Category: All Interviews

Brad Megahan & Paul Falzone, President & CEO, eLove.com

Posted on November 1, 2010

Brad megahan paul falzone elove interview OPW INTERVIEW – Nov 1 – eLove was developed by traditional matchmakers, and by the former CEO of LoveAccess.com. I caught up with eLove’s founders, Brad Megahan and Paul Falzone. (Full Disclosure: eLove is a former client of Courtland Brooks) – Mark Brooks

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You’ve been rather busy over the last year or two. What matchmaking companies have you partnered with in the last year?
We have partnered with Julie Ferman’s Cupid’s Coach, who was voted the #1 matchmaker last year at the iDate Awards. Julie’s presence in the L.A. market, her expertise and coaching, as well as running a lot of symposiums on matchmaking would be advantageous to us to partner with. We have also partnered with Singles Station, Charlee Brotherton’s company, which is now eLove. And there are others that we’re still looking at.

We’ve targeted 10 markets to pursue over the next 6 to 12 months. They are all relatively large markets – Houston, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Atlanta, Seattle, Pittsburg, Portland, Orlando, and Cleveland. And as more of our marketing is starting to take a national nature, we feel the need to have a larger footprint so we’re putting all the people in place to be able to support those additional locations. We have 50 physical offices in 42 cities in the US.

Tell us a bit more about eLove. eLove is really more about matchmaking. How have users benefited from your many years of genuine matchmaking experience on eLove? What is the user experience for them?
We look at eLove as a lifestyle company where our matchmaking is more of our concierge service. We’ve got 5 matchmaking centers across the US and we have a centralized matchmaking center where we are willing to work with people one on one and coach them. So we’re basically a life stage company that is going to encompass everything from coaching to long term relationships.

How is the matchmaking industry doing as distinct from the internet dating industry? How do the two industries compare and contrast in terms of the trajectory of growth?
The matchmaking and the online dating industry need to work in harmony as opposed to bid for the same traffic. We feel that working with matchmaking companies, as well as online companies, which has been a huge growth spurt for us. We do rev shares with these companies and some of these companies are making more money working with us and supplying us leads and getting percentages back from us on a rev share than they’re making doing their own venues.

Conversion rates are similar to the online companies. We’ve got the ability to grab the traffic and generate leads for ourselves. So we’re self sufficient all the way around.

How much do you charge?
We charge $3000 – $7000, depending on the level of service. Our average cash per membership is probably $3,000, but we’re dealing with a little heavier volume because we’re aggressive with our marketing. A lot of these matchmakers that are charging $20,000 to $25,000 plus are dealing with a very limited number of members so they don’t have any real volume to generate revenue. The industry gets black eyes and reputation starts being questioned if sometimes people take other people’s money for the sake of taking their money and not trying to get a good result. You have to have good intentions of what you’re going to do with the member once you bring them in. That is the beginning of your relationship, not the end of it.

Yes, it is so important to set expectations. I have to tell you if I were single I would be using a matchmaker. I would use Julie so I’m so glad she’s on board with you. Julie will go beyond her database. She will actually look beyond her fold of members. That is kind of a limitation with some matchmaking firms.
Julie Ferman is a perfect example of someone who is not in it for the money. Julie will do WIT “Whatever It Takes” to make that person have a relationship. And Julie is smart enough that she will not take business on the terms of: “Hi I got $25,000 and I’ll give it to you, find me a girl that is 17 years younger than me that wants to have babies immediately.” Don’t take that person’s money because the chances of that happening are very slim.

So let’s talk about numbers. Let’s say I’ve got half a million unique a month and I’ve got several thousand paying members and I can quite easily send you 1,000 good leads a month. What is that going to be worth to you? I ideally want to get paid on a per registrant basis within net 30. I send you a lead and I get the money within a month. On that basis what can you pay me?
We can pay you either by the lead, give you a check for $20,000 or give you a rev share at 20% of the value of the memberships that we sold off of that database. We’re converting 7 to 9% of our traffic just like online but at a much higher price point. And we’re getting them that money within 7 to 10 days after that has been executed.

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Martina Bruder, CEO Of Friendscout24, Top Dating Site In German Speaking Market

Posted on October 27, 2010

Martina Bruder FriendScout24 OPW INTERVIEW – Oct 27 – Friendscout24 holds the top spot for the biggest dating site in Germany, according to comScore WorldMetrix. Martina Bruder is the CEO. We caught up with her to find out her thoughts on matchmaking, LBS, mobile and how the market is changing. – Mark Brooks

What countries does Friendscout24 operate in now and what are your market positions in those countries?
Friendscout24 is operating in 7 European countries. We are number 1 in the German speaking markets, which are Germany, Austria and Switzerland. We are also amongst the top 3 in the other markets which are Spain, Italy, Netherlands and Belgium.

I noticed you recently partnered with a company called Attivio and you’re using active intelligence. Tell us more about that.
We changed our service provider to Attivio in the 1st quarter of 2009. They offer a very good service and we’ve developed that service further with them as we move forward to really have a state of the art product in terms of search. That is all I want to give away about what we do with Attivio. But the service has really helped us to enhance our search results for the users.

We were talking earlier and you mentioned a term RQ, what is RQ?
RQ is the international translation and in Germany we call it BQ, Beziehungsquotient. RQ is our newest product and RQ stands for Relationship Quotient, which has a close relationship to the intelligence quotient. RQ tests your approach to relationships, whether it is a long or short term approach. It checks what you expect from a relationship to really be happy. You can also see which type you are and you can match your type and your RQ with everyone else’s RQ on the service.

Have you reviewed your user base to see what proportion of your users are looking for long term versus casual relationships?
Friendscout24’s usership is very broad. Every day 12,000 new people register, which means clearly we’re not a niche product. Almost 40% are looking for a long term relationship. If we allow multiple answers, this goes up to 60%. But the rest of them or the same people at the same time are also interested in other types of partnership.

What is the split between male and female in that 40% number?
Females are the bigger number in being long term related. I think that seems to be part of human nature. But we also see that women take a self determined approach at short term relationships.

We’re talking about highly educated women here, with their own income. They clearly are not all looking for someone to just marry and be happy with for the rest of their lives. They have a tendency to go for short term relationships too.

We did some research to look at the future of online dating and what needs people want to see served on online dating services. To find someone you can spend your life with is what everybody has in common whether they are short or long term oriented in the now. This basic need never goes away.

How are you addressing the rise of free dating?
We can’t see it as really affecting the market. The market leaders all have paid services. So for us the rise of free dating isn’t an issue. In the past 2 years we’ve seen that the willingness to pay more is what has driven market growth. So market growth in the last 18 months has no longer been driven by the number of new people but by the ability of the services to offer high value services, which people are willing to pay higher prices for.

Are you seeing a rise in the number of users who are wanting to use their cell phones and iPhones to access the service?
Yes absolutely. You can’t even call that a trend any longer because it is a fact. We offered mobile services very early in our company life which is natural because we are part of Deutsche Telekom. Right now we’re really waiting to see our new iPhone app enter the market.

Do you think location based services are an invasion of privacy or do you think ultimately these location based services are good for internet dating?
Location based services will really be a new thing which we have to take very seriously.

Can you tell me how internet dating has changed and effected society since the mid-90’s?
I think that internet dating has changed the way people approach partnerships. It actually helps people to be a lot more self determined in finding the right partner. But it also ensures that the approach you choose is much more defined by you. You are the owner. You are in control. This is especially important for women. So for women this is a very emancipated way to approach a partnership. It has also helped people to feel a lot more at ease with finding out about another person before they actually get serious with that person. It helps you to feel more secure; it helps you to go into a partnership with a better understanding of who that person is. And if you don’t want to continue a partnership you don’t have to.

I think it has really helped people to become more self determined and to have a lot more control. If you look at the success rates, 33% of our singles who quit the service tell us they have found the person they were looking for. So this is a success rate which the market has brought to society.

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Siamak Ayani, CEO Of OculusAI

Posted on October 5, 2010

Ayani_Siamak OPW INTERVIEW – Oct 5 – I worked in manufacturing automation before prior to 1998, when I started working with dating services. Machine vision was a big deal back then. OculusAI applies machine vision technology to profile image inspection to speed up the approval process. (Full Disclosure: OculusAI is a client of Courtland Brooks) – Mark Brooks

Tell us about OculusAI?
The company started about 3 years ago. I think most people in the idating industry agree that the most important thing for online dating sites is to have a large, high quality database of profiles. Most dating sites review the photos manually, and that means people have to wait a considerable amount of time before the image is published on a site. Around 20% of images uploaded on the major dating sites are rejected. We saw a correlation between the time you have to wait for your profile picture to be published and the conversion. The more we looked into this, the more we realized that there was a need for automating the picture approval process and that is exactly what we do.

We’ve taken very advanced computer vision technology and applied that to the needs of this industry. We help dating sites to automate either parts of, or the whole image review process. By doing so, we can help drive revenue, bring down overhead costs, and improve the perceived quality of the site.

There are other things we do as well. Because the picture can say a lot about the person, we realized that it is a pretty good way of detecting if the user is a serious user, scammer or someone playing around. We can also determine if that profile belongs to someone who is not serious and we can flag that profile.

What else can you offer to dating sites with your technology?
The technology is very advanced. There are a number of things you can do with this type of technology. We want to offer inexpensive, value adding services that drive conversions and improve retention in the dating industry. There are a number of different applications of the technology that can help do this. For example, we are currently experimenting with making images searchable based on facial features like, hair color, eye color, etc. This kind of application would be an amazing search and matching tool for the dating industry.

What are the benefits dating sites will see in terms of using your technology?
By changing the picture approval process from a manual process to an automated process, dating sites can improve conversions quite dramatically, cut the cost and improve revenue. We are able to decrease customer complaints and improve the perceived quality of the site. Let’s talk about integration and how your technology can fit into the role or the function of customer service on an Internet dating site. It is very easy to implement; it is a web based service. Once the user uploads a photo, it is sent to us and we scan through that photo and return a message that the image has been either approved or rejected. Also, if we think it belongs to a scammer, we flag that picture. Based on that information the dating sites can decide what to do.

You’re working with a couple of internet dating sites now; can you talk a little bit about those at all?
I can’t answer this question because of NDA’s. But we work with both European and US customers. Because it is a web based service, it doesn’t matter where we are located or where they are located. It can be anywhere in the world.

Siamak Ayani is the CEO of OculusAI Technologies AB and can be contacted directly at siamak@oculusai.com

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Ross Williams, CEO Of WhiteLabelDating.com And Global Personals, Hitting £20 Million Annual Revenue

Posted on September 27, 2010

IMG_0096 OPW INTERVIEW – Sep 27 – It’s been a couple of years…The last interview was in 2007 and at the end of that interview I asked you what you hoped to achieve with WhiteLabelDating and you said that you wanted to be the top white label dating company. So at this stage let’s pick up where we left off. Are you the top white label dating company at this stage?
We are, yes. A lot has changed since then. Global Personals’ business has grown and white label dating is responsible for the vast majority of our business. I think we’re generally considered the number 1 white label dating company worldwide.

What is your split between Europe and the US
The majority of our revenue still comes from Europe and predominantly the UK. So our core territories at present are the UK, Ireland, South Africa, Australia and the US in that order. We’ve got big plans for the US but it can easily be a graveyard for companies that don’t approach it in the right way. So we need to make sure all of our CRM is localized, the customer experience is localized and everything fits in. It is important that we recognize that and treat the US as a collection of different regions, and by regions I mean cities each with their own attributes rather than do what many people do which is a one size fits all solution. We won’t be doing that.

You have service in the US right now from my understanding, so are these improvements that you’re working on?
Yes we can absolutely service the USA. I don’t want to give away too much about what we have in the pipeline other than to say we realize we need to improve that experience and make it really a better niche offering. We expect to be able to announce more about that later this year.

There are two sides to your business. You have the WhiteLabelDating side and then you have the Global Personals side of the business. How do you differentiate the two different sides of the business?
Global Personals is our limited company. People have known us as WhiteLabelDating up to this point because that has been a massive part of our business. So WhiteLabelDating is part of Global Personals. It represents well in excess of 80% of our revenues.

We are a white label dating business first and foremost. However, since we became the market leader we recognize that we have a responsibility to help grow and shape the market. That is why we have our own branded sites for the consumers such as Singles365.com and DatingAgency.com, which allows us to help direct and shape the market, which benefits us but absolutely benefits our partners.

When I visited you in Windsor not too long ago you mentioned that you had been ‘fighting the good fight’ against abuse and scammers recently and that it had been quite a battle. Tell us more about that.
We made a decision last year to really focus on the quality of our customer experience. To do that we needed to manually moderate every profile, every photo, every wink, icebreaker, diary entry and video. Everything that goes through our system is checked by hand from people in our offices in Windsor. We don’t outsource anything. It is time consuming and it’s expensive but it does mean we can give the best customer experience.

Since we launched our new moderation platform in February of this year, we were hit in the short term. We found that scammers were responsible for quite a bit of revenue for dating site operators because if a scammer emails your member, that member is going to pay to upgrade. So if you reduce the scammers your conversion rate is going to be affected. However, we’ve ended this year in July and August with all of our metrics performing better than they have ever done in our 7 year history.

In an article recently you said there are some unethical practices in the internet dating world that need stamping out. Tell us more, what are they?
I think everyone recognizes that you can go for short term easy money in online dating. It might get you some revenue in the short term; it might be okay for 6 months or maybe a year or two. But if you want to build a successful, long term, valuable business that will be around in the years to come you have to take an ethical approach to business.

OPW reaches many executives in the industry. What would you like to say directly to the rest of the industry?
For the online dating category to grow, we do need to work together. We need to, as an industry, clean up our act and invest in the customer experience. We need to put the customer first rather than our bank balances. You only do that by working together because one bad apple can ruin the industry for lots of other people.

Can you see Global Personals ever IPO’ing?
I don’t think that would be on our horizons to be honest Mark. We are a privately owned company and we’ve grown pretty heavily. We are now at about 80 staff and when you came to our offices you were able to see that we’ve grown rather nicely. We’re enjoying that growth and I wouldn’t rule anything in or out over the next few years. We’ve certainly got a good 3 to 5 year plan with strong growth ahead of us. And we are enjoying ourselves in the process.

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Jeffrey C. Taylor, Founder And CEO Of Meetcha.com, and Linda Natansohn, COO

Posted on September 1, 2010

Meetcha logo OPW INTERVIEW – Sep 1 – Jeff Taylor is the founder of Monster.com. He went on to create a social networking service for people over 40, Eons.com. He recently helped create Meetcha.com, a dating site for people over 40. Jeff is joined by COO Linda Natansohn in this interview. – Mark Brooks

You started Monster.com. What led you to start Eons.com?
Jeff: I spent more than 10 years migrating the job section of the newspaper from print to online with Monster. And I always saw the obituary section sitting there and I wondered why it wasn’t migrating. And so, that gave me the idea to focus in on this classified section, primarily consumed by Boomers, which became part of my idea for Eons. Baby boomers that I knew weren’t interested in retiring. Eons became an incubator and we launched digital properties for boomers. The first one was eons.com, the place for boomers. It started out as a portal and evolved into a social network for opinionated baby boomers, ready to live a wonderful, full life, as opposed to only thinking about retiring.

The age range is 45 to 60. About 15 million unique visitors have come to the site since we launched in August 2006. We currently have about 800,000 registered users, and we get about 400,000 unique visitors per month. 60% of our users are women, who are also twice as engaged as men.

Eons is a friendship engine. Unlike Facebook, where you know most of the people, on eons.com you’re meeting people with the same passions and interests. Our groups platform has really caught on and has become very important. Our members have created almost 4000 groups on the site.

If you’re interested in climbing Machu Pichu or going on a cruise, there’s no place like Eons to find somebody to go with. Our members created these things called SKITs, which are “Spending your Kid’s Inheritance Tours”. Basically these are trips to Las Vegas, or trips to Fort Lauderdale, where they go on a cruise, or a cruise to Alaska. Great friendships form online at eons.com and come to life offline during these meet ups.

Why do you think the older generation tends towards a group mentality?
Linda: Last year was the 40th anniversary of Woodstock. We talked a lot with our members about how instrumental that was in shaping a generation. This is the audience and the demographic that redefined what community means. Woodstock was just the beginning of it, but they’ve always been a generation that turned to their peers, to pull together, to find power in numbers, to share views, to challenge each other. And they’ve grown through the last 4 decades, and you know, it’s still really the way they behave.

Jeff: I want to make a comment about the friendship engine, and the group concept. When you were in high school or college most of your friends were your age. As you get older, the amount of friends that you have begins to diminish. At around 50 you have the smallest access to adding new friends. The concept of making new friends at 50 has driven the success of Eons. The loyalty really comes from making new friends. And I think the best way to do that is through affinity groups. People need to talk to each other and share their experiences, and I think that’s where the groups really come into play.

Why is there such a greater usage among your female members? And I’ve noticed the same thing on internet dating and specifically speed dating services, in the older demographic. What happened to the guys? Why are the women so much more active?
Jeff: Guys don’t really know how to have fun. I am kidding, but it’s really interesting to watch how women are different than men as it relates to engaging new friendships, to trying new things and going to new places. With Linda we always joke about the fact that 90% of the household spending decisions at age 50 and over are made by women. So a guy widower basically loses all of his decision-making abilities. So you gotta relearn those skills, I guess.

You started Meetcha last year. Tell us about Meetcha and how you have created a [social dating v booking, if you can] booking service that’s rather unique.
Jeff: We did a study about 18 months ago on Eons. We found out that 60% of our users were single, and about 70% of the engaged activity came from singles. And we didn’t really have any of the traditional toolsets of a dating site.

The other thing that we learned was that people were almost immediately compelled to meet each other offline. We talked to our members a lot about the dating process. And they told us: “Look, we’re not ready to get remarried, but we are interested in meeting new people. We don’t always like the concept of a one-on-one date.” One of the things they really liked about the SKITs was to be able to go out in a larger group and be able to do what I call “datability” instead of one date.

So we used all of that learning to create Meetcha.com. We start right off by asking you what are your passions and interests. And we’re inviting you to meet people that have similar interests. And it starts out as a game, but it moves very quickly into being a profile builder. And so this has become an anchor for our matching engine.

The concept of meeting offline in groups was an important part of our master plan. We created events called PODS™ which means “People Out Doing Stuff”. And it’s also our logo – which is two peas in a pod – which maybe is the goal. So we have basically created an entire engine, and it’s a recommendation engine for matching people. Our system matches people up and invites them to events based on their location, their age, and a set of passions or interests.

It complies with what Dr Michael Norton and Dan Ariely would concur with. They’ve pushed out some very revolutional reports that say that behavioral matchmaking is a better predictor of a good match.

How fast is the site growing?
Jeff: We launched in April and we have about 10,000 active users right now. And we were getting seven to eight hundred unique visitors a day coming into the site but that’s growing nicely. New visitors.

How are you promoting it?
Linda: For starters, we have a really active blog. It’s something that we’ve enjoyed doing, and I think our users enjoy reading and sharing. We’ve got a Facebook fan page and Twitter. We’ve also done some fun events.

We have partnered with a new place that launched in Massachusetts called the Hingham Shipyard, and the developer asked us to run an entire series through the summer. Every Friday night we run “Meetcha @ the Shipyard” PODS. So this is unique that Meetcha is able to pair up with local and potentially national business establishments, who are really interested in getting this active group of adults who have disposable income into their restaurants, and maybe even clothing stores. We’ve done some great videos, for example, about “how do you dress for a date?” And if you look at our blog you’ll see that we paired up with a really great men’s store around Boston and did a 4-part series for guys on how to easily look great for your date. And we’re about to do a cooking series…

Jeff: We’re also doing some classic search engine marketing.

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Dr. Robert Epstein – Author, Editor, And Longtime Psychology Researcher And Professor

Posted on July 28, 2010

Dr Robert Epstein OPW INTERVIEW – July 28 – Dr. Robert Epstein is an author, editor, and longtime psychology researcher and professor—a distinguished scientist who is passionate about educating the public about advances in mental health and the behavioral sciences. The former editor-in-chief of Psychology Today, Dr. Epstein is currently a contributing editor for Scientific American Mind and an occasional lecturer at the Rady School of Management at the University of California San Diego. He is also the founder and Director Emeritus of the Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies in Massachusetts. He doesn’t believe in matchmaking by numbers. Read this interview to find out what he does believe in. – Mark Brooks

 

What inspired you to take up the profession of the study of love and motivation?
It happened by accident. A woman approached me about doing some work with me, and I was trying to find a project we could do together. I was single at the time, and she was very attractive, so I made the outrageous suggestion that we should deliberately fall in love through some process and then write a book about it. She loved the idea, but her boyfriend wasn’t as thrilled.

It got me curious about whether people could deliberately learn to love each other. I subsequently posed the question in an editorial when I was editor-in-chief of Psychology Today magazine back in 2002. The editorial led to a genuine media frenzy that spread around the world. More than 1,000 women from 6 countries proposed to be the guinea pig to deliberately fall in love with me.

That’s how it started. Then I began studying the whole process scientifically. Can people really do this? Do people deliberately fall in love? I started studying people who were in arranged marriages in which love had emerged over time, and I’m still doing that research. I also created a very romantic document called The Love Contract, which allows two people to commit for some period of time to deliberately falling in love with each other.

Then based on my own work and based on scientific studies done by other people, I developed a series of games and exercises that strengthen emotional bonds. In other words, they very rapidly get people to increase their feelings of liking, loving, closeness and attraction.

I’m working now on a book about all this called Making Love: How People Learn to Love and How You Can Too. Over the years, I also ended up doing research on online dating and wrote an investigative article about online dating for Scientific American magazine. I’ve also done consulting for some of the big online dating services, including Match.com and Engaged.com.

I developed an online test as well, which can be found at MyLoveSkills.com. The test is focuses on seven types of relationship skills that research shows are important in long-term love relationships. I’ve been developing what I also just released the beta version of a new test of compatibility, available at AreWeGoodTogether.com.

Would you say any 2 people can fall in love?
No, not any 2 people can fall in love. You can get any 2 people to increase their emotional bond, but for a deep love to emerge, it’s helpful to start out with at least minimal physical attraction. And for a relationship to be successful long-term, you also need to start out with few or no “deal breakers” – that is, threats to long-term happiness. That’s what AreWeGoodTogether.com is all about. However, it turns out that, based of my rough calculations, each of us has about 350,000 people in the world with whom we could build a very deep love over time. Now not all of those people are going to be available of course, so that cuts the number way down. And not all of them are going to be local so that cuts the number down further. But the point is that there are a lot of people out there with whom we could build a very wonderful love relationship over time that is,if one knows how to do it, which is what I’m basically trying to educate people about.

How could an internet dating site systematize the matchmaking process around those facets?
Internet dating sites allow a lot of exchange of text. It’s a waste of time, however, to correspond for very long, because once people meet, all previous impressions are wiped out within seconds. If you think there is potential, you should meet, or at least talk on the phone or by video. Another problem with the online dating sites is that they make deception very easy. 10 to 20% of users admit they provide incorrect information online. But the same people say that 90% of other people are deceptive as well. There are a lot of limitations with online dating. I think that it can be improved, though, and will certainly will improve over time.

There is definitely a limited deck of cards that we have to play with. What site would you say gets closer to doing a good job of this thing called matchmaking?
I’m not a big fan of any of the existing sites. The biggest ones are, what I call “long bars” – bars hundreds of miles long which allow you an endless shopping spree. They have some use, but they make it hard to zoom in on people with whom you can build a great relationship. That brings me to eHarmony and PerfectMatch, where they do some personality testing. The problem here is no one really knows how to do that kind of matching very well. People I’ve talked to who have used eHarmony have said that most of the people they met seem to be completely random people. They didn’t seem to fit them in any special way.

These tests are very crude. The biggest problem with eHarmony especially is, what I call the False Negative Problem. If they really use your test score to match you up with people, then there are a lot of people that they’re not introducing you to – people with whom you could be very happy. Sometimes people who are very similar are attracted to each other and create a relationship, but sometimes opposites really do attract and can also create wonderful relationships. The tests cannot possibly deal with both possibilities. They don't know whether you fit the rule or the exception.

Call me cynical if you like, but tests like eHarmony’s are mainly marketing tools. Some people believe that if you’re testing the heck out of them, you must know something.

I actually ran a strand of single dinners under the domain Undating.com. I used to stand in the group and look like I was really thinking very hard and indeed I was thinking fairly hard about how to match people. I knew a lot of the people in the room and I did try to ham it up I must admit, so that people could see this is a lot of work. I think people took the event a bit more seriously and took the value of the event a bit more seriously because they could see there was some effort going into it.

The same thing with eHarmony. When eHarmony first matched people up, they wouldn’t give matches immediately because that would undermine people’s confidence in the test. I think that’s what they had in mind. They made people wait, even though the calculations can be done is a split second. You could say, I suppose, that eHarmony is simply very strong in marketing and sales – in creating the illusion of effectiveness. But ultimately the site that gets matchmaking right will win.

If you have the power to make one sweeping change in the internet dating industry what would you do?
You have to be humble in the way you match people. Even though I have a background in statistics and have taught courses on statistics at the doctoral level, I don’t think you should be using statistics to match people up. I think you should give people a lot of leeway in who they meet, and then you should be providing opportunities for them to experience each other. Someday computers will allow us to do that really well. There are people working hard right now on allowing us to meet other people realistically in virtual environments.

The social aspect of dating can also be facilitated by computers. Years ago, I fixed up two people I knew because I felt they would be good for each other. They got married and have had a happy life together. In the real world there is a social element to dating. I’ve seen a few websites try to add a social element to the dating process, and I think that’s a great idea.

Those are my main recommendations right now: create ways for people to truly experience each other, be modest about the way you match people up, and add the social element and make dating more like it is in the real world.

Now having said all that, I’ve actually been working for seven years now on what I think is a very modest and practical and humble way of matching people up without using statistics and without running into the false negative problem. That’s the new test at AreWeGoodTogether.com.

Can you tell us a bit about it?
It gives people who already know each other – perhaps a lot, perhaps hardly at all – an easy way to find out right whether they’re likely to run into problems in the future. It identifies the roadblocks that people will face by comparing the minimum needs that each has for a romantic partner.

In some ways it reminds me from my manufacturing engineering background, of something called a failure modes and effects analysis, which is largely used in the aerospace industry and it’s somewhat statistical. You’re looking at different ways a plane can fall apart. If a door knob comes off what is the effect.
Exactly. We’re conducting a “failure mode analysis” for relationships. If you can start out with someone with whom you share few or no deal breakers, your relationship will be virtually effortless. That’s worth thinking about. Ultimately, when are data base is big enough, we’ll also be able to help you find such a person.

How are you looking to work with the internet dating industry? How can sites work with you?
I have done consulting in the industry and I imagine I’ll do some more. I’ve enjoyed helping these businesses do a little bit better. I’d also love to partner with one of the big players who might be interested in using some of the tools I have developed.

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Mike Fitzgerald, CEO Of Dating Central

Posted on July 26, 2010

Mike fitzgerald dating central OPW INTERVIEW – July 26 – Mike runs one of the original and oldest white label dating services out of Gibraltar, which is just off the coast off Spain. There are some handy little tax benefits for being based in Gibraltar. Read on. – Mark Brooks

You’re based in Gibraltar. Tell us more about Gibraltar and the benefits of being in Gibraltar.
We moved to Gibraltar in 2004. The company was growing to the point where the VAT and corporation tax were becoming a hindrance to us for developing the company. The benefits of being in Gibraltar are zero rated VAT, so we pay no VAT on our membership fees, and the corporation tax is a flat fee of around 600 pounds a year. So we moved here and went from paying 16 to 20,000 pounds a month in VAT to paying zero. We also went from paying 50 to 60,000 pounds a year in corporation tax to paying 600 pounds. So from a company point of view, our overhead shrunk by 25% overnight by simply moving to Gibraltar.

Is there any down side to being in Gibraltar?
The biggest down side to Gibraltar is probably staffing. Finding skilled staff that know anything about affiliate management, SEO or web design is very, very hard. We normally have to use people who are based in Spain or fly them in from Romania or London.

Bringing them over for interviews is one thing, however climatising to Gibraltar is another one. You either love it here or you hate it. You can either fit in straight away and enjoy the lifestyle or you can find it to be slow.

Have you considered using a distributed work force and giving them the freedom to work from anywhere?
We do have staff who work from other places. We have a couple of people on the coast that work for us; we have some people in the UK that do copywriting for us. In the past, we’ve used design houses in India, Russia, and Eastern Europe in general, as well as Canada. So we do have staff that work from other places. However the core staff, such as affiliate management, customer service representatives and office managers, we need in the office.

There are some benefits for affiliates with you being in Gibraltar I understand. Could you tell us more about that? How do you attract affiliates with your business base?
When we moved to Gibraltar we spent a great deal of time talking to the tax people in the UK and Gibraltar to make sure we weren’t doing anything illegal and that we weren’t breaking any laws. So from an affiliate point of view, you don’t have to pass anything on to the tax man or the VAT man because the actual transaction is taking place in Gibraltar and not anywhere else.

Once again that’s a heck of a competitive advantage for your improvement in business efficiency. What is the founding story of Dating Central?
Me and my business partner Graham Hampson received our business degrees in Manchester in 1997. I was working in the insurance industry, on the IT side, and Graham was working for a design house. We both realised early on that design houses were reinventing the wheel every time they built a website, in a time frame of 6 to 8 weeks. We both agreed that the best way to build a website was to look at a template building system. You would then have a core engine that created these templates for you.

At the time, back in 1998/99, there was a great deal of buzz about the dating industry. So
we created a website called StudentsVille.com. We were going down the avenue of creating the world’s first white label dating service to allow all of these backroom web masters or small enterprises to have their own dating service without having to put in weeks of work and thousands of pounds.

About 6 months later, we started turning over a profit and within the first year we started to employ people. We’re self financed and never had any capital investment. Within 2 or 3 years we were making a very healthy profit. We were attracting affiliates from all industries and from all parts of the world. Once we moved to Gibraltar, we built the company up again. We managed to completely rebuild the structure, the database, the content as well as the back end. We were able to complete that project at the end of 2009. Whereby now, we have a completely new engine and new templates. Now it’s all very much Web 2.0.

How would you say you’re differentiated against the likes of WhiteLabelDating out of the UK and Global Factory who are going after the continental European market?
We differ in terms of the actual application itself. The WhiteLabelDating.com system is very much an “add your logo here” system. With our system, we try to integrate our service into your site. We are also a lot more open in regards to fees. We provide statistics where you can see a full breakdown of all your members, all of your commission, all of your charge backs and you can see at a glance, in real time, what you have done. So as far as the likes of WhiteLabelDating is concerned, we take it to the next level in terms of customisation and integration.

Our service is also tied to the niche markets. For example, we have Christian networks and Disabled networks. We’re giving our affiliates the ability to enter that market with zero overhead and zero cost. So I think the niche element of our service will always mean it will be very difficult for any competitor to come in and take away our membership database or our affiliate base. We spread ourselves across the different niches and it allows us to deal with a competitor entering the market.

You have some very specific niches. What would you say are your top couple of niches?
It’s changed in the last 5 years. We had a very stable Christian niche 5 years ago. The biggest surprise is the Lesbian network, which has really taken off. The ethnic network, which is for African-American and European Africans, has also done quite well.

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Anna Cooney And Jim Strong, Founders Of Urban Social

Posted on July 19, 2010

UrbanSocial Anna Cooney Jim Strong OPW INTERVIEW – July 20 – Urban Social is…, well, I’m not sure, so I thought I’d ask the founders. – Mark Brooks

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Urban Social is a most intriguing company that has been around since 2004. Can you tell us a bit more about what you do. Is Urban Social an events company or an internet dating company?
Anna: Our core business model is internet dating but our target market has always been directed towards outgoing singles. Our goal was to create an environment that offers them a little bit more than just online dating. So we brought online dating and events together. The events are offered by 3rd party organizers.

That’s very smart using a 3rd party. What motivated that? How does it work with them?
Anna: We only work with the companies that we feel offer the best dating events. We promote the events all around the country, so that our members have the opportunity to get out and meet people at these events, no matter where they are. It’s done through affiliates basically. We advertise them and our members find out about them.

Do they have to follow your event format or do they have more flexibility?
Anna: There is a lot more flexibility. We try and offer a wide variety of events. We’ve had things like blind dating, dating in the dark, “I’m a single, so get me out of here” weekend s and wine tasting dating ….So it’s not just about speed dating, it’s about offering them different opportunities and different ways to meet people.

What is the biggest event you’ve had so far?
Jim: I reckon the St. George’s Day event we did about 2 years ago, which was a fantastic event. We had about 120 people at that one.

What is the founding story? What drove you to start Urban Social?
Anna: We were a group of university friends living the single life in and around London. We felt there wasn’t anything in the marketplace at the time for us when it came to online dating. So we put our resources together and developed a bit more of a fun and niche site that really spoke to us.

How has the site progressed over the years in terms of the size of the business?
Jim: We’ve progressed well. Initially, it was all about getting enough members onto the site for it to be viable. So that was focused around getting hundreds of our friends and friends of friends to join the site. After that, the word spread and we grew quickly. We were also voted the best online dating site one year in a national newspaper in the UK. We also have affiliate programs in place, some key white labels and we’re continuing to grow at a steady rate.

A lot of dating sites have tried speed dating and they’ve generally found that it is tougher than it looks. So what would be your advice to a dating service that was considering running their own speed dating events?
Anna: It’s all about having a niche offering I think. You really need to come up with something different , and make sure you do it well.

Jim: The biggest advice we can really give is to focus locally. It’s a lot easier and cheaper to market locally than it is nationally. And marketing is really where you can lose a lot of money.

Have you run any larger events with over a couple of hundred people?
Anna: No we haven’t, we’ve kept them quite niche , as we feel the atmosphere is better at a smaller scale event . The average event size that we do is around the 50 or 60 mark. We find that they work much better that way.

I worked with Cupid.com back in 2004 when we bought PreDating.com, a speed dating company. We thought the 2 worlds of users would intermingle and get along great. But what we found was the people who came out to events love events and the people who do internet dating love internet dating and never the twain shall meet. There was some overlap but ultimately the socialites were more likely to be out and about than on internet dating services and we didn’t see quite as much overlap as we thought. Is this just an American thing or did you see something similar in the UK?
Anna: We’ve really seen a good conversion rate between the two but I think that’s more to do with our style and our target market.

Jim: We also find that because we offer such a comprehensive service to our customers, we’ve got a very near 50/50 mix of male/female, which isn’t the norm in the industry. So typically we’re targeting urban fun single professionals and those sorts of people tend to be very busy but also interested in getting out to meet people.

So we have found in the UK anyways, that it’s fairly successful. The events certainly appeal to women slightly more than the men, who can prefer online. But when you bring those two together you get great events.

What are your plans for Urban Social between now and 2011? What do you have in store?
Jim: We are looking into expanding our white label service to the US and Australia. We’re also looking at chat features, and a London centric site.

Clifford Lerner, Founder & CEO Of SNAP Interactive

Posted on July 7, 2010

SNAP Interactive_Cliff Lerner 051310_ 008 OPW – July 7 – SNAP Interactive operates AreYouInterested which is a social dating service. They’re one of the few public companies in the internet dating arena, so we have insight on their numbers here. I talked with the Founder/CEO Cliff Lerner.

How are things going?
Things are going very well. We've been growing our mobile application, our website and our Facebook application. Earlier this year there were a lot of Facebook changes that we had to navigate around and I think we did a very good job. I'm very happy with where we are as a company right now.

What were the changes that most affected you?
All of the communication flow on Facebook changed – the viral channels, the algorithms on posting to the wall and the notifications were all removed. There are probably some more that I'm forgetting. Fortunately, however, we never really saw any negative impact from any of the Facebook changes and our subscription revenue has actually risen steadily throughout 2010.

As a matter of fact, they helped us pretty significantly. We now have direct contact with our users via email. We now require our users to give us their email when they install our products, which we weren't able to do before. So that alone gives us an easier way to communicate with them directly.

How many brands do you have at this stage?
For starters, we actively support AreYouInterested.com, which consistsvof the iPhone application, the AreYouInterested.com website and the AreYouInterested Facebook application. We have a few other brands thatvwe also support and maintain, including FlirtWithMe and MeetNewPeople. However, we aren't actively building new features on these brands. We have a few apps on MySpace, Beebo and Hi5 as well.

I noticed that with the MeetNewPeople application you're at 4 million installations and with AreYouInterested you're over 13 million at this stage. Yes, MeetNewPeople is pretty close to 5 million and AreYouInterested is over 15 million at this point.

How do you do it?
It had a lot to do with really good timing. We launched very early on the Facebook platform when not many companies knew about this and a lot of our growth occurred at an earlier stage. Since then we've been very focused on metrics. We are still growing virally and up until December of 2009, all of our growth was in fact viral growth. But since then Facebook has made it more difficult to grow virally, so we've been focusing on adding new features and buying traffic to coincide with our conversion to a subscription model. So far it has been working very well.

How much of your user base would you say is primarily mobile compared to your online user base using laptops and computers, percentage wise?
I'd say a couple of percent. At this point we only have an iPhone application and we're strongly considering building a mobile application for other devices. However, for the iPhone we have over 150,000 installs and we get about 40,000 sessions per day. What I find most encouraging and interesting is that the average user logs in spends over 30 minutes per day on our iPhone application.

An iPhone user can seamlessly interact with someone on our Facebook app or the website. So we have that critical mass of users on the iPhone. The user accounts are also integrated, so you can sign up on our Facebook application and download and use Facebook Connect on our iPhone app as well. Specifically, all of your information is the same and you can interact and navigate from either of your accounts.

We haven't done any traffic buys on mobile yet. That is something we're going to consider in the future. Right now we're looking at mobile really as gaining as much market share as possible, and learning what users want to do on a mobile dating app. We recently launched a couple of premium features. For example, we've implemented virtual gifts, which are doing very well I might add, the ability to send pictures along with your message and the ability to see who views your profile.

Are there any user behaviors that have surprised you with the addition of the virtual gifting?
We built a pretty sophisticated virtual gifting system earlier this year and it's been very successful for us. We offer users the ability to buy gifts one at a time or get unlimited access with a subscription. We have gifts that cost as little as $1.50 and go as high as $50. We actually sell a few $50 gifts every day. Naturally, people spend money on these gifts because they're much more likely to get a response and it's much more engaging.

Who would you regard as the toughest competitor?
I don't really view traditional dating sites as competitors. So I would have to say sites that are built on top of the social networks such as SpeedDate, HotorNot and Zoosk. But I don't really view them as traditional competitors either because a lot of our features are built on top of Facebook. There are really only a couple of applications out there (including AreYouInterested) that have a critical mass of users on the social networks and critical mass is obviously key to dating. So at the end of the day, I would say as long as the social networks can continue to grow and build tools and features that allow us to grow on top of them, we'll continue to be in a very good place.

Among your competition, who would you say you are the most inspired by? Who do you keep the closest eye on?
There have been a few companies recently that are getting more into dating through friends of friends. I definitely keep an eye on them. It's not as important to keep an eye on the competitors as it is to keep an eye on the social networks in general. For example, what direction are they heading in? What communication tools are they going to allow us to use? MySpace, for instance, has recently become a lot more developer friendly. So keeping an eye on social networks is much more important to me than what our competitors are doing.

Have you got any plans for SMS?
Not at this stage. We're relatively new to the mobile space and just now starting to develop our gameplan.

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Larry Wilson, Founder And CEO Of Opposites Connect

Posted on July 2, 2010

LarryHeadShot use OPW INTERVIEW – July 2 – eHarmony matches based on similarities, but some argue that matching people on complimentary i.e. opposite traits, makes life more interesting for the matchees. Matching on opposite traits seems like a black art, to me. Matching on similarities seems like something that is far more predictable and repeatable. Opposites Connect is a new site that matches opposites. They’re running TV ads right now. I talked with the Founder and CEO Larry Wilson. – Mark Brooks

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What is your founding story and what inspired you to start Opposites Connect?
All dating sites have the same methodology. They are looking to fix up people with their perfect harmonious match, or in other words, their mirror image. It might work for several people but I’d be willing to bet there is a huge populous in the single’s community that this method doesn’t apply to. It just seems to be common sense to me. My grandmother used to tell me that opposites attract.

As a result, I started looking to see if there was anyone out there who did it that way. I was actually shocked to see that there wasn’t.

Why opposites? Do they really attract? Have you found any evidence perhaps that has drawn you to the conclusion that there’s a better approach to help people meet based on opposites?
Yes, actually there is a lot of anecdotal proof. As I said, my grandmother said opposites attract but it is important to draw the comparison between opposites attracting and opposites connecting. Sure you can attract for a variety of reasons but will you be able to establish a connection as well? That is what we’re striving to accomplish.

We all know people in our lives, for example, couples that have been together for 15 years or more. We look at them and we say: “Them? They’re so different. How is it working for them?” But it does! The whole concept just stands to reason. The differences that you have and the conflict resolution skills that you develop from having different preferences and ideas about how certain things should work really foster a long term bond.

So when I had this idea, I approached 3 prominent relationship experts, psycho-therapists if you will, who actively see clients on a daily basis. They informed me that the number one problem of the clients they have is that they’re constantly going for the same type of person over and over again and it has failed for them. We are the dating site that lets you look at that other person, that person you might not normally give a chance to even though they might have so much to offer.

How do you help opposites connect on OppositesConnect.com?
For starters, we try to make sure that people are similar to a certain degree. For example, are they both single? Are they looking for a long term relationship and do they both believe in family, etc? They fill out the questions in our questionnaire.

Once we’ve established the basics, we want to find out what makes them different. Specifically, what makes them unique. We want to give them terrific conversation starters. There needs to be more to a conversation on a first date than saying, me too.

We think that one interesting, thought provoking and fun date will lead to another and another and another and eventually, develop a long term relationship. This is where our success comes in, not necessarily in terms of producing marriages but developing fun dates into long term relationships.

How are you promoting the site? That’s always the golden question for new dating sites. You’re building to critical mass fresh out of the gate. How are you getting to the first level of membership?
We’ve just launched our Beta site. We’re doing this very slowly and in a very orderly fashion. Shortly we will start rolling out our national advertising campaign. You’ll be seeing our banners and ads on many of the leading sites. We’ve also filmed 2 promotional videos.

Another important part of our PR and advertising is the fact that we’re free for the time being. If you look at our site, you might agree with me that it’s a beautiful site. It’s certainly not what people are used to seeing when they go to free sites. Will it be free forever? I don’t know that. If we can generate the necessary revenue through advertising, I would love to keep it free.

We’re also going to launch an iPhone app and an affiliate program. As I said, it’s all a very slow step by step process.

Where would you like to be by the end of the year? What is your vision for the end of December in terms of membership and achievements for the site?
We would like to have anywhere from thousands to hundreds of thousands, certainly within a calendar year. I see no reason why we shouldn’t be able to accomplish this, given that we are a free alternative site. It also helps that there is nothing like us out there at the moment.

My research showed that while we were developing our business plan, 60% of all internet daters were on more than one site at a time. In most cases they even paid $20 to $30 a month for what essentially measures up to be the same matching technique. We offer an alternative, so I see no reason why it shouldn’t be a success.

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