I spoke with Dan Abelon, founder of SpeedDate.com, as a follow-up to my earlier post on the latest entrant into the world of speed dating.
Dan came up with the concept of SpeedDate while taking entrepreneurship courses with Eric Schmidt (CEO of Google) at Stanford Business School earlier this year. Dan and the team are located in San Mateo, CA. Dan’s partner is Simon Tisminezky.
Speeddate.com received an undisclosed round from Menlo Ventures this summer.
Partnerships
Speeddate is not talking to major dating sites as part of strategy. Dan is considering a Facebook application a priority more than partnerships. Dan is focusing on leveraging user-centric feedback to make Speeddate.com into a destination site. Perfect products first and the people will come. Critical mass is important to success.
Dating vs. social: Focusing more on dating and social networking.
Stay focused. Challenging to build great product. Competitive advantage is listening to users, integrate feedback. All about the details.
Report Members Feature – making women feel safe and comfortable is most important. Assurances that the site is doing what they can to keep people safe and comfortable.
Marketing locally, initially for San Francisco area. Heavy on the PR. I was at a meeting in New York last week where my hosts said they had met Dan at the TechCrunch40 demo pit. All the deals are happening at these events now. iDate is a must-attend, but more and more deals and coming-out parties are happening at west-coast startup events for the most part. Thats where the money, talent and exposure is.
What are Ice Breakers? Co-founder is Simon did lots of offline speed dating.
Ice Breakers are potential questions to keep people talking.
- If you could live anywhere, where would it be?
- Tell me about your craziest vacation.
- If you were to cook me a meal, what would it be?
- What would you do with a million dollars?
Post-date communication- even if you both vote yes, you can keep the conversation anonymous on the site.
Multiple modes of communication: text chat, audio and video. In text mode, static profile photo displayed.
Get matched with people, they show up in your messenger list.
It’s early, but there appears to be a mix between audio only or voice, video and chat.
Dan continues to stress giving users flexibility to communicate as they choose.
Plans to have fee structure in future. Free for forseeable future until they build critical mass.
Event schedule: Every Thursday to start, people leave browser up and loaded with Speeddate.com in background.
Crazy Blind Date, WooMe and Tripio are all competition to Speeddate.com.
