With so many dating industry executives floating around looking for something to do I thought I would throw out an idea for a new dating service.
First, I’ll buy a dating site from aedating. Or Relationship Exchange for that matter. Then I’ll license community apps from Userplane, drop in identify verfication from Trufina and talk Transparensee into giving us a copy of their search technology so we can create more compelling search capabilities.
Then I would go license personality profiling tools and create a short and sweet profile builder that was extendable with additional questions based on users interests.
I’d add a customer support area that does just that, supports customers. Too many sites out there are great at taking your c.c information but strangely absent when it comes to helping newbies figure out what the heck a Favorites List is.
I’ll partner with ProfileDoctor (Disclaimer, that’s me), maybe sign up a few relationship coaches from True for the upscale set. How about partnering with 8minutedating for speed dating and figuring out something to do with all of the canned Live Events people at Match?
Next up, savvy marketing people to come up with a killer tag line and someone who knows how to write a press release to spread the word. I’m constantly amazed at how poorly most dating sites are at communicating with customers and the press. Have you read the releases coming out of dating services? Ugh. Talented marketing folks are all over the place these days. They’ve been there, done that, and know what it takes to succeed. Mostly because they watched their previous employers screw up so much.
After that, go sign up a few affinity groups, like Starbucks, Virgin and T-mobile for customer base. Maybe talk to AARP to hit up those seniors.
I’d add a rating system too, so you could tell the cellar-dwellers from the right stuff.
I wouldn’t spend much time on mobile stuff unless I was going to play in EU, because mobile dating in the US hasn’t found it’s footing yet and unless you absolutely must hook up in the next 10 minutes, being home in front of a monitor scanning the “new members” feed is much more appealing than trying to get a cell signal in a bar on a tiny screen. Plus, EU is mostly locked up between 2-3 services already.
If things were looking good at this point maybe I would buy up a few choice small players. Give them a check and say “Thanks for playing” and import their members into the system. There are so many people wasting their time trying to get a date online at these tiny sites, let’s give consumers what they need. Lot’s of people, exciting experience and ongoing new features.
Finally, I’ll go raise $10 million to begin marketing my NextGenDating.com service to the masses. If you don’t come to the table with that kind of money you have no business starting a new dating site these days unless you expect it to be nothing more than a hobby. Shouldn’t take more than a handful of people and a few months to get to 50k paying customers, since consumers seem to be dying for an alternative to the Big 5 dating sites and the niche sites don’t seem to be able to effectively market themselves. Even if they could none of them have the money to make it happen.
Lastly, I’d create an XML feed (with ads) of everyone in the database and let developers create all sorts of apps to slice, dice, search and categorize members. People should be able to get their singles feed through their newsreader, personal portal, blog or wherever. I’d tag members with their advertising preferences so ad networks can finally market directly with pinpoint accuracy. How come nobody has figured this stuff out yet?
I’ve left out some of the secret sauce on purpose, partly to find out what your thoughts are. What would you do differently?
