Online Personals Watch has an interview with Luke Chao, CEO Of Done For You Dating.
There is certainly money to be made saving people a few hours a week of their time, but as with many ideas related to online dating, what seems like a good idea quite often doesn’t translate into a sustainable business. Look at photos and profile writing, those are the closest competitors for member dollars at online dating sites.
If the dates don’t pan out, customers get upset and come to the realization that they do in fact need to be putting in the time and effort themselves. It’s a necessary side-effect of online dating, you give up 5-10 hours a week of your time if you’re truly active.
People respond to messages that catch their eye. How do you think women wade through 100 messages a week? Now you’re paying some random person a lot of money to write your emails for you. The whole value proposition is centered around some random woman named Sue who worked for a hypnotherapist in Canada.
If this Sue person comes up with a foolproof way catch the eye of the reader, it’s just like tweaking home page text for search engine optimization. She has optimized the first few steps of the communication process and is essentially doing arbitration. What if there is a super-amazing woman and Sue knows she never responds to her emails? Does she stop emailing her? Some guy could be missing out on the love of his life because someone doesn’t think they are a good fit or some other reason. Yikes.
Joe the plummer may think that the company representing him writes good-enough emails, but do they? What if the emails aren’t effective? Do these companies do user testing, cataloging different types of emails and seeing which perform the best?
Have these companies even though this stuff through? I’m simply rattling off the first few things that come to mind. The whole process is wrought with impracticalities and issues we haven’t even thought of yet.
Now that there are at least a half-dozen companies trying this marketplace, it’s going to come down to pricing and results. Where is the transparency and accountability coming from?
Best of luck to all of these companies as they continue to outbid each other on search engines. It’s a niche market with some potential to make a few bucks until the big dating companies get smart and remove the friction associated with the browse-communicate-date timeline. The idea of having a personal dating concierge is well-received, yet I think everyone will agree that there is room for considerable improvement.
