Its never been easier to launch a social dating service. These days all you have to do is license an event database, throw in a social feature or two (who’s near me, friends matching friends, etc), “go viral” amongst the early adopters via mobile or HTML5 apps ( I call it the TechCrunch 10,000- the first 10,000 people who read about you on the popular Internet startup blog), call it social dating with a slightly weird spelling and send out a press release. Couple weeks of hacking and you can launch a beta at SXSW. Then experience the roller coaster of raising money from friends family and fools (angel investors). Finally, you figure out how much its going to cost to get enough users to be viable outside of your area code based on your initial customer acquisition costs and you faint.
If you believe the media, 94.3% of all recent college graduates who couldn’t get jobs are living at home and starting Internet businesses. Its fun in your early 20’s and the ride can be a great learning experience and one out of 1,000 or so will hit it big. Or is that 1 out of 10,000?
You know how difficult it is to start a new social dating startup? The previous the CEO of Match.com, Jim Safka, tried it. He raised $615,000, built something called Atzip which morphed into Circa, which has an iPhone app, which feels pretty stale and unloved. The ex-CEO of the largest and most popular dating site in the world couldn’t launch a service thats on anyone’s radar.
I tell a lot of people not to build dating services, which surprises them at first. Once you tell the story and point out what’s required to be successful, a lot of people will go try something else. A few times a year a person or team will pitch me an idea and the hair on the back of my neck stands up. Then I tell them in a nice way how patently absurd their idea is and that they should pivot and do XYZ.
Then they push back against all my arguments and make me sound like a clueless idiot for no seeing understanding the potential of such a great idea. If they can’t (headstrong and doomed), I politely back off. You are not Steve Jobs and being rigid and telling me that “This is the way its going to be” is not going to help you because whatever your idea is today is going likely be different in six months. Startups are like yoga, breath, be flexible and enjoy the process. Or be a type-A B-school jerk and best of luck to you and send my condolences to your investors.
Sometimes we get along and end up working together, which is great, but I pick my clients as much as they pick me. I thrive when I’m working with great entrepreneurs, and why waste time working with not-great people? We’re all learning and energizing each other and sometimes there is a nice payoff, or it flames out and we all move on to something more interesting. Part of being a good entrepreneur is knowing when to put an idea back in a drawer and go mow the lawn and think up something new.
Back to ATZIP. Jim’s old alma matter, IAC, parent company of Match, has a social dating app called Crowded Room. At least I think its a social app, or a social app that might be a dating app, or a dating app masquerading as a social app, or a social app with dating features, I’m not sure.
ATZIP and Crowded Room are like Going.com all over again. Going.com sold to AOL and crashed and burned, which was too bad because Roy and the team there were awesome. Now we have 100 other social dating apps out there. Too many duplicitous mobile apps that feel identical. There are some standouts, but most simply don’t have enough traffic on them to stay on my home screen for very long. OTOH, Match/OKC/POF and other big sites mobile apps are accounting for enormous amounts of traffic, interaction, messaging and discovery.
Some entrepreneurs fall for the idea of taking the best of all the social dating services and creating one app out of them and quickly amassing a large database of people. Sexy as that idea is, it never works. Starting a new service from scratch and achieving any sort of measurable success is incredibly difficult, if not impossible, for most people. Hey, thats life, if you don’t like the odds, then what are you doing to improve them in your favor?
There is much to be learned from the failures in the dating industry. Many lessons and things to avoid so you don’t get caught in the same traps as your predecessors. Sometimes just talking through the history of a short list of previous market entrants is exactly what you need to hear when you are starting out.
Thankfully every so often a site will come from nowhere and make headlines and fundamentally change the dating game based on a new and novel approach. they may be for serious daters (my favorit kind of pure-play service) or they create enormous casual/social services which have so many people on them that they need to come up with new ways to entertain, engage and profit from their members. I live to work with those companies and everyone, most importantly singles, benefit from their success.
I would be more than happy to discuss these topics and much more with you if you’re interested.
