OPW INTERVIEW – Mar 6 – Teligence knows voice chat, and mobile dating (white label), and has a customer service outsourcing offering as well (On Q). They’ve been busy. Here’s a quick spotlight interview with the GM, Jeff Prete. (Full Disclosure: Teligence is a client of Courtland Brooks)
Tell us about Teligence, what do you do? We’ve been in the voice-chat industry for 22 years. We’ve branched out into the web and to white label mobile apps.
How big is the business? We’re $50 Million+ a year in revenues with a high degree of profitability.
If a dating company comes to you and says we want voice chat, can you help? Yeah, absolutely. Voice chat is the easiest one to set up right now. It's a 22 year old platform that monetizes at a very high rate. You can be up and ready in 2 weeks.
What's the revenue split? It's 50/50. The more you market it, the less our share is.
You can also help with customer service outsourcing, I understand? We've got a voice customer service team, 24/7/365 email support as well as content moderation.
Are you multi-language? English, Spanish, and Portuguese are our strengths. We can staff up and get any other language that we need to.
And I think you have an announcement for us about your white label mobile dating platform? Yes, Here Media liked our white label dating infrastructure, so we worked with them to launch the new Gay.com website. It looks great – you should check it out. The next step is to launch their dating service on iPhone, Android, Windows Phone, and mobile web. They have a very active community and it’s been great to deliver them the next generation of services in the dating industry.
OPW INTERVIEW – Feb 26 – AForeignAffair is an International dating service that connects women from Russia, Latin America and Asia with guys around the world. John Adams is the CEO and Founder. I asked him about the genesis and nature of his company. – Mark Brooks
What is the founding story of AForeignAffair? AForeignAffair started in 1995 by myself, Ken Agee, and Ron Redburn. Back then newspapers had personal ads where women were seeking men, men seeking women, but you never really knew what the people looked like. We thought it would be great to put photos out there so people could actually see a photo before they meet.
We launched on the BBS system thinking we would do it locally in Phoenix. Then we discovered the Internet, and we thought: “Wow we can do this on a global basis.” We sent Ken to Russia to see if there was going to be any interest from the women to meet Americans. He was very pleased with the reception that he got there. That was kind of the beginning and we started first in St. Petersburg, Russia and Ukraine and then Colombia and all over.
This seems like a very different industry than the Internet dating industry. How would you define it? I would call it the International introduction industry. For people to be successful they're going to have to travel outside the county. I think there is a lot of ignorance in that. Once you start looking at the men and the women who use this, a lot of that ignorance melts away and you understand that these are just normal people trying to find that special someone.
What countries are you in? We are in Russia, Ukraine, Peru, Cost Rica, Columbia, China, Dominican Republic, and others.
It really seems like the opposite of Internet dating, because most Internet daters don't want to travel more than 20 miles. According to studies, these relationships tend to last longer than domestic relationships. One of the reasons for that is the fact that it does take more effort, it does take more commitment to make something like this work.
So how's your National Geographic promotion happening? We've always been open to the media. National Geographic is just another step in that progression of opening access and trying to illuminate this industry.
They did a wonderful job. I was there… Nothing was scripted, everything was as you see it. They had three separate crews, they were following the guys as they were going on the different dates, they were filming the dates, the socials, the reactions after the dates. Some were good and some were bad. It's not all fairy dust and blue birds singing around your head. It's about going over there and having options. You still have to make something happen.
What do you think this industry is going to look like in 5 years time? What's your vision of the future for AForeignAffair? I think it is going to become more mainstream. Our world is becoming smaller every day; we can communicate so much easier and it's instant and transparent. In order to be successful, you have to provide more customer service to both the men and the women, and more functionality. Not just introducing them, but helping them through the whole dating process, and helping them to be successful in marrying.
How do you think the idating industry can work with this industry? There must be a way for the two to work together. I think there is. We've talked to some of the local matchmaking companies, some of the more traditional ones, and we are still in talks with some. Partnering with us will allow them to offer more options to their clients.
OPW INTERVIEW – February 20, 2013 – AnastasiaDate is a premium international dating portal with four separate sites that serve members from throughout the world. I interviewed Lawrence Cervantes, Anastasia’s Chief Communications Officer, to understand more about Anastasia and what they’re about.
Who are the founders of Anastasia, and what's their story? Anastasia was founded in 1993 by a Russian woman who immigrated to the U.S. and married an American. They named the company after Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna of Russia who was reportedly quite a young lady and a role model for young Russian women. The company actually began as a specialized tour operator once the Wall collapsed. The owners originally took groups of American men to Moscow and St. Petersburg on organized excursions to meet single Russian women. The company soon became a success and expanded operations to include more and more cities throughout Russia and Ukraine. Then in 2003 Anastasia went online and has achieved amazing growth year on year. Since then we’ve gone worldwide with 4 main sites: AnastasiaDate.com, AmoLatina.com, AsianBeauties.com, and AfricaBeauties.com.
What business is AnastasiaDate in? Anastasia is in the business of international dating. We mix the concepts of international romance and modern love, and I’m happy to say that we have the lion’s share of the market. More and more it’s not just about domestic dating. As the net and travel break down barriers to business and society, more people are aware of the possibilities and ease of finding romance throughout the world. We enable that.
How many members does AnastasiaDate have now? Our family of sites connects over 4,000,000 members in over 110 countries, and we have regularly organized social activities throughout the year on 3 continents.
Where is AnastasiaDate based? We have principle offices in New York and Moscow, with regional offices in Odessa, Ukraine, in Chongqing and Foshan, China, in Cebu the Philippines, and in Medellin, Colombia.
Do you have a mobile app? Any day now…we’ll have more on a mobile application for Apple and Android within a few weeks and we’re very excited about that.
How is AnastasiaDate different from other Internet dating services? I like to say that we’re the next generation of dating. While the vast majority of dating sites have forever focused on domestic connections primarily with sometimes a smattering of foreign members, we concern ourselves with international relationships almost exclusively. As expanding facets of travel and tech enables the average person to discover and learn more about the world outside their own country, they discover new cultures, people, and realize the possibility for romance on another level. We help them connect. This concept is growing in scope and awareness, and is the reason we exist. It’s night and day a different direction and focus than most dating sites.
How do you make money? Like everyone we’re always looking for ways to create new revenue streams through technology, new services, improving what we have, better customer service which we’re very proud of by the way. I think like anyone will tell you, bringing home bacon is a cumulative effect, so we need to keep our finger on a lot of pulses. Whereas Chat hasn’t gone as far as we think it can in the U.S., internationally it’s done very well by us.
Who are the users typically? Our demo is the 30 to 60 age group who are interested in romance and finding a mate from a number of countries. The U.S. contains the usual suspects, followed by UK, Germany, France and Italy. We’re big in Latin America especially Colombia, and China.
What is AnastasiaDate focused on for 2013-2014? Mobile is a big directional push as it’s growing on all internet user fronts. We’ve recently added considerable muscle to our senior management team, so there should be strong acceleration in growth. We’re looking afresh at acquisitions and ventures, and we’re growing more charity participation. I’m publishing a book, so stay tuned.
OPW INTERVIEW – Jan 2 – Geoff Cook is the COO and co-founder of MeetMe, a leading publicly traded ‘people discovery’ company. (Full Disclosure: MeetMe is a prior client of Courtland Brooks)
You have one of the most fascinating founding stories in the industry. Tell us about it. It all started in April 2005. My brother and sister (15 and 16 at the time), had an idea for a social network to replace the yearbook for high school with online profiles. I liked the idea and invested some of the early money into it, and it was off to the races.
In the first week 400 people joined. 9 months later we had 1 million registrations. By 2006, we opened up an office and hired about 15 people, scored $4.1 Million Series A funding with US Venture Partners and First Round Capital. Then in 2008, we did a Series B round with Norwest Venture Partners.
We merged with Quepasa, which was a Latin American based social discovery network in November of 2011. MyYearbook had been considering changing its name, because we thought of MyYearbook as essentially connoting Classmates.com. We wanted a name that really showed what we wanted to be perceived as…the best place to meet people. That’s where MeetMe came from.
Quepasa’s audience transitioned over to MeetMe in October of this year. In order to complete that step, we needed to internationalize MeetMe in Spanish and Portuguese. Now we are going beyond Latin America with a European launch in French, Italian, and German.
Are you really competing with Facebook, or not? What we call ourselves is a social network for meeting new people and we play broadly in the social discovery space. We are very different from Facebook. We think of Facebook as the place you go to connect with friends and family. Social discovery is the area we focus on.
There are sites that try to make casual relationships and there are sites that try to focus on the intimate relationships, and I think we are clearly in the casual space. When you ask people why they join MeetMe and why they continue to log in, 90% say to make new friends; 37-38% say that they found someone they consider a best friend on the site.
You are a public company now. Has that really helped you or hindered you? Mostly helped. The reason is that it really does focus the team on the things that are going to drive growth and continued value.
How do you make money? It’s a combination of advertising and virtual currency. Traditionally, it was very skewed towards advertising. That has changed quite a bit since our focus on mobile. Our mobile revenue is roughly 50/50; it’s about 45% virtual currency, which is very different than how it works on the web, where it is a much heavier advertising skew.
60% of our daily active users are mobile. We have found that for the same virtual currency products that we also sell on the web, our mobile user are far more likely to buy them.
On Android, it’s roughly 3 times more likely than on the web; on iPhone, 5-6 times more likely than the web. Monetization on mobile is really a function of two things; one is virtual currency, and one is advertising.
We think the virtual currency side is the most promising, because that’s where you have this big benefit of users being more likely to pay you. On the advertising side you also have this pretty picture, because today only 1% of the global ad spend is in mobile, despite more than 10% of the total time spent in media being in mobile. Most people think that 10% number will go to 20-25% of all time spent. So there’s going to be an explosion in mobile advertising, because there has to be, because that’s where people are.
Facebook just announced in Q3, $3 Million a day just in mobile feed advertising. It think it’s just a very exciting time for mobile advertising as well.
We can agree that mobile was the big trend for 2012. What do you think is going to be the big trend for the people discovery category in 2013? You are going to see continued focus on mobile. The other thing you are going to see is interests being brought much more to the front of the application. We now have over a million active users every single day logging in from the U.S., and a growing number logging in overseas.
In September we said about 29% of our MAU was international, up from 17% in June. Once you start getting to that level of scale, you start getting a million plus people logging in every day, you start to enable some of the connections and allow some of the interests to enter the equation. We are starting to think through what that means for MeetMe.
What are you focused on for 2013? I would say mobile monetization is the number one. On the web the average revenue per daily active user is 14 cents. On mobile, the average revenue per daily active user is 3c. A dramatic chasm. Yet on a percentage basis that 3c is up dramatically from where we were just a year ago. In fact, in Q4 of last year, only about 5% of our MeetMe platform revenue came from mobile. That number has actually expanded to 20% in Q3 of this year. You can say that’s great progress, but I think that there is a lot of room to grow. Every one penny increase in mobile monetization, and closing of that gap from 3c to 4c, is more than $2 million in annualized revenue. So I don’t know that the 3c will close to 14c, although certainly we are committed to closing that gap.
OPW INTERVIEW – Sep 25 – Cupid has done well in Europe and is now setting its sites on the USA. That should bode well for its stock. I think Cupid is the best brand in the industry. Noone else has 2,000 years of branding to back them up! I sought out someone to talk about the baby and mobile dating. Sean Wood and Art Seredyuk took my interview. – Mark Brooks
How is Cupid mobile doing for you? Very well. We started working with mobile as early as 2007. We were able to react quickly as trends emerge. In February 2011 we saw 200,000 registration on BeNaughty coming through the web and 30,000 via mobile. In March 2012, we saw half a million registrations on mobile and half a million on web.
So is this 50/50 across the board or is it particular locations? Are you seeing more mobile users in the UK versus the USA? No, in USA, the mobile usage is now overtaking web. Not so in the UK, yet.
Interesting. What's the profile of a mobile user versus an online user? Is there any difference? Not really. It's worth pointing out that we have a multi-platform approach.
And how are they monetizing? We know Facebook isn't making too much money from mobile. How about Cupid? We are. For our registration, we have only one simple subscription to get access to all our products. We make money from communication only.
What platforms are you on at this stage? We've got native applications for the two major mobile platforms. We've got an application for iPhone, Android and iPad. Also an application for mobile in HTML5 for smart phones. So a customer can decide, depending on their preference, what application or site to use. The market now is about a 50/50 split. We even have websites for older phones because they are still on the market.
Why did you decide to go with native applications rather than just use HTML5? Market researchers say that there's no elimination of a single platform at the moment. So we're not trying to gamble and put all of our eggs in one basket. We have the development teams to support both platforms.
Have you chosen to use location-based services in the applications? Yes, absolutely. Location-based services are a likable part of a dating service. No matter what you're using, application or an HTML5 site, you can do a 1 click search and an automatic system will get your geographical location and will match you with singles. It filters out based on your search criteria and it will show your results on your map of which singles are accessible around you.
How would you say your mobile app is differentiated from your competitors? It's not only about mobile apps. It's more about strategy. For example, we provide our customers with a truly multi-platform solution.
What features are you most proud of? So from internal features, I can highlight our tracking and reporting system. Which is a system that allows us to track almost everything, see conversions for every device. It helps us understand which works best for us, helps us with real time optimization. Speaking about customers features, it's obviously location-based search.
Did you build the mobile applications in house or did you elect to use any external sources? Actually, we built all of our applications and mobile sites in house. We have a very skilled team with access to all of those development tools. This also means that we can react fairly quickly to trends.
You mentioned that you are most proud of the conversions tracking and the metrics that you're able to pull from the apps. What channels have you preferred for marketing? Where do you find people? We use almost all available channels. For example, we actively work with CPC, CPI and CPA networks. We have our own internal affiliate program. We secured some good direct deals.
So we know with online conversions that typically 10% of registrants convert to paying members and they stick around for 3 months. A typical new member registrant costs about six bucks or so. How does that compare to a mobile channel? What do you think the industry standard number should be for the mobile channels, in terms of conversions and the time people stick around. Here at Cupid, I can tell that there is a big difference between the mobile channels and web. At the moment, we probably see 25 to 30% lower price for mobile registrations. But I think the industry will change because of a lot of demand for mobile traffic and in the next six months, we'll have the same metrics for mobile as we do for web traffic.
Is the mobile platform available to partners for white labeling? Our web white label platform will have the HTML5 element with it so our partners will have mobile optimized sites. They simply, as default, won't get an iPad app, or an iPhone app, or an Android app. However we certainly could build one for partners quite easily.
So here's my second question that follows on from it. So, yes, you can do white labels. And the question that you would ask me is how much money I'd spend on promoting it. I would say I'm going to spend $200,000 in the next month on trafficking just for mobile. Where would you recommend that I spend the money? If you don't know what types of traffic is best for you, you might have to go to CPA networks so you can get your metrics on your installations or your registrations. You can also go to some mobile agencies which are a lot of the market at the moment. They can provide you some help with CPA and CPI networks.
So specifically, who would you say I should not use? What channels or specific source do you think are the worst? For every source, and every network, you can find some verticals that won't perform well for you. It's all about A/B testing.
In terms of mobile payments, what are the options that you are allowing users to use? We tried to add all of the web and mobile payments. Obviously, we have a credit card payment. We have a mobile specific SMS payment, we use mobile PayPal. We use a specific mobile system, Payforit. We keep an eye on all innovations in mobile payments so when something new is available on the market, we can add it to our sites and our applications.
You also have the Cupid apps available for download on iPhone. So Apple's taking their 30% cut. How do you feel about that? We don’t like it, but we have to deal with it. We prefer to use Android, because we can use our own in house payment system.
Who else do you think is doing a good job in mobile dating? I don’t' think anybody is doing anything particularly impressive in commercial terms. We would like to see what Facebook does with mobile and when they get their mobile advertising platform running.
If you were Facebook what would you change on the Facebook mobile app? I don't know, because the problem is not that they don't have a good mobile application. Almost 50% of the users are using Facebook on their mobile. The problem is that they are not monetizing well on mobile. The mobile advertising is the real announcement. So we'll wait.
Are you offering advertising through Cupid? Yeah, we sell some apps for our non-paid members for additional monetization.
Are you focused on app downloads or are you showing other ads? Most of our ads are cross-promotion of our other brands.
What do you think Cupid mobile is going to look like in a couple of years' time? What's your vision moving forward? Regarding our worldwide presence, in mobile we've got a very, very high presence in countries with high mobile penetration like US, UK, France. So our plans is to maintain our high positions, retain our places. Our Android application tops the lifestyle category in the Android marketplace. We are going to retain those positions and get better positions with market growth in European countries and Latin American countries.
OPW INTERVIEW – Sep 18 – Manhunt.net is gay and adult. Apple doesn’t do adult. After trying a PG app Manhunt decided to take a different approach. Here’s my interview with the CEO, Adam Segel, and their head of Product, Tim Feeley. – Mark Brooks
You've taken an unusual approach with Manhunt with mobile. You've actually gone with m.manhunt. Why did you go the online route instead of the native route? We are an adult dating site and there are a lot of content restrictions to be in the Apple Store and the Android Market.
How is the conversation with Apple? Apple is elusive. They don’t' really have conversations with you, they just tell you no. We see 40% of our traffic using mobile, I'm glad that we don’t' have to pay 30% of our revenue to the Apple Store. People are paying us directly on the phone and it's terrific.
How does that work? Well they just use their credit cards. They go through our regular credit card processing, we just made a mobile version of our page.
The element you're missing out on is the element of discovery. People going on Google Play and the iPhone store and looking for apps like yours and not finding you. They are probably looking directly for you, but they'll discover you on Manhunt.com. They'll know about m.manhunt.com? Yes. Fortunately we have a tremendous brand throughout the world so we're able to get the word out about our product. But you are correct, we do not have that advertising platform.
So how have you dealt with location with HTML5? Luckily, HTML5, especially on mobile platforms, does support querying for a mobile users GPS coordinates. Technically, there's a degree of precision that's a bit less when you are requesting via HTML5 versus a native app. But for our intents and purposes, it's perfectly suitable.
Most people, when it comes to mobile dating, don't really want specific location from what I'm hearing. Vicinity is of more interest. As long as you're within a 20 minute drive, it seems reasonable really. Or a 15 minute walk if you're in the city. For our users, it's more like a 5 minute walk, but still that's within the scope of what we're able to offer.
What limitations have you found with HTML5 versus a native app? The largest limitations is the notifications systemthat come with iPhone and Android and that we're unable to have. When people get new messages or when a friend of theirs is online, they can't get that push notification. The other is the ability to upload photos. It's perfectly fine on Android, but Apple has blocked that. There is no way through a browser to upload a photo. So our solution to that is a third party applications that facilitate that.
Have you got a solution for Blackberry? You can use Manhunt on the Blackberry, but it's a pretty rudimentary, very old mobile system that isn't pretty and doesn't have location and all that. Every time we query our members, it's really members abroad that have Blackberry. In the States, they don't really seem to have it as much or really care. It is something that we're thinking about, it is on our radar, but top priority is Android and iPhone.
How about international? Have you seen particular growth of mobile in international markets? Our number one biggest international market for mobile is Australia, where just short of 60% of our logins come from mobile devices. We also have great adoption in Spain and England.
In the USA, in terms of modes of payment; have you got a preferred provider you could recommend? We use Litle as our credit card processor – a combination of Litle and Global Collect. Global Collect helps us with all of our international billing and Litle does our domestic.
When did you launch the mobile app? It was less than a year since we've had the m.Manhunt out there.
How did you get the word out? Fortunately for us, there were two primary ways. One was when people started accessing Manhunt through mobile browsers, we took them directly to the mobile version. We also message all of our customers.
What features are you most proud of? I think that we're still rapidly improving to this day, but I'm proud of how we are able to integrated our millions of desktop members who aren't yet using mobile or choose not to use mobile, and exposing them on the Manhunt mobile experience. From a feature set, we try to be very much on par with Manhunt and extend that experience to your mobile device.
What's your thoughts on the iPad? How does that fit into your product roadmap? We are available on the iPad. We are seeing a slight, but steady increase in iPad traffic.
Have you really seen much difference between the demographic of your mobile users versus your usual online users. Does the age skew younger at all? A tiny bit, but not really noticeably. We're really seeing a broad user base of the mobile, just like the desktop. We're seeing guys in their 50's and 60's using their mobile apps, just like we are the 21 year olds to 28 year olds.
In terms of user acquisition as well, are you finding that you're acquiring via mobile? Are you actively advertising and marketing out to mobile as well? We are. We are advertising through our Google channels and we advertise mobile separately. We haven't found any tremendous mobile channels on which to advertise. Our competitors don't allow us to advertise on their apps, so it's been a little bit difficult. But we are seeing a steady increase in people joining through the mobile phone.
We've probably got a few of them watching this interview. What message would you have for them regarding advertising and swapping advertising? I can't really pressure them to let us advertise on their app because I probably wouldn't let them advertise on mine. But I would tell them that they do a great job and I'm very glad for them because it's helped us all to evolve to a much better mobile place for users to be able to have the solutions available.
Who do you hold in high esteem? Who else out there do you think is doing a good job on mobile? I think Grindr obviously started the trail and did a really nice job with it. I also think Scruff do a terrific job of having the app readily accessible and easy to use.
How would you say Manhunt mobile is going to look in a year's time? What's your goals and vision for the mobile product? We're making it easier and easier to offer your precise location coordinates. We've always kind of struggled with “are users willing to travel the extra 5 miles to find a guy that's exactly their type?” We found that they won't go 5 miles. They'll take a lesser guy who is closer than a hotter guy who's farther.
Also as people are using our apps more and more, they are asking us for some of the features that we haven't yet incorporated into the app; so this our next step.
I went to a conference recently and saw Windows Mobile exhibiting and I was very impressed. They've done a nice job with it. What's your thoughts on the future? How do you think they're going to be easy to work with? We haven't really looked into designing for that platform yet. Once we're able to discover the best way to approach that, we're looking forward to bringing Manhunt to all of the devices.
OPW INTERVIEW – Sep 11 – Beverly has a spin on mobile dating. She thinks daters should be able to call out the times they’re available as well as the date they’re interested in going on. She’s a busy New Yorker, and her service caters to similar. Here’s Beverly May, the CEO of MiniDates.com. – Mark Brooks
How do you define MiniDates? How is it different from other dating services? We're the first service that sends you dates around your schedule as well as who you're seeking. Our logo is a wine glass and a coffee cup combined. We only allow dates in coffee shops and bars. Because we also believe that for most people on a first date, all they really want to do is have a quick interaction.
And how's the site doing? Well, so far so good. We've got 3,000 people on a waiting list that we've gathered over the last three months. Anyone can join free and try it out.
What's your considerations on privacy in the app? We do a number of things to help protect our members' privacy. For one, we validate their email and their phone number. The woman gets to choose the venue. All of the venues that are listed in the app are either coffee shops or bars. Users can communicate through blind SMS or blind email. Members can be flagged or reported as dangerous at any time and their profile will be immediately taken down and put under review by our internal team.
How are you letting people define themselves in their profile on MiniDates? It’s not as comprehensive as eHarmony and it's not as short or picture oriented as Skout. But our goal is to get people offline to see if there is chemistry. So we ask the minimum number of questions that would be sufficiently comprehensive to allow you to decide whether you want to meet that person.
Safety is so very important. Your app really brings people together very quickly. Did you think about criminal background checks? It is something we are considering adding in at a future time.
How are you matching people? We do three levels of matching. It's who you're looking for as well as when and where you're free.
Do you believe in personality profiling? Even with personality profiling, it doesn't assess the intangible component of attraction and whether there's a spark with that person or not. I think it gets you part of the way. Ultimately you need to meet the person, so that's what our focus has been.
How would you define social dating? I think social integration and social graph integration is an important trend in the industry and something that we are considering for our service. A future release will allow users, for example, log in using Facebook and auto import some of the key components of their profile from Facebook. As well as potentially revealing their public identities, should they choose, on the service as part of their profile. I do think that there's a trend where millennials especially are very interested in and open to sharing. They want that validation. They have no problem having the same identity on a dating site as they have on social networks. With our service, you don't have a username, you use your real name.
Let's talk about the development of the app. You're a usability designer, right? That's right. We have a user experience and product development consulting company, Oxford Technology Ventures, which helps other companies launch effective products and services. We've done user experience and usability now for over a decade, and over four years as Oxford Technology Ventures. We saw an opportunity in the dating space because many of the existing services are very frustrating for users.
Do you help your members with the second date too? After you go on the date, you're prompted to rate that person. So we ask you questions such as: Did the other person show up? Were they on time? Would you recommend them to a friend? Were they courteous? The final part is when you say whether you want to share your contact information with them and also would like to be re-matched with them. So you can decide to be re-matched, and the system will auto schedule you for a second date.
Under what criteria do you eject members from the community then? Basically three strikes and you're out. So if you don't show up three times, chances are it wasn't a mistake.
And that's it, they're out? Never going to let them back in? At least for a little bit of time. Let's say three months or something.
Tell me more about how you developed the app. Is it HTML5 or a native app? We chose to go HTML5. Any Android or iPhone user, or anyone on a desktop using a modern browser – not Internet Explorer, but Chrome or Safari – can access our app. And when they access it at app.MiniDates.com, they will all have the exact same experience, whether they are on a mobile phone or whether they are on a website.
What's missing? What are the additional features that you will include with a native app? iPhones do not support photo upload on a web browser. This isn't specific to MiniDates. The other thing is that we can't do in-app notifications. But we already enable text and email notifications and you can get notifications when the app is open. So not many benefits really. It's basically just like a native app in terms of how it feels, how it looks, and how it operates.
What's your position on location-based services? Will you integrate LBS into the future MiniDates? We may. The problem with location-based services is that they are overwhelmingly male. Women don’t' feel safe and secure using location-based services. The other thing is that the services themselves are really focused around hook ups. By adding in schedule, it really changes the equations. Just because I say I'm going to be in SoHo, even in half an hour, it doesn't mean that I'm in SoHo right now. Therefore, having that distance allows the users safety and privacy.
So the big question, how do you make money? Right now we are free. We just launched, so we need to build a base first. But ultimately we aim to be freemium.
What do you think you'll charge? We are not sure right now. We've got multiple different markets that are interested in this. We've got millennials who are attracted to it because it's fun but they don't tend to want to pay for dating. We've got busy professionals who like the fact that it works around their schedule. They really have no issues with paying market prices which would be equivalent to Match.com or HowAboutWe.
Do you think that micro-transactions are going to be important for you? We had considered allowing the user to pay per date, but we are moving away from that model to a subscription model because we want to incentivize use and engagement.
The biggest challenge with starting a dating site is getting to critical mass. How will you do that? Right now we have 3,000 people on our waiting list that we have already recruited to actively use MiniDates and have shown interest. We did that primarily through street marketing and direct sales to customers. We have a team of brand ambassadors that go out and go into coffee shops and bars and festivals and they come up to you and talk to you about MiniDates. Regular advertising, social advertising, Facebook advertising, it's very hard to convey how you are different.
I'm going to give you $200,000. You've got to spend it in two weeks to promote and grow MiniDates to critical mass and beyond. Where are you going to put the money? We would definitely spend at least a good chunk of that on search engine marketing and Facebook marketing. Which right now, we're doing none of, because it's too expensive. We've found that our street marketing is more effective and less expensive. But we wouldn't be able to scale our street marketing to use $200,000 in two weeks. We could over six months.
What's going to happen in a year's time? Where do you see MiniDates in a year's time? Well our goal for the next six to eight months is to really launch and grow the service here in New York. We really want to have a great success story. Then we hope to replicate the model in other major cities in the US and abroad. We actually think there's huge opportunity for MiniDates in Europe, especially in London. Then actually Asia. This could be huge in India. It could be another Ignighter/StepOut story, we think.
OPW INTERVIEW – Sep 4 – eHarmony does beautiful mobile apps! Arvind heads the product group and here’s what he had to say about eHarmony’s work on mobile dating. – Mark Brooks
Let’s talk about your pride and joy, the iPad HD app. The eHarmony HD app was developed a little over a year ago. Our first iPad app was a very functional reproduction of what you would get on the site. We built an experience that was unlike any other dating app. It is warm and encouraging, rich and distinctive. When we demoed it at LaunchPad in 2011, Jason Calacanis said it was one of the most beautiful apps on the iPad in and out of the dating category.
What was the most beautiful part? eHarmony has the relationship questionnaire that takes people 40-45 minutes to get through. We were able to get that down to 5 minutes.The other thing is we made it very visual and very touch oriented. We revamped the personality profile. We’ve turned it into a product that we call the “Book of You”. Your profile is literally a book, and we use the iPad basic gesture controls for turning pages.
How do you think eHarmony is vastly superior to a real world matchmaker? We have compatibility, and I think matchmaking in the real world. It’s largely done through intuition. We have an algorithm that is based on research that’s over 30 years old. And then we have the size of our database. In general, your network is only as strong as the amount of people you have in it.
How many questions are on the mobile app? There’s about a hundred, down from 270 questions.
So knowing that you wanted to have that fast, smooth experience, HTML5 is out the window. You couldn’t have really done HTML5? There are more challenges. I think HTML5 is kind of in its infancy in terms of developers getting to know the ins and outs of it.
What’s eHarmony’s philosophy on geo-location? I’d be a liar if I said that we’re not thinking about geo-location. Our user base isn’t exactly clamoring for it. So we have to do it in a way that is very responsible where people’s privacy is protected.
So how’s the Android app different? The Android app largely mirrors the iPhone app. I think there’s one or two features that we don’t have on Android yet, and that’s just been a timing thing more than anything.
Is there much difference in the monetization between the two apps? We do see two slightly different types of people that use the iPhone versus the Android. iPhone tends to be used more by women. But for monetization, we’re not seeing huge differences there.
In terms of monetization, you’ve gone the Apple route. So how useful is Apple in leading people? eHarmony’s advertising all the time. Do you really need Apple? We are reaching new audiences with the product and we are able to do it in a very cost efficient way. So for the time being, it is something that we are keen on keeping.
Are you finding that you’ve got more marketing channels available to you now on mobile? Absolutely. We are reaching a lot more people, and they’re different people than the ones we were reaching just through TV, radio or print ads.
In terms of the development of the application, were you entirely in house or did you have a portion of the team external? We’ve fluctuated. At the very beginning we relied more on outside vendors, but as mobile has become a more and more important segment of our business, we have moved about 80% of it in-house.
Are they in USA or abroad? They are all in USA.
What kind of login ratio is eHarmony seeing on mobile now? We’re seeing around 30-35% of new customers coming from the mobile channel.
Are there any user behaviors that you’ve notice on mobile that surprised you? Absolutely. We were pleasantly shocked, that we could get people to take a relationship questionnaire on a mobile device. The second surprise was the level of engagement.
You gather more data on users than most other sites. Why not suggest dates to people? I can’t say that we haven’t thought of that.
What’s your vision for eHarmony mobile in a year’s time? Geo-location will be part of it. I think giving people different ways to interact when they are in person also becomes pretty important. I think one interesting way to go is being people’s dating allies.
At SXSW social discovery was a hot topic. I wonder if there’s some potential for you to develop along a social discovery line? There is and there isn’t. A lot of people don’t want those worlds to mix. It’s hard to think that someone’s going to say: “I need to find a hiking buddy, let me go to eHarmony.”
OPW INTERVIEW – Aug 28 – MeetMoi is a hallmark mobile dating brand. A great app, built by a notable founding team. Here’s our interview with the CEO, Alex Harrington. – Mark Brooks
How did you come to start MeetMoi? I'm not the founder. I was brought in three years ago. The company was founded by Andrew Weinreich and Jeremy Levy in 2007. Andrew notably wrote the original patents for social networking, which is presently held by Mark Pincus and Reid Hoffman of Zynga and LinkedIn, respectively. He saw social networking coming a long time ago and also saw the disruptive nature of mobile. He sort of foresaw back in 2007 that mobile was going to create opportunities for disruption in all types of industries. He saw dating as a field that could benefit consumer and potentially disrupt the status quo in the business landscape.
Wasn't he also the fellow behind Six Degrees? That's correct. He founded the first social network of scale called Six Degrees.
How did it evolve up until the point you took over? The mobile landscape has been reinvented probably four or five times since the company was conceived. When Andrew first started off, he envisioned it as a sort of a texting based interface. They quickly realized the opportunity was really on the mobile web. We launched our mobile web service in 2008. That's still going strong. More recently we have built out our service on app.
How would you categorize MeetMoi? It is not internet dating; what is it? We use the online dating category as our touchstone. We've referred to ourselves as a mobile matchmaker, but it's an ongoing process to define what exactly our category is. Social discovery is also a good label as an industry term, but not particularly helpful when you're talking to consumers.
How is MeetMoi doing now? We're doing great. We're in expansion mode. We're well capitalized. This summer is going to be a big rebirth of the company in terms of creating a higher profile and getting a significantly larger audience.
What platforms are you on now? You've got Android and iPhone? That's correct.
Is there a dedicated iPad app? There isn't a dedicated iPad app, no.
Are you on Blackberry? No, we serve Blackberry users by having a capable mobile web platform.
Was it developed entirely in-house? Or how are you splitting the in-house versus outsourcing at this stage? We do use outsource development help to extend our capabilities, but pretty much everything has been built in-house.
Where are you finding new members? How do you market out to them? We acquire users principally through mobile.
How would you describe MeetMoi as differentiated from the competitors? There are a number of people that have taken an approach to mobile which are natively online services that build quite nice mobile apps. Though they may build in features that are specifically geared to mobile, like location sensitivity, to the extent that it's not the main platform which their users have been habituated to use. The way we've always thought about it is that if it's natively mobile, your location is tracked in real time so that we can provide the best possible location sensitive matches. If you don't know your users' location information in real time, then is worse than useless because it's misleading. A lot of competitors haven't quite got that.
Have you dealt with women differently than guys or is it the same for everybody when it comes to geo-location? I think for us, like most dating services, you design the service to be sensitive to the concerns of your female users. We have a lot of focus groups for women to determine just how to tailor the product to their needs.
How's the wing-man feature working out for you? It's great. One of the challenges that dating sites have is that traditionally people don’t want to invite their friends. One of our objectives was to make dating more social. We wanted to map our product to support the ways people interact in the real world. If I'm in a group of guys looking to meet a group of girls, just meeting one isn't going to do it. I want to be introduced to another group of girls. That's the product benefit.
How are you monetizing at this stage? We've always had a paywall since the inception of the service. If you want to send an email to another user and you're not both in the same place at the same time through the introductions that we make, then you have to become a premium member. On our iPhone and Android apps, that's a $20 a month.
Are you finding that people are sticking around for the typical three months, or how's the behavior a little different than internet dating? I think we're doing better than that. The way our product works is that we're making introductions to you and you don't have to do a whole lot other than view the introductions and make a decision on whether or not you want to act on them, or ignore them.
How does the matchmaking work? What are you matching on? Are you going into personality profiling in the future, do you think? We keep our profiles short and sweet, so our goal is to introduce people to quality matches and learn people’s preferences as they give us feedback. Right now, because it's on mobile and people originate their profiles on mobile, we don't want to give people elaborate personality tests.
Have you seen much difference in the behavior between people across different platforms? So iPhone to iPhone users, Android to Andoird users. Do people behave differently? There's certainly differences in the types of users on Android and iPhone. iPhones are expensive, so it tends to be a more for affluent users. The app ecosystem on iPhone is mostly a paid ecosystem whereas on Android, there is a lot of freeware.
How are you accepting payments? We use carrier billing and credit card.
Do people enter their credit cards, or do they prefer to go through the carrier? We get a lot lower friction conversion on carrier billing without question. We do see quite a lot of credit card revenue as well. Part of it is, we have some algorithms to sort of determine which payment method suits the user, and if they fail on one we present the other.
Of course you'd rather take the credit card, you wouldn't be paying quite so much. A few years it use to be 50% that the carriers were taking for on-deck apps. What are they taking now? They're moving in that direction for sure. It still very tentative.
What do you think is reasonable? Are you happy to pay 30% to Apple? Happy is the wrong word. I think willing is a better word. Seeing revenue shares of 80% is big progress. The reason why I'm willing to pay 30% for iTunes connect is that they've built a community of users that pay and the transaction interface is relatively frictionless. If you look at Google Checkout, by contrast, that takes the same percentage. They haven't yet built in continuity billing, the billing failures are significantly higher than on iTunes. I see Google Checkout as being overpriced, but iTunes can get away with that kind of pricing because they've built the best mobile billing interface out there.
So Google isn't doing month-to-month yet? No, there's not continuity billing in Google Checkout in the app store. They have it as a mobile web or web-based Google Checkout product, but in Google Play, it's transactional billing.
Do you think Blackberry is going to be on the radar in the future? I don't have high hopes for it. It feels like it's riding off into the sunset. We don't have any foreseeable intentions of building out for that platform.
What's your vision for the future? Where is MeetMoi going to be in a year's time? I think we'll be more or less the company we are now. We'd like to have a significantly larger audience concentrated in urban areas. I think in a year's time, we'd like to have a very strong New York audience base. San Francisco, Chicago, L.A., Austin – places like that.
Do you think you'll go into the real world advertising realm? We've already done some event-based marketing. So there will be some offline marketing, but I'd say the bulk of it will be online.
OPW INTERVIEW – Aug 21 – If you think launching a mobile app is tough for your dating site, think again. White labellers have a compounded problem because they have hundreds to thousands of partners to keep happy. WhiteLabelDating’s CTO gave us the scoop on how they did it. – Mark Brooks
You’ve got a new mobile platform that you’ve launched for WhiteLabelDating.com. How’s it doing for you, and can you tell us how it works? We started the project one year ago and we launched it officially in May. It’s a brand new platform we built using Ruby and Ruby on Rails. It uses Rackspace and JSON to transmit data under an API. It’s a series of components, including search for sites and members, communication, and an API on top. What it really means is it’s a great way for us to scale up and down because it’s hosted on the cloud.
Did you think about using HTML5? Was that a consideration? Yes, it’s actually built with HTML5. Rather than using apps, we made a decision to use HTML5, CSS3, and Javascript as a platform.
LinkedIn took that approach as well. Their app is 95% not resident on the devices. Have you taken the same approach? Yes. Again, it looks like an app, it interacts, it feels very native. It’s a nice rich interface.
What are the downsides of using mainly an HTML5 approach? You can’t just tell someone to download our app from the app store. It gets that prime recognition. Also with apps, it has a bit more native capability. With an app, you can use your phone’s camera. There’s also more offline capability. Phones are richer in the interface and it can be a bit faster. But we felt the trade-off at the moment is that desktop and mobile web are getting similar to the app experience and it was the right choice for our project.
How do you accept money? All of the desktop payment options are available on mobile. You can use a card, premium SMS which fits very nicely with mobile phones. You can also use PayPal.
What’s the cut on premium SMS these days? It’s quite high and we’ve talked to our supplier about it, and they despair as well. But the carriers are charging a hefty premium on top.
Last I looked, it was on the order of 50%. Is it under 30% now? I think it’s a lot lower than that, but it’s still a hefty amount.
Will the app be in the Apple Store? It is mobile web, so it won’t be able to use the Apple Store for mobile payments. Mobile web is actually a very successful system. Since we launched in April, we’re now seeing about 20% of our daily signups on mobile. 10% of subscriptions are coming on mobile. That’s about 7% of our total revenues. That’s increasing about 10% month on month.
How else do the mobile daters behave differently than the web-sourced users? We are finding that people are spending about twice as long on the mobile as opposed to the desktop.
You also have some internal brands. How are you recruiting people into the Global Personals brands? Both us and our partners are starting to explore advertising networks, especially targeted campaigns. We also have online advertising as well using the ad networks.
How is WhiteLabelDating’s mobile app different from other providers? I think the main difference for us is that we focused on the mobile web. It’s the fact that with a dating site on our platform, a partner can have a mobile site set up very quickly and get up and running in minutes.
One of the nice things for the WhiteLabelDating partner is that they must surely be seeing improved retentions because the users are able to access the dating sites both online and on mobile. Is that increasing your retention numbers? Our retention numbers are strong. We’ve seen through our visitor stats that the number of people using mobile is increasing. 26% of our visitors are coming through mobile, which is great.
What do you think the numbers will end up at in a year’s time? I think mobile will exceed desktop internet usage in the next couple of years, maybe by the year 2015.
How about the iPad? We’re not viewing the iPad as a mobile device at the moment, in terms of the experience. It will still display the standard desktop version of a dating site.
Was the WLD mobile developed entirely in house? Yes, we recruited quite heavily last year for Ruby and Ruby on Rails. It’s a core part of our business and very strategic, so it’s something we wanted to be in house.
Do you recommend building in house or using a third party for a mobile app? We’ve got a team of 37 split between Windsor and London. We like to keep development in house.
So you’re taking the Apple approach? Yeah, I think with Apple, design is a big part of their ethos. We believe that you can get greater conversions and greater satisfaction through the user experience.
Having been through this process, the thinking, design, and evolution of this mobile platform – what lessons did you learn? What would you have done differently? You’ve got to get it right. Testing is a huge part. One of the things is that when we started we had a nice bank of iPhone, Android, Nokia, Blackberry, Symbian, and Windows phones on hand to do testing.
What about WAP? It’s still prevalent in those markets such as South Africa. Is it a consideration at this stage? It doesn’t work on WAP. We feels it’s a dying platform.
What feature are you most proud of? We’re really proud of how fast it works. It’s a very nice, slick interface. It really feels like an app. It doesn’t really feel like it’s a mobile website.I think that’s the biggest thing. We are quite pleased by how well the location services work. It takes advantage of the latest browsers in phones.
Another favorite subject: geolocation. What do you think the biggest concerns and issues are? I think with privacy being a big part of using any location services, it something we wanted to be very careful about. We don’t tell anyone where a member is. We don’t give their exact pinpoint location. We give a fuzzy range of how far away they are from you.
How is WhiteLabelDating doing overall? We just had another record month for April for us and for our partners. As you know, we just went past 12 million members and we’re expecting about 15 million by the end of the summer. That’s about one member every four seconds. Annual revenue is about 36 million pounds. About 23% of our traffic is now non-UK. Australia is one of our key markets. South Africa is very strong, and of course US as well.
