by David Evans on March 10, 2010 in Startups
As a consultant I often work with entrepreneurs working on their first startup. Sometimes I am asked to review business plans and financial spreadsheets. Some business plans are 32 pages long and cover every imaginable circumstance, down to the smallest detail.
I also see my fair share of seven-screen Powerpoint presentations. Guess what, the seven-page version [...]
During the past year or so I’ve been thinking and writing a lot about the role Facebook could play in online dating.
I’ve received a lot of feedback from the online dating industry about the possibility of Facebook becoming the worlds largest dating site. Typically I hear that:
- Facebook needs to focus on monitization strategies
- Facebook [...]
AllFacebook says that there is a growing market for purchasing Facebook Profiles. This reminds me of people who contact me looking for dating profiles. Pre-populating a dating site with fake profiles is a really bad idea. Short of acquiring a dating site and merging it’s population with a new site, companies like White Label Dating [...]
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by David Evans on April 20, 2009 in Startups
I was interviewed extensively for last summer’s HBS Case Study of eHarmony. All my interview output was nixed by eHarmony. I was told to take that as a badge of honor. You can order your copy of the Harvard Business School eHarmony Case Study for $6.95.
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eharmony,
hbs
Niche dating sites can be incredibly effective if you’re Jewish, Black, Gay, Athletic or belong to any number of groups where it makes sense to self-identify as part of a particular group of people. Matchmaker was the first site to have many different demographic areas broken out inside a single dating site, but Date.com merged [...]
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eHarmony has been called a Christian dating site, it’s been made fun of on late night television for years. It’s also responsible for 2% of all marriages. What it’s not been is gay-friendly, until now. After several years of litigation and pressure from the gay community, eHarmony has launched a same-sex relationship site, Compatible Partners. [...]
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Compatible Partners
I get a little excited when I think about all the technology required to run dating sites. Here are some new tools I learned about today.
Selenium is a web application testing system.
CRM114 is a system to examine incoming e-mail, system log streams, data files or other data streams, and to sort, filter, or alter the [...]
by David Evans on March 28, 2009 in Startups
Anyone starting or running a dating site should listen to this Venture Hacks podcast How IMVU learned its way to $10M a year. The dating industry growth hype due to the recession is leading many people to start dating sites. 98% of these companies are going to fail if they don’t pay attention to the [...]
In a previous post I mentioned that Friend Finder Networks had an amazing advertising solution right under their nose but are distracted with the IPO plans. I went back and re-read some of the commentary about the IPO and thought it would be interesting to share some of it.
For people who think starting a dating [...]
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advertising,
friend finder networks,
Marketing,
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I’m tired of hearing people complain about online dating software. What are we going to do about this? For years I’ve made half-hearted attempts at looking into various online dating software packages. From what I’ve learned, most of them I wouldn’t recommend to my enemies.
Let us look at the state of online dating software:
Lack of [...]