Today’s guest post is by Scott Valdez, founder of Virtual Dating Assistants.
It is really a privilege to have the opportunity to write a guest post for Online Dating Insider so early into the development of our company. For understandable reasons, we didn’t receive a considerably warm welcome to the market during the week leading up to yesterday’s official launch so it’s nice to be invited to speak out on one of the key sources of industry information and expertise.
In order to improve our chances of getting valuable press coverage, we decided to use a slightly edgy approach to introduce and market a concept that what was already fairly controversial: giving cash-rich, time-poor men the ability to fully outsource their online dating. We thought this would help us really stand out in the market and invoke emotion (positive or negative). Our approach appears to have helped us achieve that objective.
As some of you may have seen, we have been already been covered by VentureBeat (that article was posted on NYTimes.com) and TechCrunch. Further, we are expecting some additional top-tier coverage soon. Quite frankly, we are even surprised ourselves with the attention we have gotten, especially since we appeared on the websites of all three of the aforementioned information sources prior to yesterday’s launch.
In addition to providing us with thousands of dollars in free marketing research in the form of feedback from hundreds of people including some of the industry’s leading opinion leaders such as David Evans and Evan Marc Katz, the attention the publicity brought us will translate into a quick recouping of our initial investment and will help us to raise capital that can be reinvested into improvements in strategic areas, namely marketing and service execution.
Within the next few weeks we plan to create a package offer for a less comprehensive subscription-based solution that we can market to the group of people who have said that they are definitely not comfortable with us interacting on their behalf but would like for someone to help them narrow down the playing field. We have also decided to begin planning a parallel site and set of services designed for women, who have contacted us on a small scale to see if we can help manage their online dating. In addition to the contacts, we have seen a lot of their tweets with a link to our site or an article about us followed by statements like “I need this service too!â€
I would like to note that although we do not currently have a women and same-sex friendly site, we will not be rejecting customers based on their sex or sexual preference. We are willing to provide a customized service to fit any client’s needs.
We are excited to have finally taken the plunge. We look forward to serving thousands of singles in the years to come that would like to take advantage of the massive candidate pools in online dating sites but simply don’t have the time to do it themselves.
