Another online dating site? 2009-07-31
When I tell people that I’m building an online dating site one of the comments I get is that it is a very crowded space. In one way, it is crowded. There are hundreds of dating sites from large sites like Match and eHarmony, down to the very narrow niches like farmers only and goth scene. Why build another one?
The answer is that I could not find one that I liked. Match and eHarmony are great because that’s where most people are. They have the best selection. But those sites feel like they haven’t changed since the early 2000’s.
I like Twitter and Facebook; Netflix and Hulu; Pandora and Flickr and all the other places where I spend most of my free time these days. I’m not a farmer or into goth. I’m into the interwebs. Where’s the online dating site for me?
If I follow someone on Twitter for a couple of weeks, you know what? I feel I sort of know them. If I look at someone’s Flickr photos, I get a sense of who they are. Show me someone’s favorite bands, and I can have a pretty good idea of whether they are a good fit with me. Much more so than any static profile written 6 months ago.
I also found 2 problems with online dating that I wanted to solve. First, it’s a real chore to create a new profile at the other sites. All that writing. Blech. Gelato solves that problem. You can have a rich profile in under 2 minutes.
Second, there are a lot of fake profiles on the other dating sites. This is a bigger problem for women. Men lie about whether they are married. Scammers create fake profiles. People post old pictures when they were slimmer or had more hair. On Gelato, we use a person’s social network to validate their profile. We call this SCOOP points. “Social Confidence of Online Profile.” We verify their facebook account and if they have more than 25 friends, they get SCOOP points. If they authenticate at twitter and have more than 25 followers, they get SCOOP points.
There are a lot of unique things we’re doing to create the simplest, safest, and richest online dating site available. We are off to a great start but want to hear your thoughts.
