New York Times on dating profiles, coaches and the importance of great photos. A handful of people make a decent living doing coaching and taking photos, I’ve always thought the process needed to be automated to operate at internet scale. Why help one person for a hundred bucks when you can help 5,000 and make a lot more money (and happy people?) There are coaches at different price points, and always wingmen and wingwomen for hire. Somedat a big dating site is going to integrate these services, as I’ve been telling them for the past four years.
The quality of the profiles goes up, people have a better experience on the site, the site gets a better reputation, makes more money, and everyone is happier. How difficult is this for dating sites to understand? I often got the cold shoulder when I was pitching ProfileDoctor profile enhancement services to the dating industry a few years ago. Everyone was riding high and making money. Now that times are getting tougher, perhaps the importance of a great profile will come back into vogue. The reality is that dating sites tend to gravitate to value-added services which affect the bottom line in the short term. This myopic focus on revenue makes them unable to see the value of service which enhance the overall quality of the service, which leads to more revenue in the long run.
Shameless self-promotion: If you are an enlightened dating site operator, I would be happy to license or sell the system to the right dating site, or network of sites. ProfileDoctor remains miles ahead of what other profile enhancement services are doing. Contact me if you’re interested in a demo and learning more about increasing the value of your member database.
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Dave,
You know I’ve got nothing but the greatest respect for you and the business you created at Profile Doctor, but, as I’ve always contended in our private conversations: there’s a huge difference between providing help and providing the illusion of help. And, in my experience, any profile service that gives $30 computer printouts with helpful tips is just the illusion of help. Readers can download my eBook for free off of E-Cyrano and get similar advice. And with that advice (more specific, tell stories, no adjectives, no negativity) maybe people can rewrite their own profiles to go from a C- to a B-. But is a B- really going to help the guy who’s trying to get the attractive woman? Not at all.
This is an extremely competitive medium. If people could write their own profiles themselves, they would. They can’t – and the problem is that they don’t even know they can’t. Most dating sites haven’t really bothered to showcase how an amazing, hand-crafted, unique profile could make all the difference between success and failure. Actually, Match.com has. Except they don’t offer a service to do it. Just more useful “tips” that leave clients scratching their heads as to how they can incoporate them.
Sites like E-Cyrano can absolutely impact dating sites’ bottom lines. How? The same customer who normally quits in 1-3 months sticks around for longer when he gets results. Is it expensive? Less expensive than a couple of dates. Or a pair of concert tickets. Or shoes. Truth is, people will spend anything on a product that works – especially when it has to do with their quest for love. Witness Great Expectations and similar services. All E-Cyrano does is give people the best chance of succeeding without hiring a matchmaker – which is a pretty fair bet for $129.
And, for what it’s worth, E-Cyrano.com IS scalable. Clients are assigned and profiles delivered with the click of a button. More importantly, we give clients a finished product that convinces them it’s worth it to continue paying $25/month. That’s where the real help comes in if you’re a dating site.
Good points Evan. Of course people can’t write about themselves, and they don’t know it, a fact of life.
Most of the dating tip documents all say the exact same thing, a limited value, but valuable to some none the less.
You write people’s profiles, ProfileDoctor gives them the tools they need to make the most of their profile in their own words. Ebooks are static and don’t address the issues people have with their profiles in a usable context. And talking to them on the phone doesn’t scale well.
Some people want to pick up the phone and talk with a person, the majority just want to go out on better first dates. Some are more DIY for $30 whereas others will pay $129 for the priveledge of speaking with you on the phone. There is, and always has been a small market for either option.
I want to see the profile writing/enhancement service baked right into the dating site. Smarter systems capable of parsing profiles, identifying the problem areas and guiding people to fix it themselves. That’s the only way its going to work on a large scale. Dating sites have shied away from this overall. I’m hoping this will change.