As an industry “veteran” with over 10 years’ experience, I can say with certainty, “It ain’t easy”. None of us are sitting on our laurels, including my good friend Marcus over at POF (in spite of what he reguarly tells the media;-)

Because of this recession, there are more and more idiots out there thinking online dating is the answer to everything (with very little work involved, of course). Part of this is to blame on those of us talking up our success and part on the media touting what a great “recession-proof” business this is.

As I am fond of saying, if it was this easy to compete, we would have a lot more competitors than we do. It is not like we have a magic formula (ok, so maybe we do:) – we are just (very) good at what we do. The proof is in the pudding, as they say – our members keep opening up their wallets.

Provided me continue to provide a valued service, our customers will continue to support us. ‘Nuff said!

Here’s something to support your direct attack approach for ad spends (and why to avoid it =):

http://www.remnet.com/lanchester.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Force_concentration

Most people starting dating sites don’t have a clue about human psychology. I know dating site executives who have never taken a day to talk to a customers on their customer service lines. That should be the first week of their job.

The technology used could be the greatest in the world but if you’re not trying out new ways to bring people together, as Tobin says, it’s going to be an uphill battle.

The problem is we have large dating sites subsisting on massive advertising spend, which makes people think they can throw up a site and the money will pour in.

Niche social networks can bring in as much money as smaller dating sites. I don’t understand why people don’t create more of these.

Thank you for summarizing my post, one correction though – SkaDate is not white label, I agree that white labels are just a kind of affiliate systems. Visit SkaDate to learn more about what we do and how we do.

Trying out ideas, taking risks, and iterating through the analysis is what I’ve been telling for years. One thing is that at least you need to have that initial idea that would “look good” on the paper first. My opinion is that if the initial idea is dead wrong you can still get away trying out something different only if your costs are next to nothing. Otherwise you just can’t iterate endlessly.

My original point was that a lot of startups lack ideas, so we never know about them. The problem is the same (on another scale) when you get a big bag of VC money with an intention to outspend existing large players.

I suggest checking out Steve Blank’s book The Four Steps to Epiphany or at least spend some time listing to his course. Eric Reis’ company was built largely based around Blank’s lessons on Customer Development model which is a deviation from the Product Development methodology most startups/companies follow.

Back to the topic written by “SkaDate”, I think there’s a fundamental flaw to a lot of how online dating is conducted. Everything from “inventory” numbers to quality of “inventory”. There are also more humanistic problems which is simply how do I actually get to meet someone? What opportunities are your businesses creating to help get their to actually engage with one another.

Any new entrepreneur trying to enter the space should be asking “How do I get people to meet?” Sure there’s partially an inventory problem, but how can you get around that? There certainly are ways to do so, however “white label” is not the way to go for that (which is what I suspect your “guest writer” largely is writing to).

Match/eHaromony/Singles Net/Plenty Of Fish/Etc. solve the problem by using their inventory as a their selling point. To anyone who wants to compete directly with those companies, the solution is largely an ad/marketing spend play. However there are other options and solutions.

Anyone starting out as a new “dating” service should be getting in front of their potential customers and actually finding out what it is the customer wants. When I’ve gone out and talked to our users and customers the large thing I’ve found were women want to feel safe and secure meeting someone new. Men wanted to meet someone now and not play the “online dating” message tag before someone feels comfortable meeting.

Our service is largely centered around live events in the NYC area. We get a decent turn out at our test run of events, each time changing and tweaking what we are doing based on feedback we get by directly talking to our customers (during and after our events). In the past few months with NO MONEY SPENT on advertising (with the exception of a single press release and a 7 day trial of AdWords [miserable results]) we’ve been able to amass a few thousand users in NYC since the beginning of 2009.

Online dating for a new venture is going to be a failure for anyone trying to approach the industry with the current model. Those wanting to give it a run and think they are smart enough to make some serious changes need to work in a way that allows them to afford failure and mitigate their risks through iteration.

Dating is not about technology in the beginning though. It’s about outspending/outmarketing your competition.

To (naively) summarize, you’re telling anyone who is looking to build an online dating service to do their homework and proceed with extreme caution. It’s a very competitive market with very established large players where the main problem for newcomers is high customer acquisition costs.

Your evaluations for solutions is that if you’re looking to enter the market to get rich quick, stop now. If you’re serious, you better understand what it is you’re trying to accomplish and have a clear direction on how you’re going to differentiate yourself from the competitors.

Recently I’ve been following Eric Reis’ (of IMVU) blog (http://startuplessonslearned.blogspot.com/) and Steve Blank’s Customer Development course from Berkley. Both have very interesting views on how to enter an existing market. The concept is how to develop a lean (technology) startup through experimentation and testing your business hypothesis without burning through large amounts of cash. I think it’s well worth the read and listen if you are trying to embark on a new endeavor.