Category: All Interviews

Interview With Aaron Schildkrout, co-Founder & co-CEO Of HowAboutWe

Posted on August 14, 2012

OPW INTERVIEW – Aug 14 – HowAboutWe has one of the more unique and innovative idating business models we’ve seen in a while.  Brian Bowman, the CEO of theComplete.me and former VP Product for Match.com interviewed Aaron Schildkrout the co-founder, co-CEO of HowAboutWe.com. – Mark Brooks

What makes HowAboutWe unique?
HowAboutWe is the offline dating site. It is about getting offline and going on dates. People are posting dates that they want to go on and connecting quickly around those date ideas and getting offline. We will be also launching a site for couples that is also oriented around doing things in the real world.

Do you think that online dating still has a bunch of stigma associated with it? How important do you feel anonymity and privacy are to the online experience?
I think that people experience dating as a private activity inherently because it is a private activity. I do think there is a stigma and a taboo with online dating, and a discomfort with the perceived unnaturalness with the process. But I think that most of the barriers comes from people’s genuine desire for their dating lives to be very private. Particularly private from their social networks. That seems like something that won't ever be overcome because it's incredibly human. The stigma piece is rapidly diminishing.

Do you believe that anonymity should be a user preference?
Some people on many sites, dating or otherwise, experience anonymity as a supporter of free expression, of privacy, of creativity, and the ability to take risks that they wouldn't necessarily otherwise take. People who run dating sites who charge for the capacity to communicate definitely have reasons to keep people anonymous because there's obviously ways to circumvent payment walls if you know how to contact somebody with an app, Tweet, whatever.

Do you think criminal background checks are important?
I think it's very important for dating sites and all sites that involve interaction, particularly amongst strangers, to take very seriously people's privacy and safety.

How do you folks make money?
Our subscribers pay a monthly fee in order to gain access to all of our advanced features.

And how do you guys match people, or do you?
Our goal is to help people get offline on actual dates. The chemistry happens offline. We understand that it's important to have an online experience that connects you with the people that you're most likely to be excited about meeting offline. Our entire framework for matching and for thinking about who you see are based on who we think you're going to have the best experience on actual dates with.

How are you deriving that information? Is it based on interests?
It's much more based on what we experience as people's actual behavior on the site.

Do you feel that the integration of social networking features, whether that's friends, the interests graph pulled out of social profiles, is an important component of dating, or no?
Well, definitely not necessarily at all. I definitely think there is a business, or set of business, that can be built on your social graph that help you to find people to date. I don't think anybody's ever done that well yet, but I think they could. I'm actually thinking about that question all the time.

To that end, how would you define social dating?
The word “social” is so overused that the particularities are far more illuminating than that general statement. I think there are a number of possible ways to use your “social” data in order to provide a better experience. From smarter connections to figuring out how to facilitate introductions, to using your friend graph in order to understand the kinds of people you tend to hang out with, and so forth. There's great potential, but I think it's very, very hard. There's a reason why many, many people have tried. The start-up path is littered with the skeletons of those attempts.

Why do you think that major dating services have not tried to integrate in the social graph or the interest graph?
First of all, they're based on brands that are all about privacy, about anonymous experience, about really protecting those aspects of your interactions. eHarmony and Match are based on very systematic ROI calculations against paid advertising. To skew or mess with that model and that core dynamic is very dangerous.

What do you feel are the most important features for mobile dating?
It depends on what market you're going after. The user interaction is going to be particular to the brand and the target market.

How important are mobile check-ins?
I think the whole concept of check-ins is an out-dated concept in a lot of ways.

Are there any questions that we didn't talk about that you'd like to raise?
Sure, there are many. I think the real question is when we, and possible a few other companies, start to create a deep and genuine threat to Match.com's business, what happens? What is Match going to do? OKCupid was sort of gobbled up by them. I can't wait to see what happens there.

I think they are certainly stuck with the innovator's dilemma. So it will be interesting. If I look back at their acquisition strategy of external businesses, it's really been to fill in gaps where they see weakness. Compression starts around the pay to communicate business models.
Compression has happened many, many times and they've just bought their competitors or destroyed them. That's really effective work. They are very smart, particularly around M&A, they've done an excellent job.

What do you have to say to entrepreneurs trying to raise money in the dating space?
I think venture capitalists generally run away from dating sites incredibly rapidly and for great reason. It takes unbelievable innovation, execution and cash to genuinely disrupt. And basically nobody's been able to do it in the mainstream dating space.

What do you think is unique about Skout in terms of their approach and why it's interesting from an investment thesis?
The actual user experience is pretty atrocious. Their process for converting users and building the kind of virality dynamic that has allowed them to grow so fast, are things that appeal to some people. It's very, very difficult to turn that into a sticky long term experience. I totally understand why someone would invest in that.  If I was an investor and I saw that kind of growth, I would at least consider it. Power to them. I'm looking forward to seeing what they do.

See all posts on HowAboutWe

Interview With Chris Klotz, CEO Of SinglesAroundMe

Posted on August 7, 2012

OPW – Aug 7 – SinglesAroundMe is one of the first great mobile dating brands.  Find out about SinglesAroundMe new developments, thoughts on outsourcing, and marketing advice. – Mark Brooks

What’s your founding story?
SinglesAroundMe started in 2009. Before that I was running an Internet job board in Canada called JobShark which I sold to one of the biggest IT job boards in UK, called JobServe. Online dating has always been one of the successful fields within the Internet. When smart phones came around, with the capability to do geo-location, I thought there might be a niche that I could jump into. Clearly, you don’t want to play in a game that everybody else is playing in because you’ll never catch up. That’s how we started and where the premise came from.

How much was first mover an advantage for you?
I think that was clearly important from the very beginning. To be out there, to be first.

Might I ask how many users you have?
We are approaching about 80,000 new downloads a month at the moment.

How many of those are still active three months later?
It’s not so easy for us to monitor that so I don’t have accurate information but we know it’s a fun tool that users tend to keep on their mobile phone.

Tell us more about the user experience.
As soon as you download the app, it will plot you anywhere in the world, and from there it will show you singles within 100 feet to 100 miles or 100 kilometers of you. When we first started, you’d open it up in London and there’d be nobody. A couple months later, there’d be two or three. Now, if you open it up in London, there’s thousands and thousands using it. You can get that feeling in almost any city around the world right now.

What’s the demographics of your user base?
It stretches right up through every decade. The 20’s, 30’s, we even have a senior citizens’ plan.

What’s the fastest growing demographic?
30’s and 40’s. But newer versions are soon coming out which we call it our Mars upgrade. That should be really targeted to a younger audience.

So you’re very geo-centric. What other features are very essential to the app for you?
There’s two core features to the app – SinglesAroundMe and Destination Search. The SinglesAroundMe aspect plots you and everyone from 1 kilometer to 100 kilometers. If you want to go to a certain bar, The Destination Search Tool will show you the singles in that bar. 

How do people make the first communication?
The actual connections are very typical of traditional dating, so winks and messages.

You could actually do a VOIP call within the app. What’s your thoughts?
I think these tools are very exciting to have; voice and even video. I think we’re moving that way with the smart phone capabilities. We tried that a bit too early and nobody really had the technology to run videos.

What technologies did you build SinglesAroundMe on?
We’ve built a native iPhone, a native Android, and a native Blackberry. The next version of our Mars upgrade will be native in everything.

Do you think there will be a day when HTML5 will be able to deliver the kind of functionality that you need?  
Yeah, I hope so.

Is the iPad on your roadmap?
Yes, we are releasing iPad app very soon.

Let’s talk about your team. Did you go in-house or did you use a third party provider? Somebody abroad, perhaps?
We’re probably 70% in-house now and 30% out of house.

What are the pros and cons of each?
One thing is control. If you go out of house, you lose a bit of control. In-house you can go over things. At the end of the day, if you’re going to be serious in this business, and you’re going to be here long term, you have to be in-house.

Are the out of house folks abroad?
No, they are just a couple of miles away. You can easily pick up developers all around the world, but I think you need to be very close to these guys so you can just drive down the street and have a quick meeting with them and go over things.

Imagine you’ve got a friend who’s building  a mobile dating app, how much is it going to cost him?
I think you could get in the game for $50,000, but when you’re downstream, you realize, no. You’re in there for a lot more than just that initial start-up cost. You’ve got costs associated with each different platform that you’re building out. And these things double or triple.

What do you think is the best way to grow to a beginning level of critical mass?  
I may be the wrong guy to ask that. We’re early. We got our mass organically. We’ve been lucky from that standpoint. You had to be a lot smarter than just throwing money at the traditional media route. 

So you’re not advertising?
No, we don’t advertise. We just work our channels with the secrets we know how to do.

So you’re generally discovered on the platform, on Apple’s platform then?
We are. But it’s what happens when you’re an early leader and you’re changing, and you’re disrupting. People want to talk to you.

Are you out reaching to the media or are they just calling in?
I’d say it’s about 90/10. 90% are calling in. We’re doing the traditional things like press releases. 

What other social media channels are you actively managing?
Twitter and Facebook.

How do you make money?
SinglesAroundMe has got in-app capabilities on different platforms. We’re experimenting on different platforms. On some platforms, we’re completely free. On other platforms, we’re experimenting with an in-app capability.

How do you feel about paying Apple 30%? Do they really earn it?
Well, they created this industry, so it’s hard to argue against that. I’m happy to pay them 30%. We wouldn’t be in the business if they weren’t around.

What’s your vision for SinglesAroundMe for a year’s time?  
I think we’re going to be really gaining a lot of traffic hopefully from the younger generation. People in their twenties. As we do the Mars software release and improve our platform.

Who are your competitors and who are the people you are concerned about, inspired by?
Skout, I think is doing very well. They’re one of the guys we look at.

See all posts on SinglesAroundMe

Interview With Scott Lewallen, co-Founder Of Grindr And Blendr

Posted on July 31, 2012

OPW INTERVIEW – July 31 – You know Joel, no doubt. We interviewed Joel Simkhai about Grindr in December 2010. Here’s Scott Lewallen, the co-founder of Grindr and Blendr. – Mark Brooks

You started Grindr with $5,000. How did you do it?
I had met Joel when I lived in New York. I had moved back to Los Angeles and he showed up one day in L.A. and said: “You know what? I’m going to try out Los Angeles and I’ve got this idea. I want to be able to meet the gay guys around me. What do you think? Do you want to help me?” I was like, oh sure, that’s a great idea and I had no idea what we were getting ourselves into. There were a lot of tireless nights where we didn’t sleep, there was a lot of scribbling on napkins and pieces of paper. Some brainstorming in Photoshop and other sort of drawing programs.

So your background is branding?
Yeah, my background is branding, art, and technology.

At what stage did you realize that this was not going to be a small thing?  
When Joel first came to me with the idea, I knew we were onto something. But I think the first time that it dawned on me that we hit something really big was a month after we launched. There was a big gay party in Palm Springs called the White Party. I was there to introduce Grindr and people were using it already.

How did you make it easy for people to talk and spread the word.
Keeping the experience very basic helped us because it solved a problem: figure out who is gay and then break the ice so you can talk to them.

Tell us more about LBS. You’ve done it right. How have you done it right?
It solved one single problem – finding out who’s gay around you and letting the app do that for you.

There’s other apps that have actually used a map, like SinglesAroundMe. What do you think of that?
I’ve seen it used in a number of places. Some people have done it brilliantly and some people have not. When it comes to Grindr it doesn’t really matter where they are on the map. You only know they’re 500 feet away.

So how have you used what you’ve learned from Grindr in Blendr, and what have been the challenges?
In Blendr, obviously the magic of our simple interface and the location based services were very important to us. Because it’s clear that the gay men and straight men are interested in this type of thing, but would the women really ready for this? What we found is that it’s picked up really well and that people are very engaged on Blendr as well.

Do you think you would move Blendr more towards the Badoo direction? Friendsmaking, if you’d like, finding new friends.
We did poll our Blendr users quite recently and the number that came back to us is that over 90% of both male and female are using it to talk with new people. Talking to new people essentially means dating or flirting. After watching our user habits and seeing what their doing, we’ve begun to push it in more of a dating and flirting direction instead of just social discovery.

Do you think anybody has really gotten the social graph right. Friends date friends of friends. There’s one school of thought that says that’s not cool, it should be a separate group. You don’t want to mix that world. But in the real world, the reality is that people meet through their friends of friends. What’s your philosophy on this and how does Blendr blend that in?
I think it’s applicable to both Blendr and Grindr and just the social sphere in general. I do see it as two distinct buckets and I’m not sure that anyone has done it right in combining the two. Badoo would appear to be for flirting and dating. Whereas Facebook, it’s more about social proof.

Could you define social proof?
Social proof for me is when I’m investigating somebody and something in their profile, whether it’s an obvious mutual connection or mutual friend, or it’s just some event that I know about. It qualifies them in my mind that I might be able to talk to them and they’re not completely crazy.

What do you think is the future? Do you think these two buckets should be separate? Do you think the money’s in a particular bucket in the future, in terms of monetization?
I’m not sure. It bugs me that I have to open five or six different apps to achieve what I want to do online. It would be nice to do that from a single location. But at the same time, if there was that single solution, would I want all those different aspects of my personal life to smear together?

How does Grindr use social media to generate word of mouth?
People talk about Grindr, regardless of our efforts to market it outside the app. We’ve got a pretty big following on Twitter and also on Facebook. We’ve had countless press mentions both in New York Times or TechCrunch – mainstream publications like that, and also pop culture. One of our big moments was when Stephen Fry mentioned us in his program and basically introduced Grindr to the masses.

How difficult was it to come up with the name?
Oh my gosh. The word Grindr came out of weeks and weeks of just looking at words and looking at concepts. I had a list of maybe 50 words and we just kept circling them and doing different iterations of each word. And we ended up on the word Grindr. It’s a unique word. It’s short, it rolls off your tongue, and it’s memorable.

What would be your advice for someone who’s just starting out and thinking I want to grow something for my particular dating community online and for mobile phone. How would you recommend they start? How would you recommend they spend money to seed?
I think a lot of success is built within taking risks and being passionate and focused about what you’re doing.

What one thing would you have done different in the first three months if you had to do it all over again?
Preparing ourselves for the amount of growth that we’ve had. We have 3.5 million users around the world. And very early on it became apparent that we weren’t set up to handle the rapid scaling or the adoption rate with the gay guys that found out about Grindr. People are spending about 1.5 hours a day engaging on the app, and that leads to a lot of traffic. 

Let’s talk about the tech side of things as well. Do you think HTML5 is ever going to be strong enough to be able to do what you’re doing with your native apps?
As a geek, I think HTML5 is super exciting. I wish there were more mainstream tools that facilitated development in HTML5. But we’ve created an ecosystem and a culture where people ask what apps are on your phone, not what websites do you go to. There’s still some performance gaps that have to be met with HTML5. HTML5 seems to require a lot of processing cycles on your mobile device. As you get into older devices, the performance might not be up to par. We live in a world that is driven by app stores and the apps available in them.

You’re on Android and iPhone. Do you have a Blackberry app?
We do have a Blackberry app and we support iPad as well.

How do you treat an iPad differently?
Apple defined two very different categories of their mobile devices. Whereas Android has one big ecosystem of things that run their operating system. So with regards to Grindr, we’ve done some optimization on the iPad. There’s more room to display information on the profile. And certainly, at the end of the day, you see a much bigger, clearer picture of the person that you’re talking to on your profile.

Do you see much difference between the usage of people on the Andoird versus iPhone?
Because we were first to market with iPhone, that’s certainly where our largest population is. Android is catching up quickly. The barrier to entry to Android is a lot lower than iPhone, simply because a lot of the devices are cheaper or given away.

Are you seeing iPhone monetizing a lot better than Android?
I think Apple has done a wonderful job in terms of monetization. On iOS it’s very easy for you to purchase your subscription credits.

So it’s more streamlined basically?
A single button versus two pages of entering information is a much better user experience.

Who else would you say is doing a good job in the mobile dating space?
Anybody who’s in Google Play, iTunes App Store or Blackberry App World top rankings is doing a tremendous job. If you look at the mobile dating space, I love Badoo.

The growth of mobile dating has been amazing over the last several months. It seems that most top tier dating sites are seeing 40-50% of their traffic on mobile now. Are you going to keep on doing the same thing and improving and growing? Or is there any revelation with the growth of the competitive space around you?
The competitive space is constantly growing and changing. Both in the gay market and also the mainstream market. I think that whatever happens tomorrow, happens tomorrow. Any company adapts and responds and evaluates. With regards to Grindr, our single most important thing is to make our users happy. So with regards to the future of Grindr, to me the most important thing is to sort of take the loyalty and the monetization our users give us and turn that around and develop new features and constantly improve the experience so that we can give it back to our users. Because at the end of the day, if we’re trying to help gay guys meet each other, that better be one hell of an experience.

See all posts on Grindr
See all posts on Blendr

Interview With Romain David, CEO Of Meexo, The First Mobile Dating Service To Perfect ‘Reverse Social Graph’

Posted on July 24, 2012

OPW INTERVIEW – July 24

You've been working in mobile for ten years. You've worked for Orange and Apple. What was it like at Apple in 2007? You were one of those responsible for the launch of the iPhone.
It was absolutely amazing to be part of the experience.

Did you meet Steve?
I hadn't met Steve, but I had seen him many times. I did attend a few of the keynotes he gave.

It's an amazing product culture there. How has that rubbed off on Meexo?
Before iPhone launched, very few people really felt this emotional connection with the device. The online dating industry is at the same point. We have yet to see products that people really love. This is what we wanted to build.

People love Apple products. What do you think they love and hate about mobile dating?
There's a lot of creepiness associated with mobile dating, especially for women. The creepiness is typically sharing your location with strangers. Women don't necessarily want to meet guys anytime, anywhere. Mobile is not only about location. It's about all the things that make the platform unique. We limit the number of profiles per device to one. No more fake profiles. If you do misbehave, we can not only block your account, but also block your device.

You've been working with Meexo a little over a year now. What's your founding story? What led you to start Meexo?
When I considered online dating there was not a product that I wanted to try willingly. I was very uncomfortable with the way people could join and expose their profile to anyone. We introduced a product at TechCrunch Disrupt called the Reverse Social Graph. It prevents your profile from being exposed to all of your direct connections on social networks.

There seems to be two schools of thought here. One is that your friends should be matchmakers for you. A few apps have taken this approach. So you're taking the opposite route. There is the ability when you sign up to only allow certain kinds of friends or acquaintances see that you're on the app. But I'm not sure everybody knows that or really uses that.
Exactly. We obviously let you see friends of friends, because in real life, this is how people meet their partner. We decided to file a patent because we think this is definitely something that is going to be huge in the future.

Would you describe Meexo as a mobile dating app or is it more friends-making?
Our goal is really around relationships. The online dating industry should be called online introduction industry. There's another world that starts when you actually meet the person face to face. We are trying to provide value beyond the introductions.

Can you tell us about ‘Us’?
If you meet someone on Meexo, you have the opportunity to connect your phone to your date's phone to see what music you have in common with theirs. You see the albums floating on the two screens. You can start a conversation this way. So we provide these ways to break the ice and come up with some potentially interesting things to say.

What features are you most proud of?
Reverse Social Graph is definitely one of them. The other thing is scarcity of communication. Men tend to message a lot and women tend to be overwhelmed with these messages. The app is free and you only pay if you want to initiate conversations. You can reply for free. We want people to be very picky and thoughtful about what they say instead of spamming all of our users.

Are you charging for points yet?
We are.

You launched at TechCrunch Disrupt and SXSW. Which one was better for you?
When we announced our product at TechCrunch Disrupt, we were very lucky. We were very proud to be one of these companies that took stage as part of the final round. Unfortunately, we could not launch our product at TechCrunch Disrupt, it was just too early for us. We launched at SXSW. We were also very fortunate to be one of the finalists in the mobile category of SXSW.

What was some surprising feedback that you got?
The Reverse Social Graph was something people never really thought about and that resonated with a lot of people. We did make some adjustments based on what we learned.

How do you deal with geo-location?
We use GPS to know the city where you are, but we don't share your exact location with people you don't know.

What other mobile dating services do you hold in high esteem?
OKCupid and Grindr.

Have you actually developed the app in-house or did you use a third party?
We built everything in-house. We're using a company called Stackmob for our back-end that provides the technology so you can focus on your core product.

What are the technologies that it was built on? What choices did you make for tech?
For us, it's iOS, objective C. It's a native application. We wanted the app to be fast and take advantage of the device 's capabilities. That's why we didn't want to do a mobile web version. It was very important to focus on the user experience.

HTML5 has great days ahead of it. In the case of LinkedIn, it makes sense. It's mostly a browsing experience. In our case, we wanted to be able to tap into the phone's camera API. We wanted to tap into the location API. We wanted to use the core capabilities of the device that HTML5 sites could not access. HTML5 in the future? Yes. HTML5 now? I don't think it's ready for what we want to do.

Let's fast forward a year. What makes Meexo standout for membership? Where are you at in a year?
I think we're going to see a lot of things around this concept of meaningful relationships. This is the one aspect of social networking that has been left behind. We think there's opportunity there. We started focusing on dating, but this is part of this meaningful relationship concept.

See all posts on Meexo

Interview With Jessica Powell, (Former) CMO Of Badoo

Posted on July 17, 2012

OPW INTERVIEW – July 17 – Back in 2004 Friendster had its thunder stolen by MySpace. Then Facebook retired MySpace. Badoo is distinct. Its a leading social discovery site and over 40% of its traffic is mobile now. – Mark Brooks

I can’t see Badoo retiring Facebook, but how is it different?
Facebook is for your existing friends. Badoo was designed for meeting new people.

Is Badoo dating? Or is it something else? Friends-making perhaps?
All of those things. Dating exists on the site but we don’t view ourselves as a strictly dating site.

Now is it more flirting? There’s something fun about flirting. I’ve heard flirting described as making other people feel good by giving them compliments. If I look at the home page now, there’s chat, flirt, but there’s no mention of dating. I think “dating” and “singles” are words which you’ve avoided. Quite rightfully so. Is the active word flirting really what Badoo is?
I have no problem saying that people can date on Badoo. You can equally flirt. The top reasons people go on the site is chat and making friends. That constitutes about 70% of the activity on the site. Badoo is trying to mirror real life by throwing you together with a whole bunch of different people. Some people you may chat with, and it may never be anything more than that. Over 50% of people have added someone they’ve met on Badoo to their Facebook.

Jonathan Abrams started Friendster in 2002. He was on a number of dating sites. He thought internet dating was “cheesy.” So one of the things he endeavored to do was make Friendster a more natural way for people to meet. I see Badoo delivering on that vision. You’ve taken the international route and you’re just coming up on 150 Million members. How many of those members are now non-USA and non-UK?
If you look at how Badoo grew, you would see a spiral out from Spain into the rest of southern Europe, then crossing over into Latin America. There’s obvious linguistic and cultural ties to Spain and Portugal. And then it started to spread north from Latin America. So the bulk of that 150 Million is outside of Anglo markets. And UK and US markets are among our fastest growing as the product has just now started to hit those two countries.

Plentyoffish had a similar growth trajectory. It started off in Canada and then Markus chose UK because he knew he could get his arms around it more easily. It’s a very price sensitive market.  
Yes and because we are free,  it lends itself to virality. We do have a freemium model and it has reached over $150 Million run rate.

How predominate is the mobile Badoo in those numbers?
In the US, over 50% of our new registrations are happening on mobile. Now we look at mobile first, and then the web.

How has that trajectory changed geographically? Is it the USA that’s 50% and are you seeing other demographics that are even stronger for the mobile adoption?
The US is the strongest in terms of new registrations on mobile. But he primary source of registrations is still going to be web in certain parts of the world such as Latin America where the smartphone penetration is not that high.

You’ve got a really good app that people love. How are you getting word out to these new markets?
Again coming back to “we’re free”, helps. We really aren’t prescriptive in terms of how you interact with the site, what to do on the site and the kind of people you can meet there. I think ultimately our users understand Badoo flexibility and make use of it and that’s why it ends up spreading because it works.

What’s the split between mobile money and online revenue generation?
We wouldn’t break revenues down into different platforms. We don’t do advertising. We make money from subscriptions and micro-payments. You can pay a small amount to place your ad at the top of our site, for example.

What about virtual gifting?
We have it on the site as well.

Has that been popular?
People use it. It’s just another feature that we have, and it contributes to the revenue.

Have you see the behavior of people actually gifting themselves to make themselves seem more popular?
Not so much. But guys do not tend to be the most creative gift givers. You see a lot more diversity if the women are giving gifts.

Can you see a day when mobile usage is going to exceed online usage for Badoo?
Absolutely. We always wanted Badoo to be something very casual and very flexible. I think mobile compliments that very well.

How are conversions different?
You do see a difference. Mobile users, perhaps because of greater activity, are more likely to convert to paying users.

And Android versus iPhone?
I think it’s still early days to be able to compare in great depth, in part because some things aren’t available today on Android, such as subscription billing.

Are there any other unusual behaviors that you’ve seen with the way people behave on the mobile phone versus online. One area would be location based services. How have you incorporated LBS?
We have a feature that shows you people nearby. At the same time, we’ve built in lots of different controls for people. So you can choose to not show your distance or that you’re online. As a woman, those kinds of features would be important to me. Location is important because I’d probably want to date someone who’s near me versus someone who’s off in another country.

So you think women are really warming up to the idea of sharing their location?
If  you’d asked that question 10 years ago, the response would have been very, very different. There has been a shift among a lot of people.

Badoo has grown without any marketing budget. But now, advertising is happening for the very first time, from what I hear.
We don’t want to rely on viral growth only. At some point that’s going to stop. We’re still seeing 125,000 sign-ups a day but I think we have to look at using some traditional marketing as well to start explaining to people what Badoo is and how they can use it.

So it’s a seeding strategy then? Basically to prime the pump to get an initial audience.
I think so. I would not compare us to a traditional dating site, where a lot of acquisition comes through TV advertising and other kinds of offline advertising. I wouldn’t see us in the long term going down that route.

See all posts on Badoo

Interview With Steve Sarner, VP Of Tagged.com, One Of The First And Biggest Social Dating Services

Posted on July 10, 2012

OPW INTERVIEW – July 10 – Can Tagged beat out Badoo in the USA. They have a head start. Here’s our interview with the VP of Tagged, Steve Sarner. – Mark Brooks

What is your founding story?
Tagged was founded back in 2004, originally as a social network for teenagers. Once Facebook started to grow, we realized that Tagged was not going to be the winner of that race. We saw a huge opportunity in meeting new people. We have now over 330 million registered members worldwide.

So 30% of your users are now logging in via the mobile app?
Yes and we are very confident that by the end of this year we'll be over 50% mobile.

So tell us more about the phenomenon which is called friendsmaking?
We just simply call it the best place for meeting new people. A lot of people play social games. A good percentage of our users uses Tagged as a dating application.

How do you help your members use it as a dating service through the mobile app?
One of our most popular application within the app and within the site is “MeetMe”. Our algorithms will serve up people who we think you might want to meet. In addition to that, we also have enabled the location aspect on our mobile app as well.

What's your approach with location? What do you think is the best way considering women are a little tentative of using and declaring their location?
First it is really easy to turn it on or off. Our location is somewhat opaque. It will tell you if someone is within a half mile, but it doesn't give a pinpoint.

Do you push matches as well, based on location?
Not yet. You can filter to look for people close by. But that's certainly one of the things that's sitting on the product roadmap.

Would you consider compatibility and personality profiling, perhaps?
We're more in terms of trying to get like-minded people in interest. We're more general and casual friend-making. It's not designed to be the place to find your soulmate, but we do a pretty good job of getting people together and that happens quite often.

What's the typical demographic of Tagged members? Do they tend to skew a lot younger?
No, actually a lot older. Over 75% of our audience is 21+. Our median age is 33. Our fastest growing age demographic is above 40. 25% of our members are in the US. Our next largest countries are UK and Canada. We're very large in the Netherlands. Big in southeast Asia, Malaysia, Thailand, and then we kind of bounce all over the world.

How do you reach such an international audience?
Purely by word of mouth. We've had some great, engaging games where people invite their existing friends in and people just find out about Tagged. We grow by about 25,000 new members a day on a consistent basis.

How do you monetize mobile?
On the mobile side, we are completely ad free. People are buying gifts to promote themselves on the mobile app, as well as to play the virtual games. That's where the money is generated.

What are you charging in the USA and is that typical globally?
The VIP subscription is $20 a month. The gifts start at $1.

How do you feel about paying Apple 30%? Do they earn it?
Our app is completely free. There's no charge to download the app. To the best of my knowledge, those transactions are being done through PayPal separately. 

How about Android. What's your approach for Android?
Android is actually our most popular platform.

And Blackberry?
It's definitely the one with the smallest usage. But we do have enough business on Blackberry to justify the development and keep that on.

Did you take an HTML5 route with the apps or did you go native?
At this point we are native, but we are definitely exploring HTML5.

What do you think the limitations are with it at this stage?
I think the biggest limitation is just having enough tech talent that's comfortable with it.

Have you built entirely in house, or did you outsource?
We built everything entirely in house. Almost all of our games now are built in house. We do have a few third party games left such as Playdom and a couple of others.

Why partner with Playdom?
Before we built our in house game studio, we did have all third party games. The Playdom games have been very successful so we've left them on the site.

You'd think the iPad would be wonderful for gaming and discovery, and social dating. What's your approach with the iPad?
You have to go to what the people are using. We certainly are committed to developing for all of the tablets, including the iPad.

What would be your advice to anyone who is building from scratch?
Our success has been through very fast iteration. I would say move quickly and get it out with minimum features, then find and test to see what's going on, and iterate quickly.

A big problem, of course, is growing to critical mass. Do you ever sell downloads, for example? I know some other apps will actually sell installations and promote other complimentary services.
One of the other companies we acquired last year, Digsby, was a download client, IM and multi-social real time communication application. That was one of the ways they could monetize effectively. Having that audience already of about 20 million monthly active users, we were able to remove those downloads, remove the ads and things that might be in the way of people enjoying the experience.

Digsby is one of my favorite IM's. Are you going to integrate this in Tagged?
No, we're not. We've come out with our own live IM client within Tagged. But we're working on something that we think the Digsby community is going to be really happy about.

Who would you regard as your top competitors at this stage?
Badoo in UK and MyYearbook & Quepasa in US. They have merged and they're re-branding themselves as MeetMe this summer.

Where do you see Tagged in a year's time?
We really want to crack the code on social discovery and meeting new people. We think there is a massive market. We are working hard on proprietary technology, algorithms, and patents to find a way to connect like-minded people.

Interview With Tanya Fathers, CEO Of Dating Factory, White Label Dating Provider

Posted on July 3, 2012

OPW INTERVIEW – July 3 – Dating Factory has done well white labelling in Continental Europe, and is now setting its sights on the USA and UK markets. Tanya Fathers has some considerable heritage in the idating industry now, after co-founding World Dating Partners in 2001. She moved onwards and upwards to co-found Dating Factory in 2009. (Full Disclosure: Dating Factory is a client of Courtland Brooks)

This interview was conducted by Brian Bowman, CEO of theComplete.me.  Formerly the VP Product at Match.com.

What makes your company unique?
First we don't have our own dating websites, so we don't compete against our customers. We only provide technology. Secondly, we allow people to own databases.

Can you give us two examples of URLs running on your business?
We have about 8000 URLs all together. eDateability, for example, which was on CNN News or DatingBuddies.com. 

A question around identity. Why do you think that dating sites require consumers to be anonymous? Is it to protect the business model of paying to communicate or is it something that consumers want?
Both reasons. People are paying to be able to talk to each other. But also a lot of them want to stay anonymous.

So do you think that anonymous as an option is OK, or do you think every user should be required to be anonymous? So if I'm a consumer and I don't want to be anonymous, do you think a website should allow a user to do that?
I think on freemium websites, maybe. On subscription websites, it just defeats the object.

Do you think that criminal background checks are important?
They are very misleading at the moment. To conduct a proper background check, it takes a lot of a person's time. I would be against this particular approach.

Misleading because you think that the information you get back is less than accurate?
Yes, it's not possible to do it 100% accurately with this particular approach. It creates a false feeling of security. They think that this guy is properly checked but he is not.

So you think that jDate, Match, and eHarmony went far enough or did not go far enough in terms of the background checks? And should they have offered them to everyone including non-subscribers? What's your take on that?
I think it can be a service on demand. It needs to be connected to proper background check agencies. Consumers have to realize that they have to pay more for a proper background check.

What matching do you provide for your clients? Is it scientific matching, or is it just based on the parameters in the profile?
We run two platforms at the moment. Partners can decide which one they want to use. We offer a standard and advanced matching where people can choose different criteria and narrow down the searches by interest, age group, and so on. Then there is a proper psychology matching based on 60 different criteria and social metrics; sexuality matching that was designed particularly for the dating purposes by a proper psychologist; there's a combination of sexuality, psychology and interests which we call “a perfect match”.

Eli Finkel has come out pretty strongly showing that the science of personality testing doesn't produce compatible long term relationships. What do you think is the future of sites that use that as the foundation of their matching algorithm? Do you think they have to change? Do you think they should stop making scientific claims, or just let it be a marketing message?
Just let it be a marketing message. There are plenty of audiences that want to be matched.

Where do you think the responsibility of a dating site ends? What should be the promise? Is it a good first date? Should it be that we have more marriages than anyone else? What is the actual deliverable promise of a dating site?
Connecting people. You can not promise marriages. You can connect them and hope for the best.

Is matching around interests important?
It is. In our system, we have quite a few dating sites created around different interest groups.

Where are you pulling the interests from? Is it just asking the person or are you pulling it out of the social interest graph?
We are asking people at the moment. We do offer automatic registration using LinkedIn, Facebook, and Google+ but not so many people are using it because of the privacy.

What do you think is the impact of asking them to register using Facebook? Is it negative?
Our conversions dropped when we asked them to.

Dropped by how much?
It was about a 20% drop, which is why we removed it very quickly as a mandatory entity and left it to our partners to decide.

How do you define social dating? What does it mean to you?
I think social dating is creating an environment where people can communicate slightly wider than only looking for other single people. It's creating a sense of belonging to some sort of community as well as adding some gadgets people can use on mobile. Creating more modern technology.

Is the integration of social networking features like friends and interests and social profiles important into a dating experience? Should it be required or do you think it's just an optional benefit?
I think it's optional. Possible interests can be more enforced on people because it creates all of their profile. People don't want to tell their friends that they are on a site looking for somebody.

What demographic would be most interested in social dating?
Probably younger people at this stage.

Why do you think the major dating sites such as Zoosk, Match and eHarmony, haven't  integrated friends, or the interest graph into their dating experience?
I just don't think they are flexible enough to try and experiment. Maybe Match.com's demographic is not ready for social dating.

Social discovery, if we were to define it broad as meeting new people, sometime for friendship, sometimes for dating. Do you think the social discovery market is broader than online dating?
I think online dating is part of social discovery.

Do you think social discovery consumes online dating or do you think they continue to be separate markets?
I think it actually consumes it from what I can see.

In what period of time?
It's hard to tell. Social discovery is definitely much broader and there's lots of single people that go for this sort of situation in hopes to find somebody around social events. The dating entity will always be there. I don't think it will be completely consumed.

When do you think it starts to really impact the dating industry then? Do you think it's already started or it hasn't started yet?
Since 2002, every year there is this question. Free dating will kill paid dating, social networks will kill dating. Dating is a basic human need. I can't see anything killing it.

How important is mobile to your business? What percentage of people use mobile on your platform?
It is very important. We’ve launched our mobile version recently, and we used HTML5. But we are also producing apps on demand. Before we had a mobile version, about 10% of our users were browsing the dating sites on mobile devices. We expect it to be higher now, of course because the interface is more user friendly.

Do you think HTML5 is hurting that, because it is not interactive enough, or no?
We'll see. We've done HTML5 as a basic version for the whole platform. And we do applications customized for partners because we don't want to jeopardize marketing initiatives. It has to be different.

So what are the important features for mobile?
Register. Login. Browse. View profile. Pay.

Do you think a different business model will be embraced because of mobile? Is it micro-transactions or mobile check ins?
Micro-transactions are imperative if you want to cover world wide. In some countries there are restrictions on how much you can charge.

With Groupon-like dating, do you think that can extend the lifetime value of consumers? Do you think mobile enables that more? Or not important?
Mobile is more interactive. I think everyone keeps it in their pocket and if a nice lady pops up they will look at it. So I would say that mobile is essential for longer term interaction.

In terms of profiles, do you see profiles changing from this sort of heavy text-based profile to something different, whether it's on social or mobile?
It becomes more visual. People hate doing lots of typing these days, especially if they register on mobile.
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To learn more about Social Discovery, check out the Social Discovery conference, August 6-7th in San Francisco. 

See all posts on DatingFactory

Interview With Ian Bell, CEO Of Tingle, The First Mobile Dating Service To Offer Voice Calling

Posted on June 28, 2012

OPW INTERVIEW – June 28

What inspired you to start Tingle?
I come from a background in building communication services. We owned a company seven years ago that was building rich communication services for feature phones. What we lacked was a community. Online dating is a community. It needs to be structured and curated like a community and I've always been interested in doing that.

How many members are you at?
Tens of thousands.

What's prevented you from growing faster?
We haven't really begun to market aggressively in the U.S. yet. It's taken us quite a bit of time to perfect the product.

So you're at the stage where you've got a nice app you're ready to roll. What would you do differently if you had to do it all again, in terms of the build?
It's unfair to be in 2012 looking at me in 2010. If there was one thing I would have done, that is wait until the technologies had matured.

What was the biggest challenge that would have been fixed if you'd done it 6 months ago, in terms of the development and the environment?
Very, very subtle things in iOS have been problematic and solved in more recent builds. A good example is linking to states within applications. What we did was build all of this incredible state tracking technology which is now completely unnecessary, but may be useful down the road when we go to other platforms like Blackberry and Android.

State tracking? What does that mean from the user perspective?
Our application sends a lot of notification to the users every day about various things that are happening. Without some sort of state tracking you cannot determine what action the user is responding to. That technology wasn't supplied by Apple until probably just before iOS 5.

What platforms are you running on?
Everything iOS. iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch.

You've not done Android yet? Why?
We didn't mature our API until about February time frame, so the Android project is just about to kick off.

Do you want to do Android?
Absolutely.

What's your thoughts on HTML5 apps?
I'd love to be able to leverage Javascript and HTML5 on mobile devices. It's particularly hard to do voice over IP and some of the other push based technologies in a non-native environment.

LinkedIn recently revealed that they've built their app on HTML5. Why is it not a good fit for the internet dating sphere?
For our app, which I think is pretty unique in the industry, I just don't see how it's feasible for us to sustain some of the things that give us a competitive advantage.

What's your most unique couple of features?
Tingle's the only app I'm aware of in the straight dating market that lets people talk to each other on the phone completely anonymously.

Why aren't the apps offering this essential service? What's the difficulty?
Two things. The technology is kind of hard to do. I come from the VOIP industry. I'm one of the innovators that got that technology off the ground when I was working at Cisco in the nineties. The second thing is more social. I don't think that most dating services are designed to confront the spam issue. If you were just to layer voice communication, then you're inviting phone calls at random hours of the day, perhaps dozens of phone calls from complete strangers every single day. So we've worked really hard on technologies and systems developed to condition that signal to noise ratio. So that when you add the calling feature and the other features down the road, you're not just creating more opportunity for disturbance.

How does the handshake work when a guy wants to talk to a woman?
If I see a woman I like, I send her a wink. Until she accepts my wink, I can't send her a message or call her. If she accepts my wink then we're connected. Then we can talk and get to know each other. And if we go out on a date and things don't work out, she can just block me.

Can she revoke certain forms of communication or is it a hard stop?
It's a hard stop right now.

So you've got the voice piece, which is fantastic. Did you build it entirely with your own people or did you use a third party?
We've leveraged a mix of third party and in house technologies.

So I want to build a mobile dating app, let's say, and I don't want to include voice, what am I going to spend? What should I be budgeting?
What we've built, with voice of IP and all that, it was well north of a million dollars. If you want to build a lightweight hook up app, that's something two or three guys with some inspiration could do in two to three months.

So basically $30,000 to $1,000,000?
Yeah.

So what tech is Tingle built on?
Tingle's back-end is mostly Rails and some bigger iron software on the server side. The native stuff on the client side is Objective C right now on iOS. It will be native on Android. And native on Blackberry if they don't die first.

If you had to build it again, would you change that?
No. Well, one thing worthy of consideration is Ruby on Rails. Rails was a great filter, because I wouldn't have to interview as many PHP guys. There are benefits to PHP as well. I think it's a trade-off between a good Symphony based PHP deployment and Ruby on Rails. I always say the real benefit of PHP would have been integration with WordPress.

What other technologies did you consider and reject? And why did they not make the cut?
We would never go .Net because I don't want online error. We are a bunch of guys with laptops and hosted services. At the moment, we spend a lot less than $500 per month to host tens of thousands of users, which is awesome economics.

Who do you use for hosting?
A mixture of third party services. Everything we use is VPS. So we have VPS service with Linode. We use some other facilities with Amazon, EC2 and AWS.

How are you making money?
We are generating a fairly healthy trickle of revenue just from our open beta users. These are people purchasing prepaid credits which they use to talk.

So you're credit based? It's not monthly?
It's not subscription and it's not pure advertising.

How do you feel about giving Apple 30%?
Apple does us a lot of favors, so for now I'm content to let them take their cut. When we're on Android, the fees are significantly better.

How will you play it on Android?
We'll probably handle transactions on our own and not use the Android payment process. We actually set that up a long time ago with Optimal Payments and integrated our technologies. It's locked and loaded and ready the second we're up on that platform.

How have you handled the geo-location?
They are very unsophisticated and largely derivative of the gay dating apps that came along. It does not apply to the straight market.

The thing that's really interesting for both men and women about location based discovery is serendipity. It doesn't matter that a woman is in a specific coffee shop or restaurant that I'm by, it just matters that she's in the area. We created a notification based location based discovery system “Radar”. Radar passively tracks location updates from within the operating system. When we find people near each other, we then pass that through the search filters that they have set up.

What's a wink cost?
Winks are always free. Calls and messages are paid. You can earn the credits that you would spend when you call or text people. Our hardline exchange rate is about 150 credits to the dollar.

The “women are free” model is something we're very cognizant of and that's a major driver for the industry. We discovered that women who actually buy subscriptions and go after guys that they are interested in are generally more happy with the experience. In our model, it's free to reply to a call or message from another person.

Have you thought about incentivizing replies?
Yes, we think about it a lot but it's a little like prostitution. We definitely don't want to encourage those types of users in our community.

How did you get to the first 10,000 users?
We host parties. A party in L.A. will draw between 2,500 and 5,000 sign-up’s if executed well.

Where's the next one?
Probably in L.A., and we're going to do some parties this summer in Miami, New York, Toronto, Calgary, and L.A.

What's your hurdle for seeding per new member? What are you willing to spend?
Not more than $7, and we never have.

Once you're at critical mass, what's your hurdle rate for the conversions and CPA now that you're over 10,000?
The virality kicking in will have a nice effect on our overall CPA. My rule of thumb is that I won't spend over $7, but in general we're spending between $4 and $5.

Virality is super important right? What's the keys?
For me, the key is to show how you're different from everything else that's out there in a consumer perspective.

A big hook in your case is that you've got a stellar name.
The brand's OK. I wasn't very comfortable about it at first, but I've gotten there.

Why?
We've gotten some push-back from folks who think tingle is a negative connotation. For me it was always about the tingle, the butterflies in your stomach.

So you licensed the name or bought it?
We bought it and we're in the process of trademarking it.

Let's talk about growth. Have you had $200,000 to spend and you had to spend it next week, where would you put it?
I would throw it at my most effective third party lead generation tool, which right now probably looks like Facebook.

It's nice that it's one platform that's got decent volume. Have you tried any affiliate networks?
Actually, we haven't done any affiliate. We have a project to get that going but it's just not our focus right now.

Do you think there will be an internet dating site for Tingle.com or is it always going to be a mobile app?
It will always be mobile.

Why?
We want users to feel connected all the time.

Are there any user behaviors that have surprised you as you have observed your membership?
The proximity of people and the tendency for people to pass nearby each other is really inspiring.

It also shows that people want mobile and that's the future of internet dating – lose the internet.
Yes. And Markus Frind has said exactly that. But I think the impact of mobile is a lot more cutting than most people think at the moment. Markus seems to get it. He said that 60-70% of his users are going to be mobile by the end of 2012 and he essentially said his business model is invalid in that sense.

If you were buying and you could acquire any three mobile dating companies, which three would you choose?
Obviously the best mobile dating companies are all gay dating apps.

Who else do you think has done very well with a mobile dating service?
It's hard to say. In the gay market, the service model is well established and the guys have done well. In the straight market, I guess on the top of the list of companies to go after would be us.

See all posts on Tingle

Interview With Alex Furmansky, President And Founder Of Sparkology

Posted on April 20, 2012

OPW INTERVIEW – Apr 20 – Sparkology is an exclusive dating site for the upper crust. You have to have an Ivy league degree to get in. I interviewed Alex Furmansky to get the skinny on his new site. – Mark Brooks

What's your founding story? What sparked Sparkology?
A few years ago I had so many female friends in their mid-20's to early 30's. They were having so much trouble finding a man using traditional dating sites such as Match.com and eHarmony. They got over 30 messages a day from the wrong guys and ended up just ignoring them. I tried to experience this from a man's perspective. I spent the time to write a woman a long message only to find that my message ended up in the same inbox as the 29 other messages. 

As a guy, your first interaction is proving that you're not a creep. This burden of proof is difficult.

So you're kind of on the matchmaking end of the market, I presume?
There are mass market dating sites, accessible and free for all and then there are the matchmakers that charge crazy amounts, but they're curative. I see us as a tech platform that allows us to do both. We're curative, we're exclusive. But at the same time we're scalable and self-directed.

What geographics are you going after first?
Since our market is educated young professionals, the most natural market is New York. After that it's the other large metro areas in the States, that includes San Francisco, L.A., Chicago, Boston, D.C.

Growing a dating site is a very costly affair. Are you looking for money now? How do you fuel the growth?
Last April we raised a pretty substantial friends and family round so capital is not an issue. Now that we are ready to scale even bigger, we've started to raise a seed round now.

If I were single, would I make the cut to get onto your service?
Most of our members are invited by existing members. If you're not invited by a member, then you can go to our homepage and apply. You supply your LinkedIn or Facebook URL and that's how we screen you. Everyone is a young professional. We do place a slightly higher standard on our men. All of our men are verified graduates of top universities.

So you're manually reviewing accounts then?
To verify your alumni status, there are two ways to do it. You can give us your lifelong alumni email forwarding address. We issue you a confirmation email to that address. Or our staff will call you and have a personal conversation with you to welcome you to the site and ask you questions about your college experience and verify that you went to that school.

We have a feature called Date Feedback that helps keep people honest. So after a date, you can leave feedback for your date that our concierges see. So far we've had 2 guys who have been false in their profiles and we've had no problem kicking them out within 24 hours.

What did they lie about?
About age and occupation.

How about the women? Women lie more often about their age.
So far we've had no complaints from guys and no negative feedback. In fact, I thought that this feedback would be used to flag the bad apples, but it's actually being used to share success stories.

I was very surprised about your price-point. It seems extremely low and fair. It's under the average of the industry. You're charging $10/month for women and $2-3 per initial communication for guys.
That's correct.  I'm not here to usurp people, I'm here to deliver a fair service. The reason we require credit cards is to make sure the person is serious and committed. It stops the fake profiles. For me that's the core reason for charging people. Making guys pay to start a conversation is sort of a tax on spam. It's no longer cost effective to send out 30 messages a day.  It's better to pick those two, three, four women that you like.

How are you finding new members to reach critical mass?
We have this thing called a Race to 1000 in every city. It employs some gamification where it gets everybody on board to create critical mass in order to start interacting. That's how you seed a city. As far as gaining new members, the beauty about our site is that it is exclusive and high touch. We do men-only events and women-only events.  It is seen as more of a community that you are proud to be part of and talk about. We give cool rewards for people who refer their friends. We'll send bottles of wine or t-shirts.

Match.com has their Daily 5.  Most dating sites send emails with matches. Are you going to be doing that?
I like that every email that you get from Sparkology, you view as a gift and you want to open it. So I think that barraging people with emails everyday is against our mantra.

How are you measuring success?
There are two elements of success. One is the business success, but I think the better sense of success is how happy the people are on the site. You can gauge that very easily with the number of messages on the site and how the message sending correlates with the output of the algorithm.

See all posts on Sparkology

Interview With Rachel DeAlto, CEO Of FlipMe

Posted on March 6, 2012

Rachel DeAltoOPW INTERVIEW – Mar 6 – FlipMe has an interesting angle on idating. Cards. Others have tried before, but her business is catching on. The press like her style. The cards are funny, and she's coined the term 'flirting retail product.' – Mark Brooks

Why FlipMe? What's your founding story?
The concept for FlipMe started back in 2008. My last relationship of 8 years was an almost missed connection. I was having lunch with my parents, and he was having lunch with colleagues. We made eye contact, but it was an awkward situation to make a move. Instead of letting the moment slip by, he passed a note through the waitress after his table left. FlipMe was started to avoid those missed connections, and facilitate a way for people to connect in any situation. We spent several years doing the legal (patents, trademarks, etc) and financial legwork.

How do you make money?
We are the only flirting retail product of its kind. Our packs are designed to be an impulse purchase at retail and hospitality locations. The packs of cards (each pack is $25 retail and includes 30 cards and a 6-month subscription) are sold online and at retail locations nationwide.

Others have tried this before, how is your business more enduring?
We are not looking to replace online dating, and we recognize that we are an accessory, a tool. Our goal is to make dating and flirting fun again, and make it almost like a game. Our ability to be sold at retail is also a huge advantage.

Do you have a way to work with idating companies?
We would love to connect with idating companies to offer the cards as a complement to their sites. There are many ways to co-brand and even integrate the profiles/landing pages. We are open to all possibilities. I think our company offers the perfect compliment to most online dating sites as it brings the best of both worlds – a way for people to safely connect with others online AND off.

How's sales?
Sales are steady. We get some great surges with press – our feature in Cosmopolitan Magazine this month (attached) was a great boost. I also do flirting and dating coaching so when I am called on as an expert in the media, sales benefit as well. Right now we are working to integrate with the hospitality sector which could be huge.

What surprises have you had as you've grown your business?
Everything has been a surprise! I think the best surprise has been the love from the media. We have been blessed with a great response to the concept by the press. Also surprising was how quickly similar companies sprouted up. This is why I always remind people of the importance of patent protection (as a lawyer myself legal barriers to entry is a non-negotiable).

What's your goals for 2012?
Our goals are to find strategic partners in the dating and hospitality industry to place the product. We also have plans to develop the site itself into a forum and destination for single women to engage, learn and communicate.

See all posts on FlipMe