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.
Category: All Interviews
Quickie Interview: Dan Winchester, CEO Freedating.co.uk, Introducing ODA
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.
Quickie Interview: Magic, CEO, World Dating Company
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
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.
Quickie Interview: Rutger, Founder, DatingWebsites.nl
OPW INTERVIEW – Sep 19 – Rutger Tolenaar is a Netherlands and European mega-affiliate.
Quickie Interview: Jeroen, Director, Social Clicks
OPW INTERVIEW – Sep 19 – As a channel for iDating member acquisition, Facebook is hot. Red hot!
Want help with your European Facebook social media marketing. Perhaps
Jeroen can help.
Quickie Interview: Greg Swierad, CEO, IntelligentElite
OPW INTERVIEW – Sep 19 – IntelligentElite has grown largely through word-of-mouse. Greg is the new CEO.
Using Language Patterns To Match People: Jonathan Mall Interview
OPW INTERVIEW – Aug 9 – believe that 'people will tell you everything if you only observe.' So I was quite interested to learn of the work Jonathan Mall was doing in using language patterns to match people. If you'd like to learn more I recommend the seminal work 'The Secret Life of Pronouns.' – Mark Brooks
What's your background and founding story of Mailmindmatch?
While doing my PhD in Psychology, I read the literature demonstrating that language synchronization patterns can be indicative of effective communication, mutual rapport and coordination. Various papers report that people who matched their language style were more likely to start a relationship or have a higher chance to prolong their existing relationship. I immediately wanted to calculate match scores for my own communication partners and found that most recorded conversations accumulated in my Facebook inbox. Previous work, by Pennebaker's group and others (e.g. Ireland et al., 2010; Taylor & Thomas, 2008) >conversation transcripts, thus a thorough investigation and optimization of the language style matching approach was lacking for online communication. Therefore, I build a Facebook app to analyze all my messages and visualize the language style match. The language style match scores obtained for my friends on Facebook largely coincided with my feelings towards them. Ex-girlfriends and even good male friends were on top and people I cared less about were at the bottom. I conducted a large study, asking 300 people to rate up to 20 of their Facebook friends and then calculated which language characteristics would predict how much people valued each other. Over 2.5 million individual messages were analyzed and the predictive power of the resulting algorithms was high. Thus, language style matching in online communication can reliably estimate how effective two people communicate and how much mutual rapport they are feeling.
Now that I've graduated I am looking for partners to apply these algorithms in an environment where a good fit between people is important and has commercial relevance.
How does Mailmindmatch help iDaters make better matches?
iDating has long been trying to create algorithms that match people before they ever made contact. It neglects a large part of the courting process, the actual conversation. Effective communication means listening and reacting "on the same wavelength", which is what mailmindmatch.com measures. While language style matching can also be used to propose prospective dates, based on the content of previous conversations, ongoing conversations offer the most relevant information to determine whether two people match. For example, when an iDater is chatting with 5 prospective dates, the algorithms can indicate which one appears to be the best match.
Where can we see it in action?
The Demo is available at http://www.mailmindmatch.com.
How can an iDating site work with you to integrate the test into their site?
The infrastructure to do the processing of messages is in place. Chat protocols with 300+ words exchanged are enough to calculate language style match scores. The next challenge will be to integrate the technology in the most beneficial manner. While matching based on language style can improve existing matching algorithms that find prospective dates, given the individual nature of interpersonal communication, the algorithms are particularly powerful to evaluate starting conversations.
What would the ideal implementation look like?
An overall match score could be displayed next to a conversation. iDaters can be getting advice on how to communicate more effectively, i.e. achieve higher rapport. At the back-end, language style match scores can be used to operationalize the actual fit of two people once they started chatting, allowing to optimize existing match algorithms without the need of iDaters rating each conversation.
How much would it cost the iDating site to use this test?
The exclusive license costs 80k/year. If IP rights are warranted, other cooperations can be negotiated. Please contact me if you like to know more.
(References:
Ireland, M. E., Slatcher, R. B., Eastwick, P. W., Scissors, L. E., Finkel, E. J., & Pennebaker, J. W. (2010). Language Style Matching Predicts Relationship Initiation and Stability. Psychological Science, 22(1), 39–44.)
AtThePool CEO Interview, Alex Capecelatro
OPW INTERVIEW – Aug 20 – I used to run an adventure and social club in Silicon Valley. It was a singles club that wouldn’t admit to being a singles club. AtThePool.com reminds me of my little club. Yes, its great for singles, but that’s not really what its about. Here’s my interview with the CEO/Founder, Alex Capecelatro. – Mark Brooks
What is your founding story?
AtThePool has been live for just under a year. Our goal is to help people connect offline, so not too different from a typical dating site, except we're not focused on dating.
I had been moving around quite a bit in the States. I found incredibly difficult to connect with people around me. I began working on At the Pool when I was living in a town called Beacon, upstate New York and it was probably the most depressing time in my life. I was building a chemical manufacturing company out of an automotive garage, and it was extremely isolating. I tried Meetup, but it didn't really work up there. I tried Facebook but Facebook doesn't really help you meet new people. I tried dating sites and learned that a lot of people using dating site not for dating but to get out and meet new people.
So the initial thought for AtThePool was to create a really easy and fun way to meet new people in your area based on your interests.
I've got a whole ton of questions for you, but one question just is burning in the back of my mind, what were the chemicals in the garage?
Long story. I have a background as a chemist. I spent a number of years doing that. With a couple of friends out of MIT, we developed a new class of materials based on Aerogel, which is the world's lightest material.
I sold lasers, and we had to measure Aerogel, and it was very difficult to measure. Amazing stuff!
Our company was called Aerogel Technologies, and we were pretty much the only manufacturing plant in the world that's making Aerogel.
Are you a fan of traditional idating sites, or are they broken? What do you think?
Idating is getting more and more popular. It's here to stay, and it's just getting bigger.
Would you say you're more of a social discovery? You're discovering new people to hang out with.
The website is 100% social discovery but we have a new app that is coming out in about a month. The app is very different. The app is looking more at your existing relationships connecting to people nearby, and it's not so much about meeting new people. Meeting new people is interesting and exciting if you're in a new town, but on a day-to-day basis your existing relationships are overwhelming. You know a lot of people that you are not following up with, you know people who are probably right around the corner that you just haven't caught up with in quite a while. Social discovery is interesting, but I don't feel like it's an entire product. It's really a feature within a greater product, and that's how we are evolving our company.
What do you think of Meetup?
I have a lot of mixed feelings about Meetup. I love the mission. It's really good in the business community but it really doesn't resonate with the young community. Part of it is the design and the user experience. It's more than 10 years old. I feel like they need to reinvent themselves, or they are not going to stay relevant to the new crowd.
So how are you making money?
At this point we are focused on execution and growth. We are not focused on revenues right now. We do have a couple different models that are in the works and that we are experimenting with. The first one is launching sort of white-label pools, communities of people that have a reason to meet. There are pools we can white label and drop into conferences and other events we are getting a lot of attention and a lot of attraction to.
The other one is local deals. For example, we know who in Santa Monica is into yoga, into cycling or surfing, because that's how our interest graph is built. What we are doing is building a recommendation engine, and if we scale the right way that's a huge business.
How many members do you have now?
We are not disclosing the number, but we have members in over 95 countries. The growth has just blown us away, it's been pretty phenomenal.
Are you looking for funding?
We raised funds about 7 or 8 months ago, and we are well funded for the next year. We're not looking for money right now, we're just focused on executing/launching this mobile product, and just having a good time.
What is AtThePool and GetThePool going to look like in one year roughly?
I'm extremely excited about the mobile launch. Our goal ultimately is not one year out, but maybe five/ten years out. We believe the entire world needs to be connected. I want to be able to travel anywhere in the world, connect with the people around me, and be able to get offline.
eDarling CEO Interview, Lukas Brosseder (MD And co-Founder Of Affinitas GmbH)
OPW INTERVIEW – Aug 13 – eDarling recently pared away from eHarmony and is independent again, and ready to compete internationally. eDarling launched in the UK recently and is now open for business in 22 countries. Here’s their founding story, from Affinitas co-founder Lukas Brosseder. – Mark Brooks
This is our first interview with eDarling. What’s your founding story?
David Khalil and myself founded the company in November 2008. In Europe, we didn't see a true matchmaking company. Here, it was always a combination of a dating site and a personality questionnaire, but not a true matchmaking service, and existing players weren’t very innovative. None of the matchmaking sites such as Parship in Germany and eHarmony in the U.S. were able to go international. We believed that this was possible, and that was our idea. In May 2009, 6 months after the launch in Germany, we were live in 4 other countries.
Would you say that your product and philosophy is different from the likes of Parship and eHarmony?
What distinguishes us is a very true matchmaking system. We are focusing on delivering very good matches. You only get 7 initial matches when you finish our relationship questionnaire. We pride ourselves in the quality of the matches, and the communications.
eHarmony has been a big part of us for a very long time, and we have grown together in a lot of ways. Initially, they were one of our biggest heroes. Our matchmaking system is very different from the eHarmony system.
Let's talk about matchmaking then. What is your philosophy; what kind of basis do you focus on for the matchmaking?
All the other larger competitors’ matchmaking is based on the big five model. We truly believe in compatibility and being matched based on having similar interests and personality traits. We have several innovative algorithms implemented that understandably I can not talk about in detail. A big part of the secret sauce are the users on the site, and here we pride ourselves on having a high educated, extremely dedicated user base. I think that also is a big part of our success.
Recently you parted ways with eHarmony. Could you give us some more insight on why, and what happened?
We parted on very good terms on either side. I think the main reason for the parting was Dr. Neil Clark Warren’s strategy to decrease eHarmony’s international footprint. We wanted to grow internationally. It was a good way and good timing for everyone to take different routes and to take different strategies.
How many countries are you in now?
We launched in UK and Ireland just a couple weeks ago, and now we're in 22 countries.
Congratulations on entering UK and Ireland. How did that go, and how did you seed into those countries from scratch?
We have done this 20 times before. We know how to grow business internationally. With UK and Ireland, it was the same set up as it was with Hungary, Finland, Denmark, and Slovakia, which all were launched at the beginning of this year. We make the site free and spend significant 5-digit marketing budgets per day to build up a user base. When we have a user base and also activity on the platform that is sufficient, we start to charge.
What is eDarling going to look like in a year or so's time?
We will grow further international. We just launched in Ireland and UK which is the largest dating market in Europe. So there are a lot of things to do. We won't rule out launching in more countries in Europe. We also see opportunities in South America.