I was reading an interview with Phonematrix’s CEO. Phonematrix is the latest of a long line of companies trying to sell anonymous calling to the dating industry. I’ve also heard from several background check companies “excited at the positive response” they received at iDate.
It’s interesting to see how many previous vendors who attended iDate last year were nowhere to be found.
Anonymous calling and background check companies are pure FUD marketing plays. FUD stands for Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt.
Services such as anonymous calling and background checks are valuable services clearly needed by the industry. I will argue this point far past what is considered reasonable bounds.
I want to talk about three reasons why anonymous calling and background checks have not been received well by the dating industry.
1) Problems pitching the value of their services
2) Greed – lack of partnerships
3) Legal issues
What is the core value proposition to the dating site? What is the proposition to customers? The answers to these two questions should be quite different.
These calls and background checks are most likely going to be costs absorbed by the dating sites or rolled into the subscription cost.
By missing the mark on the value proposition, they lost any chance of being taken seriously.
Dating sites remain resistant to services that are not offered in a well-developed and easy to understand bundle. Selecting from myriad vendors to deliver several features and functionality is difficult under the best of circumstances.
A la cart services tend to be a lot more expensive in terms of resources and money and integration than package deals.
See Verified Person, DateNumber and other companies with perfectly good products that never took hold in the industry. DateNumber was cool, I really liked the service and the fact that I got my messages as MP3’s in my inbox. They got smart and went after the auction market, where the revenue opportunity dwarfs dating.
Yahoo and Match had to bring in experts to do due diligence on background checks. That was like showing people a space ship who have never seen an automobile.
Why doesn’t Phonematrix do a deal with a background check and photo ID company? Building a partnership like that is simple.
The only free competitor to background checks is reputation management. The problem with anonymous calling is that it’s not the only game in town.
Calls can be made for free in any instant messaging client, including Yahoo, AOL, MSN and iChat messengers. During the past few weeks I’ve been spending at least 3 hours a day using Skype instead of my cell phone at my home office. Consider me a convert. Call cost is free if both parties have Skype. Yahoo charges a few cents a minutes to make calls from their messenger client.
Why would I pay several dollars to make a call when I can do it for free? Dating sites don’t share this information with members because then they lose them. In fact, many dating site will not let you mention your IM or email address. This is totally backwards. You’re getting my $20, why do you care how I choose to communicate with other members?
Vivox uses the phrase graduated communication. I agree with Markus, a viop call from IM is the highest likliehood of success. There needs to be an intermin step, like what Vivox is doing. View profile, send wink/email, text chat, then voice.
Other companies get this as well. I spent an hour in the new Userplane multi-party audio/videochat client yesterday. Impressive. Why not install that with a few lines of PHP or Javascript. Bingo, free anonymous calls for your site’s members.
Many ways exist to bring additional levels of safety, security and comfort, and yes, even revenue, to dating site. It requires a new approach to serving customers, both from vendors and dating sites themselves.
