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Why investors don’t fund dating
- pimlottc 11y agoThis is a great analysis although the Silicon Valley jargon is heavy at times. Even as a fairly-regular HN reader, I didn't recognize some of these, like IAC and ARPU, and they aren't defined or linked in the piece.
- hluska 11y agoARPU is "average revenue per user", but I can't for the life of me figure out IAC. Maybe someone else can help???
- cldellow 11y agoIAC is a company who owns a lot of dating sites. Source: the article.
- hluska 11y agoThanks so much! I have absolutely no idea how I missed that...:)
- nemild 11y agoIAC is a company: http://iac.com/ http://iac.com/
- smokinn 11y agoIAC Interactive which is the parent company of most large online US dating sites (among other online properties). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IAC_%28company%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IAC_%28company%29
- KingMob 11y agoPretty sure IAC is the massive holding company (iac.com) that owns multiple dating sites, and not a business acronym. Weirdly, a quick perusal of their site doesn't indicate what it stands for.
- Elepsis 11y agoIAC has basically stopped treating its name as an acronym and now just calls itself IAC, but it originally stood for InterActiveCorp.
- clarky07 11y agoIAC is the name of a company. ARPU = Average Revenue Per User
- andrew_null 11y agogoogle is your friend.
- NhanH 11y agoThere seems to be a lot of explanation from a business-y POV as to why dating startup is hard, but I'm curious from a different POV: does dating company/apps actually solve any problem that people are having? To be more precise, dating is hard, but the difficulty is multi-facet, and I can't see an app potentially solving any of them for me. I'm a single 20s-something, so firmly in the target audience for most dating app. And I fail see the benefits of using almost any dating service from a startup out there.
- aaronbrethorst 11y agodoes dating company/apps actually solve any problem that people are having? Yes. Meeting people you're potentially compatible with. I met my current girlfriend on OKCupid a couple months ago. I'm in my early 30s, never married, and have an increasingly stringent set of requirements for a potential mate[1]. Meeting people I find interesting is challenging. [1] Half-jokingly, you could summarize this as a rabidly liberal ivy-educated tenure-track professor, as those are the people with whom I've had the most chemistry.
- foldr 11y agoRabidly liberal = professes to care a lot about the poor and disadvantaged, but finds the prospect of sleeping with one of them unthinkable.
- aaronbrethorst 11y agoI'm not entirely sure what you're trying to say, but it sounds kind of like an unnecessary personal attack.
- foldr 11y agoIt's not really a personal attack. Many people wish to date only within or above their social class. I'm just questioning whether this attitude is compatible with being "rabidly liberal". (Unless what you're saying is that while you personally are not rabidly liberal, you want to date someone who is.)
- ams6110 11y agoHow about the elephant-in-the-room reason, the sites are overwhelmingly used by creepy male weirdos and VCs don't want to be anytwhere near the scene when a serial killer uses the service to pick his victims.
- jrs235 11y agoToo bad this write up showed up after this episode: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9523431 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9523431
- 7Figures2Commas 11y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8456100 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8456100 I offered similar thoughts when Dating Ring first launched: YC's public persona is all about "hyper-growth" and building "very large" companies[1]. But if you go through the list of companies it has funded, a good number would have a very difficult time making a prima facie case that they fit the profile of a business that can achieve significant growth and scale. Dating Ring is the perfect example of that. There are numerous challenges associated with breaking into the online dating space generally. First, the costs of customer acquisition are typically quite high because there's so much competition. That makes it very difficult for new services to gain traction without significant investment in advertising. Second, there's an additional level of churn built in to this market because when a dating service works, it loses customers. That produces a constant need for investment in the aforementioned user acquisition which is so costly. More specifically, Dating Ring seems to be positioned in no man's land (no pun intended). It can't compete with the quantity and immediate gratification of online services that cost nothing or roughly the same, and it can't compete with the quality and exclusivity of matchmaking services which generally have costs signaling much higher value. If the OP's comment is true, Dating Ring would ironically appear to be offering the worst of both worlds by trying to package users from the former as part of a service masquerading as the latter. Even with adjustments to its model, the odds that this company ever achieves "hyper-growth" or becomes a very large business are next to nil. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBYhVcO4WgI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBYhVcO4WgI None of this means that the founder hasn't experienced sexism, but she seems far too eager to ignore the inconvenient fact that some early traction and an impressive team don't necessarily mean you have an investable business.
- birken 11y agoThere are also many free alternatives which are very good. I'm not suggesting something like Tinder or OkCupid are perfect, but both of them are fully usable for your whole dating lifecycle without ever having to pay a cent (both of them have premium options, but they are entirely optional). Maybe IAC will change that at some point, but they haven't thus far. Dating is also always going to require work that can't be replaced with money. I can throw money at my laundry, my meals, my house cleaning and completely outsource them. But with dating, regardless of how good the site or matching is, I'm still going to have to meet the other person and have to do most of the "dirty work" involved with dating myself. So I'd think that fact limits the upper bound of money they can charge and upper bound of money a dating company can make.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- beachstartup 11y agoanother problem with dating is simply throwing money at the problem actually decreases the quality of the results! it's easy to go out on tons of dates with gold-diggers, or the male equivalent, moocher deadbeats. unfortunately people get tired of both very quickly even though on paper it sounds like a lot of fun (dating exciting, interesting losers).
- danieltillett 11y agoIs there any reason the term gold digger can't apply to both men and women? I do agree they are to be avoided as I have yet to meet one even slightly interesting.
- sliverstorm 11y agoThere will always be some work component for the user, but a site that is so good at matching that every date you go on is a great match- that site is worth a lot of money, because a great date doesn't feel like work. No one knows how to do it yet, but it would be very valuable. Much like a perfect movie recommendation engine.
- ape4 11y agoBut dating services can go viral. Network effect.
- beat 11y agoAnd what are the odds of that, in a field already saturated with both successful, established competitors (OKCupid, Tinder, EHarmony, etc) and a thousand other would-be viral newcomers? And even if you could overcome the competition, you still have all the other problems Andrew Chen wrote about... how do you make money? How do you grow without spending a fortune? How do you exit?
- goatforce5 11y agoKeep in mind that Tinder is only 2.5 years old and entered what was already a crowded market. But they had a new take on mobile dating and managed to find room in the market. There's always room for one more!
- beat 11y agoThe problem is, founders tend to try to solve problems they've experienced and understand. For the twenty-somethings that are the public face of "startup founders", they may not understand international trade or enterprise health care or other big problems, but they understand dating. So they write dating apps. And then, by the time they've acquired enough real-world professional experience to actually understand some interesting and high-value problems, they have a mortgage and kids and don't want to eat ramen like they did when they were 22.
- balls187 11y agoAs someone working on International Trade, I will say Dating is an interesting and big problem. Partly caused by the rise of online dating, but also because The world is moving in one direction, and effective dating is still stuck in the old way of doing things.
- beat 11y agoThe problem is, the only part of dating that can be obviously optimized is meeting new people - increasing the size of the pool, and increasing the quality of the pool (and in the case of Tinder, increasing the accessibility of the pool by optimizing the mobile experience). I've been married for 22 years, and introduced couples who wound up getting married themselves. Relationship chemistry is difficult and tricky business. Large parts aren't quantifiable. For my own marriage, it really boils down to my spouse keeps me stable, and I make her take risks. We're better people together than we are individually. That's not something you can solve with an app.
- ci5er 11y ago> they have a mortgage and kids and don't want to eat ramen like they did when they were 22. Not only that, it's very tiring being an old fart and being told that you don't "get it" by a 27 year old VC who does want to fund an app. Maybe even a dating app. OR being told you don't "get it" by a young Stanford grad that really thinks it would be cool to rebuild an entire 3M patient record data set in MongoDB and access it with something written in Javascript on NodeJS. Fun times.
- solve 11y agoCurious to point out that Tinder & clones found a solution to the dating churn problem: - Don't target people for whom success in the app will make them want to churn = people looking for a public committed relationship. - Target people for whom success will make them want to use the app more = people looking for secret private hookups!
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- tlb 11y agoHe botches the math. 20% monthly churn means you have to replace your customer base 2.4 times over a year, not 8 times. But the conclusion is the same: CAC > LTV.
- shasta 11y agoI assume his formula (1+monthly_churn)^12 – 1 was based on a misremembering or misunderstanding of annual churn = 1 - (1-monthly_churn)^12.
- andrew_null 11y agoOP here. You're right, I'll update for math.
- mbesto 11y ago> It’s super hard to get a dating product funded by mainstream Silicon Valley investors Huh? I've seen quite the opposite. Anecdote: The League [0]. $2mil in funding without the existence of a product or a team (when it was funded). There's some very mainstream investors on that list too. Investors who don't invest in dating apps don't do it because they know the problem never gets fixed. Investors who do invest in them, know they can sell to IAC. As I've heard from a prominent VC who is friendly with the Match.com board (paraphrased) "The whole dating app market knows that at scale finding someone on a dating app is statistically no different than finding one at a bar. We simply making going to the bar easier". [0] - https://angel.co/the-league-date-intelligently https://angel.co/the-league-date-intelligently
- andrew_null 11y agothat's one data point. Not saying it never happens, and in fact, Dating Ring raised $500k or so. But here's a lot more commentary on the topic: https://www.cbinsights.com/blog/dating-startup-venture-capital-funding/ https://www.cbinsights.com/blog/dating-startup-venture-capit...
- mbesto 11y agoSo Shasta, IDG, Cowboy, XSeed, Khosla, Lowercase, etc are not mainstream? Here's some more data points. According to AngelList https://angel.co/online-dating https://angel.co/online-dating ~38,000 investors https://angel.co/cryptocurrency-2 https://angel.co/cryptocurrency-2 ~989 investors https://angel.co/travel-tourism https://angel.co/travel-tourism ~1,082 investors Yet the market for Travel is $300b (online) and the dating one is $2b (online). How does that constitute as investors not wanting to invest into dating startups when there's 38x as many investors (by absolute numbers) as travel and yet the market is 150th the size? Seems like it's quite the opposite, no? If anything the talking point here should be "why are so many people investing in dating apps when their returns aren't great?" It'd be also helpful to define what you consider "mainstream" before drawing a conclusion...
- TimPC 11y ago
- alaskamiller 11y agoUber is dating for drivers and riders. AirBNB is dating for owners and renters. Facebook is dating for content and readers. Amazon is dating for supply chains and consumers. Tinder is for hookups.
- ig1 11y agoWhile these are all reasonable and valid points it's missing a key one: margin. If you look at successful SaaS businesses users who pay <$50/month are pretty much always loss leaders. Almost all the money in SaaS is in enterprise and large customers. It's very hard to make subscription work for consumer SaaS businesses simply because the margin between CAC and LTV is so small. Gaming (ala World of Warcraft) has shifted away from subs to IAP because it's easier to lower CAC through making a product freemium than to increase LTV. Commercially successful dating sites have become so through increasing LTV by locking customers into long term contract and reducing CAC via shady tactics to increase conversion. Neither of which many investors want to be associated with.
- andrew_null 11y agoI actually specifically talk about CAC and LTV and why enterprise/SaaS can drive higher revenues over time. There's a whole section for it.
- mastermojo 11y agoThe 5% churn = 79% annual churn is incorrect. Churn doesn't compound, because after churn your user base is smaller and 5% of that becomes a smaller number. It is actually 0.95^12=0.54 (5% churn/month = 46% annual churn).
- one-more-minute 11y agoThat formula is more correct, but only assuming you don't replace any churned customers – or at least, replace them all at once at the end of the year, which seems like a pretty unreasonable assumption to me. If you replace customers every month then the number leaving per month is constant, so you end up churning 0.05×12 = 60% of your userbase per year. Edit: The 12x model is also pretty coarse, but you can take the limit of continuous replacement, and you end up churning -12log(1-x) = 0.616 × your customer base per year.
- meesterdude 11y agoya'll are total nerds. Have some upvotes! edit: subtle sexism
- abandonliberty 11y agoYou're assuming no replacement. I think the calculation runs like this as per[0] 5% => 1/.05 = 20 months average lifespan = 1.67 years => 1/1.67 = 60% yearly churn. [0]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Churn_rate#Churn_Rate_of_a_Customer_Base http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Churn_rate#Churn_Rate_of_a_Cust...
- teej 11y agoRealistically you are adding more users each month. A business that is not adding new users each month is going to be out of business.
- andrew_null 11y agoThanks. I did totally botch the math, I typed this up in one go and mixed up the formula, thanks for pointing it out. Updated to be more accurate.
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- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- lifeisstillgood 11y agoDating has always been a game of breadth first search and sampling with rapid feedback. The "promenade" (a town or two would meet up, single boys circled clockwise around a circle of anti-clockwise girls) was commonplace in eighteenth and nineteenth century Europe. In the end though, most business and consumer interactions at least begin with something very similar to dating. So solutions found in "proper" dating sites ought to be translatable to sales and marketing apps Even advertising is a weird form of one sided dating, with the most promiscuous and least picky self selecting for paid exposure to man y many potential new partners.
- mml 11y agoMy takeaway from this article is that Ashley Madison is a great investment. No churn, comprehensible to investor class, generally high disposable income customers. Hmm.
- goatforce5 11y agoThere's talk of an Ashley Madison IPO in the near future: http://www.bbc.com/news/business-32746405 http://www.bbc.com/news/business-32746405
- andrew_null 11y agoUnfortunately there's some morality clauses in many investment funds that keep them from investing in something like that. Same class as porn, gambling, etc. Might be great for an individual investor though.
- nostrademons 11y agoDating belongs to a category of industries that also includes jobsearch/careers, education, fitness, and socializing. The characteristics of these industries are: 1. They are broad, holistic consumer problems where a success metric might be clearly defined (find a spouse, get a job, earn a degree), but the steps to get there aren't. 2. There is a social status component: people (rightly or wrongly) make status judgments about your life outcomes. 3. Success means you don't need a product. There's a big mistake that many rookie founders make with these industries (and I'm speaking from bitter experience founding a career-guidance startup): You can solve people's problems, but you can't rob people of their problems. I met my fiancee on OKCupid. I met her on OKCupid. But I did the hard work of living an interesting life and adjusting my expectations to reality on my own. We did the hard work of earning each others' trust and respect, building a relationship, and overcoming our differences together. We deleted our OKCupid accounts about a month after meeting. Similarly, someone who gets a job through LinkedIn gets the job themselves, LinkedIn doesn't get the job for them. They have to do the hard work of building the skills and meeting the qualifications themselves. They need to build their network themselves. They impress the hiring manager and interviewers themselves. LinkedIn is a tool for managing this, but it is not and cannot be the reason for their success. A lot of founders look at hard problems like dating or unemployment thinking "This sucks. It shouldn't suck. I'm not going to rest until everyone has the perfect spouse, perfect job, perfect skills, etc." They don't realize that this is not a problem they can fix. If they could fix it, it would rob their customers of their humanity, of a lot of what makes them real. The reason we choose people as employees, as spouses, and as friends is because of things they do and challenges they overcome, not because of products they use. Successful companies in these spaces realize this and focus on one individual sub-problem they can solve to make people's lives easier. Tinder won't get you into a relationship, but it shows you people of your preferred sex. Indeed also shows you options, but getting the job is your responsibility. Google has done wonderful things for self-education by making the whole web available with a few keywords. LinkedIn and Facebook started out as great rolodexes, but then (IMHO) have been steadily ruining their products by trying to creep into more and more of my life.
- ryandrake 11y agoTrue, there is currently no app or web service that can do all the work of getting you a job, or getting you a girlfriend, or whatever, from start to finish, but that doesn't mean it's impossible. It only means that particular app doesn't exist yet. Whoever cracks a nut like that can name their own price.
- haritpathak 11y agobecause its a sham business.
- balls187 11y agoThe criticisms made against dating startups could be levied for many other market segments as well. I imagine that if investors are shying away from dating startups, it's for no other reason than Dating Startups are no longer in vogue (because dating is complex), and the heard tends to stick together. Dating is a common problem, and investors have gotten "dating app" fatigue. Here are some counter points. > I’ve heard [Churn] numbers as high as 20-30% monthly Making an argument based on hear-say. > Dating is niche and has a shelf-life So is the market segment for weddings, and newborns. Underserved niche markets are ripe for "disruption" which follows with it--investment. > Dating products have historically depended on paid acquisition channels to build their customer base, Source? > City-by-city expansion sucks It's an extra challenge, but ubers, and airbnb's and many other marketplace as a service have figured it out. > Demographic mismatch with older, married investors While there are investors whose methodology precludes them from investing in markets that have not bearing on them, it's probably safe to assume at one point in their life, they had to date.
- svalorzen 11y agoIsn't considering churning in dating bad kind of like saying that a supermarket or restaurant shouldn't give much food to their customers otherwise they'll be sated and won't eat anymore? It seems to me that it's the opposite, mating for humans is such a basic instinct that there will never be a shortage in the market, considering also that new humans that want to date pop up at a pretty much constant rate.
- azernik 11y agoThe problem is not at all like restaurants. If a restaurant gives someone good food, they'll stop eating and buying today, but will probably be back tomorrow or later in the week. With a dating site, if you're successful, you probably won't be seeing that customer again for at least several months, possibly forever. Sure, new people are entering the dating pool all the time, but the marketing effort required to constantly replenish your userbase at those levels of churn is incredible.
- anovikov 11y agoI don't get the 'shelf life' argument. Most people are constantly on dating sites to keep meeting other people (maybe under fake names if they are already married).
- caseysoftware 11y agoI wrote about this last month.. with dating sites, losing is losing while winning is losing bigger: http://caseysoftware.com/blog/working-for-a-dating-website http://caseysoftware.com/blog/working-for-a-dating-website
- HeyLaughingBoy 11y agoOutside of deliberately "tainting" matches, I don't really see a big problem with what you said on your blog. Back when I was in the dating pool, it would have been nice to get matches on all checkboxes, but life doesn't really work like that. Nobody's perfect and if you go onto a site expecting a perfect match (yeah, I'm sure many, many do so!), you're going to be sorely disappointed. e.g., I hate cigarettes, but I married a smoker. In this case love made me see past something that would have been a dealbreaker. I'm an atheist, but I've dated religious people. But to the point about losing customers, that's an interesting one. One the one hand, the successful matches will probably send business your way, but will they make up for the ones you lose due to "success?" I don't have data, but my gut tells me that even with great matching software, it will take people so long to meet someone who causes them to stop using the site, that you're better off giving them great matches to keep them coming back until that happens.
- yogi123 11y agoFunny thing is that dating as a primary use case led to the creation of social networks in the first place: Friendster -> Facebook (poking, checking out classmates) -> $223 billion market cap.
- eonw 11y agoi think part of the problem is the bad taste anyone would have in their mouth after using any of the obviously fake dating sites that have existed to date. as the majority of dating sites are littered with vast amounts of fake or ancient profiles, after a person has been through a few, they usually write them all off as fake or poor quality. its just an industry, much like adult, that collectively has not done itself many favors in the eyes of the general public and past customers. the other issue with growing a date network is the fact that it is a hyper local focused market, so unless you have a good regional marketing and roll out plan, traction will be hard to gain. these two problems coupled make it a pretty tough nut to crack. reeducating, recreating trust and moving market by market is going to a cost a bit. the good news is, members tend to stay around a while, in fact often times for a few months after they have found a new person to date. If you want MRR, dating is even better then porn. one thing that was good for the market was the disappearance of myspace and aol, both of which allowed for searching via zip, dating status and age... making them free places to find possible dates. source: used to work in the web based dating industry.
- graycat 11y agoOnce thought about doing a match making business: (1) There are lots of singles, and the number is not going down. Sure, each year some get married, but others come of age. (2) Potentially there is a lot of money in the match making business at least in the sense that most young people, especially the women, are highly motivated to get a match. Let's support this claim: The women are motivated by ballpark $10,000 to $60,000 a year and are spending that now. How? Sure: College. It's still the case (blame Mother Nature) that heavily women go to college to get their Mrs. degree and otherwise their teaching certificate or RN. Feminists, aside, that situation won't change soon. Maybe some people like this situation and maybe some don't, but, still, blame Mother Nature. But college is a poor place for young women to get their Mrs. degree: Why? The male students are nearly all too young, too poor, and unemployed. Other main competition: Bars. Bummer. What Mr. Right wants to meet his Angel in, what, what the heck, a, what, a bar! Look, guys, neither the bars nor the colleges are on the way out of the match making business from customers getting married. So, why conclude so soon that a match making service has to be on the way out of business from losing customers from making matches? Match making better than college and bars: The woman can be pretty and the man, older, ready to be good as a husband and father, that is, someone the woman will have a super tough time meeting otherwise. This is a very old story, not going away soon. I remember: In college, the girls wanted nothing to do with me. But nine years later I drove my new, high end Camaro back to my college to look up some stuff in their library, and walking from my car to the library, for the first time, from 60 feet away, I got a really good look from an undergrad woman. That's the truth, guys: The car and my age, and that was enough -- I passed the first two filter questions on her list for Mr. Right. Blame Mother Nature. Fathers? They would be better off saving on college tuition and getting some really good match making for their daughters. Big, untapped, totally natural market, very poorly served otherwise: Start with the women younger. Example: Lady Di. When she was 15, she decided that she would marry Prince Charles. About five years later, she did. Mother Nature says: Girls 12+ are thinking about husbands. So, by age 15-16 they might be ready for a Sunday dinner at home with a candidate Mr. Right, late model car paid for, house bought, cash in the bank, good job. Then 2-4 years later, she gets married. In human history, this is not nearly a new idea, but a good match making service -- and it would have to be really good -- can be one of the best ways to make this work for the girls/women, their fathers, and the men. (3) How to get new singles to replace the ones that get married? Sure: Go to singles groups; the standard is church youth groups. Churches are smart enough to invest in the future -- have married members who make more members. Another way? Sure, hold singles parties, eventually invitation only. So, meet "the best people". So, much cheaper than a high end country club or yacht club but with potentially even better results. (4) Barrier to entry. Sure, match making is necessarily nearly a local business. So there is a geographical barrier to entry. So, get the best collection of singles in one area and have close to a natural monopoly. Of course, the software doesn't have to be local.
- endgame 11y agoI don't care how good your article is, if you pop up a subscribe box over the content I'm not going to read it. http://tabcloseddidntread.com/ http://tabcloseddidntread.com/
- Beausoleil 11y agoDating apps should have a bright future here in the US thanks to the sterilization of the American work force. We have women like Ellen Pao to thank for that. Men are rightfully too afraid of the legal consequences of hitting on female co-workers with HR policies like "no unwanted sexual advances." How do you know an advance is unwanted until you try?
- fredkbloggs 11y agoThe churn argument overlooks the fact that there's a lot of repeat business. I know plenty of people who have been using one or more of these services literally for years. IAC seems to have figured out something the other investors have not, which is how to capture that segment of the market and keep them coming back. It seems to have something in common with slot machines and other casino and freemium games: you have to give people enough wins to keep them playing but not enough that they actually get what they want.
- __z 11y agoReally interesting analysis. I always wondered if the general quality of online relationships is less than those formed elsewhere. I mean, if you found your partner on a dating site I wonder if you are more likely to break up because you know there is a whole pool of singles just waiting to message. If you don't have a buffet of potential partners to choose from you may be happier?? I am reminded of Dan Gilbert's research - seems it may apply. I know that online dating was a horrible experience for me. I felt I was becoming way too picky and judgemental trying to pick people to go on dates with. I also knew I couldn't judge chemistry and compatibility through someone's profile so the whole thing was pretty frustrating. I ended up meeting the person I married totally randomly one day when I wasn't looking. Obviously I am not saying all relationships that were formed online are terrible or anything - I'm talking generally.
- woah 11y agoAre you a man or a woman?
- qq66 11y agoThe thing about dating services is that they work a lot better when they're not explicitly marketed as dating services. Facebook started out as a thinly veiled dating service, where the primary activities were looking up people you might want to date and communicating with them. But the product was marketed as a more general tool, even keeping the meaning of the "Poke" button rather cryptic. Instagram is in the same vein - a large use case is showing your friends and acquaintances how cool and attractive you are, with the goal of raising one's dating status. And Instagram is marketed towards making sunsets and pictures of flowers look better, allowing users to realize for themselves that a Gaussian blur might make their selfies look better too. Huge numbers of products are marketed towards increasing one's attractiveness in some way, whether shampoo or automobiles or clothing, and outside of Axe body spray, very few of them are explicit about it. There's no reason that websites wouldn't follow the same script.
- sridca 11y agoVery interesting analysis. It seems that as a general rule leveraging sexuality and power to promote something is effective as long as that association remains covert.
- bali 11y agoI think that has more to do with how publicly one has to use/consume the product. E.g. most people don't like to tell their friends that they have a sexual toy at home, or that they like to binge eat, or watch porn or do something else that is considered shameful once exposed publicly. However as long as it's not a social product (e.g. porn sites or the axe deo), it's fine, since they do it privately. The problem with online dating is that it exposes one's intentions more publicly.. The embarrassment factor is somewhat declining though - according to Pew Internet's online dating survey it was 21% in the US in 2013 vs. 29% in 2005. However one has to keep in mind that what Pew measured is agreement with statements such as "Do you agree that online dating is a good way to meet someone". So you might say yes since you have a friend who did it, but you may still not register yourself. The latter has some strong support if you look at how many people use online dating, which is only 11% of the population and something like 40% of singles if I remember correctly. These numbers contradict to the notion that it's ok for the majority to date online, but the tendencies seem to go in that direction [source: http://www.pewinternet.org/2013/10/21/online-dating-relationships/ http://www.pewinternet.org/2013/10/21/online-dating-relation...]
- rdl 11y agoI wonder if there's a market for angel investing (w/o followon) in dating startups SPECIFICALLY to become friends/familiar with great early-in-career founders, to try to invest in their second, presumably non-dating startup. i.e. throw down $25k on whatever valuation purely to build a relationship with 10 teams/year, with the hope one might survive as a business, and one or two might be stellar teams who fail for reasons specific to dating, but will come to you first when they do their next startup. $250k/yr isn't that expensive, and you could pre-screen by just investing in 100% of the YC dating-or-adjacent companies. Extra points for going out of your way to be helpful vs. maximizing your return, and being super helpful during inevitable wind-down.
- vannevar 11y agoA more obvious reason that dating sites don't get funded is that they're uniformly terrible. No one understands dating well enough to create a service that works reliably, and according to Pew Research fewer than 1 in 4 online daters actually find a long-term relationship online. So the sites become an exercise in hand-waving, and I can understand why investors are reluctant to invest in what boils down to pure marketing, the service equivalent of a Pet Rock.
- rebelidealist 11y agoDating is a massive business. A major part of our economy thrives around dating. People who don't believe you can charge for it are not creative. It's true that we don't like to pay for membership, but the service can charge for activity tickets such as events, movies, dinners etc.
- tiatia 11y agoI doubt that. As soon as your product has momentum investors will shit you with money. The problem is the hen egg problem. Same with ebay clones. You don't have users and new users are turned off by the fact that you don't have users.
- adamzerner 11y agoTo me the main points seem to come down to market size. My impression is that the points made are valid, but that the market is still big and unsaturated enough for there to be a ton of opportunity.
- dcre 11y ago> Most investors who can write checks (as opposed to associates) are older, married, and kids. Amusing word omission.