
We need a startup to fix online dating - fatalerrorx3
http://techbyproducts.com/we-need-a-startup-to-fix-online-dating/
======
waxman
Try Grouper (<https://www.joingrouper.com>). [Full disclosure: I'm a co-
founder].

The "browse-and-message" paradigm is fundamentally broken, not to mention a
little dehumanizing (you're kind of shopping for people, which, let's face it,
is pretty weird).

Our take is that the biggest problems with online dating are both the online
part and the dating part --- it's hard to gauge chemistry online and it's
cumbersome (and for women, potentially dangerous) to arrange a meeting.
Meanwhile, labeling it as dating increases the pressure and the awkwardness
for everyone.

Grouper Social Club sets up drinks between 2 groups of friends: 3 guys and 3
girls (or 3 guys, etc.).

There are no profiles or messages on our site. We match the groups together
ourselves using Facebook info (which overcomes a lot of biases), then take
care of all the coordination. Members pre-pay for their drink and the
experience (the only fee), confirm a time, then we give them the place to
meet.

We don't like labels, and don't think of Groupers as dates. To some they're
similar, but the expectations are importantly different. Worst case: you're
out with your friends and experience a funny story together, the average case
is a super fun night out where there are some sparks between at least a pair
of you, and the best case is, well, sky's the limit. Also, there's safety (and
less awkwardness and more variety) in numbers.

We're live in 13 major cities in the US and Canada and growing quickly. 93% of
members who go on a Grouper say they want to go on another one, and about half
already have.

Our mission isn't to fix online dating, it's to end loneliness. Specifically,
we want to help people get out from behind the blue glow of their computer
screens and actually connect with people.

Social networks and online dating sites can be more isolating than social. But
they don't have to be.

Shoot me an email at Michael [at] joingrouper.com if you have any questions.

~~~
mikeknoop
Do you guys do mixed groups (2 guys, 1 girl -- etc)? In the future? Your
messaging tries really hard not to label Grouper as a dating service but (3
girls) and (3 guys) is pretty transparent about what the intentions are for
the two groups.

Lot's of growth avenues, looking forward to seeing this grow.

~~~
taligent
If they adopt the Japanese approach then it works just fine.

Basically they aim for equal numbers of guys and girls but the protocol is
that you spend equal amounts of time with each opposite.

So it doesn't just become an awkward pair off situation.

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rm445
'A' startup? As the article notes, there have been several attempts already
and no clear winner.

Some observations about the online dating industry. There's a market
opportunity - money has traditionally been made from dating/introduction
services. They seem very suitable to move online. And they would seem to
scale: in most services people match themselves, or an algorithm matches them,
without involvement from the site staff. You would also expect network effects
to be strong (customers want access to all the candidates in their
geographical location) therefore rapid growth and huge revenue seems a
possibility in a winner takes all kind of way.

So tell me: why has the online dating market not been locked up (pace
occasional disruption) since 1999? My suspicion is the existing sites just
don't have any way to differentiate themselves from the competition that
actually makes a difference.

Online dating, if it can be 'fixed', will be fixed when someone has an insight
into the underlying social question and manages to implement something unique.

~~~
kaliblack
One possible reason the market hasn't been locked up is mentioned in the
article. Each of the services he tried had a different type of members.

I think if there's an opportunity it's not one of one-service-conquers-all.
Small niche dating services may be more effective. The main advantage is that
members start with things in common, depending on the niche. A disadvantage is
that unless the gender mix is fairly even it will die. However, you could
combine different, but compatible, communities.

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newobj
If you weren't able to get a date from any of those sites then maybe the
problem is you?

~~~
weeksie
This. A thousand times, this. Every time I read a post about someone who can't
get a date on OKCupid I roll my eyes. Then again, I live in New York so the
high population density makes it a usable site. Sure, men outnumber women and
women get more messages than men — but that's how the real world works as
well. I've approached far more women in bars than have approached me. I
imagine this is true for everybody except for rock stars, celebrities,
gorgeous people, (and introverts whose only experience would be the few times
they are approached).

The only thing that online dating gets you is an opportunity to introduce
yourself and, if it's a good service, to introduce yourself to someone who is
likelier to be what you are looking for. It's not a magic get-a-date thing,
just joining up doesn't guarantee a date, just like going out to a bar doesn't
guarantee that you're going to walk out of it with a girl or a phone number.

Attractive people get more messages? Yes, of course.

The only girls on dating sites have baggage? No more than any other single
girls (or guys) of their age. At least that's been my experience for the last
year or so that I've been single again and dating.

~~~
fatalerrorx3
It can also be based on age range, the younger you are, the less likely you
are to find success on a dating site, beings that there's a smaller dating
population in your age range

~~~
weeksie
This goes for dating in general, it's not peculiar to dating sites.

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HeyImAlex
Just limit the number of first contact outbound messages a user can send per
day to something ridiculous(like one). Response rates on free sites are
abysmally low because its not hard to write a generic message and send it out
to every person you see, poisoning the well for every poor guy writing a well
thought out message and waiting patiently at his inbox.

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thisjustcamein
I'm pretty familiar with the online dating industry both through business and
my own personal involvement. While I agree with the issues that you raise
(POF, for instance, has 6.6 guys per girls the last time I checked 6 years
ago), I don't see how a new business model will really address this.
Attractive women are being wooed all the time and that's not going to change.

I think an online speed dating service for business professionals, however,
would do well. I believe that there are services like this out there but none
of them have achieved a true following I would argue.

Imagine logging onto a site where with use of full audio and video you meet 10
eligible bachelors or bachelorettes over the course of 30 mins.

~~~
fatalerrorx3
You could limit who can contact each user based on the requirement of filling
out a "dating checklist" this means that women won't get inundated with
messages and will actually respond to those who fit her requirements.

Hey, there's your startup...video speed dating! lol

~~~
fatalerrorx3
POF doesn't make it a requirement, probably because it would create friction
in the signup process. eHarmony on the other hand, that's too many questions
and no one is going to fill that damn thing out.

~~~
vidarh
It can be done gradually:

Let people sign up without filling in much to just browse. But at each and
every step, show them some possible candidates that will be unavailable to
them unless they fill in a bit more information.

"This pretty woman? She won't let you message her unless you fill in your
birth date and it matches her preferred age range. Guy over here? Cares deeply
about your music taste".

It's no different from how a lot of these services will suddenly hit you with
paywalls to do various things. Get you fired up about contacting someone
first, and then demand just a bit more.

~~~
zensavona
OKCupid does this to some degree - you need to fill in basic info, but it nags
you to complete your profile as you message more people.

Out of all the online dating sites I've seen/used I think they are the best by
far.

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marcusestes
An unmarried woman with a child isn't necessarily carrying "massive baggage."
What a rude and borderline misogynistic sentiment.

~~~
tomjen3
In the dating world, yes she is.

It is not fair, of course, but it is the truth. Just as short guys like me are
at a disadvantage, so a women with children, people with disabilities, ugly
people, people who live at home with their parents, people who are unemployed,
old people (but this bias is mostly against women), people who are addicted to
drugs, people who have STDs, etc.

Again not fair, but the dating world is a market -- we all try to sell ourself
for the best possible offer.

~~~
manicdee
You have conflated "dating" with "picking up".

Single parent status is not baggage, it's a perk!

------
ajdecon
I agree that the issues the OP brings up are problems -- at least from the
perspective of a single man -- but I'm not sure these are problems with online
dating so much as dating itself, or the world. The male:female ratio is a
problem in most dating settings, for example.

In terms of whether online dating needs "fixed", I'd be interested in knowing
how the success rates for online dating are better or worse than current
offline methods (going clubbing, dating co-workers, whatever). My own
worthless anecdotal experience shows a much _higher_ rate of success in online
dating than trying to meet people IRL. ("Worthless" because I met my wife
online, and we naturally hang out with people who tend to spend lots of time
on computers.)

Also, from the OP: _I had average success on this service, but the reason it
probably wasn’t better had to do with the fact that the Q &A section tended to
expose character flaws that turned me off._

I think it's interesting that the OP was getting _too much_ information about
his potential partners... or at least, too much too early. Most people have
flaws, and one advantage of traditional dating is that you learn about their
flaws more slowly and have time to learn good things that mitigate them before
getting scared off.

However, I think it's more likely that people are going to have to adjust to
knowing more, rather than using services that expose less: more and more we
live our lives online, and it's very easy to learn "too much" about someone
just by using Google. We're either going to have to accept that people are
flawed, or it's going to get even harder to find partners...

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technosophics
We are in the middle of working on a solution that would bring quality to the
experience of dating. We are using creative ways to first have people learn
about themselves, discover and understand their own patterns in relationships,
and what they are really looking for in a partner (besides the obvious). Then
it provides relationship guidance and advice, through an interactive dialogue
with an A.I. built for this purpose. The matching is also different. It will
not only suggest interesting matches, but also how you may interact with the
other, and why; i.e. the different possible dynamics and the likely reasons
behind it. The method is based on solid psychology, applied in a creative way,
for the purpose of self-discovery, self-understanding in the context of
relationships. The main idea is that whoever you strongly like (or dislike)
reflects undiscovered aspects of your own self that you are working on
developing a relationship with. It also deals with issues of communication and
emotional intelligence. All in all it will provide a continuous guiding
service for people in order to find and experience fulfilling relationships.
Obviously not everyone will be attracted to the service, since it will require
some introspection and honest self-reflection, but again we are focused on
quality rather than quantity, and from our research it looks like it will
attract more women then men – which is not a bad thing :) . We’ve got most of
the self-discovery, relationship-guiding, and matching technology – with
working prototypes. We are bootstrapping at the moment, looking for help with
the back-end infrastructure, web/mobile front-end, marketing, and of course
funding. If interested, please get in touch:
<http://technosophics.com/home/contact/> Or take this survey:
<http://technosophics.com/home/survey/>

------
jarin
I'm the lead developer for Set For Marriage
(<https://www.setformarriage.com>), and we've thought a LOT about these
issues.

We do charge people a subscription fee to be able to start conversations, but
it does seem pretty unfair for people to have to pay to reply so we don't
require a subscription to reply to messages.

I agree with waxman that the "browse-and-message" thing is kind of played out
(winks are too), so we're working on some ideas to help people find partners
and interact without requiring them to fill out a giant questionnaire or spend
hours copy and pasting a message to every potential partner on the site.

------
dkarl
We need a startup to fix online dating: agreed. Part of the problem is the
overwhelming volume of attention that women receive: agreed. However....

 _But even though I received the highest response rate, I was still almost
never able to get second or third replies. Once I got a response that I
replied to, the exchange pretty much stopped dead in its tracks._

Women get tons of messages every day, as the article points out, and they
don't bother to reply unless they're really interested. I got very few replies
on dating sites when I used them, but almost every reply turned into a date.
They had already made up their minds before they messaged me. Dating sites are
not great and I would love to see something better, but the OP's experience
suggests some failure of communication peculiar to his situation, not
something from which to draw general lessons.

For what it's worth, in my experience, the women who wanted to meet me agreed
after only one or two messages. They made up their minds before they messaged
me. The women who wanted to chat back and forth were only there to chat; they
weren't actually interested in me. Rich online interaction doesn't facilitate
meeting in person. It competes with it. When it comes to efficiently deciding
whether to invest time in getting to know somebody, meeting them for coffee or
a drink risks less than an hour of your time and yields much more useful
information much more quickly than trying to get to know someone online. Women
follow the same logic men do: if they just want to chat, they chat. If they
actually think you have some potential, they want to meet you ASAP so they can
find out what you're like in person.

If I were trying to make money from an online dating site, I could certainly
convince people of the opposite. It's so dangerous to meet someone in person
before you _really_ know them... why go out and meet one guy who's probably a
dud when you could be talking with a whole bunch of cool people from the
convenience of your own apartment... and when you finally meet someone in
person, they should be a real person you have a relationship with, not an
anonymous profile. I'd do everything I could to keep them on the site, making
me money, instead of out in the world meeting people. For myself, I want
exactly the opposite. I think once I've skimmed an expressive profile and seen
a few pictures, I've already learned 90% of what is possible to learn online,
and I want to proceed as quickly as possible to an in-person meeting where
I'll learn more in twenty minutes than I'd learn in a week of chatting.

I'm not sure how a site could do better at that than Match or OkCupid, but I
can't wait to find out.

~~~
sjg007
Video chat?

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benhebert
Hard to judge baggage or anything of someone's character based on an online
profile... especially when you're creating an image that you want to be seen
as. When I was single I went on PoF to test the waters (pun intended) and it
was easy to meet women and I had a few fun experiences.

I haven't tried any of them in years, but I don't know how you evolve the
model from where it is. There are few social situations where you find a
favorable girl to guy ratio except for a college campus.

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kissrdotco
A friend of mine wrote a good series of blog posts about the issues with
current online dating sites, many of which you mentioned.

<http://gobigorgoho.me/post/5834417671/online-meeting>

His startup aims to solve these problems and is set to relaunch in early 2013!

<http://blog.acquaintable.com/>

------
aidos
There are always services like tastebuds.fm. Online dating via the medium of
your music profile. Obviously it suits a particular demographic, but that's
probably the best way for dating sites to work.

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gboning
I haven't used it myself, but hin.ge (<http://hin.ge>) went through the same
incubator the startup I work for did and seems like an interesting concept.

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mvleming
What's easier to do? Change the world or change yourself?

~~~
tomjen3
Based on what people attempt, the world.

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RawData
Try youlookgoodtogether.com. It's crowdsourced matchmaking...very interesting
idea if I do say so myself.

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j45
There's some fundamental dysfunction that needs to be addressed in online
dating:

\- Why the heck do folks use a service built by people who might not have been
successful in love? Would I use an operating system programmed by doctors?

\- How do dating sites overcome the personality shortcomings of having a hard
enough time connecting in real life, let alone the computer. In the end the
relationship is in real life.

\- People are nickels trying to get dimes instead of improving themselves.
(Analogy can be read here: [http://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com/blog/why-
wont-anyone-be...](http://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com/blog/why-wont-anyone-
be-honest-with-you/)).

\- How do you set the bar of the mindset you want to attract? Should dating
sites be encouraging and attracting people, "Love me to validate myself and my
worth of receiving love", or "I'm happy, work at being the best I can and
would be even happier with someone"?

\- People who come on a site, find love, and leave might not be profitable
customers. It's like the startup stuff out there, does much of it keep you in
a startup phase instead of moving into more?

\- In some cases, the socially challenged geeks that build it who may have
underdeveloped personalities themselves trying to help others connect. geeks
compensate for in person skills by being behind a keyboard. ie., what does
Facebook have that isn't transactional and is transformative, say, like a
successful dating match might be?

As a society, too many folks don't work on connecting to ourselves, and
through that to others. Too many don't know how to be a friend to ourselves,
have a healthy inner dialogue, and instead want someone else to know them and
love them more than they do themselves.

Maybe dating itself is the problem. Statistically fails 99% of the time. To
some it's emotional baggage collection. Some people even display their
emotional baggage in the large overpriced bags they carry. Not enough time
spent on developing one's self into their best self.

Maybe dating sites should be about dating yourself to find and become your
best self so you can connect with others doing the same and let the love
happen as soon as you learn to remove the barriers to receiving and giving
love yourself.

What do you think?

~~~
zensavona
That got heavy fast. I completely agree that the way we do dating as a society
is fundamentally broken and needs to be fixed (and I think that in some parts
of society it already is, it just depends who you surround yourself with).
However a startup can't give people emotional and introspective depth (prove
me wrong!)

~~~
j45
Haha, I don't know about heavy.

There seems to be a certain amount of self-effort, self-learning, self-
development that is necessary to understanding and relating .. to yourself,
and through it to others in a relationship.

What if a startup focused on development of one's self that in some way let
those emotional and introspective sparks happen?

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thisjustcamein
Well, good luck to you on your search, my friend!

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j2kun
Try beggarscantbechoosers.com

