
Ask HN: How do I make my dating app popular? - youngappdude
Me and a friend are going to be developing a dating app for some fun. The development will be difficult but we feel that getting people to actually use it will be even harder.<p>How does one get the first adopters and get people to stick to it. The app may be well made but who wants to use a social app if there a no or little users?<p>We just plan to put up a few posters at our Universities, some leaflets at some bar and word of mouth via Facebook.<p>Apart from that we are clueless? What can HN suggest?
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malgorithms
I once answered the question of our launch strategy for OkCupid on Quora
(here: [http://www.quora.com/OkCupid/What-was-OkCupids-launch-
strate...](http://www.quora.com/OkCupid/What-was-OkCupids-launch-strategy)). A
few things I can add:

1\. You're right in thinking that bootstrapping users will be much harder than
coding the site. A dating site requires not just a critical mass of users, but
also a critical mass using it in a certain location with enough people that
there are internal compatibilities.

2\. We loosely categorized our users into 3 groups. (a) those explicitly
interesting in dating. (b) those who would consider it, but who weren't ready
to make the decision, and (c) those who would never sign up for our dating
features. Our early strategy was to (try to) nail all 3 groups, arguing that
there was mobility between b and a, and that group c could still be used to
spread around dating-related toys without realizing that's what they were
doing. All this led us to personality tests and a bunch of other goofy things
that attempted to be viral but could also enhance a profile if converted. On
average, 10% of our early users became online daters on our site, and the
other 90% were spreading the word in one way or another, but we never heard
from them again. As we got bigger, we slowly shifted our message towards the
dating side of things, as those "growth hacks" diluted our message.

Of course this is not the only strategy. Consider (1) Tinder, a very simple
dating app, which has become a phenomenon. I would say it's hard just to
invent this phenonmen, though... And (2) pay dating services, which can
collect membership fees and then use the money to market. It's an expensive
game which requires a lot of cash and marketing knowledge.

Disclaimer: I left OkCupid a year ago.

~~~
the1
why did you leave?

[ ] found someone.

[ ] too much ad.

[ ] spent too much time.

[ ] other. Specify ________________.

~~~
argonaut
OkCupid was acquired in Feb. 2011 by IAC. So it's not hard to guess why a
founder would leave a company 2 years after acquisition.

------
greghinch
You're building a two-sided marketplace, one of if not the most difficult
model to get up and running in the startup world. Kudos for taking on the
challenge!

While we're not building a dating app, we are building something that in many
ways functions like one, and so we've studied the model a lot. The simplest
version of a good marketing strategy we've seen is

1) pick the side of the market which will be hardest to grow organically, but
which will drive growth on the other side (hint: in dating, it's the women)

2) pick a region to focus on. The entire US is too large to start. One region,
or a smaller country, helps you get started. (Hint: in the US, I would pick a
smallish Midwestern region with lots of universities).

3) Figure out a clever, simple marketing plan to drive your selected market in
your selected region, and go after them heavily. Obviously I'm over
simplifying this step, but it's going to need to be something which quickly
grabs the attention of your target market, demonstrates the value of your
product, and gets them to become active users quickly. If you're going to make
this product work, you should be able to figure something out yourself, as
you're the one who knows your product best.

Best of luck!

------
dirktheman
The question is not how you can get users for your app. The question is why
would someone want to sign up?

You have to think about competitive advantage. What sets your dating app apart
from existing dating sites, already populated with 1000's of profiles?

I don't have a profile on dating sites (happily married), but I can imagine
that a big problem for dating sites is people pretending to be different than
they really are. That's a problem you could solve, for instance by only
allowing profiles that have been referenced by friends/relatives. Heck, you
could throw key parties (pun intended) where people could swap their
credentials!

Or instead of a traditional dating-app, make a geisha-app. It's not a date,
it's company.

Just throwing random ideas out there, but the general idea is either you cater
to a niche, or you better have a massive marketing budget to take on the
OKCupids of this world.

------
lopatin
If you are willing to spend some money for an initial burst of users, try
advertising on [https://ads.pof.com/](https://ads.pof.com/). Plenty of Fish is
one of the largest dating sites and their self serve advertising platform is
fantastic. Make a few accounts in various demographics to see what works.
(hint, make a targeted landing page to your ad/demographic .. works better
than a generic one).

Otherwise, a web property that ranks for certain keywords can still go a very
long way. Make a blog dedicated to dating tips and advice. Write posts
targeted at people struggling to find dates, or who are not having success
with current dating sites. Write about how to use dating sites effectively.
How to act on a first date. There's lots of information on the internet
already about this, so it doesn't take too much creativity to pool some
resources together and make a quick blog post about such topics. At the end of
your blog posts, suggest your dating site/app. People who just read your
article are filtered to be your target audience and will trust your
recommendation about what dating app to join.

------
icoder
Assuming dating depends heavily on geographic (location) and even demographic
(especially age) properties, you will not need 'just' users, but also within
the same geo/demo group (ie same location, same age). You can use this to your
advantage by focussing your marketing efforts to one such group. If you take
your home town you can use local advertising (ie team up with bars/clubs) and
even your own network. You could even think about naming/framing the dating
app to the location (ie Boston Student Dating).

This gives you a better chance of success, enables you to test the overal
viability and you can learn and improve.

Since you are doing this for fun, you'll probably have reached this goal at
that point. To go beyond, you'd have to come up with something to make the
thing spread (which by itself will be rather low for a dating app, so you'll
need a trick here, or make money from your local users and use that for heavy
advertising) or convince investors based on the initial results so you can
have yourselves a marketing budget.

------
marc0
I'd say you should shift your point of view. You say: you made an app and now
you need the community for it. That's the wrong order. In your case, the
community is the most important thing, and the app is secondary. So, go and
find an existing community and turn it into 'your' community (hard!), or build
a new community from scratch by focusing on a narrow class of customers (even
harder!). Third alternative: buy a community, if you got enough vc ;-)

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jeffmould
With so many different dating apps available you will need to differentiate
yourselves and show why your app is different (better) than the others. Your
plan to guerrilla market at universities and bars is a good idea, but it will
not work if you are seen as "just another dating app". If you can show why it
is different and/or why it is better that is appealing to your target market
the rest will come naturally.

------
paulwithap
As a few other people have said, the only possible way you're going to have a
popular dating app is by having a lot of fake users in the beginning.

When Tinder first launched, at least 90% of the profiles I came across were,
after a little investigation, very obviously fake. I became suspicious after
being "matched" with every single attractive girl I "liked" after having just
created a profile. These "girls" had the mysterious ability to travel vast
distances in extraordinarily small amounts of time. One second, a girl's
location would be 7 miles away, the next, she was 1407 miles away -
incredible. If they responded at all to a message, they were vague, short
answers that had nothing to do with what I was saying. I also received 10s of
the exact same messages from different girls. They weren't trying to get me to
click links or buy things. Their sole purpose seemed to be to create the
illusion that Tinder was full of gorgeous women who wanted me. After a while
of using the app, the fake profiles dropped off, and I seemed to encounter
more real people. I thought initially, that this was because they had gotten
enough users to show me real people, but I've now noticed that any time I use
the app in a new area, I'm flooded with fake profiles and fake messages all
over again.

In short, create fake users.

------
Theodores
The thing is that if you do come up with some new way of getting untold
gazillions of people to sign up, what is to say that the people at match.com
won't be able take your innovation and get using it too?

For instance, you could have some way of promoting users that had brought more
users onto the site, e.g. if Alice gets half a dozen of her friends to sign up
then Bob gets to see Alice listed prominently in the search results. The
incentive for Alice could run deeper than that, maybe only if she has got her
friends to join will she be able to see all of Bob's pictures or learn about
his sexual tastes. There could also be advantages for Alice's friends, because
Alice introduced them to the site they might get the advantages Alice has for
a limited period of time.

As soon as you 'gamify' people will cheat, e.g. in the above example, Alice
might create half a dozen accounts, one for each of her various email
addresses. Obviously you would need a method to make this not happen, and, if
you solved it, you might have a competitive advantage. However, how long would
you have this advantage for before some developer at match.com cloned it?

------
adamzerner
1) For success to happen, you need an app that people like more than the
competition. Which requires building that app. Which requires knowing how to
program... and having an idea of what will make it better than the
competition. Start from the bottom up.

2) [http://platformed.info/](http://platformed.info/)

3) Some ideas:

\- Have the company confirm the pictures on peoples profile (that way you know
that the pictures are accurate, not from 5 years ago or of someone else).

\- Have the site compile user data, and recommend 10-20 people for a group
date.

\- Make it a dating/matchmaking a side outcome. Maybe make it like reddit.
User generated content and discussion + reputation. I would think that that
would give users a lot more data as to who they'd be compatible with
intellectually. This could also make for quite the social news site, because
people would be desperate for reputation (because single people are often
desperate to be not single), and thus site usage would be very high.

------
huragok
"Build it and they will come" doesn't hack it anymore. You have to find a pain
point to solve because yet-another-x-but-new will flop (wasting your time and
money). In short:

a) define the problem

b) get a MVP together

c) market the shit out of it

d) iterate on product

e) goto (c)

Either the product will catch on and you'll be sipping sake in SFO or you'll
fail (more likely) and drop back to (a).

Good luck!

~~~
georgespencer
Did you read his OP? He was asking about how to do c).

~~~
huragok
> Me and a friend are going to be developing a dating app for some fun.

I didn't read anything about how the OP would be doing anything novel or new
or solving problems. I just saw "we're doing something for fun".

------
ilolu
I live in India. I know that dating sites / apps don't work in India. People
are more conservative here.

Can some one from US/ Europe/ South America throw some light on dating scene
in their countries. Do the dating apps / sites like okcupid work well ? Or is
there local sites that do better ?.

~~~
blumentopf
Germany here. My impression is that there are some hotspots (e.g. Berlin) with
enough users on OkCupid that using the site actually makes sense. In the rest
of the country the user base seems to be relatively small. In areas with US
Army presence (e.g. Patch Barracks Stuttgart or Grafenwöhr Training Area) one
can find an awful lot of US expats on OkCupid, people who obviously know the
site from back home. Locals however seem to prefer the German sites. Which is
somewhat sad, I think OkCupid is unique as a mixture between a dating site and
a social network, it leads to a more casual tone there. The German sites are
mostly focussed on finding partners for longterm relationships, by and large
they seem to be not as casual and relaxed as OkCupid (e.g. parship.de).

------
lowglow
1\. Create fake profiles of beautiful women in your area™!

2\. Then pretend to be said women.

3\. Profit.

~~~
freehunter
Fake it until you make it, it worked for reddit!

Trouble is showing up to a date as a beautiful woman. That would be the
biggest challenge for me.

------
lauriswtf
Start with answering this - What problem are you trying to solve?

------
diydsp
one of my friends is really bored with the people he has searched for on one
of the big websites... he really feels like he is seeing the same people over
and over again.

and,

some of the big sites develop "characters" over time. for whatever reason.
okcupid is too "goody goody, perfect people, over-educated" for him.

e.g. the user-generated questions- he interprets as social directives. He
resents questions being painted into a corner. he resents their binary nature.

I agree with him mostly. It is clear that what sounded good "allow users to
propose their own questions" has grown into a maze of people who claim they
"like the taste of beer" or "don't". The result is the people who make it on
that site are the ones who endure multiple-choice critiques and that just
isn't everybody, man. People date differently.

perhaps even if you had no technical improvements, etc., but you could offer a
fresh new user base of people, he would be interested. so if you try to invite
people and promise them a fresh beginning - without the inertia of users of
the first generation.

Also pay attention to BitCoin. it has two parallel users: miners and buyers n/
payers. Different groups take part in different ways.

~~~
reginaldjcooper
I once read an interesting article on how OkCupid was doing question weighting
wrong because people would mark matching on factual questions (like, "What is
the largest of these? A. Elephant B. Whale C. The Moon") as being absolutely
vital to get correct. People would then end up with like 90%+ matches with
others they would not really get along with, just because of the ridiculous
weighting on those questions–it became a matching system more like, "who has
answered the same questions as I?"

------
malditojavi
Create a fake profile of Ashton Kutcher in it.

------
DaGal
Consider making some nice feature that no other service has. For instance,
user A may "secretly" mark that he likes user B. When that attraction is
reciprocal, it's made known (visible) to both of them.

That's one of the weird ideas I had while studying relational algebra.

~~~
niclasj
Hows this different from Tinder?

------
joshmlewis
Hey OP,

Please email me at hi@josh.ml. I have exactly what you're looking for but not
the development skills. I actually built an MVP last year and gained 2k users
in a couple weeks at my local university.

I'd love to chat and see if we could combine forces.

------
EventsEngage
Get tons of fake profiles of beautiful women created and keep then active and
engaging with other users. Fake it till you make it.

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the1
1\. download pictures of female Harvard students using wget and apache index.

2\. livejournal your progress.

3\. tell your friends to look at the pictures.

~~~
adityamenon
He asked how to make a dating site, not how to start the next facebook.

xD

~~~
sergiotapia
When you point out the joke it makes it infinitely lame for everybody
involved. Just let the joke be and laugh at it!

------
DanBC
Have some easy method for people to block or report others who send
inappropriate messages.

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al2o3cr
For once, a Bender reference about blackjack and hookers might actually be
relevant. ;)

