
Pure Launches Sex-on-Demand App, #9 Among Fastest Growing Dating Startups - dmor
http://mattermark.com/pure-launches-sex-on-demand-app-already-9-among-fastest-growing-dating-startups/
======
schoper
The world is full of women offering sex-on-demand. At very reasonable rates.

Edit: The great Michel Houellebecq's Platform, a novel of a travel company
that revolutionizes the industry by promoting sex tourism, is a recommended
read.

[http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6040/the-art-of-
fic...](http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6040/the-art-of-fiction-
no-206-michel-houellebecq)

Sex is the great eradicator of meaning. And we all want our sex to mean
something. Hence the difficulty of being a human being.

~~~
jseliger
This was downvoted and yet seems to me a perceptive comment. Unless Pure
drastically limits the quantity / quality of men, they aren't going to succeed
because overwhelming male response will drive out women.

The developers behind Pure presumably aren't stupid, of course, and know much
more about how to solve this problem than I do. The problem most women have is
not sex, but _finding someone they actually want to have sex with_ and (who
also wants to have sex with them). That's where filtering becomes important.

~~~
girlsbonetoo
I think the "most women" mindset is where things start to go wrong with
analyses of sex. I think that there are enough people out there (men and women
both) that "large enough" subsets exist to make things like this work.

My personal hypotheses are: 1) the subset of women who want to have casual
encounters regularly is small; 2) the subset who want to have casual
encounters _sometimes_ is very large; 3) if you can reduce friction and stigma
significantly then you can activate a modest size subset of women who want a
casual encounter _now_.

\--

When I lived in NYC, I found happy casual consensual sex through Nerve / CL /
OkCupid on the same day I looked about 50% of the time I was interested
(between 5-10 successes and some awkwardness but no failures).

~~~
xxhere
You should publish a how-to guide for women. Really. Some best practices to
avoid potential stalkers and maintain anonymity. These two issues are my main
reasons for not participating in the online dating environment.

I'm afraid of traveling to somebody's place due to potential hidden cams;
thank you very much Mr. Tucker Max. I'm afraid of hosting, because if the guy
is a creep, now he's a creep with my address, and with a little digging
around, my name, which probably leads to my work. Hotels that I would decide
to go to ad-hoc are the best option, but as of now I can't spare hundreds of
dollars per encounter. Besides do hotels allow registering with a pseudonym?

So as a woman who might be open to the idea, but has the above concerns, there
really is no option for me other than a relationship (as in, vetting the guy
myself before any fun) and social contacts (people who've been vetted by my
friends).

------
olalonde
The problem with those services is that the amount of girls just looking for
sex is tiny compared to the amount of guys just looking for sex.

~~~
beachstartup
this isn't true. it's 2013. women are having lots of sex, and they're on the
internet. deal with it.

it's just that all the women are banging the same 10-20% of guys. the rest of
the guys are not getting laid, except on rare occasion, or inside of
relationships.

sex is a pareto distributed market.

long-term relationships / marriage are not.

~~~
xxhere
woman here. this rings true. i have a female friend who did online dating,
with the specific purpose of finding short term encounters. i would say she is
an 8 on every guy's scale, a 10 on most. she went after very physically fit
and intelligent guys, messaged them, never got a reply back.

~~~
xxhere
@samstave, I can't seem to reply to you, but to answer: nobody.

~~~
ScottWhigham
I'm not buying that a female "9" (on average apparently) went to a popular
dating site, messaged a bunch of guys (even 9s themselves) and received no
response. There's something else at play here that you aren't telling us or
don't know. There are lots of possible reasons no one messaged her back:

1) She messaged only a few people (small sample size)

2) She messaged only people with older, inactive profiles

3) Her information lacked a picture

4) Her profile lacked key information

5) Her picture(s) were bad

etc

~~~
bilbo0s
You forgot the most likely explanation:

6) All of the profiles for guys who are 9s that she messaged on those dating
sites were fake. If a guy is a 9 or a 10, he rarely needs a dating site.

------
7Figures2Commas
From the fundraising document:

    
    
       Our target audience is sexually active people with smartphones/tablets, who are using dating services, watching porn, buying pleasure products and escort services.
    

What could be more appealing than the prospect of hooking up with a random
stranger who's active on half a dozen dating services, frequents porn sites,
has a closet full of sex toys and, when all else fails, doesn't mind paying
for a little affection? Sounds like the man/woman _every_ attractive, sane
person is looking for a quick romp with!

------
jmtame
A few things that seem strange:

\- Where's the Y Axis on that graph? It could be 10 or 1,000 downloads and I
wouldn't know the difference.

\- #9 fastest growing based on what index? It'd be impressive to say it's #9
in the App Store under the dating category, but there's only one mention of it
being #9 fastest growing. It doesn't elaborate futher.

\- If you're going to pilot launch this, don't do it in San Francisco. There's
a reason why Tinder was launched in LA and Grouper in NYC. Girls in SF will
not use this; I talk to a lot of them because I run a dating startup and
they're already very hesitant about meeting complete strangers for drinks. If
anything, launch this thing in Las Vegas and be the Uber for prostitution.

\- There's nothing here that stands out as compelling as a way to overcome the
chicken and egg problem. A wait list is not going to solve that problem for
you.

------
navs
Is something like this going to pass the Apple approval process?

~~~
philipbroadway
Grindr, jackD, etc are in the App Store, this shouldn't be an issue

------
pkinsky
So is this Grindr for straight people?

(With some nifty features, granted)

~~~
erichurkman
There have been other apps that try to mimic Grindr (and Scruff, Jack'd,
Growlr, ...) for the non-gay/bi crowd, and this won't be the last one. The
question with any dating app/website/service (at least in our cultures
currently) is, "How will you attract and keep women engaged with the service?"
Fortunately for Grindr, that's not a problem.

That said, there is still plenty of room for innovation even with many
competitors to Grindr. Grindr seems more and more overrun with spam, bots, and
fake profiles. Hopefully they (or competitors) can create ways to deal with
these beyond just "reporting" them.

------
clavalle
They have more than just the 'more men want sex with a stranger than women'
problem to deal with.

I would think that safety would be a significant concern in using a service
like this.

------
nawitus
This PDF[1] explains the app in more detail. The PDF claims that online dating
costs $15, which is clearly false..

Interestingly, to request sex you need to buy a 24h pass for e.g. $9.99.

Apparently you need to first select attractive profiles before they can send
you a sex request.

1\. [https://www.dropbox.com/s/hd3f814nsxflnbl/Pure-Invest-
ENG.pd...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/hd3f814nsxflnbl/Pure-Invest-ENG.pdf)

------
sdoowpilihp
This does not solve the issue that men and women, in most cases, have
fundamentally different mind sets in regards to sexuality. It assumes,
incorrectly, that anonymous sex is something that appeals to a large majority
of women. I am going to go out on a limb here and say the inverse is true.

~~~
enraged_camel
>>It assumes, incorrectly, that anonymous sex is something that appeals to a
large majority of women.

I don't have any citations handy, but in several gender studies classes back
in college, I learned about research that has shown that _most_ women actually
have fantasies about hooking up with complete strangers. Where it gets
complicated is that these fantasies almost never reflect actual desire, but
rather serve as a way to enable certain feelings in the woman: excited,
wanted, dominated, etc. This is why romance novels almost never describe the
physical traits of the male character and focus overwhelmingly on how he acts
and how he makes the female protagonist _feel_. It's also why men can almost
never relate to such novels even when they read them.

------
aethertron
Tinder is one competitor. It uses much less explicitly sexual words/pics in
their promotional stuff. That seems to be something that would be more
agreeable to women (stereotypically).

But I've heard it described as Grindr for straight people. Seems it's known as
a straight-up hookup app.

[une] [http://www.gotinder.com/](http://www.gotinder.com/)

[deux]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5294253](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5294253)

[trois]
[http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/technology/jackrivlin/100009761...](http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/technology/jackrivlin/100009761/tinder-
the-casual-sex-app-that-makes-us-even-more-vain/)

------
stcredzero
The pill changed the rational cost/benefit equation for casual sex for women.
Now what we need is another pill that changes women's feelings about it, but
one that is marketed as something other than a promiscuity pill.

EDIT: The link currently returns Server Error (500):

[http://getpure.org/en/](http://getpure.org/en/)

However, if you put in [http://getpure.org](http://getpure.org) and let the
server redirect you to [http://getpure.org/en/](http://getpure.org/en/), it
works. Someone must have misconfigured something.

------
lectrick
Site is 500'ing. Oopsy!

In any event, this app won't get past the severely disparate interest in
casual sex between the sexes.

Unless men just accept that women interested in casual sex might have FAR more
conquests than they do. Good luck with that.

~~~
stcredzero
The site 500's unless you leave off the /en/ from the URL. (It's posted in the
article as [http://getpure/en/](http://getpure/en/) though.) Someone
misconfigured something. I commented about this, but then someone else
downvoted me.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6214711](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6214711)

------
callmeed
After recently reading this thread in /r/AskReddit, I'm skeptical this will
work:
[http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/1j8jkm/people_who...](http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/1j8jkm/people_whove_hooked_up_on_craigslist_what_was_the/)

A lot of bad experiences on there (at least for straight people) and, after
all, this is what Pure is trying to do ("a better casual encounters").

------
SideburnsOfDoom
They're going to have trouble with the name. Pure (
[http://www.pure.com/](http://www.pure.com/) ) is a radio company - which
means they're in the business of moving bits around and may want to have a
smartphone app for streaming at some stage.

------
rjvir
The $9.99 to request sex is an interesting way to fix the supply and demand
problem of women and men. For $9.99, you can request sex from as many females
as possible, without any guarantee that any of them will say yes. This will
inevitably lead to a lot of unsatisfied buyers.

------
ArekDymalski
Judging by the video and the deck I'd say that they're approaching a problem
that can't be solved by an app. Because it's not about finding someone to get
laid - this problem has already several solutions which are working since few
thousands years.

------
malandrew
I wonder how long until someone launches an app for couples seeking unicorns
and vice versa?

------
reader5000
Sorry, but the "government" isn't why you need an app to get laid.

------
jkscm
They could go for full adress verification like ebay does. Or customer service
that calls you 1h after an encounter if you don't "check in" otherwise.

------
aminbandali
Brave New World

~~~
gojomo
There's also 'The Circuit' in _Logan 's Run_, which actually delivers the
semi-random anonymous partner to your residence (via hyperloop tubes?):

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMlHZNMH5KA](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMlHZNMH5KA)

~~~
aminbandali
Good one! Thanks for the link :)

------
patmcguire
Does this actually exist? As in, is there a product in the wild?

~~~
klibertp
It's in 'private beta', I think.

------
cliveowen
I'm a bit skeptic, what are the chances that it hooks you up with a
transvestite? And besides, is it even legal?

Also this:

"We believe it’s natural for someone to feel a powerful sense of attachment to
a long term partner, while experiencing romantic love for somebody else and at
the same time, feeling sexually attracted to a diverse range of people."

Sounds like these guys are encouraging cheating on your spouse. There's no way
this can pass the App Store's strict policy.

~~~
woofyman
Many transgendered people consider "tranny" a slur.

~~~
cliveowen
The NOAD reports it under "informal", had it been a slur it would've been
under "vulgar". I actually check the dictionary before posting any given
comment.

~~~
cliveowen
There are many terms that minorities consider offensive, in the meantime I'll
stick to the dictionary. When transvestites will be authorities in language
matters I'll change accordingly.

~~~
jlgreco
Which dictionary? Yours is incomplete; knowing that, do you consult others?
[http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/tranny](http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/tranny)

The word _is_ a slur, and is considered such by many more than just the people
it refers to. Though I suppose nobody can _make_ you care.

~~~
cliveowen
Since it seems to be that much of an issue for you guys, I edited to comment.
That said, I don't see me switching from a celebrated English dictionary to
the laughable Wikipedia anytime soon.

~~~
jlgreco
The laughable dictionary is, at least in this case, more accurate than your
celebrated one.

Weird, that. I hope you are not forgetting that English dictionaries are
_descriptive_ , not _prescriptive_. You are going to continue having trouble
using them if you make that mistake.

