
VCs swipe left on dating apps - jseliger
https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/14/vcs-swipe-left-on-dating-apps/
======
blunte
Let's be honest. Many "VCs" are just geeks who got a windfall on some deal
they were involved in and suddenly find themselves in positions of
power/authority. Just because a person suddenly as money/equity to invest
doesn't mean they are Warren Buffett. Few people can truly determine the value
of a product or company in the future (even WB). Just take a look at what post
2001 dot com era has done to the startup and tech world. Uber is still
negative to an astounding degree, and countless other companies have been
funded that have no clear path to profitability. And look at the SF real
estate market. Briefly wealthy nerds have bought properties with little regard
for their real value, artificially (or realistically-temporarily) driving up
the prices. It means nothing to the few players involved because their
salaries are significant compared to the masses and the properties available.
It's the euphoria that has pushed the US into new and incredibly absurd
territory which can, frankly, allow for the absurd political climate that we
see now. This whole "VC" idea is bunk, because it is based on the "fake"
(sorry to use the popular word) economics that have created never-profitable
dot-coms that have been bought by barely-profitable dot-coms where the early
players cash out while leaving the stupid average people to suffer the AOL
sized losses.

~~~
JamilD
I've started to get the same impression. It seems like VCs, as a result of one
or two past successes, now attribute to themselves omniscience when it comes
to choosing companies.

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calcsam
"Funding for the past year is down [to $47M] from $280 million invested during
the prior 12 months. (Though to be fair,the lion’s share of that, $240
million, went to China-based dating app Baihe, a decade-old category leader.)"

In other words, when you throw out one outlier, funding actually went up from
$40M to $47M.

~~~
hkmurakami
Numbers ruin a good (or an entirely fabricated)story once again. ;)

~~~
paulddraper
There's presumably a good story -- Baihe -- it's just not the one they decided
to tell.

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joeblau
Had to drill into the article to realize "swipe left" meant "interest
declined". I met my wife right when Tinder and other dating apps took off so I
missed the whole dating app wave.

~~~
kobeya
You aren't the only one. It was not good form to write a headline that is only
interpretable by a minority of the audience.

~~~
chc
I suspect people who understand the reference are not the minority of the
audience. I've never even used Tinder and I'm familiar with the idiom just
from reading tech news.

~~~
sAbakumoff
C'mon, "swipe" was in top 10 words of the year 2015 according to Collins
Dictionary

swipe (verb): to move a finger across a touchscreen on a mobile phone in order
to approve (swipe right) or dismiss (swipe left) an image

[https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/nov/05/binge-
watch-20...](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/nov/05/binge-
watch-2015-word-of-the-year-collins)

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jmtame
VCs have never really had an interest in dating startups. They summarize it
nicely here: "Often they’re strategically mismatched. VCs look for a loyal,
active, long-term user base, and dating apps tend to attract periodic, short-
term users. Monetization is also a challenge, as paid apps have to compete
with free ones. There also are few deep-pocketed acquirers with interest in
the space."

~~~
kobeya
There's probably room for a service that doesn't just match people up, but
helps to manage the relationship indefinitely into the future. A sort of
dating plus relationship coach. I am also reminded, more cynically, of letter
writing in the movie Her.

~~~
maxwell
This is why I think Facebook is ultimately "just" the most successful dating
site/app. It matured from facilitating college hookups to sharing baby photos
with family. It's the definitive place to find out that your co-worker got
divorced, that your high school crush is single again, or that your ex moved
across the country and got in amazing shape.

The "relationship coach" is your audience of friends, family, colleagues, and
acquaintances who see quite clearly how successful your romantic life is by
what you (or your partner) share (or don't).

I can't imagine many "matching" services/features that would make very good
businesses. Unless exclusively focused on hookups, cheating, or escorts, but
then naturally a harder pitch to investors.

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spditner
Past articles[1] have gone into detail about how bad the churn and cost of
customer acquisition is with dating sites. At best if you succeed at bringing
a couple together, you've lost two customers at once.

[1] [http://andrewchen.co/why-investors-dont-fund-
dating/](http://andrewchen.co/why-investors-dont-fund-dating/)

~~~
acjohnson55
A whole season of startup podcast is devoted to following a dating startup and
there's much discussion of the dynamics of the space:
[https://gimletmedia.com/episode/origin-story-
season-2-1-2-3-...](https://gimletmedia.com/episode/origin-story-
season-2-1-2-3-4/)

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greggman
The dating app I'd like to see/make is the one that figures out how to
ban/deal with lewd men scaring away so many women.

I've heard from so many women how they tried for a few days and just got DTF
(down to f*ck?) messsges they left discussed. I'm surprised any women actually
say on the sites.

Unfortunately no good ideas spring to mind.

~~~
kirubakaran
Bayesian classifier should be able to correctly categorize these simple
overused messages, right?

~~~
nether
The problem is, sometimes they work. See
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13657508](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13657508).
One of the reasons OkCupid didn't ban duplicate messages is that often they
led to successful exchanges.

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Animats
IAC seems to be doing just fine with Tinder. IAC had Ask Jeeves, now Ask, one
of the early search engines, and they run About.com, Vimeo, and some similar
sites. They keep lumbering along with those. In dating, they're #1. They own
Match, OkCupid, Tinder, Meetic, Twoo, PlentyOfFish, OurTime, BlackPeopleMeet
and FriendScout24.

IAC is a spinoff of Barry Diller's Home Shopping Network, moderately large,
somewhat boring, and profitable. Not a bad place to end up.

Someone to approach if you have a working online business and want to sell
out.

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brilliantcode
VCs also swipe left on Blockchain. I think we are going to see more "spaces"
being abandoned left and right as we are entering the end of low interest rate
capital.

~~~
elastic_church
The blockchain model is able to self fund itself. What is called 'traditional'
is undermined by blockchain projects, so every body trying to be an
intermediary blockchain service simply subsidizes the building of tools that
accelerate their obsolescence along with the industry they were trying to
disrupt.

The VC model is a round peg for a square hole in the blockchain space.

As a single datapoint: Melonport's offering was crowdfunded in two minutes
today, and that was on top of the Ethereum blockchain. And you should watch
what is dubbed the "ICO" space.

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tropo
I'd like to see one vaguely like OkCupid, but with validation for everything.

A few things can be automatically checked, so they are free. Validating that
you can send/receive email at a particular address is such a case.

Other things cost money to check, so there is a charge, and of course a
markup. (this is the profit; nothing else to annoy people) For example, a
credit score could be validated for a few dollars. For more money, they can
fly somebody out to measure how big you are. Common things get standardized
prices, but there is no limit to what you can ask them to verify. They can
check property records, DNA, police reports, stock ownership, body parts,
ancestry... the sky is the limit, from the mundane to the offensive.

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fluxic
Lots of exceptions to the rule though. This startup just raised a massive
(private) round: [http://mashable.com/2017/02/02/hater-dating-
app/](http://mashable.com/2017/02/02/hater-dating-app/)

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rick_perez
Dating apps are kind of like social networking sites. They both take a
tremendous amount of money to get off the ground and are very difficult to
monetize.

Tinder was different because the goal is not to have a long-term relationship
(and leave the app).

