Back from New York. The meetup was a success, 12+ people showed up and we spent a lively evening at Apple Bar talking about the online dating industry, how startups are changing the game considerably by going after niche markets with new features and functionality and many other topics that I didn’t get to overhear because I was busy jumping from group to group to try and spend time with everyone.
Tobin and Jevaun, Cupids-Lab (check out their party invites); Meir from Date.com, Ross Felix, Dating Revolution; Gordon Gooch, DatingHeadShots; Cliff from SNAP (Are You Interested), Ken Deckinger from Spark Networks (HurryDate); Michelle Shani and Christina from [formula PR] (SpeedDate.com PR firm), Arthur from NewYorkDatingCoach; Charley Miller, GiveAndDate ( launch party May 27) and a few others who’s cards I didn’t get or they didn’t want to be mentioned – sorry if I left anyone out. I enjoyed being able to match a faces with commenters, thanks to everyone who showed up. There were another 10 people who were out of town or busy that couldn’t make it. We’ll do it again in a few months, with sponsors, more lead time and earlier in the week.
Friday morning I visted with Sam and Vikram at Milabra, their image categorization services are taking shape nicely and the pr0n demo is entertaining. They have some serious H1N1-style flu going around there.
Friday afternoon I headed to OKCupid’s offices, which interestingly enough were previously occupied by OddCast, who’s custom avatar of yours truly has graced the pages of this blog in the past.
After taking in the view, Sam Yagan gave me a tour of the space and we ended up standing next to The Wall Of Stats (no photos, please), a gallery of performance metrics on the wall which tell a very clear story: OKCupid membership, interactivity and engagement are on the rise. When looking at a variety of metrics its interesting to see spikes, drops and other disturbances in activity graphs.
Here is Sam holding up the Sprint ad that ran in most national newspapers as a full-page ad recently. This type of exposure is a major coup for the brand.
I kept on asking Sam what they attributed various disruptions in the graph to. Some are easily explainable when viewed in relation to certain dates, others fall into the “who knows” category. Fun with statistics, advanced edition.
After waiting forever for lunch, I got to sit down with the whole team and talk shop. Employees can sometimes be nervous about open forum conversations with bloggers. big companies always have at least one PR person in the room when I’m on a call with executives. Not so with OKCupid, the dev team didn’t seem to read this blog, which was refreshing and made the ensuing conversation that much more interesting (converts, I hope).
The OKCupid team is heavily skewed towards Computer Scientists and incredibly bright people. Some of them read their email in Pine, which made me smile. They live and die by their stats and are *always* working to improve the site. I was by far the most ignorant person in the room and I learned a lot. It’s good to get out of your chair, hit the streets and see what’s happening out there in the online dating industry. Very different from the experience at iDate, where everyone is pressed for time, deal-hungry and generally doesn’t have the time to sit back, relax and let the conversation flow for several hours.
I’m sworn to secrecy but OKCupid is coming out with some very cool stuff very soon. Hopefully you will get to read about it here first.
Meeting so many intelligent, fun and driven New Yorkers working hard to make online dating a better experience was both humbling and a great learning experience. Thanks to everyone who took time out of their busy day to meet with me, talk about their business and tell their stories. That’s a big part of what makes my job satisfying.
I would like to visit more companies like this, thinking about putting together a tour of a few states and a trip up to Canada to have informal meetup, followed by a few visits with companies for informal, mostly-off-the-record lunches. Let me know if you would be interested in participating and I’ll start scheduling the road trip.
