
Why investors don’t fund dating - andrew_null
http://andrewchen.co/why-investors-dont-fund-dating/
======
qq66
The thing about dating services is that they work a lot better when they're
not explicitly marketed as dating services. Facebook started out as a thinly
veiled dating service, where the primary activities were looking up people you
might want to date and communicating with them. But the product was marketed
as a more general tool, even keeping the meaning of the "Poke" button rather
cryptic. Instagram is in the same vein - a large use case is showing your
friends and acquaintances how cool and attractive you are, with the goal of
raising one's dating status. And Instagram is marketed towards making sunsets
and pictures of flowers look better, allowing users to realize for themselves
that a Gaussian blur might make their selfies look better too.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    
    
        -12log(1-x) = 0.616
    

× your customer base per year.

~~~
meesterdude
ya'll are total nerds. Have some upvotes!

edit: subtle sexism

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

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

~~~
rcarrigan87
Despite the echo-chamber of SV and tech media, most successful founders are
older, with real world industry experience.[0]

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

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

[0][https://hbr.org/2014/04/how-old-are-silicon-valleys-top-
foun...](https://hbr.org/2014/04/how-old-are-silicon-valleys-top-founders-
heres-the-data/)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

~~~
tomc1985
A lot of the questions are pretty terrible, it forces one to cram their
opinions into 2/3/4 choices. The moral quandries with "this is wrong / this is
right" are the worst

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

~~~
goatforce5
There's talk of an Ashley Madison IPO in the near future:

[http://www.bbc.com/news/business-32746405](http://www.bbc.com/news/business-32746405)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

------
mbesto
> _It’s super hard to get a dating product funded by mainstream Silicon Valley
> investors_

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

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

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

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

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

Here's some more data points. According to AngelList

[https://angel.co/online-dating](https://angel.co/online-dating) ~38,000
investors

[https://angel.co/cryptocurrency-2](https://angel.co/cryptocurrency-2) ~989
investors

[https://angel.co/travel-tourism](https://angel.co/travel-tourism) ~1,082
investors

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

------
balls187
The criticisms made against dating startups could be levied for many other
market segments as well. I imagine that if investors are shying away from
dating startups, it's for no other reason than Dating Startups are no longer
in vogue (because dating is complex), and the heard tends to stick together.
Dating is a common problem, and investors have gotten "dating app" fatigue.

Here are some counter points.

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

Making an argument based on hear-say.

> Dating is niche and has a shelf-life

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

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

Source?

> City-by-city expansion sucks

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

> Demographic mismatch with older, married investors

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

~~~
woah
Are you a man or a woman?

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

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

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

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

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

------
jrs235
Too bad this write up showed up after this episode:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9523431](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9523431)

~~~
7Figures2Commas
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8456100](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8456100)

I offered similar thoughts when Dating Ring first launched:

 _YC 's public persona is all about "hyper-growth" and building "very large"
companies[1]. But if you go through the list of companies it has funded, a
good number would have a very difficult time making a prima facie case that
they fit the profile of a business that can achieve significant growth and
scale. Dating Ring is the perfect example of that.

There are numerous challenges associated with breaking into the online dating
space generally. First, the costs of customer acquisition are typically quite
high because there's so much competition. That makes it very difficult for new
services to gain traction without significant investment in advertising.
Second, there's an additional level of churn built in to this market because
when a dating service works, it loses customers. That produces a constant need
for investment in the aforementioned user acquisition which is so costly.

More specifically, Dating Ring seems to be positioned in no man's land (no pun
intended). It can't compete with the quantity and immediate gratification of
online services that cost nothing or roughly the same, and it can't compete
with the quality and exclusivity of matchmaking services which generally have
costs signaling much higher value.

If the OP's comment is true, Dating Ring would ironically appear to be
offering the worst of both worlds by trying to package users from the former
as part of a service masquerading as the latter. Even with adjustments to its
model, the odds that this company ever achieves "hyper-growth" or becomes a
very large business are next to nil.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

------
ig1
While these are all reasonable and valid points it's missing a key one:
margin.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

------
alaskamiller
Uber is dating for drivers and riders.

AirBNB is dating for owners and renters.

Facebook is dating for content and readers.

Amazon is dating for supply chains and consumers.

Tinder is for hookups.

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

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

[http://caseysoftware.com/blog/working-for-a-dating-
website](http://caseysoftware.com/blog/working-for-a-dating-website)

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

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

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

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

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

------
yogi123
Funny thing is that dating as a primary use case led to the creation of social
networks in the first place: Friendster -> Facebook (poking, checking out
classmates) -> $223 billion market cap.

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

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

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

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

Amusing word omission.

------
ape4
But dating services can go viral. Network effect.

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

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

~~~
goatforce5
Keep in mind that Tinder is only 2.5 years old and entered what was already a
crowded market.

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

There's always room for one more!

------
graycat
Once thought about doing a match making business:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[http://tabcloseddidntread.com/](http://tabcloseddidntread.com/)

