TechCrunch has a review of a new mobile video dating app called Flikdate. Its the first all-female founded dating startup I’ve ever heard of, cool.
Snip:
By default, every conversation is limited to 90 seconds and costs you one flik. If, however, you decide that you want to talk for longer, you can go on a virtual “date” without time limits. That’ll cost you 5 fliks, but if your partner accepts your proposal, he or she will now appear in your datebook and you can go on another “date” or communicate by text chat anytime.
Once you run out of fliks, you can either wait a day for the service to automatically top off your account or buy 25 additional fliks for $0.99.
This is kind of interesting for 20-somethings. Seems like 99 cents is a bit cheap in terms of monetization, thats $.25 cents for an unlimited virtual date. $7,500 a month in revenue on 10,000 users assuming a 15% take rate. But for the kids, its a good deal.
I use Facetime on my iPhone all the time to talk to friends at Red Sox games and see their cute babies. But I don’t understand why people would want to chat with random strangers just because they are on the same app as them. I want a solid search filter, but I guess there are some people who are just happy to connect with others, regardless of if they are 10 or 1,000 miles away. I’ll dig into this a bit more with an upcoming post on Airtime.
Remember WooMe? They blew through millions trying to do a web version of Flikdate. WooMe is in the deadpool now, even though they had some truly great ideas, being a spam/fake profile-mill didn’t end up being the best growth strategy.
The question is, do people really want to do video dates on mobile instead of on a laptop? Is mobile video dating that much better than sitting at your computer? We’ll see.
Facetime, Airtime, Facebook video, mobile versions of speed dating apps, etc., there is a lot of competition out there for Flikdate. I wonder what the acquisition cost is for a mobile speed dating user? Its probably more than a dollar, which is break-even for the majority of people who buy some fliks.
They’re going to need additional monetization channels, thats for sure. Investors will demand them. We know how this goes, right? Cue Badoo and Are You Interested. Pay a $1 a day to show up at the top of the list in your geographic area. Pay another dollar so you can use a mobile version of CamTwist and choose from overlays like devil horns, beach backgrounds, etc. Gamification, leaderboards, you know the drill.
Figuring out additional revenue streams is pretty easy. Now we’re back to the primary issue, acquiring enough mobile customers who will actually pay more than their acquisition costs.
That will take a few million if they want to make a dent in the market. Go ask HowAboutWe how many ad dollars they are spending on New York Times banner ads.
“Flikdate uses Facebook as an identity mechanism, which allows it to easily ban users who misbehave. On the service itself, of course, you are completely anonymous – but if you decide to take those pants off, Flikdate knows who you are.”
Trend Alert: Lots of dating sites are using Facebook as an identity verification service. (Does anyone besides eHarmony do identity verification these days?) No posting to walls, no on-boarding of Facebook data. This is great news for those of us with fake Facebook profiles (I have about 10, of all ages, genders, locations, etc.). So much for OpenID and its variants. Facebook is *the* new authentication scheme, even though its ridiculously easy to fake your identity there. Heck, I have my fake profiles all friends with each other so I look trustworthy and there are bots for keeping those profiles fresh and people you can pay to like/friend you. Thats a fun game to play if you’re into faking out Facebook. I’m just screwing around for fun, the people doing it for profit, well it reminds me of Myspace Friend Trains.
Flikdate should show up in the Apple app store next week. I’ll add myself and post my ID up here so we can all check it out together.
