Comments on: Fundraising Advice For Your Dating site Startup

By: John

John — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 14:45:02 +0000

David,
True, but I am only talking about out-of-pocket dollars spent. My point was that it is possible (if you have the programming talent) to start your own dating site with very little initial cash.

By: David Evans

David Evans — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 14:37:56 +0000

You are not taking into consideration the amount of time it took you to build your site. Would you develop a piece of software for a client over four months for less than $1,000? Of course not.

By: John

John — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 14:31:17 +0000

I also disagree with the 50k figure. I have recently started a free dating site (shameless plug: http://www.FindOneTrue.com) with way less than 1k. I coded the site myself in my spare time (took about 4 months) and currently use a very affordable hosting option (less than $100/month). I am getting decent traffic from organic growth and will grow the infrastructure as my traffic increases. I am perfectly willing to have my site grow slowly instead of spending thousands on marketing.

By: David Evans

David Evans — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 23:00:31 +0000

3.5 is the default rating, go complain to SezWho, the comment system I use. I’m thinking about trying Disqus as well, which I use on my other blog.

By: Tobin

Tobin — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 18:48:19 +0000

Second question… I noticed you’re “rate this” is kind of fake (= I “JUST” posted a comment and it already received a 3.5 rating?

By: Tobin

Tobin — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 18:47:16 +0000

The cost of technology is getting cheaper and cheaper. I’d even argue that you can get up and running for under $20k ($50k is very high in my opinion).

You’re right that the customer acquisition is key and I believe in a previous post you even mention that it’s more about marketing than it is about product development (which is somewhat sad in itself). Keeping those customer acquisition costs down is going to be key for any new startup in the space.

Somewhat interesting is how there’s an earlier post saying how seeking funding just got easier (via Angelsoft), but now there’s a post about the days of acquiring significant capital is over.

Since it is largely a marketing problem, what are your thoughts on effectively using a seed round of funding ($50k-$250k) for acquiring paid customers. It’s hard to pony up cash against the larger companies (and even smaller companies as more of them pop up) to do traditional marketing plays online.