Mark Brooks is starting a list of Dating Software and Services similar to my Tools & Services directory. At least that’s what I though until I looked at the date of the post, April 13, 2006. I thought it was from last week. My inability to read dates correctly, I couldn’t help but start writing responses to commenters, albeit one year later.
To get started: here are some of the issues I have with these types of lists.
- Lot’s of systems get on there that shouldn’t be.
- No technical due diligence is performed.
- Most of the people who complain about the software are not programmers, so their angry lashing out is biased.
- When it comes to dating site software, offshore developers aren’t going to save you a dime. In fact, they are going to cause you many more problems.
- While I am about as virtual as you can get, I like to be able to be close enough to my developers that I can buy them a beer while we talk shop an well as be able to chew them out in person when they stray off course.
- Someone on Mark’s list said that custom coding is the way to go. That was obviously written by a programmer.
- Most every dating site in a box will not scale to millions of daily pageviews. Just ask the IT guys at Match, or Markus at Plenty Of Fish. Ask dating site developers about load balancers and watch their expression.
These are generalizations, mind you. There are some incredibly talented developers and businesspeople putting together dating site systems and hosted solutions. The problem is they are difficult to find, or expensive, or not customizable enough. No one solution is ever going to be perfect. You have to prepare to get the short end of the stick on a few things.
Be incredibly careful about working with vendors and developers outside of the US. This is a general statement that will upset many incredibly talented developers and companies, but after hearing people complain about non-US vendors for years, take heed when you’re paying someone in foreign currency to develop your dating site.
Hosted services. If you want a site that looks just like every other third-tier dating site out there, and shares the same questionable profiles with hundreds of other sites, go for it, and expect to give up 20-50% of your revenue for the privilege.
From what I’ve seen hosted white-label social networking sites are far better managed than dating sites. Better code, better service and less hassle overall. I’ve also never used a hosted dating site myself and never recommend them to a client unless they are a tiny niche site and know nothing about internet businesses and have money to throw around. That hardly ever happens. Perhaps SkaDate or Dolphin or World Dating Partners are exceptions to this rule.
If you are hot to trot about a cool niche site for dirt bike riders or left-handed volleyball players, go start a site at Ning.com. You’ll be up and running in a few hours and promoting the site in a few days.
Your site most likely won’t need to scale to millions of users, and if it does, so what? At that point you’ll have so much money you can rebuild while you grow, like Myspace did and Friendster didn’t.
Mark’s statement that it takes $100,000 to seed your community surprised me. Mark, surely you mean to add a zero to that number. Whatever the number, it’s related to your target audience, for one thing. If you target techie early adopters, all you need to do is start a blog and get mentioned on TechCrunch.
The problem is with most new sites, it’s not the first 50,000 visitors that count, it’s the 50,000 after that. Lots of people will check out your site when it launches, and never come back.
Small nice sites, you better know where your potential members already hang out online. If you don’t, you’re in big trouble, go find them.
I still say it costs several million dollars in marketing money to build up a decent-sized dating site. Some things get cheaper like hardware and development costs due to advances in software. Marketing just gets more and more expensive.
As Sam Moorcroft, owner of ChristianCafe said in Mark’s post, not to dissuade new competitors, but you will most likely lose your shirt trying to start a mass-market dating site these days.
Affiliate marketing is a waste of time unless you are a big name brand. Save your energy for other traffic driving experiments.
Emil Sarnogoev has a seriously great comment on Mark’s blog. Where has he been hiding out? Robert Fathers has a great comment as well, I’m not going to repeat what they say here, I would though, because I agree on almost all points both make.
I agree with Markus on a few points as well. Relationship Exhange could have owned this market and since they have been bought and sold and bought have lost momentum which is too bad they had a good thing going.
Someone named Andreas made a good time-capsule comment, basically that it’s $100k and a 12 months to get a ground-up development project to where existing high-end dating scripts are out of the box.
I say $50k and a month, tops.
If you build, customize or sell dating site systems, scripts or anything related, head on over to the Tools & Services Submit Form and send me your details. I’ll post on the page when I do the next update.
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Dave, you will most likely lose your shirt trying to start a *niche*-market dating site these days, too…
There is no dating software in the world that will allow you to scale to millions of uses out of the box. These things require constant weekly tweaking to stay operational.
David, you are not going to make a big deal with a $50 – $1000 script you buy. You can not become successful if you do not have your own development team or if you know nothing about servers and scripting / db. Show me one successful dating site using a script that is sold in tens or hundreds of copies. I bet you can’t.
Create your own software and be prepared to work on it as your community is growing. This is what we (or me alone???) are doing at http://www.onelovenet.com dating site. I could have bought a $50 script and launch the website a lot more earlier, but I preferred to wait a few more months and develope something I can understand from A to Z.
More on my blog. :)
http://www.unitedwebsite.com/zoltan/2007/04/19/bought-script-or-in-house-development-for-dating-sites/
Sam, I disagree that there is no room for niches.
Markus, I agree with you 100%.
Zoltan, you are saying there are no sites running Dolphin or Webscribble that are successful? I have a difficult time believing that.
Developers will always advocate developing everything from scratch. Most people that want to run dating sites are not technical by nature.
I see little value in developing custom dating sites. Wast of time for most people. You can almost deploy a dating site like a blog these days, granted, you always need a competent developer to help out with technical issues.
Dave, what do you call successful? Top 10 in their niche? Top 50?
Regarding custom vs premade, I can only repeat what Sam wrote on Mark’s blog: “If you need “the $100k it will take to seed your community to a level that people actually want to pay” it would seem foolhardy (to the extreme) to think a $499 package is going to work for you. Imagine blowing $100k in marketing to a $499 site!”
Perhaps, you can buy a premade script that has most of the features you need but you will still need the time to learn it and make changes to it quickly when needed.
And one more thing. The game is not about scripting alone, hardware alone or marketing alone. It is about a combination of scripting, hardware, marketing and the understanding of the needs of an industry. If you only know scripting you won’t succeed. The same with hardware and marketing. If you know nothing… be prepared to have a team that can work for you. And widely open your pockets. Just my 2 cents.
Zoltan, everyone defines their own success. Let’s say top 10.
Of course you need time to learn it. I never said that the scripts work right out of the box. They all need security, e-commerce and performance tweaks before they are ready for prime time traffic.
I am working with developer installing and testing several popular dating scripts right now. The scary thing about most scripts is that you have no idea where the holes/issues are, you can only rely on the feedback from a limited number of developers who share their experiences.
I look forward to the time when we can focus on community building and customer service, not which PHP library and MySql bugs need to be squashed, you know what I mean.
I know David, I definitely know. :) But being in web development and community building since 2000, I get used to it.
Dave, you asked Zoltan, “you are saying there are no sites running Dolphin or Webscribble that are successful? I have a difficult time believing that.”
You have now defined success as being in the top 10 in their space (or niche or whatever).
So, let me put it to you: please show us *any* top 10 sites that are running Dolphin or Webscribble or whatever.
——————————
Back to my original comment about niches and you saying you disagree: what niches can still be successful in your view for a newcomer *and* one using any of the out-of-the-box scripts out there?
Christian Dating, although not exactly a niche, is the next segment of the market that is going to heat up, after the “millionaire match” sites.
There are several well-funded companies preparing to launch Christian dating sites, keep an eye out for them.
Sam, anyone can succeed with a niche site if it’s well-defined, the owner is experienced with internet business models and they provide a great service that doesn’t feel like a templated me-too site.
Emil Sarnogoev has a seriously great comment on Mark’s blog. Where has he been hiding out?
—
Dave, I haven’t been hiding, it’s just that you found this talk one year later ;)
How can I contribute to the current discussion?
No. None of the off-the-shelf dating software packages are suitable for the next match.com. Nor they need to be. If you are a developer, you know the answer already. Go custom. Or go customize what’s on the table. If you’re not, there’s no point in throwing in 50-100K in custom development from scratch, no matter how defined your business plan is. Feel the business first. Experts say it’s ok to grow even with a broken site – just offer what people want. Especially when there are good solutions out there to start and play around with next-to-no budget.
It’s stupid to buy a $50 script to sit and wait until it makes you a millionaire. Go complain when it doesn’t. But it’s smart to buy up to $1000 software package (or a hosted/managed solution) and turn it inside out back and forth to find what other two-legged species want, or more important, need.
Yes. It’s STILL possible to succeed in online dating business. To me, this time period reminds the search engine market before Google. Old-timers saying the market is saturated, newcomers asking questions nobody can answer. We have big and small players, all still unable to resolve critical problems that prevent from satisfying basic human needs. And surely the winner isn’t around yet. The one that will do it all different and grab the user before you can say “hello”.
I bet the winner will start small. Maybe, they already did. With traditional marketing quickly becoming irrelevant and viral marketing already being the driving force, the situation proved to be able to change almost overnight.
By all means, start small. Look at HookUp.com – one of our latest SkaDate customizations. It has hundreds of people signing up daily. The deal is that when you have a signup rate even like that you will think quite different, I mean you will be another sort of a businessman – knowing what online dating smells like; seeing its problems and specifics, and probably having ideas how to solve them. This is the experience of an unmeasured value. This is being in business. Now, imagine that instead of that you are in the middle of building a voracious technical monster and the desperate hope that it’s going to justify its cost right after going live, keeps you awake at night. Funny that I say that – we have 3 big ongoing custom-build-from-scratch projects with the development budget up to 100K, but it’s a whole lot of a different story. The catch is that they do it after starting small, defining their niche and now want to scale to satisfy _existing_ needs. There’s a long road before that.
If anyone interested, I’m going to post more thoughts on our blog later.
Thank you.
Hello all,
I find myself in a sticky situation, and I’m posting this comment hoping to find some direction. Here is my situation: I’m starting a new dating site, and have hired an off-shore team to handle the development (hind site is telling me this was my first mistake) which is now 3 months behind production and counting. I can’t even begin to express my frustration & disappointment in these guys who promised me a launch date of Nov. 1st 2007…It’s now Jan. 08 WTF! I’m now looking at other solutions as my biggest priority is to get my site up and running ASAP. I’ve thought about some off the shelf solustion such as SKAdate, but like some of your other members have stated I don’t want to poor 50k in marketing into a script that cost $695. What is a guy to do? I’ve search high & low for a mature platform and have came up dry. Does anyone have any recommendations or any advice? If anyone could please shed some light on this situation it would be much appreciated!
Thanks in advance,
Anthony
sounds like Antony didn’t do enough home work, enough research, and enough searching to uncover the real/true/genuine difficulties in the online dating arena.
A few words Anthony. Scale down in order to Launch, then add those additional features that are delaying the site. Since statistics show that your site probably won’t take to market anyway, you should probably figure out what exactly is unique about your site, build exactly that one and only feature, then launch it and see if people actually take to it. If so, then scale in the additional features one by one.
If it doesn’t take to the market, you will immediately know why because the people will tell you, and then you can revamp or pull out and take your left over money to start something else.
Not surprised that “the other list” was that out of date! When are you going to run a conference for us?
Wesley A. Alexander
307 Huntington Avenue
Boston MA. 02115
Phone number 412-277-4773
Email alexanderunlimited@ymail.com
July 30, 2008
To Whom It May Concern:
I am interested in buying dating site software. Where I am 100% owner of the dating site. I want a copy of your regular dating site and can you customize your site with these feature and how much would each customizing would cost.
1. I want to do some customizing to the software to be able to have a feature like Eharmony.
2. I want also different categories like for example:
· Mail order bride and groom
· Inmate dating
· Religious
· Regular dating
· Alternative dating of all kind
· Swingers
· Gays and lesbians
· International dating
3. Instance messaging to cell phones.
4. Mobile dating from my site.
5. I want to have a feature for speed dating parties.
6. Instance messaging to members
7. Free sign up for new members to become members
8. Charger them use the other features except to show interest in another member.
9. I also am looking for a place where members can just place their personal videos and pictures.
Then I would like for these features also added:
10. I want to be able to do contest for my member of their personal videos and pictures.
11. As longs, as their first picture is PG10 rating the rest can be XXXX rating.
12. I want the contest to be in the form, where the site will put their entry in the right category, and make sure all forms; paper works is in the right place.
13. I want the contest to be able to tally up votes and show members and contestants how many votes they have received, and where each contest rank during the contest
14. I would like to find out how much does customizing cost?
· Is it by the hour or project?
15. Do you do hosting?
· If you do host what is the cost to purchase hosting space:
· Rent space
· Rent a server
· Buy a server.
16. How much is the basic site without the customization
17. Can I have a copy of your demo to view?
Can you please contact at my email address above or leave a message at the phone number above.
Thank you very much in advance for you help and quick response.
Sincerely yours
Wesley A. Alexander
I am very disappointed in Skadate. I wanted to customize their software. I sent a Non disclsoure which they signed after about a month of going back and forth. They finally signed it and then after I sent all my confidential materials, they said they were not customizing until they updated their software. After that I requested that they destroy the materials I sent and I have not heard from them since. What’s up with that??
Marla,
We honor confidentiality especially after signing NDA, let’s find out what the problem was.
Feel free to send me personal message. I’m not sure I’m aware of your problem. Feel free to let me know so I can assist you.
SkaDate has been nothing but trouble since I’ve used them. Stay away!
I agree. My site is down all the time and they can never give me a good answer as to why. Support is worthless. They just want to make a quick buck from you and then let you fail. There is nothing in it for them once they sell you the initial package.
1) Can anyone shed some info on the ‘Standalone Dating Software’ from http://www.datingsitebuilder.com
2) And also the affordable dating software from http://www.wazzum.com
Thanks
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