If you don't mind bit of a downer, I see three major obstacles in your idea:
1. monetization. How do you ensure your platform can at least cover its costs? The users want to know your platform wont go dark one fine day because of an overdue server bill. Better yet, that it won't get yanked like many of Google's cool projects due to insufficient profitability.
2. incentives alignment. How do you ensure the incentives for your platform are to get the users paired up permanently, which usually would mean they stop perusing your platform? Unlike typical services, a dating platform is one such that most people want to be able to ultimately do away with.
3. fulfillment. How do you make users feel they are putting in reasonably hard effort? How do you let them increase the effort if they so desire? People do feel fulfillment from putting in effort; cf. a lot of computer games that grant satisfaction through daily grind.
[edit]
A throw-away thought:
current dating platforms operate in "push" model: the singles make themselves available.
How about you make a "pull" platform - let already established couples find & match up great candidates to join their social circles - as new couples.
Making the already established couples your main users would solve the obstacles 1, 2, and 3. You would take money from the already established couples for finding & matching up new great, interesting, friendly couples for them. You would have the already established couples "grind" (put in the effort) for finding & setting up new ones.
Make it a concierge service. Manually match people and set them up on dates (maybe even pay for the dates). It's a lot more work but it's the only way to create incentives to join an empty dating site.
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.
- 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.
As someone who is in the scenario you describe (new city - don't know many people), I really love this idea. I would definitely use it if it were a big thing, but it will be a less than ideal experience in the early stages (not many prospective friends/groups).
I think one of your biggest challenges would be getting enough users to start. Also, it seems like you'd run into problems that face online dating, where if the service is successful, your users will no longer need you. Have you thought at all about how to deal with that problem?
I rather think this idea would be better deployed in an existing social environment. (Facebook, MySpace, Hi5, etc.)
I'm not sure how much people would trust a NEW dating site, especially with all the information out there about fake profiles -- how will you gain enough organic traffic not to turn people off with fake profiles? And if you use fake profiles, then it's self-defeating, and although monetization should be easily achievable, won't help people find a potential partner.
Why not a dating application that doesn't intrude in people's lives?
i don't think it is an idea that will, by itself, sustain a dating site. it is a good single facet, as things like this do help when pairing people, but it misses other facets that combine to make a good match.
i think that an interesting idea might be to combine hyper-personal data like this into a site that is more closed and private. can't freely browse people and the data they submit, you only get algorithmically matched up to a handful of people per time period.
that would address one of the bigger issues with dating sites, i think, which is that people don't tend to get good matches because they don't feel comfortable putting their entire personality out on display to the internets-at-large.
just my $0.02, though. wanted to give some kind of input since you were having trouble getting some before.
Online dating is still not as successful it could be because all data is not used. Everyone has smartphones, partners could be matched up based on the generated sensor data. There's also the low cost gene sequencing services, daters could be matched up using it.
The friendship problem cannot be tackled the same way. Women might be more open to actively seeking new platonic friendships in dating service kind of fashion, but they are less likely to be lonely anyway.
To solve the male loneliness problem would require focusing men around an issue. Men build good friendships over shared forced activities (school, work, military, political meetups, dinners with their wives's friends husbands).
To solve the loney man issue requires more of the same. Greater efficiencies in organizing economic/volunteery groups.
Crowdsourcing and crowdfunding is the answer here. Sites like mechanical turk and kickstarter with better social networking features, and finding ways to physically get people meeting together. For example, a component of kickstarter campaign might require doing a thousand man march in the capital city. Part of a mechanical turk task would require holding a protest. Similar ideas to get people excited about a shared cause meeting up at the same place.
Also, governments should consider creating an army units for elderly or otherwise lonely men. If your old and you're wife/husband died, you should be able to join the army to help in some capacity, even sitting at a desk at the barracks and filling in mechanical turk tasks.
1) Make it a one-side market. For example you could let guys set up profiles and then buy Facebook ads to advertise those specific guys ("Think Brad is cute? - He's single, click to find out more") to single girls in their areas with similar interest.
2) Leverage off of another userbase. Tastebuds.fm is a good example that leverages off Last.fm's userbase. If I wanted to take this approach I'd make a dating service for users of 23andme's genetic analysis service. Newspapers will literally fall over each other to write about a dating service that uses DNA to match couples.
3) Take the primary feature of your competitors and turn it into a weakness. Most dating websites focus on having x million members. Turn around a build an exclusive dating website ("fed up having to search through hundreds of profiles and getting most of your messages ignored?"). Only have 20-30 members of either gender at a time and only give them access for a limited period (say a couple of weeks). Have a wait-list for people who want to get on. People will want to signup even without knowing how many people of the other gender or on the system.
My dating app idea is very different from the ones I see posted here.
The usual approach is to use algorithms / self selection to find matches for people (and pesimistically, specifically matches that won't work out but will string people along just enough to keep them engaged with the site.)
I would like to see a social / gamified matchmaking service that utilizes our own social intelligence to find matches for others. People seem to love matchmaking and shows like the Bachelor/Bachelorette have been very popular, so I would imagine that there would be a set of users who would find this very entertaining.
Monetization would be in-app tips that happy couples provide to the people who matched them up (of which the app-maker would take a cut). This aligns the incentives of the app-maker with the users (rather than against them as with normal dating apps).
Feel free to use this idea, I don't want to work in the space but I would like to see such an app exist.
Certainly a nice idea. Since dating falls under (albeit a light version of) the network effect, getting started seems to be rather difficult. I'll also have to give up all of my location data? Eh ... probably not a concern for most users.
I think some useful things might be marking spots most frequented by singles and somehow incentivizing location owners to get people to sign up. A great advantage would be that the friction for signing up is very low.
I'll check it out when I have an Android phone again, but honestly don't expect more than 10 people in my area to have even heard of it.
Had a similar idea a while back. Allow people to sign up, create a profile, etc. Then have matchmakers. People browsing profiles and matching people up. If they start dating, you get rep for being a good matchmaker.
Every time I pitch startup ideas to my gf, she always tells me it sucks and gives me great reasons.. but the other day, I had this idea about dating website and she kinda liked it even though she would never want me to work on something like that.
Instead of trying to use the Internet to solve a problem that is better solved in real-life (i.e. meet people and talk), why not create a whole fiction world where you can be anything you want. Basically, it's a game where you put the profile picture you'd like to have, and the 'about me' you'd like to be. So, you talk with lots of strangers and avoid the awkard thingy while still having fun and meeting people. Of course, after some time, it will naturally start to be more intimate and it'd be possible to share more real stuff.. but that's not even necessary.
Think about all the guys and girls in couple who'd like to have fun dating again but can't because they're already in relationship? Or single players who just want to have fun?
Here it is. It's rough around the edges but I hope it inspire someone.
I agree. The only problem is that building a dating app user base is extremely difficult and capital intensive. You couldn't be cashflow positive quickly (or maybe ever).
In my large US city, even some of the big-name apps (like Coffee Meets Bagel and Match) had almost no active users.
I think it would only work if you tacked it onto an existing social network, like Instagram or TikTok, but you'd need the parent company's blessing (which almost certainly wouldn't happen).
A dating site could work sustainably if it was a site for planning date nights. Make profiles based on activities and swipe right or left on the activities you want to do.
Revenue sources would include:
- Ads for local businesses, classes, and events.
- Annual subscription which is cheaper after the first year and gives you discount codes to events and restaurants.
Once you get the site to work for date nights, let people be open to getting matched based on similar activity interests. Then you can solve the problem of two users finding a specific joint activity.
Would this solve the problem of finding people to have sex with? No, but computers are bad at sex.
Would this solve the problem married couples have of picking a place to eat? Hopefully.
Dating, matchmaking, or even just finding friends, is a perfect problem space that is just ripe for a free service to come and try to solve.
Why isn’t there a free platform for dating? (not counting the subreddits and FB groups for that, because they’re retooling something else, not built from the ground up to solve problems specific to this space).
It’s one of the biggest social issues imo, especially in cultures that restrict or repress dating in meatspace, or places with uneven demographics (e.g. there are literally millions of more men than women out there, which means that many will inevitably “die alone”)
If more people could find a suitable partner or even just compatible friends, it would make the world a much better place, if only by reducing misery (and spurring the economy :)
Why isn’t anyone else stepping in besides the wolves that just prey upon loneliness and desperation?
I have an idea I've been toying with for a dating tool (I refuse to call it an app) based on the premise that all dating "apps" and "sites" are horrible because their incentives are aligned toward wanting people to actually use them. You pretty much have ad-driven and subscription models and both have perverse incentives. Further, the whole "wink", "like" and "swipe" nonsense increases the "meat market" commoditization and dehumanization of the whole thing.
So my idea is to put all the incentives the other way. The tool is designed to operate on a budget of ~$0. I would accept donations, but otherwise have no monetization and therefore no desire to increase "engagement" of any kind. My incentive is such that I actually don't want you to interact with the tool, because that will cost me bandwidth and processing time. I will allow you to have a profile of text and one single image of restricted size, because I don't want to have to host anything else. You will fill out a multiple choice questionnaire with as few questions as I feel I can get away with to ensure at least some level of basic compatibility, and then you do nothing.
Periodically, a cron job will run and see if anyone matches, then it will send you both each others profiles (through good old-fashion email) and ask if you'd like to go on a date. If you've both agreed, there will be a sequence of messages from the system proposing date ideas, locations, and times until consensus is reached. Then it's all up to you. This is designed to ensure that you make a real human connection to the person in a real life interaction before any contact information is ever exchanged.
It probably sounds as though this sort of thing would have a hard time attracting users. I consider that a feature, because it means it'll cost less to run and it will avoid attracting ego-inflation seekers, low effort numbers gamers, and other ungenuine people.
As envisioned, I would expect this sort of thing could cover a moderately sized state on a raspberry pi.
Make it a blind dating site. Users add their name. gender, location, and email and they get matched up randomly. Let them message each other to decide whether they the randomly matched couple actually want to go on a date.
1. monetization. How do you ensure your platform can at least cover its costs? The users want to know your platform wont go dark one fine day because of an overdue server bill. Better yet, that it won't get yanked like many of Google's cool projects due to insufficient profitability.
2. incentives alignment. How do you ensure the incentives for your platform are to get the users paired up permanently, which usually would mean they stop perusing your platform? Unlike typical services, a dating platform is one such that most people want to be able to ultimately do away with.
3. fulfillment. How do you make users feel they are putting in reasonably hard effort? How do you let them increase the effort if they so desire? People do feel fulfillment from putting in effort; cf. a lot of computer games that grant satisfaction through daily grind.
[edit]
A throw-away thought:
current dating platforms operate in "push" model: the singles make themselves available.
How about you make a "pull" platform - let already established couples find & match up great candidates to join their social circles - as new couples.
Making the already established couples your main users would solve the obstacles 1, 2, and 3. You would take money from the already established couples for finding & matching up new great, interesting, friendly couples for them. You would have the already established couples "grind" (put in the effort) for finding & setting up new ones.
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