

Show HN: Dating website where ladies get paid - wiradikusuma

Happy new year fellow HNers! This is my first Show HN... and it's a dating website. The crowd here is not my target market, so I'm not looking for SEO/traffic, but looking for feedbacks. Lots of it. I'm fully prepared that I'll get bashed due to the nature of my product.<p>What: An online Indonesian dating website where the ladies get paid if their date sucks. That "paid" part is just a gimmick (the feature is not fully implemented) which seems to work. So far nobody questions the lack of implementation. If people do need it, I'll implement it.<p>Why: I want to quit my job and "do startup" but I don't have any good idea. Dating website is (saturated but still) easy to get traction. I also use this as a learning vehicle (Scala, CoffeeScript, AngularJS, Google App Engine).<p>When: I'm doing this after hours and weekends.<p>Where: http://www.ngajakjalan.com<p>How: Most likely you don't want to create an account, so please login with demo/demo. It's a real account, so please don't send message to other members from there :)<p>Stats so far: Landing page for 2 months, then 2 months running. 8k members, 85% male, 100k pageviews/month. Spending $10 daily for FB ads to get female members.<p>Specific questions: I'm thinking of raising seed money so I can quit my job and work on this fulltime. Given my situation (single, employed, solo founder) and my website progress, (1) Is this a good idea? (2) What would it take to get me there? (3) If not good idea, what are the alternatives?
======
sharemywin
Another thing to think about is dating is local so I would concentrate my
marketing on one town to add more value to your users. You might want to think
about partnering with a daily deals site and cross marketing dating type deals
to your members. You might be able to become an affiliate. review the deal and
then only forward the good date deals.

~~~
wiradikusuma
I think of dealing with daily deals site, but I don't have leverage yet (not
incorporated, small userbase). Thanks for the "review the deal" idea, I didn't
think about that! (I was simply thinking to pass everything). Regarding
locals, I pinpoint the capital city (Jakarta) in my FB ad.

------
sharemywin
I think in genral too early to tell

some questions: what's your cost per female aquisition cost? what's your cost
per male member aquisition cost? Look at montlhy active users(how many users
from last month logged in this month)

Test other advertising avenues to get costs via those channels

Do two tests(not at the same time): 1\. setup up something like adsense for a
couple of days maybe for like 10% of the male users. 2\. stop advertsing for a
month, does the site still grow?

if I were going to invest I'd like to know how are you going to make money.
how much are you going to make per user. how much does it cost to get a user?
so, if I pay for X number of users how long do I need to wait to double my
money.

~~~
wiradikusuma
I don't use AdSense because I think, "Why would anyone search for dating
websites?" as dating is more like "as you go" kind of thing. Thanks for your
advice regarding how I'm going to make money, I haven't really thought about
that. I just keep on developing and spending ads (for growth) without thinking
the other end.

~~~
djt
You should trial some adverts, hunches are great, but testing is relatively
cheap these days and can make a big difference.

Always test your assumptions.

------
tferris
How is the conversion rate of your FB ads to get female members? Or what are
your costs per female subscription?

Regarding your questions 1,2: Raising money for dating is quite hard. Still
everyone believes online dating is broken and there must be something better
but looking back at dating deals and exits (there are very few) I doubt that
you are able to raise any money with dating

~~~
wiradikusuma
Roughly $10 gets a dozen per day, so lets say it's $1/female signup. I dont
really care about males now as they seem to come "free" and I might need to
close registration for them to maintain balance.

This is an after-thought but... I heard that dating is a billion dollar
industry in the US alone, how come it can be hard to raise money for this kind
of website?

~~~
smartwater
It would be easy for some, hard for others.

------
sharemywin
Also, how big is the market. Invests want you to be able acheive revenue of
>$20 million. If we assume you make as much as facebook per year per user at
something like $1 per user then you'll need 20 million active users. If you
look at your current advertsing channels can you get there.

------
wiradikusuma
I'm thinking of advertising in magazine/tabloid, like a small box in the
corner, anyone have experience with this kind of offline-to-online marketing
like this?

~~~
Avalaxy
People have become blind to these kind of mass-marketing advertisements. If
you let a few people read a newspaper with a full page advertisement somewhere
hidden inside, everyone will just skip the ad and go to the next page. To make
things worse: nobody will even remember what the advertisement was about.

Plus it's impossible to accurately measure the results of your campaign.

------
x64arm
How do you verify that a member is female or not?

~~~
mcherm
Fraud in this area is not a major problem. Participants who misrepresent their
gender usually do not find dating success.

