Ever since Jim Safka at Match.com said the number one demand from members was help with online dating, several companies have emerged to provide dating advice.
We have videos from Dr. Phil, live coaching from any number of people and now for $19.99 a month Econfidant will provide one-on-one dating advice via email.
There is certainly a market for relationship help, in fact there are many companies and coaches that provide these services, via phone, email and in person. Keen.com did this with Match.com for a while, providing a selection of advisors based on your specific criteria.
Perhaps Econfidant has found the right price point and dating sites are at the pain threshold where a subscription-based help system makes sense.
Oh the stories I could tell. Don’t hold your breath when it comes to the glacial pace of partnering with online dating companies, they are as skittish as they come.
Em & Lo pioneered the online dating help market and their original SpringStreet profile remains the shortest and most revealing I’ve ever seen. Those were the good old days.
Technorati Tags: econfidant
Related Posts
Dr. Phil on Match.comOnline Dating Links for Thursday April 9 2009
Match.com and Meetic Announce Latin America Partnership
Mysterious caller
My Little Dating Buddy
{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
You can add eHarmony to this is too, they just recently launched their eHarmony Marriage service.
This is what is done in my forums. I have over hundred thousand examples of people asking for help, and then getting pages of advice. Why would anyone pay for a service like this, when they can get the raw opinions of thousands of users with the click of a mouse?
There is a great number of people who don’t want the 1,000 opinions from 1,000 folks. That’s not personal. It may be helpful to the kind of people who value a broad spectrum of advice, no doubt from the useful to total junk given the quality of most boards. If they like it, fine but there is an entire market of people who would never in a million years think of airing their dirty laundry in front of hundreds of thousands of people. Think of psychologists, would you want 1,000 of them telling you what to do in a web forum? Wait, don’t bother answering that.
You are right… But many who don’t ask the questions will just search for others who asked the question. At the end of the day, it becomes extremely hard to monitize. Everything on the site is a trade off and when i add another link i have to take one away. This is similar to self helf books, deanglo etc.
At $20/mo., how can econfidant offer personalized service? Seems like personalized, unlimited service is a very high cost business model.
Sage dating advice is always at a premium. Look at Dr. Phil or Dr. John Gray. Dr. Gray even has teams of coaches that teach his Mars/Venus theories, which is a lot more valuable than sifting through random message board postings.
I’ve been doing online dating coaching for two years now and E-Cyrano will be expanding with other coaches in coming months, for the very purpose of making this both scalable and lucrative.
Profile help/photo help/dating coaching is like a spa at a nice hotel. It’s not for everybody, but for the few who care enough to utilize it, it’s incredibly useful.
If, in one year, you have 1000 happy clients who paid good money for our help, you not only have the best brand loyalty in the business, but you have 1000 people who will continue to pay month by month for eternity because, by God, online dating now WORKS for them. These people are walking billboards – advertisements for your site – human embodiments of the Tipping Point in action. They will tell their friends how your site and my site helped them find happiness, I assure.
I look forward to working with all of the sites who recognize that their best business is in helping their members succeed, rather than letting them try to figure it all out on their own.
This model also doesn’t seem scalable. Assuming this does take off (not sure who would actually pay, but let’s assume), how many advisors will econfidant or the others need to manage the business? It doesn’t make sense.