I agree that dating is basically marketing for yourself.
But dating sites are there for those who are generally bad at that. The requirement of marketing 101 to be successful on a dating site kind of defeats the purpose.
Dating sites are not actually designed to help you find relationships.
They are designed to leave you constantly questioning the relationship you're in, knowing you could always find something better around the corner. They might get signups because people believe they can find a partner, but they keep customers because those people are addicted to the game of newer, "better" lovers.
It's another of many cases of businesses that claim to solve one problem, but really solve a different one that's not in the user's best interest.
Every new dating app that comes out is an attempt to make dating apps not suck. No one has succeeded so far. There are a small number of people with a ton of success who know how to market themselves, and there are a lot of good people who don't have that skill that find themselves shouting into the void.
Sure, there's a lot of clever ways to get an audience as a dating site, and I've seen many sites with clever marketing tactics. The success rate is still abysmal.
Dating sites are a stupid idea in the first place. Your system or algorithm cannot ever hope to compete with 30 seconds of face to face interaction, ideally with that first meeting occurring by way of mutual friends.
Sorry, but building a better dating web site is trying to drive a nail with a screw driver. People who need help dating need a larger and more active social circle. They don't need a dating website. Anyone trying to sell a dating site will inevitably discover they're hawking snake oil and surrender to that reality.
Respectfully, I think you're wrong on your conclusion.
There's a lack of alignment between a person's explicitly declared preferences and the things which actually make them happy. This is so ridiculously true when it comes to dating on and offline.
I think this is the real, society advancing problem on which dating centric startups should focus. I'm all for indulging people (and making a buck), but sites like this one generally are useless, depressing, and alienating to a good number of their users.
Edit:
There's also a really harmful cycle of addiction which a lot of people get into on these sites. Quite often the proprietors design their dating sites to promote such cycles, and it's more than a little depressing.
To see what I'm talking about, read Ian Bogost's Cow Clicker post [1], and then imagine that the daunting chore of participating in the "social game" is directly tied to your self worth.
At the very least please don't do that to your users.
Isn't the whole thing supposed to be a dating site? Isn't the whole point of dating to find (ie: "isolate") someone you like and go do fun things together?
OK, so let's say you've got a gun to your head and must do dating:
1). You don't have to appeal to everyone or the population average. You can start appealing to outliers in terms of viral spread ("Sure, I'll RT that I'm looking for a boyfriend, why wouldn't I?") and hope they have friends in the wider population.
2). Scalable content generation, the technique for all seasons when coming from behind in SEO. "online dating" is competitive, "20-something white guys in Ogaki" is not. Local search optimization for dating is an angle, although I know it has been plumbed before quite deeply (welcome to everything about this space).
3) See the OKCupid link bait? Think you could come up with similarly juicy headlines without the data? I'm thinking the answer is "yes", since Cosmo has done it for years. Twenty Reasons Guys Don't Date Smart Women, etc. (It will spread.)
4). Find an enemy, manufacturing them if necessary. If your marketing generates an emotional response it is less likely to fall into the background. A previously successful strategy for many dating sites has been "The world and our competitors won't let X do Y but we're different and love will win out, booyah."
5). Everybody in this space plays dirty. If you can't see the bloody knives in any competitor's hands, that is only because they're buried so deep in the body of everything right and good in the world. You will stoop to their level - and then some, because incumbents hold al the cards and their sins are buried in Google backups whereas yours will be fresh in Matt Cutts' inbox. You will be dancing on the knife's edge until you get your site burned to the ground, or you will never have enough traffic for that to even matter.
Seriously, do you really want to do online dating?
The rash of online dating startups always strikes me as a misguided use of people's efforts. I can appreciate that people think there's something they can contribute to it, and that they see it as a really positive win for social interaction (and I think people should work on what they want to work on).
But the thing is, dating sucks. Full stop. And online dating is merely trying to slightly reduce the friction for the very tiniest part at the very beginning of it. It seems to miss the whole fundamental reason why online dating is hard, which is that dating is hard, and not easily abstracted.
Online dating is a misnomer, it's basically just online meeting of people.
The fundamental thing to attack when considering dating is how to get enough people to use it and keep enough people using it; not the semantics of the site.
I think the basic problem with a site that operates like you suggest is that attractive women tend to not need dating sites. The same is true, probably to a lesser extent, of attractive men.
I made that mistake when launching my first dating website By trying to be more efficient. Unfortunately, this market is not about dating, it's a dopamine delivery market. You want to keep people long, increase your LTV, show them an ever better possible "match" so you never settle. You don't want them to actually meet someone. Hence the crappy chat features ( while the rest of the tech stack is usually pretty solid ).
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.
- 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.
I think dating sites are particularly tricky because you rely much more on active users than simply user generated content.
Think of twitter, although active users are very much important, once a tweet is there it's there and it's available for everyone so the website gets a little more valuable with every tweet that is posted. But a dating site? Someone that makes a profile adds nothing if they abandon it after a couple days!
So although I agree with you that getting users is indeed one of the biggest challenges; I think your experience was particularly bad :)
There's a market because online dating is a funnel process. In large markets, there are thousands of potential female matches and tens of thousands of potential female matches.
The funnel from initial message to reply is brutal. The funnel from conversation to date is also brutal. Relying on mass messaging has a terrible conversion rate. So you need relatively specific messages, and lot of them, to get as far in the funnel as "first date".
Some people feel that they don't have time for that nonsense. Along comes an English lit grad who needs some extra cash ...
If I were building a dating site, it wouldn't be anything like what the original author suggests. Rather than focus on matching algorithms or ways to stimulate initiative (okcupid is already reasonably good at that), I'd focus on providing value after the initial connection has been made. I don't know of any dating site that does that well, at the moment.
But dating sites are there for those who are generally bad at that. The requirement of marketing 101 to be successful on a dating site kind of defeats the purpose.
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