this thread, such as 20% of the guys (I'm betting on less) get most of the likes and that women are the gatekeepers; which is good for them not having to trudge through spam, but it perpetuates the problem that guys already have IRL at social scenes and just keeps the women playing into the players' hands.
No dating app is going to solve the problem that 80% of the men on the app are unappealing to 80% of the women. That's a fundamental social issue, and there's no magic fix for the 80% of men having trouble finding success on these apps.
Taking the decision of who is appealing away from women (and men, as if the 80% ever had any selection power) by using matchmakers seems like a promising fix to me. Although women still have the power to reject the date, they at least might be relinquished of the power to all go after the same guy (much to the chagrin of the guy who wants to fool around with all those women). Too bad I currently have so many other issues in my life more critical than wasting time in the dating scene, or I would try this one out.
But the truth is, in society, 80% of the men and women do find each other. So the problem isn't that its impossible for apps to match these people to each other as it never happens, rather how to facilitate it on dating apps, what happens in real life.
Right, but a large majority of the 80% of men and women finding each other have done it for millennia without the need for dating apps. In general, dating apps have a higher percentage of traditionally "unappealing" users than the real world, for obvious reasons. Because males are generally the aggressors, in the sense that they compete for attention from females (from an evolutionary biology perspective), obviously there will be more males on dating sites. And if there are a) more males on dating sites, b) more "unappealing" users on dating sites than the real world, then it follows that there will be a lot of unappealing males on dating sites. Not exactly a winning proposition for women.
Women generally get lots of low-effort messages, so they start to ignore most of them; men then generally realise that the probability of their messages getting read is low, so it's not worthwhile to put a lot of effort into them, but better to send lots of message to maximise the probability of being seen.
A lot of men find it easier to send short and generic messages ("Hey ur cute wats up?") to many women rather than taking time to write something thoughtful. The logic is that if you message 100 women, at least a few are going to respond.
As a result of this, female members are under a constant barrage of mindless messages, which is what's being referred to as spam.
> The logic is that if you message 100 women, at least a few are going to respond.
While this is true that some people subscribe to this logic[1], the number of messages (good or bad) that women get seems to out-weigh the number that the men get. I've heard (anecdata alert!) that some men get frustrated and will start sending out "form messages" because they will take the time to craft meaningful messages only to get no reply[2].
[1] I heard a similar story of someone (a "dad's friend" of a friend a long time ago) that would basically ask every woman at a party for oral sex. He would get lots of slaps in the face, but he never went home empty-handed (allegedly).
[2] I would personally liken it to investing time into job-hunting (i.e. trying to craft a decent cover letter) and then just getting no response from the potential employer. Though depending on the situation one other the other might be more stressful (e.g. searching for a job while unemployed).
I've heard (anecdata alert!) that some men get frustrated and will start sending out "form messages" because they will take the time to craft meaningful messages only to get no reply
This was documented on the old OKCupid blog. I think the post was taken down after Match bought them.
Men grow frustrated and get tired of wasting their time, so they stop sending in-depth messages. Women are then even less likely to respond, which ultimately sends men into a downward spiral of desperation.
It's not just that if you message 100 women, a few will respond. It's that you tried being thoughtful and genuine and discovered it was a waste of time.
Though it's of course anecdata, this is a huge problem for basically every woman I know who's used the service. Not only is it mostly spam, a lot of it is pretty horrible and demeaning. A few friends post the worst of it to Facebook and tumblr and it's cringe-inducing.
Can't speak to the male side of things, as I haven't used it myself. But I feel gross being lumped in with the things that friends have shown me.
The male experience on dating sites is soul-crushing. It consists mainly being utterly ignored by everyone. Then, when you read profiles and put in effort, you discover that you're shouting into the void. So you move to copy-paste in part because it hurts less and in part because it gets you more responses.
It's a marketing effort. Your goal is to communicate the benefits of your product (you) to your prospective customers. And just like real marketing, there is a ton of other marketing competing for the same customers. If nearly everyone else is sending copy-paste short messages, do you really think doing the same is going to succeed?
Yes, it sucks to actually read profiles, compose thoughtful initial intro messages, and then be ignored. Just like it sucks to come up with a great startup marketing campaign and then not get the results you were hoping for.
Instead of that's too much work, let's change from rifle/targeted to shotgun/blast, I think you just have to keep iterating and changing how you target, change your marketing media (different sites/venues/ways of meeting people), etc.
I understand the "trough of sorrow" of shouting in the void. But I don't think the answer is to start doing what everyone else is doing - unless you want to get the same results as everyone else of course.
(Not meant to you specifically, Kalium; "you" is meant in a general sense above)
What you've missed - and I implied instead of stating outright - is that the "same results as everyone else" is in fact more desirable. Mainly because it is something other than the null set.
The copy-paste-spam method produces better net results that the thoughtful, targeted approach. The only other more successful method I've ever even heard of rests on data mining OKCupid's users, carefully crafting your profile for them, and so on. Described here: http://www.wired.com/2014/01/how-to-hack-okcupid/all/
EDIT: Also, getting meaningful data is nearly impossible here. Generally all you get is positive response/no response. When most of your iterations come up with a lot of no responses, you've really got nothing to go on. You cannot target without data. The blast approach compensates for that.
Imagine doing a dozen very different marketing campaigns and being greeted with an identical total lack of response from all of them. Hard to learn from that.
Someone mentioned "HerWay" in another comment. I checked it out, and one unique thing they offer (if you are a male user) is, a limited form of analytics on your profile. Important, because men can't initiate contact.
This had one really important piece of information, that seems counter to what a lot of people are suggesting in these comments: a short initial message is all you need (if the match is good.) He finally settled on a single initiating message “You seem really cool. Want to meet?” and it worked.
I was the one who mentioned HerWay. In fact, men can initiate contact to any woman whose profile they can see. Think about what it would take for a site centered on the idea of taking power from men and giving it to women to make that product move.
The guy basically data-mined OKC and gamed the matching system. Then suddenly the site began working for him, since he looked like The Perfect Match to a sizable number of people.
OkCupid is one of the few dot-com companies whose customers have a bad experience (for example by getting no replies), and then blame themselves rather than blaming the company.
If more guys blamed OkCupid, maybe they'd be willing to try things like Dating Ring instead? That'd put pressure on innovators to innovate, rather than stopping at "men need to try harder."
I know what you mean, "traditional" sites like eharmony and Match.com are truly awful. I haven't tried tinder yet, so I can't comment.
But is OkCupid really the best we can do? Is there no combination of computer bits and human processes that would result in fewer guys getting ignored and more getting dates?
The problem is that men and women want very, very different things from dating sites. Now I'm going to follow this by generalizing terribly, mostly because it's easier and faster than couching everything in the most appropriate disclaimers. As other conversations today show, someone will certainly take truly horrible offense to my doing so. That's their prerogative. I'm just trying to communicate the tendencies of groups.
Men want to be able to contact the women who interest them (read: are attractive). Men desperately want to not be filtered out, and will stoop to basically any amount of lying to get around filters.
Women only want to be exposed to the men who interest them. Women want sites and systems to do their filtering and selecting for them.
Right there, there's some substantive conflicts. You have very different strategies from the get-go. But that's not all. It gets worse.
Women don't want to do any of the work or take any of the risk. Women expect men to approach them, and then they will sift through the suitors for the promising ones. And at the same time, men will lie, cheat, and otherwise bullshit to avoid being filtered out so they can spam dick-pics at every woman in range. Think of your typical hormone-driven bar scene.
You'd think you could change these patterns, by putting women in control on a site and inverting the central power dynamic. It turns out that when you do that, people still behave the same way. You wind up having to re-introduce the dynamic you were explicitly trying to avoid in order to get people interacting with one another at all.
In short, the world of online dating is a clusterfuck of opposing strategies and people who will systematically subvert any system you use to impede those strategies. OKCupid wins by not trying to force people to behave a certain way. The result is a shitshow for everyone, but all the alternatives seem to be worse.
No matter what you do, the pattern of men-as-supplicants/women-as-gatekeepers re-emerges. At a guess, it's because that's the culture we live in and it's what people are most comfortable with.
Also, people will be exactly as shallow as technology allows them to be.
I got on okcupid a few years ago after being alone for years and years b/c of depression and social anxiety and in a matter of weeks I was swimming in dates, and in a matter of months I met the woman who's now my wife.
There's a lot that's unpleasant and stressful about online dating, but with a few classes of exceptions it's not society, it's not women, it's not the site, it's not anything else but you that's keeping you back.
While I appreciate the attempted positive message, it's pretty clear to me that it's simply not an accurate reflection of reality. The common experience for guys on OKCupid does not involved any amount of "swimming in dates".
Where do you live? The gender balance on OkCupid varies a lot by region, and needless to say when your gender is rarer (lower supply per demand) you'll have a better experience.
Pretty sure OkCupid is worse for guys in the Bay Area because the influx of software engineers (who are both mostly male, and the kind of people to try online dating) skews the site's demographics.
This is exactly what I've found and exactly what I used to do. So much less painful and so many more dates. The dates themselves, however... didn't always get me what I wanted.
Yeah, that's the risk you take. That said, you're more likely to get what you're after with many runs at a high-risk process than no runs at a low-risk process.
There's actually something of a negative feedback loop that's taking place. Women get a ton of junk messages (spam, inappropriate, etc.) while men get responses to their initial messages very rarely (most often just dead silence). So the women continue to be frustrated by the dozens of terrible messages they get and men continue to get frustrated by the low return on their efforts when they take the time to read profiles and craft thoughtful messages. In the end, it's a lot of effort on both parts to even establish a conversation.
While the feedback on Tinder (where there is less investment required by both to start a conversation) early on was positive in my circles, it's starting to turn really noisy too. In the end, I think we'll see a successful model where you have the low barrier to conversation as per Tinder but a bit more info about the person as per OKC.
Well not spam per exactly, but the ratio of messages is like a couple of orders of magnitude different. A woman's OKCupid inbox can hit the > 100 to 1000 message each week.
> Men will swipe right on the majority of "matches"
Great stereotyping you have going there. Could you share some more insight into your "Women as the gatekeepers and men will hit on anything" life view? Maybe some men would prefer not to have to "swipe right" and face constant rejection? Maybe some women might prefer to approach men first instead of waiting on a man to present himself? Naw, what am saying? Gender roles were defined for a reason. Let's all just stay in our places.
Men and women statistically behave differently in known ways on dating websites.
This is a fact, not advice or a prescription. This also says nothing about how you behave or should behave, or how any particular person you know behaves or should behave. Recognizing this does not mean that you think that the behavior causes the expectation, as opposed to the expectation causing the behavior, the expectation and the behavior both being caused by a third thing or combination of things, or the behavior and the stereotype being a result of random coincidence. It also doesn't mean that other behaviors shouldn't be accommodated, even if it inconveniences the most common usages.
Specifically for Tinder, this is a good strategy. Dating is a numbers game. Online dating, even more so. By spamming right swipes, you increase the chances of finding someone who swiped right on you.
Unless you're a good looking guy. To which, I am not.
ETA: I ended up deleting my account, because even with finding a match, and sending a decent intro message, I still got radio silence from 70% of the matches, which was probably less than 1% of my right swipes.
Eh, I felt it was accusatory and putting words in my mouth (though I didn't downvote it - I can't, since he replied to me).
He seems to have taken my description of general gender dynamics in online dating to be an endorsement of said gender dynamics. This is in no way true.
He seems to also have taken my description of aggregate gender behavior in huge user bases to indicate specific individual behavior - this is also in no way true. There are plenty of users on both sides who don't subscribe to the larger usage trends, but ultimately the trends are pretty overwhelming.
I for one am all for upending gender roles, but we're talking about how online dating works right now, not how it could hypothetically work in a society where gender roles as we know them didn't exist.
It was the phrase "and this model works". You could have said "and this model is very profitable". But "works" implies correctness and fit for purpose which is seen to me as an endorsement.
But yet it works. The tricky thing about gender roles is that while they may not be progressive nor just, much of the participation is voluntary.
There isn't exactly the Gender Role Police sitting around going "NO! SWIPE RIGHT!" "NO, SWIPE LEFT!". These trends are voluntary from the participants.
This may be a bit tragic - i.e., people voluntarily disempowering themselves by reinforcing gender roles that work against them - but yet this happens. En masse even.
"It works" doesn't imply correctness. It just implies that it produces the desired result to a sufficient level of consistency/reliability.
Again with the generalizations that lead to stereotyping.
Beyond that, you must realize that a platform(environment) can reinforce and even encourage a particular behavior. To say that they are all 100% rational actors is not accurate. Research has shown many times that people react differently based upon their environment.
One may see Tindr's popularity happening for a different reason. Dating sites are a network effect business like no other. Tindr was very effective at their initial marketing push at colleges. Could it actually be Tindr's very effective network building and marketing at the early stages that has to do with it's success? Could it be that Tindr is closer to how college age daters work? And once the network effect took hold it spread to other demographics the mechanics were not the reason for it's growth? I'm sure some will agree that much of OkCupid's early success had to do with the fact that people just thought the quizes were fun. Plenty of people go to clubs with music they don't really like because they want to meet new people and that is where the people are right now.
All of a sudden we might discover a situation where a platform is reinforcing gender stereotypes proactively. In many cases against the wishes of non trivial portions of their users simply because that is where the people are? This reinforcement can actually change the views of people outside an environment once they have spent significant time inside of it.
Unfortunately, all of this is a lot more complicated just like stereotypes are. And is why we should take a step back and be careful when saying things that might reinforce them.
UX suggestion from someone who decided to give you a try and fill out your application form:
If you're only open for business currently in NYC and SF, maybe mention that before you have me fill out the long form rather than waiting until after I've submitted it, OK? Because otherwise the user who doesn't live in one of those places feels like you just wasted a bunch of their time.
This is something that is a difficult decision for a fledgling startup trying to get traction with a highly local product.
It is hard enough to get traction in one market because you don't have an email list to start necessarily. However if you collect all this great segmentation data and email addresses from people in other cities, suddenly you have a huge head start when prepping to launch in new markets.
I am not for one moment disagreeing that it is a poor user experience. Just saying that from a business standpoint, I can see where they may make the decision to frustrate some users initially who aren't in their active markets to get a leg up when they expand.
Sure you could argue that if they piss you off here, you'd be unlikely to consider them in the future, but then it becomes a numbers game. People who have a hard time finding a good date may still have that problem if this company grows into their market in the future, and may still be willing to give it a shot at that time since the chance for finding love probably outweighs that one time they had a less than ideal user experience.
Anyway, just thought I'd play devil's advocate here as you hit on an interesting lead generation point.
What makes your matchmakers any better than a random stranger? Or a computer algorithm? Or a pile of bricks? I searched through your whole website trying to figure out why your matchmakers are worth my time and money but it doesn't seem like you've made any attempt to address those concerns, which is extremely odd since their matchmaking skills are the core of your business.
Am I missing something? Based on the (lack of) info on your website, your matchmakers really could be random people you pulled off the street.
Have a page about our matchmakers that we'll be adding back this week, and you also get more info about your matchmaker after signing up.
You're completely right that we should have more info on the matchmakers featured prominently on the site. Appreciate that feedback and will be changing that soon!
(In short - they've been with us for the past year and matched thousands of people.)
We have 5 full-time matchmakers with varied backgrounds, mostly in psychology, theater, and working at other matchmaking agencies. We often get questioned more on what makes our matchmakers good, than another company would get questioned on what makes their engineers, or other employees good. This is both because matchmaking isn't a common profession, and because matchmaking is a majority female profession that tends to get undervalued and not viewed as a 'real' profession.
Our matchmakers stay up to date on trends, have exceptionally high EQs, have experience matching thousands of people, and we accept under 1% of people who apply for the job.
You get that question more because you're selling a service and thus the matchmakers are your product. A company that sells physical goods like a smart phone dont get asked about their engineers because there is a product to look at. If I was buying a consultant's time for any other business I would also want to know their qualificaitons.
Do you have any data or evidence that says matchmakers outperform random chance (random chance within certain parameters, basically age and sexual orientation)?
I'd be interested in the odds of two people selected at random forming a relationship vs the odds of two people selected by a matchmaker forming a relationship. As well as two people selected by a computer algorithm vs two people selected by a matchmaker. And two people selected by some random asshole off the street vs two people selected by a matchmaker.
I'm guessing not.
You need to demonstrate with data your "service" is useful to convince people to use it.
> You need to demonstrate with data your "service" is useful to convince people to use it.
The thing is, you don't.
All you need to do is to market the living shit out of this idea, and since no one can reliably answer whether it beats random chance people will use it. You get to earn the benefits for as long as it takes for someone else to actually do the studies that debunk you and then one-up you at marketing.
You're right! I was more talking about the people here asking questions that weren't being answered with a straight answer. Surely people do use unproven (or even disproven) products all the time. I was just frustrated with the non answer marketing talk.
I've been doing a little googling (and I do mean a little) and it seems as these matchmakers will offer dubious value for predicting long term relationship satisfaction.
>Because they gather data from singles who have never met, the sites have no way of knowing how two people will interact once they have been matched. Yet our review of the literature reveals that aspects of relationships that emerge only after two people meet and get to know each other — things like communication patterns, problem-solving tendencies and sexual compatibility — are crucial for predicting the success or failure of relationships. For example, study after study has shown that the way that couples discuss and attempt to resolve disagreements predicts their future satisfaction and whether or not the relationship is likely to dissolve.
>the information that they do collect — about individual characteristics — accounts for only a tiny slice of what makes two people suited for a long-term relationship.
>According to a 2008 meta-analysis of 313 studies, similarity on personality traits and attitudes had no effect on relationship well-being in established relationships. In addition, a 2010 study of more than 23,000 married couples showed that similarity on the major dimensions of personality (e.g., neuroticism, impulsivity, extroversion) accounted for a mere 0.5 percent of how satisfied spouses were with their marriages — leaving the other 99.5 percent to other factors.
Sure it will get you to meet singles, but there probably isn't anything special about it other than that. Adding someone who majored in theater arts is unlikely to add value for the cost involved.
I feel your frustration about the non-answer marketing talk.
To be honest, were I not in a relationship at the moment (and if I lived in SF/NYC), I'd probably sign up for this. For me, the primary value is not however their Premium Matchmakers beat random chance; it's taking away the work required to find a date.
After you finish high school, or graduate from university, finding a potential date gets incredibly more difficult. You no longer spend majority of your day with hundreds of people, many of whom could be your potential partners - you have to work to expand your social circle and meet people (most of whom are already in stable relationships anyway). I'd gladly pay Dating Ring for the sole reason of helping me meet people who are also looking for a date.
Oh, I agree it has value for just that reason. Just I didn't like the supposed magic sauce that got throw around to justify the value without proof. I dont believe the value is in the matchmakers (who might as well be a computer algorithm) but access to singles also looking for a date or relationship with little work. It is overpriced for what it is though. If I were single I might be interested in a service that did similar at a lower price point that didn't emphasize on "how great our matchmakers are. Trust us."
I know how hard it is to meet new people to date. Especially when you get older and all your friends all are busy with families and what not.
And you still didn't answer the question - WHY are they better? Just because they read on psychology, and "have exceptionally high EQs" (what is that?), doesn't make them good.
This PR has been a trainwreck. You're the conductor.
As IQ is to Intelligence Quotient, I assumed that EQ is to Emotional Quotient. So kind of like emotional intelligence. I'm sure I could find much more info about these terms and proper usage with a google search.
Give use access to your facebook and $20 a month. In return, you get ONE match a month. If they don't want to meet you, that's too bad. You paid $20 to be rejected.
The two things you would need to do to sell me are:
1) Allow access without facebook. I'd be fine scanning a driver's license for you that matches the name on the credit card I pay with.
2) If you don't provide a good match (i.e.) one that wants to meet me, you should provide another match.
I think the key on the rejection thing is to remember that the other person is also on the hook for $20, and won't get another match if they reject you. So if the service is even basically working from a matching perspective [1], you should get a date. Rejecting you is basically saying, "this person is so bad that I'd rather give up my $20 than trust them that this might be a match". I also think it's interesting that you focussed on the possibility of you being rejected as opposed to you rejecting the match.
[1] A big if. I'm skeptical about the whole thing, specifically about the "we match people, not profiles" claim, which makes little sense to me, since your profile is all they know about you. But my point is that the economics of it seem OK.
Ah, correct. I meant to say also that we used to send people on dates for $20, and the few times people had bad times, they said they would have rather paid $20 not to go. So it's better to spend $20 and not waste time, than it is to spend $20 and go on a date that you know instantly isn't a good fit.
[1] We should explain this better, but when you sign up, you'll see you can tell your matchmaker a lot more about yourself, and we use feedback from each match / date to improve matches. Plus, of course, we're using all of the research we've collected on what makes people compatible. So it's definitely off of more than just a profile, but I get what you're saying.
Honest question, if you think someone is unmatchable based on their expectations not matching up with what they offer.
Will you let them know and refuse their business, or will you just throw other unmatchable people at them and keep taking their money. (basically will a reject pool exist where you don't really put in any effort, but just slap together the left overs)
As someone who's only matches on Tinder and OKCupid in the past few months have been camsites and escorts this is an actual concern of mine.
@genericuser A big value add to what we do is that we will offer advice to people who keep getting rejected. If it's that their expectations are too high, we have it on our list to guide some people toward Premium. Not so we can make more money from them (our margins on Premium are lower) but because some people need coaching more than they need matches.
That doesn't really answer the question of the reject pool.
To me it just kinda says you will fault the user if their matches don't result in a date, but try to keep 'helping' them while you are getting paid.
As a further question how do you even out demand for the different matches. Assuming the number of matches contracted by men for women is not the same as the number of matches women for men? Do some people not get matches do some people get surprise double matches(in which case if they were only expecting one date a month won't they generally reject the lesser of)?
I mean honestly I would rather not be matched and not be charged than matched with someone who got extra matches all the same day they weren't expecting.
Mostly because I think I would very rarely reject a date. I like meeting new people even if I may not have a romantic future with them.
Even if I don't think they would be a good fit based on their profile, I'd always be up for having my expectations disproved. I also don't trust profiles to describe people very well.
Much agreed with your points. In addition, this part:
"Your profile also gives our matchmakers a glimpse into what you’re like as a real person, but don’t worry - we don’t base too much of our matching on your photos that your friend took that one time at that party after a few glasses of red wine :)"
...really terrifies me. I need to trust that the people doing this selection understand the context of my pictures while not knowing me at all? If I'm serious about finding a match using this service, I will gladly spend a full hours filling out a form telling you more about myself, rather than giving you access to my FB account.
We do also have you fill out a profile, and you're able to share any info you want with your matchmaker. You can also update them after each match. If you really want to spend hours and do a more in depth search, that's what Premium is for.
Those objections sound reasonable, but why do you think that you only get one match per month? I don't see that text on the front page -- do they tell you later?
1) It's now on our list to add signin without Facebook, since that's been such a popular request.
2) The problem there is that if you don't like your second match, then what? What's hard is that matchmaking isn't a common thing you pay for, so people aren't used to the risks involved. If 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. If we were to provide two choices, we'd have to raise the price. We're the one matchmaking service where a personal matchmaker is going to send you a match for $20 .. most charge thousands.
Additionally, it's not so much about the business model as it is about trying to change the way people so quickly write one another off. If you know you only get one shot, and this person has been chosen specifically for you by a matchmaker, there's a much higher chance you'll give them a shot, which is what we want. People are far too picky and miss out on lots of great people. If you want 1,000 chances, there's always Tinder :)
And lastly, we're going to build a free match into the signup flow, so there's at least that :)
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.
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.
$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.
$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.
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.
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.
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.
@rogerbinns - The problem with being paid on success is that people are really bad at understanding the value behind 'success' and also, it's very hard to verify. Working backwards, it's easy to convince someone that finding their life partner is worth $1 million, and a 1% chance of that therefore is 10k.
But most people still think $20 is too much to spend at just a chance. If they were to pay on success, no matter how good we were, we'd be losing a lot of money. Some startups are fine doing that, but we wanted to create a sustainable business model from the start.
Also, I've heard the 'if you're good, you lose customers' comment a lot, but that is not the case with dating. People who are successful still go on a lot of dates, and the better you are, the more people they refer. Our goal is 100% to provide the best matches possible, so that people like us, refer their friends, and end up happy / in love / dating / having sex / doing what they want. If we had a crappy service that kept 'dangling' people in front of one another, a) none of us would want to work here and b) we'd have very high churn and die very quickly.
I realize you're hectically trying to respond to a heap of comments here, but you really need to ensure you're clicking reply to the actual comment you're replying to.
edit: since this is a YC company, I'll add some content to my criticism (even though most of this should be obvious).
1. This is a new service, and people don't know you yet. Asking them to sign up with their Facebook account is asking for too much, because there is no trust element established. Consider having a stand-alone sign-up mechanism that enables some bare-bone features with the option to hook up to Facebook for additional benefits (i.e. 5 matches per week vs. 2 matches, promise for more accurate matching, etc.). Users need to see some value out of the service before they volunteer their Facebook info.
2. Lots of people don't use Facebook, and even more of them are leaving Facebook. There are also lots of people who are cynical towards it and use it as little as possible. You are certainly alienating them by requiring a Facebook account.
Working at a company appealing to non-tech people, with a "Sign up with Facebook" ability as well as "sign up with email", I can tell you most people just sign up with Facebook.
We don't have anything that says "we won't post to your wall" etc, but most people use it anyway.
Ha, we definitely get that that's a dealbreaker for a lot of people. Most top dating sites are populated by a ton of fake profiles, so while logging in with Facebook isn't ideal, it helps us as a small startup to prevent spammers. We don't post to members' walls / we basically just ask for birthdate and photos.
I totally understand where you're coming from. However, consider that there are more fake Facebook profiles on the Internet than fake online dating profiles. Facebook itself does not to any sort of identity verification, so the benefits of relying on it to filter spam are dubious.
Additionally, our matchmakers review each profile before approving a member. So Facebook definitely isn't perfect, but it helps to prevent some spam, as well as multiple signups from the same person. It also makes the signup flow a lot faster for members.
OkCupid has fake profiles but it's not THAT bad (maybe Tinder has spam problems, or so I've heard, but they're spammed because they are at scale). Nothing a reverse-image search on Google can't usually solve.
I used to work there. Fraud/fake profiles are one of the hardest & most important problems to solve, and one of OKC's main competitive advantages is doing so in a scalable way. It's not a problem from the user perspective, but that's a testament to a lot of intelligent effort, not a reason why fake profiles aren't an issue.
I've always been fascinated by that aspect of dating sites. Could you share some of the technical specifics as to what the hardest challenges are that still remain to be solved and how the cat-and-mouse game has evolved?
1) It requires very little trust to FB connect a site. FB now lets you explicitly control what they can access and what they can post, very easily. This used to be an issue, but not anymore.
2) True, but when you are a startup it's better to focus on making your experience great for some people than making it OK for all people. You should definitely support non-FB users over time, but it's pretty reasonable to have a single code path at launch.
I'm surprised to see all the negativity towards this. If I was single, I'd be signing up right now.
The biggest objection seems to be that OkCupid is like a buffet, and now they're being asked to eat at a restaurant where the chef interviews you and brings you what he thinks you'll like. If the buffet was working great for them, I can see why they'd object to the change.
OkCupid wasn't so great back when I used it though. I'd send out many messages (personal, customized ones -- not spam) and get next-to-no replies. It felt like I was spinning my wheels and going nowhere. Were my opening messages poorly written? Did my profile need work? Maybe. But that's why I think I'd benefit from having a professional matchmaker, who's a better writer than I am and can present me in the best possible light.
Not to hate on a startup, but I've dated on OkCupid before, and while it's not foolproof, you can meet someone who seems perfect online and then you don't hit it off in person. Having limited matches is just a dealbreaker. Sure there's the idea of too many possibilities leading to the 'paradox of choice' or 'fear of missing out', but let's be honest, you really need to have a lot of options to meet someone who's right for you (unless you're really lucky). "Your matchmaker will send you a new match each week" -- a match, singular, is just not going to work for the majority of the population.
I don't consider wide options to be a positive for me in online dating, as the total number of potentials is particularly deceiving. OkCupid for me had the most results for people I could message but had the poorest ratio of time invested in messaging to time spent dating. eHarmony had significantly fewer results for me but had a much better outcome.
Personally, I'd rather have one potential match a week with a higher chance of actually going on a date, than messaging many people a week with little to no response. Granted, I realize I'm making the assumption that this service will actually provide a higher probability.
Predicting who people will be attracted to is not actually that hard, and if you get a match and aren’t attracted, you tell us why and we’re able to improve future matches. Heck, some people email us pictures of their exes and we use that to send them better matches. You’re right that similarity / interests / and whether you’re attracted are all important. This is something that we can predict really well. A big part of this though is that people (especially women) are so inundated with ‘matches’ and messages on other sites that they never meet. OkCupid had a great recent blog post that showed that the power of suggestion is just as important as the matching algorithm. So what’s nice about our service is that people are much more likely to meet, since they only get 1 match and because of the matchmaker suggestion. This is not to say that it’s not worth using OkCupid or going to bars or picking up hobbies but I’d say to do them all. What’s $20 if it means a 1% higher chance of meeting your next partner? I know people hate putting a value on love, but the happiness I get from my partner is worth at least a million bucks (he cooks and cleans..). I was single for 3 years before meeting him, and if someone had told me there was a 1% chance of meeting him, that would be equal to $10,000. So even if you don’t agree with my math, $20 is still a far cry from 10k, and I would have paid a lot of money to have spent less time single. Of course, tons of people are fine being single or dating around, so it definitely depends on your priorities.
I see what you're saying, but let's say on OkCupid the vast majority of people you wouldn't want to message, let alone meet. You message the highest matches based on similarity, interests, and appearance (who you might be potentially attracted to in real life). If you're particular, that might mean only messaging one or two people per day depending on your style. What happens if you get that one match per week from Dating Ring and you automatically are not attracted to them based on appearance or personality? There are certainly people who seem really interesting and then they message me back and then it's pretty clear that we're never going to have a fun conversation, and you move on. Hard to do that with one match per week. I know online dating can be tedious at times, but let's be honest, going to bars all the time or picking up a ton of new hobbies to meet new people is even more time-consuming and from what I've seen from myself and many other people definitely less fruitful.
Perfectly valid comment, and not hating on us at all. If this were just a random match each week, you'd be completely correct. Dating is definitely a numbers game, and it takes a lot of choices in order to find the right person. But there is a whole lot you can do behind the scenes to improve those odds. We've gone through the research, we've met thousands of members in person and coordinated thousands of dates, and we've learned how to greatly improve the odds when it comes to personal introductions. I'd say a big reason other dating sites don't do this is because the more clicks they get, the more money they make. But we're not in it for clicks.
OkCupid and other sites also use algorithms to increase the chances, but you also get way more than 1 "match" a week, and you can also peruse tons of random profiles as often as you want (and these still usually give some kind of compatibility score). You could very conceivably set up a new date every night with someone who has gone through some sort of "algorithm" to match up with you.
Is your algorithm/method so much better than any other site that you can afford to only send one match per week and hope to achieve the same (or, hopefully, better) results as other sites?
When it comes to dating, I don't think success/date matters as much to people as success/time.
I glanced through it but it's unclear to me why your service is better than any other. Basically you say you make the match but that requires that I give up my agency over something that is at least somewhat important to me. I might be willing to go along with it but maybe a little clearer or obvious explanation of how your magic works would make it an easier sell? I might be an outlier though.
Thanks, this is great feedback for us. We explain more in our FAQ: datingring.com/faq . We're going to work on improving the explanation and building in a free match, because the easiest way to explain why what we do is better is just to experience it. (Since most of how we match is private.)
We definitely realize that Facebook is problematic. The pros are that it helps some with security, we don't post to your wall, and it makes the signup flow much faster. But we're considering adding a way to sign up without Facebook since it's definitely the top complaint we've heard since the relaunch.
Instead of you both pay $20 and either one can reject the date and you're both out $20- whoever rejects the date is out the $20, and the person who didn't reject the date gets a refund. That would REALLY put the onus on the matchmakers to do a good job making matches.
People who are open to going on the date don't lose anything if there's no date, or end up going on a date. And if people continue getting bad matches that they reject, they won't pay the $20 for very long before leaving.
Otherwise, why would people stay on the site if they keep getting hit for $20 AND don't go on any dates?
That thing they did where they shipped hot single ladies from NYC to meet rich single techies in SF[1] left a bad taste in my mouth. I know lots of people thought it was a great idea and lots of other people didn't. So, we'll just have to agree to disagree about it.
And then there is this allegation of spamming OkCupid users[2] (which didn't really get denied). This also leave another bad taste in my mouth.
Add to that the general tone of the founder's comments in this thread.
Each of those things are some what subjective. But, I would have a hard time recommending this site to any of my single friends. In fact, if any of them told me they were looking in to Dating Ring, I would actively try to convince them not to.
Seems a little weird to me, honestly. I mean, we started curating our own dating on the web to get away from this type of haphazard matchmaking, didn't we? This seems a bit like reinventing the horse and carriage. And anyway, since when was flirting with people online work?!
It's also a little insulting to not even be the one selecting your date. I know we get set up by our friends now and then, but they are our friends, not some random service on the Internet. This service has not built trust, and its results seem to me fundamentally dubious.
I thank whatever powers are out there that I'm married, because when I see the time and effort my single friends sink into meeting people online, it certainly looks like work.
From both observation and personal experience I believe that for typical person from a western city finding a partner gets orders of magnitude more difficult the moment you finish college. In high school and at university, you're constantly exposed to hundreds of possible dates, but after that your social circle tends to shrink to your family, friends and coworkers. Expanding the circle and eventually finding someone starts to require effort.
We're still primarily in the first wave on online dating - where we've added a layer of technology to make something as important as finding dates easier. But as with any first wave of technology, there are tons of flaws, and on average it takes 7 hours on an online dating site to line up a date. The majority of online daters are dissatisfied with how long it takes to get a date, and the quality of dates they meet in person. Additionally, 90% of people lie in their online profiles, and most people are not very certain about who they're looking to date - much less who they're looking to date based on just browsing an online profile.
If you do want to select your date, there are tons of these 'first wave' online dating websites to do that. But we wanted to provide a different experience, and use matchmakers to make the overall experience better. In other industries, it is accepted that you need an expert to help out. You wouldn't have a friend perform heart surgery on you. But societally, there's a huge stigma against needing professional help to find dates, which is quite silly, when it's one of the top drivers of life in general and when statistically, no matter who you are, it's really, really hard to find people you connect with.
In terms of building trust, that's what our relaunch is all about. If you sign up, we'll send you a promo code for a free match, and we do much more than any other service to gain our users' trust - from monthly parties with everyone who works at the company, to live chat through our site, to personalized notes about why each match was selected (plus, of course, email support). Creating a great dating site that people trust is a really, really challenging feat, and not one achieved overnight, but we're working as hard as we can to get there.
Lots of feedback here seems to be very critical and for the purpose of pointing out everything you've done wrong. That's totally fine, and exactly why posting to HN can result in useful feedback. I just wanted to say that I think you have a great idea here, and if in the future, I find myself single again, I'll take another look at your service.
I tried signing up but it was really unfriendly to us non-American folks:
- Height in feet and inches
- Pretty limited locations
- I'm neither Democrat nor Republican
- It's called American Football and Football, not what you have (OK, I let that one slide)
- ...
I get that the non-English speaking world is harder to reach but on the other hand: English is not a problem for the higher educated in most of Europe and I see no real reason to limit this service to just the US. A profile is a profile.
Thanks so much for submitting your info! Right now, we're unfortunately only
located in NYC and the Bay Area. But we really appreciate your reaching out,
and we will let you know as soon as we expand to your city!
I think it would be nice to display this more prominently. You get a nice 'conversion' out of this but I'm not sure this counts.
We added that to staging based on a previous comment, and the change will be live by tomorrow. And getting signups in other cities doesn't help our stats or conversion rates (it actually lowers them). We have it available since we plan to launch in other cities, but when we do launch in Europe that is great feedback for us to have, and we'll be changing quite a bit before then.
I think it could scale the same way that, say, a massage parlor scales: by hiring and training more people. Except in this case you don't run into space limitations since everything is done online. If folks are willing to pay their premium rates [1], it could work! $350/mo is pretty steep, but I'd rather pay that and get results than $0/mo and no dates.
The more people using your service, the less work for each matchmaker. Most premium matchmakers spend most of their time recruiting. We don't need to do that since we have so many users. We also have a lot of technology that automates the non-personal stuff, like sorting through age, height, etc.
In terms of knowing what people are looking for - we met our first few thousand users and arranged a few thousand dates by hand. We learned a lot about what matters, and what doesn't - for instance, how active people are tends to matter a lot more than their political preferences. I hate to pull the whole 'proprietary' card, but we're not very public about how we match beyond that .. will try to add more info to the site soon.
With fewer dates you are more invested in the individual relationships. This is the opposite of something like OK Cupid where you may message 100 people and only get a few replies.
Well it's about efficiency too, Coffee Meets Bagel does the 1 day a match thing and after 4 weeks of non matches (either I wasn't attracted to them or they to me) I just quit the site. Compared to a minute spent swiping 30 people on Tinder, or a minute or two reading someone's profile on OKC.
Unlike a lot of the other people on here, I like the Facebook integration, provided of course nobody else on my Facebook can see that I've added this app. It saves the hassle of having to upload pictures and lowers the proportion of fake accounts.
As a male (23 years old), I've completely written off online dating. Sites like OkCupid make total sense if you're a female because you don't actually have to do any work, but they absolutely suck for men. Women are inundated with messages and rarely respond, and thus as a male you have to spend hours and hours sifting through profiles and sending tons of messages. On top of that, very few of the women on dating sites are even attractive.
That's why I prefer Tinder, although it'd be nice to have a middle ground between the shallowness of Tinder and a dating site.
It's great that this site saves time on the user's part (mainly the male). The problem is that it doesn't seem like I can see what my potential match looks like. Being a male, looks are pretty important. That's why I stopped going on Groupers - my last one hooked us up with 3 unattractive women. It sounds shallow and fucked up, but that's just the reality of it.
Until a service comes along that hooks me up with women that I know will be physically attractive enough from the get-go, I'm not going to pay money for it. And since most hot women are already inundated with guys trying to ask them out in real life, I'm not sure if a site like that could ever exist.
In the account creation settings you don't necessarily cover all options with your drop downs.
For instance the "It is very important that my partner: "
you have 4 options:
No Preference,
Wants kids now,
Wants kids in the future, and
Doesn't ever want kids
As someone who absolutely does not does not want kids 'now' but is indifferent to them in the future I really wish there was a an option called.
'Doesn't want kids now'
Thanks - I definitely need to update our blog since we made so many major changes. (We've explained in our newsletters but I should make those public.)
The group dating piece: A lot of you wrote about missing group dates. Ah, we do too! While we are big fans of the magic of groups, we realized that we could either focus on compatible matches, or keep group dates -- but we couldn’t do both well at the same time. Since you expressed that compatibility with one person is more important than meeting three singles at once, we decided to focus on 1-on-1 dates. Scheduling 6 compatible people in cities like NYC and SF was just not as feasible as scheduling 2 compatible people.
Have you considered scheduling dating events for your members? I imagine you could charge more than a club night for such events. You would allow members to exchange contact details, but you could also play matchmaker after the event ("remember that guy in a suede jacket, david, didn't get a chance to say hello but would have liked to ...") and charge for the convenience.
Ah, yes, we have been doing this since we launched. The $20/month gets you access to free, exclusive Dating Ring parties (lotsss of people find dates through those) as well as that one match a month. We should definitely surface that better.
Worst service ever. I paid for $40 for 3 dates back in May, didn't hear from them until after 2 months in and was matched with 1 date. I still haven't gotten any additional "dates".
I don't recommend this site to anyone, you would just be wasting your time. There are other sites that are a lot better when it comes to online dating.
Why do all the new dating things (also as an example Tinder) require Facebook these days? I know quite a number of people staying away from that social network (including myself). Aren't you making it yourself too easy to rely on one thing to authenticate/verify people?
It's because a Facebook connected user is just a much more valuable user to your service. You have access to their friend list, photos, likes, etc. And it's easy.
Sure, they could do the work to let non-FB connected users in as well, but given the scale of FB and the value of FB data, it's really hard to justify that work until you've hit product market fit.
When you only have one path to sign up and register it's really easy to focus and make that path as high quality as possible. Later you can add support for the people that want to use your product but don't have FB.
This reminds me of Slavoj Zizak's quips:
"You want coffee without the caffeine, you want beer without the alcohol and you want to fall in love without the fall." or words to that effect. [1] So, as he says, we want the Other deprived of its Otherness.
Signed up and got put on waiting list. Used OkC and Tinder before, let's see how different this is. Also will be interesting to see if this follows a lot of the online dating trends that was outlined in Christian Rudder's Dataclysm book.
Are you in SF or NYC? Those are the two cities we're live in. Will be launching LA / Boston next. If you are NYC or SF and are on the waitlist, we're able to get most people off within a week. Email me - lauren@datingring.com if you're still waiting.
Since I rarely see any dating-related topics appear on HN I thought it would be reasonable to share a quick link to where the dating site I'm working on will eventually live.
Right now there's just a simple Wufoo form so I can gather input from users I can use to build the first version of my site...I have my own personal experiences with a lot of the free/paid services out there and ran into issues with fake profiles or being asked for credit card information so I'm working on an initial design right now, that should be nice and simple, won't require a credit card at all, and will have a healthy dash of security thrown in...but I'd love your input as well so if you have a few quick moments to share it that would be great :-):
http://serradate.com/
The original service was group dating. You signed up for the service, pay $20, and get put on a group date customized by the service. (I attended a group consultation for the service, but wasn't impressed enough to pay and continue with the date)
The startup pivoted because, unsurprisingly, single dates are more popular.
I signed up for Dating Ring in NYC in like March, and have generally had a good experience. Probably been to a dozen dates/events. Of that I've only been on two "bad" dates. I define that as dates where I felt we just didn't have anything in common and/or they were completely not my type. Most were mediocre, but we had fun, mostly because I know how to be entertaining over drinks. A couple I was interested in but never really had a good relationship develop from it. In general, I had fun so it was money well spent.
I'm new to the city and the site was a great way to meet totally new people frequently without having to jump through all the hoops of stuff like OkCupid.
I have to say I am curious about this "pivot" in how you are approaching matchmaking. It is nice to have an "out" and not waste my time if it is clear that I won't find the person attractive mentally or physically.
Honestly I think I've stuck with the site out of curiosity, and not really the expectation of having a good date. Over the past year I've had much better success finding relationships using OkCupid in NYC than your service. Mostly because I can better select dates that are attractive and interesting. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
