Online Dating Insider

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This is the fourth update to my infrequent “Creating a dating site” series.

I have attempted to compile common answers and my experience with startup dating sites. Much of the content is anecdotal and is by no means a complete blueprint to building a dating site. Hopefully you read this and want to talk to me about helping you build your dating site. Even better, contribute to the conversation and add in your two cents, rebuttals or clarifications via the comments. The best stuff will get added into the series.

I often receive queries about how to go about building a dating site, what software to use how much does it cost. My short answer is that it depends entirely on what you want to accomplish with the site.

What it Costs
The overall cost structure for developing your site depends entirely on what you want to accomplish with the site. Are we talking about a me-too niche, a scalable advertising-based revenue model or a site driven by innovative high-end features? Do you even know what kind of site you want to create?

Much of the cost comes from how far you push the existing dating scripts. Building one from scratch is usually unnecessary unless you have a totally unique value proposition and don’t mind paying people lots of money to build the back-end and administrative functions that comes included with most dating scripts.

For a script-driven site, $10-15k for a programmer, another $15k for designers, staff, programs and other resources and another $20k for initial marketing push. There are countless variations on the theme based on your requirements. You may not want to put that much into marketing, instead relying on viral initiatives or PR.

If you are not familiar with the online dating space or running an internet business, a consultant would charge at least $35k to get the site built and up and running to your specifications. The sheer amount of time spend educating, dealing with developers, writing functional specifications, project management and other behind the scenes tasks is enormous. And that’s for a cheap site.

There are few shortcuts. Offshore programmers may be a bit cheaper, but if you don’t have the resources to build a solid site and have $50k in the bank to do it, you probably should look into other business opportunities.

There are several stories of people starting dating sites on a small budget. Those people are incredibly lucky and had good timing. The majority of dating sites have neither.

Hosted vs. White-label
You need to be able to sustain operations for the six months it takes to get decent traction. Sometimes a hosted solution with a shared database is the way to go, other times it’s best to strike out on your own. Deciding between the two options is what I do with clients and takes a lot of back and forth to come to the solution that best fits current circumstances.

If you just want to get a site up, and don’t care how bland your site is, go with a white-label solution or one of the free hosted sites. White labels will take most of your money but your time-to-market is days or weeks, not months. If you’re ok with giving up a certain amount of flexibility and revenue, that’s a good option to consider.

There are a few players to choose from, including World Dating Partners and White Label Dating (add more companies here).

Dating Scripts
I’ve researched or worked with several of the hosted sites and scripts; right now I’m in the middle of a large Dolphin development project.

My primary advice is to be extremely careful weighing the pro’s and cons of building a site yourself, there are so many gotcha’s and if your programmer is not top-notch, you are going to pay a lot of money for something you won’t be happy with.

(Disclaimer: SkaDate and Boonex are or have been advertisers on this blog.)
SkaDate has a new hosted solution that can also be run on your own server. SkaDate was founded by ex-Boonex members. SkaDate is supposedly a solid solution in many ways, yet their hosted version is reported to be slow as molasses by some, probably due to loading many sites on one server, and the tech support not very helpful. As with all software outfits, your mileage may vary.

After 20 beta releases, Boonex has released version 6.0. Boonex co-founder Andrey Sivtsov has mentioned BoonExpress Presence and Chat as a replacement for MyBlogLog, which creates communities around blogs. I won’t be switching anytime because I am very happy with MyBlogLog but this might be a nice option if you’re already running Dolphin.

I have been working with Dolphin for four months now. Some things it does well if you are looking for a basic dating site, but as soon as you try to get clever, add pages to the signup process or break with the underlying programming logic, things start to go off the rails quickly. Working with outsourced programmers adds another level of complexity to an already difficult undertaking.

One last thing about Dolphin. Once you start developing on a version, it’s basically impossible to upgrade. So we’re stuck with a 5-dot-something release for the life of the site.

A big problem with every dating site script is not the code itself but that there are approximately five decent programmers familiar with each script and system on the entire planet. What’s a dating site entrepreneur to do? Not much I’m afraid.

There are at least 25 other dating scripts, which I would rate in general from poor to average. Nothing against the developers, but when you take the resource requirements, support, developers quality and overall startup experience into consideration, it’s no wonder dating site operators struggle to get their sites up and running.

I say this often but the social networking software scripts and hosted solutions are often orders of magnitude better than dating scripts. I’d like to see a dating site add a payment page to an established social network script and see how that works out.

As was writing this, I received the following email, “I’m trying to decide if we should build our site from scratch or use OSDate or SkaDate.” The short answer is that without knowing how much time money and resources you have, the type of functionality you expect to implement and a handfull of other factors, I really can’t make a suggestion.

As you can clearly see, I remain frustrated with the lack of decent dating site script options, viable developer support networks and documentation.

Links

• Go read Markus Frind’s blog, The Paradigm Shift. He founded Plenty of Fish.
• Read about Sam Yagan.
• Check out the Tools & Services (seems to be a problem with the page right now, looking into it).
• Read everything you can about online dating.
• Join Webmaster World, lots of information about software selection and marketing.
• Remember, Google is your friend.
• The Infrastructureless Software Compan
• Free is a tactic, not a business model.
• Amazon S3
• AWS and your data center
• Monster Muck Mashup - Mass Video Conversion Using AWS
• Digg’s Senior System Admin Ron Gorodetzky on How to Handle Network Growing Pains
• Elgg social networking platform.
• More women on nice dating sites
• KickApps
• Consumating Goes Open Source
• Squid Proxy Server

Next up, promoting your niche site.

• Tuesday 9/25 links
• How To Build a Dating Site in 8 days
• Installing Boonex Dolphin in 42 Minutes
• Looking For a Group Script
• Friday Snow Day Post