Andrew Chen nails it by identifying the problems dating sites run into when they are focused more on near-term profits than anything else. As the man says, make the product experience awesome!
Snip…
Ultimately, most metrics tend to focus inwards, on self-interested gain, rather than outwards on the value you’re creating for your customers. Let’s take a couple examples of inward-focused metrics that people often cite:
- account registrations
- pageviews
- unique visitors per month
- revenues
I’m sure you measure many of the above, as I do as well. It’s OK to measure this stuff, but if you start to optimize for it, you are starting to focus on the business of value extraction, not value creation.
How do you measure it?
Here’s the interesting part – everyone’s benefit-driven metrics will be completely different, because most people’s customers and value proposition and product are ultimately very different. Unfortunately, you don’t have the crutch of standardized numbers like pageviews or uniques to lean on.
For dating sites:
Why do customers join dating sites? To find their soulmates. Thus, measure the quantity of successful matches you make, not the lifetime value of the customer. Focusing on LTV can easily lead you to do things like creating fake accounts to make people come back, or optimizing it so that they find their best matches several months down the line, or trying to get everyone to pre-pay for the service rather than making the product experience awesome.
