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According to AlarmClock and Red Herring, background-check firm Verified Person has raised $12 million.
The money came from Sevin Rosen Funds and Rho Capital Partners. Verified has raised a total of $14.5 million since it was founded two and a half years ago.
CEO Tal Moise found out how difficult online dating can be the hard way, when found out his first date was married, from her husband.
Verified tried to enter the online dating space two years ago, along with competitors such as Trufina. Most of the background check companies have gone on to other markets after running into myriad issues trying to offer their services to dating sites.
Verified’s focus is currently on the corporate world and government agencies.
It’s mystifying why online dating sites have dragged their heels when it comes to background checks. Here’s an opportunity to make existing members feel safer, gain new members who want a safer dating experience, and increase revenue.
I’ve heard arguments about integration costs, which have plummeted. Then there is the concern of the validity and coverage of the data-sources. No service is going to be 100% accurate, but no dating site should choose a background check company based on solely on their data.
Cost to customers has been an ongoing concern as well. Casual daters are much less likely to purchase background check services. Serious daters have shown they will pay. Market the services to your paying members first, bundle background checks during signup and upgrades, or strike a deal with a company to provide free checks for a certain number of your members.
Many in the industry believe background checks are too complicated for something as simple as online dating for the time being. It’s also difficult to provide solid metrics that show that offering safety services will increase revenue, which is all dating sites really care about in the end.
True.com was smart to be the first popular dating site focus on safer dating, it was the execution, legal tangents and poor marketing that hurt them in the end.
My crystal ball sees a simpler, more cost-effective safety check bundled with other services in 2006. Dating sites that market background checks effectively stand to win business from other sites. Which large dating site will stand up and be first remains to be seen.
[tags: verified+person]
Category:Safety Tags: SafetyBlog reactions
2 responses so far ↓
1
Dan (Check me out!)
// Jan 19, 2006 at 1:37 pm
In tune with it being the “web”, there are other services that online daters can use to “vet” their potential dates.
Short of a full on background check, one thing they can do is see if a prior date had said anything about the potential date.
At relationslip.com, that is just what people can do: after you go on a date, you fill in a survey about the date, rating the date on various dimensions. Over time, you get a picture of a person, their reputation. At relationslip.com, you can lookup your potential date’s reputation and see if a date is worth pursuing or there are some red flags raised.
While this stops short of a full on background check, it does give you more information than you knew before. Reputation is the key.
2
Heather (Check me out!)
// Jan 24, 2006 at 12:30 pm
Matchinform.com offers a rating system an apparently has grown fast, the data base must be large because i have located dates’ reports filed by others. It seems they have done a pretty good job of filtering out gossip and revenge and allow for clear, important information to be passed around that is actually helpful to daters.
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