A developer at SEOmoz built a dating site from concept to launch in 66.5 hours.
The first month of being online Mingle2 had around 90,000 unique visitors. By July the site’s popularity exploded, seeing nearly 700,000 uniques and 1.9 million page views for that month alone. Being the founder (and a user) of the website, this has been the most interesting and rewarding website I’ve ever been involved with. Before long I started getting emails from various other dating websites and investors and after countless sleepless nights trying to decide what I wanted to do, I put my indecisiveness to rest and sold Mingle2 to JustSayHi, a competing dating website. I chose JustSayHi primarily because their aspirations are very aligned with mine; we both want this property to be synonymous with free online dating, much like how craigslist has become synonymous with free classified ads.
This is the kind of guy who could give PlentyOfFish a run for their money and he’s only 25. I love hearing stories like this.
The reality of building a dating site is that it usually takes a lot longer to get buy-in from all parties involved, a solid workable game plan in place and all of the behind the scenes bit-wrangling that happens when building any software from the ground up. Eharmony spent something like 3-5 million to get up and running and on solid ground.
I had to share some inspiration for all of you out there sweating through the development of your new dating sites. Now get back to work!
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Who cares about developing a site in 66.5 hours!
His real secret is the incredable amount of unique visitors he found. Must be something to do with being a developer for SEOMoz.
I have a new website http://www.pluscupid.com. Can anybody give me some advice on how to increase the traffic?
In looking at his data on Alexa, Compete and Quantcast, the number of uniques would appear to be highly exaggerated. Are there something these sites are missing?
Is it so easy? I spent tens of thousands of dollors and more a year with more than 10 expers to build my site http://www.agelessfriends.com .
Wow, all these stories and I scratch my head. So I hear 66.5 hours. Geeze, and I have been building a site Alaskamate for roughly 3 months using a skadate product as a base and customizing from there. I lauched yesterday on a grass roots word of mouth platform to beta test and have 9 members. I am truely the little fish…..Anyone now a great PHP guy or gal who has videochat experiance?
who cares how much time a person took to build a site. Its unique visitors traffic which really matters.
Talk about little fish……..My site is not a dating site but I sell candles. It’s been up for months and I’ve even paid for Google Adwords….still I’ve only had 6 unique visitors- I really must be doing something wrong!!!
before you go on reading the rest of my comment I have a question.
Do you think its better to use your audience as the entire country (in which case you have to compete against plentyoffish and eharmony) or do you think its better to target a specific group. Such as bbw, blacks, christians, star wars fans etc?
I’ve spent probably around that amount of time designing my website. It’s not a dating website but more of a smash between twitter and last.fm. I post my website to comments on blogs like this, post it to all my friends on facebook/myspace whenever I make updates to the site, have a link to the site in my signature in forums I’m active on and I even am currently using a free $100 Adwords coupon I got from google.
The site has been up a little more then a month now and I have total 167 Absolute Unique Visitors and only one other person has created an account on the site besides myself. (An account is not necessary for 80% of the features on the site). So I’m just going to keep going at it and adding new useful features and trying to drive more visitors to my site. Things just take time. No website gets famous over night.
My next site I’ve been thinking about is doing a dating site though. Hence the reason I googled this article. I’m really not one to use a script or program to make site thought. I’m all about hand coding sites myself. I learn more that way and I have 100% control of the site and its features. Plus I don’t have to pay anyone that way :)
I used this tutorial to made mine :
http://www.howtomakedatingwebsite.com
Thanks for your tips
I got free software off of the web, then modified it to what I wanted for my 2 dating sites. I have over 10,000 users on each of them. It is an ongoing process and requires a lot of time.
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