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As you may or may not know, several years ago I started a company called ProfileDoctor. We built a service that enabled live editors to review dating profiles and make suggestions in improvements. While I thoroughly enjoyed building up the company I ended up getting side-tracked by consulting projects in the dating industry and shelved ProfileDoctor.
Fast forward a few years and I’m amazed at how much better profiles are on dating sites these days. There are still millions of badly written profiles, but overall the quality is much better.
Hint to dating sites. A profile evaluation is a great way to market to stale members and get them back on the site. How many year-old profiles are lying dormant in your database? Major dating sites have millions, wouldn’t it be interesting to market to them with someone better than a “we miss you” remarketing email?
A few weeks ago I wrote about posting your profile photos on HotOrNot to find out which ones people like best. Today I came across the PlentyOfFish Profile Review Forum. What a great idea! For all the good-natured grief I give Markus at PlentyOfFish, it’s features like that that impress me the most.
The concept of crowdsourcing profile reviews is a fantastic value for members. A paid profile writing service might get to know you better but throwing up a profile in the PoF forum and receiving feedback from 50+ people in 24 hours seems to make more sense. There will always be a small percentage of serious daters who will pay $30 – $200 to have someone write their profile.
I would love to build text processing system that parses profiles for terms like “little black dress” or “long walks on the beach” and emails offending members to avoid cliches. One that system is built, you can add on all sorts of interesting tools and services. Don’t be so greedy, make it a free service and wrap it in relevant ads. After all, the value of a dating site, at least to members, is the quality of it’s members and their profiles.
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So forum members might give all sorts of helpful hints about avoiding cliches and negativity, but even after taking it all in, the writer still has no idea what to say in it’s place.
It’s why sites like E-Cyrano will always have value. By writing profiles with heavy client input, we do what no amount of advice can possibly do – we provide a tangible product better than 99% of the profiles out there.
Kudos to Markus for identifying the need and for utilizing his community for a source of good.
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The web is replete with articles listing popular clichés people should avoid in order to cut a unique figure. These are far from helpful. We are instinctively fashioned to go the mob way. But the psychological triggers work differently than genetic triggers when it comes to dating sphere. Well-known profile writing sites like Heusinte and E-Cyrano know the nuances full well. That’s why profile written through them will always have a jump on other profiles in the datosphere.
As for Markus, he is keeping himself busy with what he is extremely good at. That is, making his site vociferously people-friendly and tacitly people-centric.
A text-parsing system and a decent set of machine-generated questions could write a better profile than most people. You two have the high-end, which is a small market. I’d rather see dating sites themselves create better profile systems, which would alleviate the need to have someone else write your profile.
Crowdsourcing works too, in certain cases.
Knock, knock. No leniency to laid-back, slapdash type. And, David, that makes us two.
If you’re talking about helping people who don’t have solid command of the English language, that makes sense. In that case, you should start offering your services in Asia.
I’ve tried most profile writing services and written a few hundred myself. Getting people to explain who they are and what they are looking for should be better dealt with by dating sites, but there will always be a market for profile writing.
Pleasure meeting you.