Do you feel like the speed dating events would've worked better if you guaranteed attendees to be of a certain attractiveness range? I.e. "ages 25-35, guaranteed to be 6+ via photo vetting".
that's an interesting idea. my first instinct is that the more you restrict the pool, the more people enjoy the event, but the harder it is to sell tickets. but maybe not ... maybe the more limits you place on who can attend actually makes it more appealing, and you can charge higher prices without substantially increasing CAC.
I respectfully disagree with a lot of the conclusions you're presenting in this article. For a really big one, in the section where you talk about the downsides of tinder and human matchmakers. All of your points are true, but they aren't the main reason people don't like tinder / matchmakers. The reason is really simple: those services fail because of massive gender imbalance.
Who knows what the real numbers are, but there are way more guys than girls on apps. This messes with the sexual market and causes women to overestimate their own value and ignore many of the guys there, and then the high probability of being ignored causes those guys to adopt spammier and scummier strategies in a giant failure spiral. I can't dox myself, but I used to work in an unrelated industry whose product had a lot of structural similarities to dating apps. Solving this specific problem (Men get ignored, respond by putting in less effort on more people, which causes them to get ignored even more, and so on and so on, metaphorically speaking) was in fact our company's #1 priority one year.
And matchmakers? Exact same problem. Matchmakers can never find enough single women to match all their clients with, so they get desperate and just kind of find any random women they can to match you with. I learned this lesson the hard and expensive way, unfortunately.
I promise you, if you could somehow come up with a dating app where the genders were balanced, so many of the problems with apps like Tinder just disappear. But you'll never do that. For a whole bunch of sexual market dynamics reasons that should be obvious. Hell, even the background material sucks; almost every city in the US has a substantial surplus of single men. We can't even gender-balance our cities, how will we gender-balance dating apps? 😅
I'm pretty convinced that it is not possible to create an effective dating app. I'm 100% convinced that it's not possible to create a successful dating app business. That's why Tinder, Bumble, etc, are all basically gacha games, it's the only way to make money. The fundamental problem with dating apps is that they only make money when you're on the app, but you stop being on the app when you find a partner. You can solve this with charging upfront but that's a hard sell, ad you'll have a lot of angry customers when they have to pay upfront only to still not find success.
I have so many other thoughts about this post, but I've emailed you, so I'll save it for there. Thank you for writing this up
“I briefly flirted with having venues run the events themselves so that I did not have to attend each one. While there was some inbound interest, I never felt comfortable relinquishing full control over the experience. Venue staff were often too busy or unreliable to do a great job. In the end, I chose to run all the events myself.” - that’s tough and exhausting that you had to physically be present for each one! But the right call to make sure each event went well.
Such a fascinating article, have so many thoughts. I would love to see if I can glean any other insights and write a Substack piece as well on it. I really appreciate the business and marketing insights as someone who also is a digital marketing professional as well as dating data nerd. I signed up for the NYC event since my friend Steve Dean forwarded it to me. Would love to chat more about your findings.
Do you feel like the speed dating events would've worked better if you guaranteed attendees to be of a certain attractiveness range? I.e. "ages 25-35, guaranteed to be 6+ via photo vetting".
that's an interesting idea. my first instinct is that the more you restrict the pool, the more people enjoy the event, but the harder it is to sell tickets. but maybe not ... maybe the more limits you place on who can attend actually makes it more appealing, and you can charge higher prices without substantially increasing CAC.
Really awesome work and fascinating article. Reaching out!
This is super cool. Love that you did this although your conclusion is what i would have guessed :)
I respectfully disagree with a lot of the conclusions you're presenting in this article. For a really big one, in the section where you talk about the downsides of tinder and human matchmakers. All of your points are true, but they aren't the main reason people don't like tinder / matchmakers. The reason is really simple: those services fail because of massive gender imbalance.
Who knows what the real numbers are, but there are way more guys than girls on apps. This messes with the sexual market and causes women to overestimate their own value and ignore many of the guys there, and then the high probability of being ignored causes those guys to adopt spammier and scummier strategies in a giant failure spiral. I can't dox myself, but I used to work in an unrelated industry whose product had a lot of structural similarities to dating apps. Solving this specific problem (Men get ignored, respond by putting in less effort on more people, which causes them to get ignored even more, and so on and so on, metaphorically speaking) was in fact our company's #1 priority one year.
And matchmakers? Exact same problem. Matchmakers can never find enough single women to match all their clients with, so they get desperate and just kind of find any random women they can to match you with. I learned this lesson the hard and expensive way, unfortunately.
I promise you, if you could somehow come up with a dating app where the genders were balanced, so many of the problems with apps like Tinder just disappear. But you'll never do that. For a whole bunch of sexual market dynamics reasons that should be obvious. Hell, even the background material sucks; almost every city in the US has a substantial surplus of single men. We can't even gender-balance our cities, how will we gender-balance dating apps? 😅
I'm pretty convinced that it is not possible to create an effective dating app. I'm 100% convinced that it's not possible to create a successful dating app business. That's why Tinder, Bumble, etc, are all basically gacha games, it's the only way to make money. The fundamental problem with dating apps is that they only make money when you're on the app, but you stop being on the app when you find a partner. You can solve this with charging upfront but that's a hard sell, ad you'll have a lot of angry customers when they have to pay upfront only to still not find success.
I have so many other thoughts about this post, but I've emailed you, so I'll save it for there. Thank you for writing this up
“I briefly flirted with having venues run the events themselves so that I did not have to attend each one. While there was some inbound interest, I never felt comfortable relinquishing full control over the experience. Venue staff were often too busy or unreliable to do a great job. In the end, I chose to run all the events myself.” - that’s tough and exhausting that you had to physically be present for each one! But the right call to make sure each event went well.
Such a fascinating article, have so many thoughts. I would love to see if I can glean any other insights and write a Substack piece as well on it. I really appreciate the business and marketing insights as someone who also is a digital marketing professional as well as dating data nerd. I signed up for the NYC event since my friend Steve Dean forwarded it to me. Would love to chat more about your findings.