Category: All Interviews

An Interview With Geoff Cook The CEO Of MeetMe, About Charm

Posted on October 22, 2013
Screenshots of the Charm app

OPW INTERVIEW – Oct 22 – We heard MeetMe intoduced a new app, Charm, and had a few questions:

What is Charm?
Charm is about having fun while meeting real people, real fast. We’ve always been about driving new connections and deepening relationships among our users. We believe substance and authenticity are missing from many social apps today. For example, studies have shown that the people who use FB the most are among the most unhappy, potentially because people are consuming a highlight reel of other people’s lives. Meanwhile, the popular dating app Tinder is photo only. We don’t think you can get a first impression of someone from a photo. If you are at a bar or coffeehouse you are attracted by personality as well as appearance. Ultimately we built Charm to show people are more than a profile photo, to enable the personality to come through.

Does Charm represent a ‘pivot’ in your business model?
We launched Charm as a standalone app because we think mobile apps are best when they are simple, doing only one or two things and doing them well. On a web site, you might be able to launch feature after feature into a menu, but on mobile that would only bloat the app. Mobile users visit for a few minutes a session and more than a hundred times a month. We view the audience for Charm as much the same as the audience for MeetMe and we heavily promote the Charm app to our MeetMe users, but we believe the simplicity of Charm as a standalone app will increase its potential.

We see much of the industry moving towards a portfolio approach, from IAC with Tinder, Okcupid, and Match; to Twitter with Vine; to Facebook with Instagram, Poke, and Messenger. We have said publicly we plan to launch 4 new apps in the next 6 months and Charm is the first of those.

What are the challenges of using video in the iDating space?  What’s the upside of video?
Video slows down the consumption and presents some friction as users must add a video.  At the same time, videos add a whole new dimension to apps like Tinder, and ultimately are more authentic. Photos can be 5-10 years old and be the best picture of a person ever taken. Videos don’t reduce a person to appearance in the same way as a photo does.

Will video be the new profile photo?
What’s changed is video has come into the mainstream on mobile only recently with Vine’s launch and Instagram’s recent update. Vine recently pioneered the short, looping video that enables creativity by stitching interesting videos together in a simple record-process. We believe this has dramatically reduced the friction to video creation and opens up natural opportunities for meet-new-people applications. 

How’s the growth of Charm coming along?
It’s very, very early but we are pleased to see tens of thousands of users join in the first week.

See all posts on MeetMe
See all posts on Charm

Noonswoon Interview With CEO Peter Panas

Posted on October 8, 2013

Noonswoon peter panasOPW INTERVIEW – Oct 8 – Noonswoon is a mobile dating app that launched in Thailand this year. Noonswoon is a winner of 2013 AIS startup contest, and has recently raised $400K. Here is our interview with CEO Peter Panas. – Irena Brooks 

What is Noonswoon's founding story? What is your background?
Mickey Asavanant and I co-founded Noonswoon in 2013. We're both still single and personally motivated to build a dating company that doesn't suck. Mickey previously co-founded a dating company which grew to 2.5M users and is now part of the Match.com family, and I've been working in product management at larger Internet companies, e.g. Priceline, Yahoo, Amazon, MySpace.

How does Noonswoon works?  Would you say Noonswoon is Asia's CoffeeMeetsBagel?
Noonswoon introduces singles to one quality match per day. CMB is probably one of the more similar western dating companies, but our functionality is geared much more toward the needs of an Asian audience. The goal of finding love remains the same.

What's your business model?
We're still optimizing the business model, but in essence users pay to be introduced to other quality singles.

How many active users do you have?
40K. We see ~1k new users per day.

How do you spread the word about Noonswoon?
Our users are our top evangelists spreading the word about Noonswoon.

Who do you consider to be your biggest competition in Thailand?
We don't really have any serious direct competition here. The local market is primarily still comprised of offline dating agencies.

Have you launched in other Asian countries?
Not yet.

What's the market like in Thailand? What is the biggest difference between US and Asia?
Dating culture in Thailand is still very different from the US and Europe. Asians place much more importance on privacy.

Congratulations on the $400K funding. What is your plan on using the money? What is your priority?
Hiring the smartest people on the planet to join our team.

Where do you want Noonswoon to be in the next 18 months?
We want to establish Noonswoon as the leading dating company in Asia.

See all posts on Noonswoon

CherryBlossoms.com Interview With CEO Mike Krosky

Posted on October 1, 2013

OPW INTERVIEW – Oct 1 – Cherry Blossoms is a hallmark international dating brand.  They’ve been around for years.  Its time we captured their story. – Mark Brooks

What is Cherry Blossoms founding story?
The company started in 1973/4. There was a gentleman who wanted to find a wife from another country, and then another guy said: "Hey I can help you do that." They placed personal ads in countries such as Philippines and Japan. They got very good responses from those ads, and started thinking that this could be turned into a business. This is how Cherry Blossoms started.

I was living in Houston back in the 90s. One of my neighbors met his Philippine wife through Cherry Blossoms. The company got me very interested so I got their magazine and started to write to some ladies.

I've always been interested in computers and communication. I thought that this would be a perfect thing to have online. I contacted the company about that and they were very interested. So I put together a little plan and decided to move to Hawaii and see what I could do.

How quickly did Cherry Blossoms move online?
Because they had a good revenue stream coming from the magazine, I didn't want to cut that off. So we created an online magazine. There wasn't a lot of communication. It was in 1995 and there were maybe just two companies that had an Internet personals presence at that time. Then people started to register, and we started to develop communication devices, such as sending emails. It grew quite quickly.

Andrew Conru started Web Personals back in '94. What were the sites which you admired back then?
There was, like you mentioned, Web Personals which Andrew sold to some company and started FriendFinder. Another friend of mine, Lee Zehrer, had a company called Foreign Relations for Russians. He later moved on and started Kiss.com. But I stayed focused on the international business.

How would you define Cherry Blossoms fit in the market?
There are a lot of companies out there doing good stuff. The business is growing because the Internet is making the world smaller. We have been in the business of love for over 38 years. We are responsible for over 5,000 marriages every year, so it's very exciting.

What does the future hold?
We continue to enhance and improve our website. One of the improvements is a better communication software. 

What's your thoughts on video?
It is probably one of the best improvements that we have on the Internet, and it will continue to be of great value for people.

What's your mobile offering at this stage?
We are in the middle of our work for RWD (Responsive Web Design). We have another 2-3 months before we're ready to release this. When you log onto Cherry Blossoms, our software recognizes that you're on a mobile and you are going to use different pages than if you're on a laptop.

What do you offer in the way of on-the-ground services?
I would say we are strictly idating. We did tours back in 70s/80s and even 90s. Then IMBRA was introduced to regulate international matchmakers. We're really not a matchmaking company. We never felt like that was our place. We got away from the tours because the companies that are doing that in Philippines are walking a fine line. The Philippine government is not that keen on international matchmaking companies because of the problems they had way back in the 70s.

What countries are you in now?
We are in well over a hundred countries. We still have our greatest presence in the Philippines, followed by China and South America. We also have a presence in Russia and Ukraine.

SafeCharge Interview With CMO Shemer Katz

Posted on September 25, 2013

OPW INTERVIEW – Sep 23 - SafeCharge has focused on the iDating business and attended iDate conferences since 2004. They’ve signed numerous significant clients in the iDating business now. They know our industry. Here’s my interview with the their CMO, Shemer Katz. – Mark Brooks

Tell us more about SafeCharge. What do you do, and what's the founding story of Safe Charge?
SafeCharge is a payment provider, established in 2000. Today, we provide services to thousands of online mobile merchants, including some of the biggest dating companies.  We provide them the connectivity to the acquiring bank risk management services, and our main objective is to give them the best payment conversion with minimized risk of fraud.

Can you tell us who you are working with?
We serve half a dozen of top dating sites in Europe you list on your European online dating ranking page on OPW.

Why are they using Safe Charge?
Because of our experience in the idating industry. We offer the best payment conversion because we know the statistics, we know how to reroute the transaction to the proper acquiring bank, and how to manage the fraud. We have a large negative database that has been built throughout the years specifically to this industry. So we know exactly who the fraudsters are and we know how to block them ahead of time.

Now that is interesting. You have a black list…..
Yes. The black list has been built throughout the 13 years that we have been serving the industry.

You work with idating as one vertical. What are the other verticals you work with?
We work with sports betting, gaming, online financial services, online games, retail, and many other digital services.

What would you say are some of the latest trends in the payment processing industry that are important for the internet dating industry executive to know about?
Mobile payment is definitely one of the hottest trends. We also accommodate our payment services to support the mobile payments. Our mobile payments page is HTML5 compliant and the users get a native payment experience.

In addition to that, dating merchants are increasing the payment options that are available on their checkout page in order to increase their conversion in each region. Of course that is a great way of increasing revenue, just offering more payment options.

What has been hot though in the idating industry specifically? What has done well in the way of alternative payment systems? What would you say would be the top two additional?
It varies by the geographic. I would say that mobile payments, premium SMS, and direct carrier billing are the most important payment options. Also the cash-based payment is growing in some regions.

Are there any new regulations that the industry should be aware of?
I think that the enforcement of PCI compliance by the card schemes is major. The merchant has to go through the process to become compliant with the PCI requirements. More and more merchants prefer to use an external card vault to safely and securely store their customer's  sensitive payment information. This is actually the most effective solution that still allows for the one click payment for repeat customers while completely offloading the burden of PCI compliance to a third party like SafeCharge.

Quickie Interview: John And Marianna – 50 Plus Singles Dating In Europe

Posted on September 19, 2013

OPW INTERVIEW – Sep 19 – John Meuffels is CEO of MatchMedia.eu, and Marianna Exter is CEO of 50plus-treff.de.
I bumped into them at iDate Cologne just after they met each other. They had just discovered that they were competitors in the 50 plus
dating niche. 

Quickie Interview: Marc Lesnick, Host, iDate

Posted on September 19, 2013

OPW INTERVIEW – Sep 19 – Marc Lesnick was pleased with iDate Cologne. He was completely on form and did a stellar job running this Internet Dating Conference. This was the 35th iDate conference! Next up, Brazil in November, and then it’s Vegas Baby!, in January.

Quickie Interview: Dan Winchester, CEO Freedating.co.uk, Introducing ODA

Posted on September 19, 2013

OPW INTERVIEW –  Sep 19 – Its about time we had an industry association. Dan’s helping to form the Online Dating Association, and get standards in place. No small task. He needs all the help and support the industry can muster. 13 UK internet dating companies are supporting the initiative now.

See all posts on FreeDating.co.uk

Quickie Interview: Magic, CEO, World Dating Company

Posted on September 19, 2013

OPW INTERVIEW – Sep 19 – Maciej ‘Magic” Koper has grown his Polish catholic dating site, and niche network of sites, without spending any money on advertising. He has a significant portion of the 15m Euro a year Polish Internet dating market now.

Quickie Interview: Karolina, Marketing Manager At Metaflake.de

Posted on September 19, 2013

OPW INTERVIEW – Sep 19 – Metaflake is a German and European mega-affiliate, and have unique visibility on the German D-A-CH market especially. Karolina Schaefer gave a particularly informative presentation at iDate Cologne.