Just in time for Valentine’s Day, social dating site Heartbroker pulls off the covers today. Heartbroker addresses what the founders call the pervasive problems of profile misrepresentation and scamming found in many popular dating sites. The site uses feedback from friends to help improve match quality and member security.
Heartbroker works by having singles ask their trusted friends to write a testimonial and rate them on five simple attributes. The testimonials are listed on singles’ profiles so that their matches can evaluate them. The attribute ratings, on the other hand, remain confidential to encourage honest feedback, and are used to determine compatibility with others. Friends can also try their hand at playing Cupid with Heartbroker by suggesting matches to their single friends.
Previous reputation-based dating sites like Engage that proceeded Heartbroker spent too much time fiddling with the knobs and dials and not enough on traffic acquisition. Its easy to blow through a lot of time and money trying to get things perfect and then run out of money and say what the heck happened? I see this every week in the dating industry.
I’m a big fan of experimenting with reputation-based dating sites. Friendly feedback provides a perspective on a person’s personality that they often can’t vocalize in a dating profile.
The primary challenge for Heartbroker is there are two conversion funnels. One to get singles to sign up and a second to entice their friends to take time out of their day to sign up for yet another Facebook app and fill out a questionnaire.
I tell people I will give them two round-trip business class tickets anywhere in the world if they introduce me to my wife. If thats not enough incentive, badgering your friends to say great things about you in a Facebook app that they have to sign up for, well that could be a formidable hurdle in the way of Heartbroker’s potential for success.
It’s also not clear what type of feedback will be most effective. I have a feeling that Heartbroker will have to tweak their feedback questions on the fly until they find a core set that accurately reflects a person in a relationship context, is easy to fill out and friends are ok with taking the time to do so.
What I really would like to see is a Mad-libs or OKCupid-style set of questions. For example: When the check comes: Dave a) makes excuse to go to the rest room, b) throws out credit card and crows “Its on me!”, c) gets out tip calculator and starts itemizing the bill for 10 minutes.
Furthermore, an anonymized look at the last 25 of a person’s Facebook Wall will provide a valuable unvarnished peep at person in conjunction with tests, essay questions, social feedback, etc.
Having spent some time with the Heartbroker folks, I think they are on to something. Lets see them get 10,000 users, learn some things and tweak and refine the user experience. Only then will we begin to know if testimonial-based dating on Facebook can compete with traditional dating sites. I certainly hope they do a blog and share what they are learning along the way.
