Category: All Interviews

Tsavo, CEO Mike Jones Interview

Posted on August 30, 2008

Mikejones1 OPW INTERVIEW — Aug 30 — Mike Jones is now an advisor to Userplane and AOL and is CEO of Tsavo. What is this mysterious Tsavo? Here's my interview with Mike. – Mark Brooks

What's your role at Tsavo and AOL now?
With AOL I function as a Strategic Advisor, facilitating the transition to Sam Wick for daily management of the Userplane business. The majority of my time operationally is setting up Tsavo and finalizing the transition with some of our initial, undisclosed acquisitions.

Tell us more about Tsavo.
Tsavo is focused on building technology facilitating highly-personal and relevant experiences with online content. I would like to see a world where, instead of browsing through 30,000 blog posts a day, there is a system that actively understands and learns my media consumption behavior.

What kind of media are you particularly going to be looking at and serving up to users?
Our current focus is on a wide-reaching publishing network with niche vertical focus. Overall we are viewing it from the standpoint that Tsavo will be a multi URL network across a whole series of verticals.

Is there an official launch date?
No there’s not. Since we’re starting off with a few acquisitions, we have active staff and revenue today; my CTO Nate Thelen and his lead engineer Gabe Harriman and our head of product Mike Macaadan focus primarily on building the relevancy sub-structure. You will begin seeing our acquisition announcements in the next few months, and the relevancy technology begin surfacing in the next six months and beyond.

What kinds of sites and services are you looking to acquire at this stage?
We’re looking for content sites that have strong editorial and original content. We’re looking for a few back-end technologies that relate the semantic web and content aggregation.

Are dating sites within your realm of interest?
Probably not. I don’t believe it will fit initially with our focus on media & relevance. I do have interest and am researching other types of subscription services.

See all posts on Userplane

Adryenn Ashley, Book Author – OPW Interview

Posted on August 27, 2008

Adryenn_ashley2 OPW INTERVIEW — Aug 27 — What are you doing to add content to your dating site? Here’s an interesting book/author for you to consider talking to. Adryenn Ashley is author of “Every Single Girl’s Guide to Her Future Husband’s Last Divorce”.

Adryenn, what inspired you to write the book?
I’m like a lot of future second wives. I postponed getting married until I found the right man, but it took a lot longer then I anticipated. By the time I got married, I had a house, retirement and investment assets. I had a lot of my own net worth; I wasn’t marrying into it. So I did a prenup, but I didn’t know everything that needed to be included, and about a year and a half into it, we got into some family law issues with his ex-wife, and I realized that I was wholly and totally unprepared financially for being a second wife. I didn’t protect myself as well as I could have. I accidentally did almost everything right, but had I really known what I was in for, I probably would have done more.

Why do you think people get divorced?
Seventy-five percent of all marriages break down because of financial stress. This leads to the communication breakdown, which then leads to the lack of sex and affairs.

What red flags should a woman look for in a potential (but divorced) partner?
The first thing I would tell any woman who is thinking about marrying a divorced man: Rule number 1: Read the divorce decree. Make sure you know what’s in it; and that it’s actually signed. That happened to a friend of mine. He had to cancel his wedding because he wasn’t actually divorced. It had been ten years but the judge had never signed the papers. If you’re thinking about living together, definitely pull your credit reports. Start having those financial discussions. “I see you have 40 credit cards, they’re all paid off with a zero balance. But why 40?“

Don’t ever think of a prenup as “I’m protecting myself against my future spouse.” Think of it as “I’m protecting myself for my future spouse.” That’s the whole point. As a very litigious society, we have 92 million lawsuits every year and 98% of them are settled out of court. Only 2% go to trial because people know they can sue you, and your insurance company would rather settle out of court. Bottom line, you want to protect your assets and your privacy.

If you could wave your magic wand, what would you do to improve the world’s divorce rate?
I am trying to get everyone to think of a martial partnership agreement as the rock-solid foundation of their marriage. It sets you up financially, emotionally, it makes sure that your hopes and dreams are aligned. People do grow apart, but the last thing you want is to find out ten years into your marriage that you’re the ‘pay the house off’ type and your partner is the ‘leverage the house, mortgage it to the hilt and invest in higher returning assets’ type.

What is your key advice to women in the book?
Get educated. We tend to put blinders on top of rose-colored glasses. If you look at religious marriage counseling, a four-hour marriage class reduces your divorce risk from 50% to 20%. Those four hours are all about asking those difficult conversation questions, which are key. If you don’t want to have a prenup, don’t have one, but do the work anyway. The work is what is going to get you that low divorce rate, because if you do what I tell you to do in my 40 hour marriage planning class, your chance of divorce drops to about 4% instead of 50%, and down from 70% for a second marriage. I teach this class once a year, and I’ll soon certify others to lead classes throughout the country, but you can do the work yourself by following the steps in the book.

How can men protect themselves from divorce?
Right now, there’s a marriage strike going on. A lot of men are not getting married. They see an outrageous court order of $40,000 for Kimora Lee Simmons children (who makes plenty of money on her own). Why $40,000? Do their children need that kind of lifestyle? How much does it cost to feed a child?

Or let’s say your wife has an affair and gets pregnant. In most states, you’re automatically the legal father regardless of whether or not you’re the biological father. There are so many reasons for men not to get married that there’s every reason for them to do this marital partnership agreement work; to really get to know the person they’re marrying, to have these agreements up front.

According to the Red Cross, 23% of babies born into marriage, just by blood typing alone, could not possibly be the husband’s child. That’s almost 1 in 4. If you take into account the report from the Association of Blood Banks, of the DNA challenges in paternity establishment for unmarried couples, over 30% of the people who said “That’s my baby’s daddy” were wrong.

Bottom line, the best insurance you can give yourself and your marriage is the gift of communication. Make sure you talk regularly, and that big decisions are shared equally. The real secret is that making sure you are financially compatible is the best indicator of whether or not you’ll make it to your 50 year wedding anniversary!

SelectAlternatives, CEO Andy Sutcliffe Interview

Posted on August 23, 2008

Andysutcliffe OPW INTERVIEW — Aug 23 — You’ve heard of People2People. Have you heard of Select Alternatives? They also work with newspapers and offer them dating sites. Here’s the founders story. – Mark Brooks

What is the founding story of Select Alternatives?
Back in 1988 I was working for the Boston Phoenix, which is a weekly alternative newspaper in Massachusetts. I helped to develop the first 900 telephone response personal system that we were then able to leverage into a $100 million company, by offering very local personal services to newspapers in the US and Europe.

With the advent of the internet, the 900-personals business started a very precipitous decline. As I saw the major players in the internet dating space emerge, I thought there was still a great opportunity for people to meet people based on their psychographic interests. They already had an affinity for local alternative newsweekly and I thought we could create the next generation online dating and personal product by being hyper local.

So the basis of Select Alternatives is that it is a series of local sites (currently 27 local sites), each one engineered specifically for the demographics and psychographics of a particular alternative newsweekly or newspaper’s readership.

What is your favorite partner site?
My favorite is a newspaper in Seattle, Washington called The Stranger. It’s a very hip newspaper and has done extraordinarily well in transforming their readership from strictly print to an online readership. They call their personals site “Lovelab”.

What is the proposition to a newspaper? What cut do they take and how does it work for a newspaper?
Typically, there is an initial licensing fee. Newspapers then receive 50% of the revenue from memberships and 100% of local advertising that they sell onto the sites.

What do you charge for membership?
One of the things that really differentiates our sites is that we welcome users to surf throughout the site instead of putting up a “join now” barrier. That’s why we average over 16 pages per visit and we convert 35% of registrants to paid membership. We let people create a profile totally free and if somebody contacts them it’s totally free to respond. However, if they wish to initiate contact we then ask them to buy a membership. The prices vary because it can be determined by each individual newspaper. But typically the membership is $10 for 7 days, $20 for 30 days or $40 for 90 days.

Another way at looking at membership revenue and comparing it to advertising revenue is to divide the membership revenue into the total page views, divided by 1,000, in order to arrive at an average CPM. We average over a $7.50 CPM, with some sites as high as a $12 CPM.

What do the newspapers do in terms of promotion?
The personals link is on the main navigation of the newspapers’ home page. Secondly, on that home page we always put out a teaser ad that has a photo of an actual local member with a direct link into their profile and into the site itself. So those are the basics in terms of standard promotion. Different papers then create different programs. For example, The Stranger came up with a marvelous way of linking their readers to their advertisers by creating “Friends With Benefits card”. The Stranger contacted their local advertisers – coffee shops, restaurants, spas, etc. and said they were going to drive traffic to their establishment in exchange for a discount for their members.

How would you say you compete with the likes of a Match.com?
What differentiates our product from those big national players is that it is strictly local. Match.com is the “Wal-Mart” of dating. They have a gazillion products at a low price but if you’re looking for that particular person and you’re willing to pay a little more for quality, you’ll go local.

Finally what are your plans for 2008 through 2009? Are there any particular business development plans you would like to mention?
Clearly this model has worked in the U.S. This year I’m offering the product in Canada and I am looking for partners around the world – especially in Europe – who would like to represent the product to publications in different countries.

ScientificMatch, CEO Eric Holzle – OPW Interview

Posted on August 16, 2008

Ericface01 OPW INTERVIEW — Aug 16 — Get a DNA test and find your match and it could result in more orgasms and less cheating, apparently. ScientificMatch.com charges $1k and will send daters a DNA test.  I interviewed the CEO to find out how it all works. – Mark Brooks

What is the founding story of Scientific Match?
Five yeas ago I came across a study known as the sweaty t-shirt experiment. There was a documentary on TV and I just happened to be watching late night educational television and they described the sweaty t-shirt experiment. The experiment took place over on a college campus in Europe. A bunch of male students wore t-shirts for a couple of nights in a row exclusive of any external fragrances or any soaps or deodorants that would add to their natural odor. Then they had female students sniff the t-shirts that were worn by the men. And some of the t-shirts were rated as smelling very sexy and very desirable and some of the t-shirts were rated as smelling very unattractive or like dirty old gym socks.

It turned out that the determining factor between the two extremes were the commonality of the immune system genes between the t-shirt wearer and the t-shirt sniffer. When the t-shirt wearer and sniffer had very different immune system genes from each other the t-shirts were rated as smelling very attractive or very sexy even. And when the t-shirt wearer and sniffer had very similar immune system genes, like for example, a brother and sister, then the t-shirt was rated as smelling very unattractive.

I immediately thought that it sounded like a great idea on which to base a dating service. I spent the subsequent five years doing research and development to learn if this is really a valid idea or not. And the more research I did, the more I realized that there are even more benefits then just the fact that you would like the smell of your spouse’s dirty laundry.

So how does this site work?
When somebody signs up on ScientificMatch.com we send them out a DNA collection kit. That consists mostly of a cotton swab for the inside of your mouth and you send that along to our laboratory once you’ve rubbed the inside of your cheek. The lab analyzes some of your immune system genes. They upload the results onto the website and the website automatically matches people together that don’t share any common immune system genes with each other. That’s what the scientific literature has identified as the most compatible matches. It’s a pretty basic theory. Nature wants us to mate with those who have different immune system genes from our own because it creates the healthiest offspring.

Would that really give any indication of compatibility in character? Is there any research that has been done around the compatibility of two people based on this?
It doesn’t relate too much to personality matching. This is mostly a physical phenomenon. However, we list six benefits to this type of matching on our website. The most interesting one is that when two people are matched together in this fashion, the female of the pair in an exclusive relationship will cheat less on her spouse then if she wasn’t matched properly in this genetic manner. It was shown in a study out of the University of New Mexico that the woman’s proclivity to cheating on her spouse is almost directly proportional to how many immune system genes she shares with her spouse. So the proclivity to cheat on the woman’s behalf is the closest we can get to anything behavioral. The same phenomenon, by the way, has also been shown in several studies of animals that mate for life. If the “monogamous” pair share too many immune system genes, the female will stray from her partner to get impregnated by other, more compatible males. She’ll then return to her lifelong partner to give birth and raise the offspring together, with the male non-the-wiser that he’s not the actual father.

In terms of behavior if two people are a match on this level it sounds like there is going to be more of a sexual attraction, which is a pretty major contributor to a successful relationship.
That’s exactly right but its important to point out that that’s only one piece of the puzzle and we don’t proclaim to be matching anybody on any kind of an emotional or like you said a character level. It’s a chemical attraction, it’s a sexual attraction and one of the studies we cite actually does show that when couples are in a relationship that are matched very well according to this genetic process, they report having a higher level of sexual satisfaction. In fact, the females in the study reported having a higher rate of orgasm. So it definitely contributes to a greater degree of sexual satisfaction. And I agree that’s a very important component of a long term relationship.

But just because two people have chemistry together doesn’t mean that they’re going to be soul mates and it doesn’t mean that they’ll even like each other.

How does the ScientificMatch.com test compare with the likes of the tests that you can buy for $1,000 through 23andMe.com?
We don’t screen anybody out based on their propensity for certain diseases or any deficiencies in their genome. We look exclusively at three immune system genes. That gives us six genetic reference points because each gene is composed of two halves, one half comes from the mother and one half comes from the father. So we just make sure those six genetic reference points are completely different between one person and the other person that we’re matching them with.

How much is your test?
Right now through next Valentine’s Day we’re charging $995 and that’s about half of our normal price. Normally we charge $1,995 but that’s for a lifetime membership. Some people think that’s expensive based on online dating services but it’s also very inexpensive when you compare it to offline matchmakers.

What are your goals for the site for 2008 through the end of 2009?
We’re at the point right now where we’re really going to have to decide, do we want to license it out to existing matchmakers or do we want to grow the business ourselves? Our preference is to grow organically city by city. We’re also talking to matchmakers and we’re trying to gauge what their interests might be as well. We do want to be national within a year or two but whether that’s through licensing or doing it on our own, we’re still not sure.

See all post on ScientificMatch

Match.com, GM for France Arnaud Jonglez – OPW Interview

Posted on August 9, 2008

Arnaud_jonglez OPW INTERVIEW — Aug 9 — Match.com is doing well abroad.  Here’s my interview with the Match.com General Manager for France, Arnaud Jonglez. – Mark Brooks

What did you do before joining Match and how long have you been with Match?
I’ve been with Match since January 2007 and I started working in the internet back in 1997 when I started an online agency in Hong Kong. After that I worked for Lycos and Orange as well.

Lycos had a dating product. Were you involved with that?
Yes. Lycos acquired Spray network, the owner of SprayDate, a large Scandinavian dating service, that we rebranded into Love@Lycos. At that time, Love@Lycos was the very first dating service allowed to be featured on TV in France. France is a very regulated country. Now a lot of internet dating companies go on TV but at that time they were the first ones.

How much is Match advertising on TV in France now?
Since Match decided to invest in the French market in 2006, we did 3 big TV campaigns, one in Q3/Q4 2006, one in Q1 in 2007 and the other one last summer. We created some very nice TV spots that were custom made for the French market and focused on the long-term relationship. It really helped us and our brand awareness grew from 30% to 52% in just 10 months. We are now capitalizing on that awareness through important online campaigns.

How is Match.com’s position different from other competitors in France?
There are two kinds of dating sites in France – “self service sites”, where members are proactive and search the profiles and then “matchmaking sites”, where people take a test that can last up to one hour and at the end the system sends them the matches. The specialty of Match is that we have both. We still leave the control in the hands of the users but we also offer what we see as the best matching tests and services that are on the market, developed for us by Dr. Helen Fisher, one of the major researchers in the field of romantic interpersonal attraction and the author of “Why we Love”. We are targeting people that are around 30 years old. 50% of our member base is older than 30 years. The service is really made for people looking for long lasting relationships.

When we started in France, the online dating market was not well served. We discovered that France had the highest number of users who tried dating services according to a Comscore survey conducted last year. The survey found out that 22% of French web users tried a dating service at least once, when at the same time it was only 13% in the US, which is a much more mature market. But at the same time, when we were asking people if they were happy about the experience and if they would recommend it to somebody else, 60% said no. As the global leader we are present in 37 countries but we only saw this in France.

What the market was offering, was really short term relationships. Nobody was actually offering Love in the country of romanticism! We started asking people what they were looking for and most of them were looking for a relationship that works, a long lasting relationship. That’s why Match started to invest in the French market back in 2006 because the gap between the offer and users expectations was so big.

What’s the key distinctions between French internet dating and elsewhere?
People have different ways of expressing what they want and things may be appropriate in one country and not appropriate in other countries. But I think everywhere people tend to look for the same thing which is to find a mate and a relationship that works. In France we have a unique pricing. France is the only country in the world where we offer the service free for women.

Is Match mobile offered in France?
Yes we do have this service but we don’t push it very aggressively. We have it as an additional service that we offer to our users at no extra cost. Match mobile is not our key focus in France because we still growing fast on the web.

Are there any product introductions you can mention?
Since 2006 we have been rolling out our plan and made some strategic moves in France. First we launched a new site specific for the French market in 2006. Then in 2007, we increased the media pressure off-line and online and started offering the service free for women on Women’s National Day last year. It was great timing since our main competitor started charging women at the same time.

We do a big survey at least twice a year, where we ask our members what they would like us to develop and what their expectations are with online dating. We get more or less the same answers every 6 months which is to start a relationship that is going to work. So in January we decided to launch a French version of Chemistry that is integrated into the Match main service. So far the result has been amazing. Just during the first few months 160,000 people took the 30 minutes test, which shows just how interested people are in tools that help find their soulmate. For us this is also a proof that our vision of the French market and our positioning are right, so we have decided to invest even more in these features and released a V2 of this service just a few days ago. This service that we launched 8 months ago under the name Match Alchimie will help us accelerate our growth on the French market and stay ahead of the competition who is now trying to develop Chemistry-like products.

See all posts on Match.com

Frumster, Ben Rabizadeh – OPW Interview

Posted on August 2, 2008
Logo of Frumster

Frumster, LLC is no longer for sale as of January 2009. The company has decided to reinvest all revenue  into increased marketing and improvement of their technological platform. The company does not anticipate putting the company back up for sale in the foreseeable future.

OPW INTERVIEW — Aug 2 — Ben runs Frumster and JWed, and they are for sale. According to Compete they have ~6% of the traffic of JDate, but have a lot more potential to grow. – Mark Brooks

What’s the company’s founding story?
Frumster.com was started in December of 2001 by a gentleman in Israel (actually a Canadian who had moved to Israel) and I was one of the first members to join the service. I had heard about it pretty much on the first day. At the time I had nothing to do with the site in terms of ownership. I was pretty impressed with the service, and after about a year, the owner was going through financial difficulty because he was running it for free and it started taking up all of his time. So he started asking for donations, but he didn’t get enough. Suddenly, he started charging a monthly fee for the service without warning. So it went from a free service to $18 overnight. And within 48 hours he set it back to a free service because of so many complaints.

It was obvious there was an opportunity there. He needed money to operate the service because by that point it was pretty much a full time venture. I was in between jobs, so it was just a good opportunity for me. I contacted him and asked him if the business was for sale and it was. We ended up purchasing it by September 2003. So pretty much 1 ½ years after he had started it, we had taken it over and turned it into a real business.

What does the name Frumster mean?
I think he told me he got the ‘ster’ originally from a Saturday Night Live skit with the copy machine man. Benster making copies! Napster and Friendster, etc. Frum is a Yiddish word which means religiously observant. So when it was started, it really was a niche service. At the time, the only Jewish dating service out there was JDate, and the religious community didn’t feel comfortable in that environment. It wasn’t niche enough for them. So he created Frumster as a breakaway from JDate to attract the religious niche.

Frumster requires you to specify your level of observance. What are the choices?
You can choose between Traditional, Modern Orthodox-Machmir, Modern Orthodox-Liberal, Yeshivish Modern, Yeshivish/Black Hat, Chasidic, Carlebachian, Shomer Mitzvot. We later added the non-observant categories, which are Reform, Conservative, and Traditional, and we have a unique category called Traditional and Growing.

Frumster originally was started as a site targeting religious Jews, but over time, and it happened pretty rapidly as soon as we bought the service, we transformed to a marriage-oriented service. It’s been like this for several years now. We really don’t mention too much about religion anymore as it’s really focused on Jewish dating for marriage. We still retain the religious flavor of the environment and make it comfortable for people, so we’re very strict about, for example, uploaded photos. We make sure they’re modest. No pictures in bathing suits and the like. We still retain our religious type of environment, but our marketing is focused on our target audience, who is anyone who is very serious about getting married.

So the site is for sale. Why are you selling?
The site is for sale, mostly, for personal reasons. When I bought the company, I really bought it as an investment so I just wanted to take the company to the next level. It was really a home based website that had no resemblance to a business at all, so we had to create a company. My goal was to turn it into a real business and sell it and move on to the next thing.

So it’s really a personal choice. I think of myself more as an investor then a manager/operator.

How much are you asking for Frumster?
We’re trying to get the most we can, obviously. But typically, from what we’ve seen in the dating industry, the valuations are about 2 ½ to 5 times annual sales. So we’re looking in that range.

How much revenue is generated from the site?
This year we’ll be close to $800,000 if not over, so somewhere plus or minus $800,000 for 2008. That’s roughly 5,000 subscribers. Our subscription rates are less then half of our competitors, the big ones, J-Date, Match.com and eHarmony. So we’ve been increasing our fees. So we think that as we catch up with our monthly fees, we should be over seven figures in revenue.

Do you have plans to start another site?
Aside from the sale, I should mention that we started a new Jewish dating site called JWed.com, which is also part of the sale. JWed is really an incredible opportunity because it speaks to the much larger JDate niche, the non-observant Jewish niche, because again even though we accept non-observant Jews on Frumster, the name Frum speaks to religious clientele and actually dissuades those who are not religious.

So we started JWed, which we’ve been in the process of launching in the last several weeks and it should be ready now. We’ve already been accepting registrants and things are going pretty well. So that’s what we’ve been focusing on: JWed. Most of the buyers we’re talking to are really interested in JWed. Frumster is a niche, the members are there, it’s solid, it’s not going anywhere and everything is word of mouth. Its one of those niche sites that have low marketing costs because its community based. Whereas JWed is a much, much larger customer base spread around the world more geographically then the observant base. That market is about 15 times the size of Frumster.

I don’t know if you know JDate‘s numbers, but it’s a pretty big market. We’re very excited about JWed, so if we happen not to sell we’re really going to be focusing on JWed in the next year or two, and if we do sell, there is a possibility we’ll still be involved in a strategic role.

LifeProject, Fernando – OPW Interview

Posted on July 26, 2008

Fernando_ardenghi OPW INTERVIEW — July 26 — LifeProject Method, created by Fernando Ardenghi, is an innovative and high precision quantitative method that allows us to meet people based on similar personalities. He plans to launch his own online dating site incorporating LPM. – Mark Brooks

What’s your background, Fernando?
At 37, I’m an Argentinean electronic engineer. In 1996, I started my doctoral thesis but didn’t complete it. Since 1997, I’ve been working in different Argentinean factories (including a Nuclear Power Plant). I’ve also been studying entrepreneurship since 2001.

What got you interested in the Internet dating business?
In 1997, I took the normative 16PF personality test when applying for a job. Could the knowledge I’d acquired from my failed doctoral thesis be useful for a business opportunity? Out of curiosity, I investigated methodologies and tests recruiters use to evaluate job candidates. The result of the normative 16PF personality test (expressed as a quantized pattern), plus an adapted quantum mechanics math equation, led me to invent a quantitative method to compare similarity between patterns that could be useful for dating purposes.

What research have you done that’s focused in the space?
I haven’t conducted my own research yet; I need a database of at least 100,000 people to take the 16PF5 test. Reading up on research conducted by renowned academics, I’ve yet to see any scientific paper (published by an online dating site that claims scientific matching or any related academic) showing how its ‘recipe’ really works, i.e. proving they can offer enduring, long term relationships (or marriage) with low divorce rates.

I noticed that the word ‘compatibility’ has many meanings for online dating sites, academics, researchers, and psychologists.

Sometimes the word compatibility means a high degree of similarity between several variables (religion, education, income, personality, likes and dislikes, etc.) of prospective mates; sometimes compatibility means a mix of similarity and complementarity between variables; sometimes when a dating site says compatibility or even chemistry, nobody really knows exactly what it means! Some online dating sites offering compatibility matching methods use the word similarity as: “a proprietary Dyadic Adjustment Scale”, others mean: “a proprietary multivariate linear regression equation”, some say a mix of similarity and complementarity meaning: “a proprietary multivariate logistic regression equation”, still others mix similarity and complementarity meaning: “a proprietary equation to calculate “compatibility” between prospective mates!”

Since 2003, I’ve been testing online dating sites who claim scientific matching by creating dummy M/F profiles and using them as test points for reverse engineering purposes. I discovered that proprietary tests or models used by those sites could have great precision in measuring different psychological variables, but the matching algorithm (they apply) has low precision when comparing one profile to others. The whole precision (measurement_of_variables + pattern_calculation) is less than anyone could achieve by searching on one’s own! I solved that problem and contacted many researchers/academics and online dating sites, with no success until now.

What is LifeProject Method?
LPM is the codename of an innovative and high precision quantitative method that compares similarity between quantized patterns, like:
The pattern 6.7.6.8.9.6.7.7.8.7.2.5.8.7.3.4 is 74,79865772% similar to the pattern 5.7.4.8.7.4.5.6.4.6.8.9.6.8.4.4
The pattern 6.7.6.8.9.6.7.7.8.7.2.5.8.7.3.4 is 92,55033557% similar to the pattern 7.7.6.8.8.7.6.5.8.7.4.5.7.7.3.4
The pattern 6.7.5.8.8.6.7.7.8.7.4.5.8.7.3.4 is 88,38926174% similar to the pattern 5.6.4.7.7.5.6.6.7.6.3.4.7.6.2.3
The pattern 6.7.5.8.8.6.7.7.8.7.4.5.8.7.3.4 is 87,58389262% similar to the pattern 7.8.6.9.9.7.8.8.9.8.5.6.9.8.4.5
LPM takes into account the score and the trend to score of any pattern.

In the above example, it used the results of the 16PF5 test, but it can use the results of other test, like the 30 subdomains of the “NEO PI-R” Big5.

  • The ENSEMBLE (whole set of different valid possibilities) of the primary domains of the Big5 is 10E5 (quantized from 1 to 10) and 10E10 (by percentile)
  • The ensemble of the primary domains of the Big7 used by WeAttract is 10E7 (quantized from 1 to 10)
  • The ensemble of the 16PF5 is: 10E16, big number as All World Population is nearly 6.7 * 10E9
  • The ensemble of the 30 subdomains of the Big5 (quantized from 1 to 10 and not by percentile) is a terrible very big number: 10E30

LPM doesn’t include sex, sexual orientation or religion. It only takes into account personality (measured by a normative test, like 16PF5 or the 30 subdomains of the “NEO PI-R” Big5 Big5).

In LPM, “compatibility” (between prospective mates) is a high percentage of “similarity” between personality patterns, perhaps over 90.00000000% ± 0.00000001%
LPM algorithm calculates “similarity” between personality patterns using the following adapted quantum mechanics math equation.
BRA <#X| means person #X’s 16PF5 Report
KET |#Y> means person #Y’s 16PF5 Report |CQ| means Comparison Operator
<#X|CQ|#Y> means the Comparison between client #X and client #Y
<#X|CQ|#Y> == K01 + K02 + K03 + K04 + K05 + K06 + K07 + K08 + K09 + K10 + K11 + K12 + K13 + K14 + K15 + K16
(A) Warmth; (B) Reasoning; (C) Emotional Stability; (E) Liveliness; (G) RuleConsciousness; (H) Social Boldness; (I) Sensitivity; (L) Vigilance; (M) Abstractedness; (N) Privateness (O) Apprehension; (Q1) Openness to Change; (Q2) SelfReliance; (Q3) Perfectionism; (Q4) Tension. 16 independent variables that take integer values from 1 to 10

How will it help dating sites?
LPM is a new way to meet people based on similar personalities. I chose the normative 16PF5 test available in different languages, because no other dating site uses it. In August 2005, Dr. John A. Johnson told me, “There are probably undiscovered factors beyond similarity of any type that determine relationship quality.” I think LifeProject deserves an opportunity to prove it can contribute to long-term relationships with low divorce rates. If not, many people would be interested in meeting/contacting others sharing nearly the same personality.

What does it cost for online daters?
The annual fee for end users is expected to cost USD300 for the first year, with a yearly re-subscription of $30. Fortunately the US, Canadian, European and Latin American markets remain enormous. The “unexploited” Latin American market is now over $100 million.

There are currently no sites with the vision to see the potential for this type of matching method. The inevitable next step is for me to bring it to market myself.

Sparkbliss, CEO Joel Blatt Interview

Posted on June 28, 2008

Headshot_joel1 OPW INTERVIEW — June 28 — Sparkbliss is a tiny upstart startup dating site.  Here's our interview with the Joel Blatt, the CEO and Founder. – Mark Brooks

Listen To The Interview.mp3

What is your founding story?
I started Sparkbliss because I had a personal need to meet eligible people myself and I also saw a growing market opportunity in terms of what I deemed the conventional online dating approach as being flawed, not providing the results that we expect in typical business models.

What makes Sparkbliss different?
It's a private online dating site. We understand the the importance of protecting and controlling your personal information and not broadcasting it over the internet and not exposing it where it could compromise you. With Sparkbliss you truly control that information. So unlike every other social networking and online dating site, which enables you to search a database of photos and profiles, Sparkbliss doesn't allow that. The only way you can view Sparkbliss members is if you are invited by an existing member to view their bios. You can also forward the bios to your friends who you think would be interested in that person.

So it sounds like you are encouraging people to become matchmakers. Is that correct?
Yes. And I see incredible benefits to that approach. We hear about romance scams and sweetheart swindles, so I truly wanted to provide that truly safe and private forum for dating and meeting people. And by having the matchmaking model, people that you know, people you trust, are going to be doing your bidding and they will not make an introduction if you have outdated photos or plagiarized descriptions of your likes and dislikes. The matchmakers not only provide the introductions but they also add a testimonial or reference.

How do you motivate and reward the matchmakers?
For them, the motivation is the satisfaction that they're helping people they care about.

How do you make money? Is it free?
It is an advertising based model. It's a free online dating and matchmaking site.

How are you priming the pumps?
I've just been doing a lot of PR and conducting a lot of interviews. As of today, for example, I was interviewed by ABC radio.

I'm very confident now, especially from the reaction from the investment community. The need for protecting private information is emerging and Sparkbliss just fits nicely in saying 'look you do need to consider your personal privacy and here's how to do so without taking a whole lot of risk.'

Baihe.com, Jason Tian – OPW Interview

Posted on June 21, 2008

Jason_tian OPW INTEVIEW — June 21 — Chinese internet dating sites use mobile billing as their primary billing mechanism.  But the government threw a spanner in the works and capped the amount providers could bill each month. Too many mobile companies were tricking users into signing up for monthly dues. So, there was a big change in the fees that the government was allowing to be charged through telephones. It went from 30 RMB to 10 RMB a month. I recently heard there has been another change; anybody who charges through the phone has to get permission again from the user before they can rebill every month. It has had a big impact on all the websites which were using mobile. Baihe.com used reacted by switching its business model to become a real world matchmaker with an online dating element. – Mark Brooks

How are other dating sites dealing with the imposed limitations for mobile billing?
Actually they don't have a good way to deal with it. Most of the services which are relying on the mobile are now leaving the space. Their profits are shrinking very fast. Mobile payment as a major payment method for online dating companies is shrinking quickly. However, at the same time, online payment is growing fast with ecommerce growing and the banks efforts. In the last year, online payments doubled and it's still growing quickly. Of course, it's still much more complex compared with mobile payments. With online payment growing, we can predict the payment environment will improve for online dating companies.

When we last spoke you have moved very significantly and quickly through to offering real world matchmaking services. How have things changed in the last year since we spoke?
We have made significant progress in offline matchmaking business. Our price increased two times and we are profitable. Our average price is now $1,200.

What services are you offering?
For every candidate we verify their identity and do some communication before they meet each other. We make sure the candidates are a good match. A lot of the customers are afraid that they will be refused by the other candidate. So we provide the pre-date communication and then we arrange the date.

Do you offer any coaching services as well?
We provide some coaching in how to communicate and this is also a paid service. We have one -to-one coaching and some training calls for groups of people. We also published a book this month. Lots of TV stations and newspapers are very interested in this book: "Women Must Marry a Good Husband".

How do you charge for the coaching services?
It's now based on the training class. We charge $40 US per class. At this time, we are designing a new service.  We will provide clients with one year of coaching.

Who does the matchmaking?
For VIP customers, the matchmaking is done by the consultant. They are using our back end assistants to filter the candidates from our user base. For the new product we designed, we will provide a coach to the customer and they will find the candidates by themselves.

What regions do you serve?
We have offices in Beijing and Shanghai. Also we provide remote services for other big cities in China.

What have been the major challenges that you've encountered as you have created this matchmaking service?
We have solved a lot of problems and there are still a lot of challenges. The first challenge was how to build trust. As time passes, more and more customers start to recognize that we are serious about providing this matchmaking service. Almost 50% of our current users are referred by their friends who already used our service. The second challenge is that there are not enough qualified matchmakers. And the third one is in balancing profitability and service quality. The profitability depends on how many customers are served by one matchmaker at the same time. If you assign too many customers to the matchmakers, they cannot handle the workload and the service quality drops down quickly.

How do you determine pricing?
Some customers are very difficult to serve because they are very critical and need a lot of attention. So we developed a system which gives out an estimated cost, the best price to close the deal. The system helps us identify potential personality issues. Actually we cannot decide very accurately for every single person. We can only make the system fair on average. We have some very profitable customers and there are also some customers who are difficult and we lose money. That's much like insurance companies.

How do you measure service and success on an ongoing basis?
The first factor is success rate. Is the client getting married? Are they engaged? Have they decided to terminate the service because they have some commitment with someone? Secondly, sometimes they don't find their right person through Baihe, but still we like to know if our coaching helped them. We measure our service profit, and monitor the attitudes of the matchmakers and whether the service is delivered in time and is meaningful. So we do customer satisfaction surveys every month and decide if the performance is adequate from the service team.

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Zhenai, Dr Song Li – OPW Interview

Posted on June 14, 2008

1 OPW INTERVIEW — Jan 14 — Dr Song Li runs a leading dating site in China that offers telephone based matchmaking. We originally met at Beijing's iDate in 2006, then Shanghai in 2007 and then again at iDate in Tokyo in May. He's observed the best of the West and created the best of the East. – Mark Brooks 

What do you charge for Zhenai (formerly 96333/SinoFriends) and how is it different from other dating sites?
We charge an annual subscription fee of 1,999 RMB, which is about $300. We have a unique business model, different from any dating site in China. It's a combination of online dating and telephone based matchmaking. By the way, we changed our domain name. We were formerly known at 96333.com and we have changed the name to Zhenai.com. "Zhen" means cherish and "ai" means love.

First you can do online dating like Match.com and if you find someone you would like to date, you can call our telephone matchmaker team. They will ask questions about your personality and then call the person, you are interested in, on your behalf and essentially try to package and sell you to your prospect. So that's the first service. 

Then if there are some sensitive questions clients would like to ask but are afraid to be too intrusive, they can call our telephone matchmakers and, on their behalf, they can find out the answer from the other client. That's our second service.

Third is when our telephone matchmakers find out for clients whether the other side has an interest after the first date. They provide feedback post-date.

And, if they want more?
Right now we don't have that service but we are thinking of adding more.

Do you offer any coaching services?
No we don't do that. It's always very difficult to see the balance between providing more value added service and the cost. We choose what we think are absolute critical services that daters need and focus on those.

How do you recruit the matchmakers? What are the main things that you're looking for in matchmakers?
Mostly we hire university graduates who majored in psychology. We found psychology majors are very good at providing advice to people.

How do you do the matching? Are the matches delivered online or via a matchmaker?
It's a combination of online questionnaires and phone calls. All of this is done over the phone so there are no in person meetings.

A lot of matchmakers insist on in person meetings. It's rather interesting that you're doing it over the phone. But in person meetings they tend to charge a lot more as well.
That's right. In China, offline matchmakers charge from 6,000 RMB ($800) to 60,000 RMB ($8,000). So our price point is lower then the lowest offline matchmaking agencies. It doesn't make sense for us to provide face to face meetings. First of all, we're an internet company. We don't want to move into an offline franchising kind of a business because we would have to open offices in multiple cities and China is a very large country. It's like you do it nationwide or don't bother at all. With the phone we can cover the entire country. And we are the only company that focuses on this model. We want to be the very best in one space. That's why we are teaming up with FastLife Speed Dating because they provide professional offline speed dating service.

When did your launch event go with FastLife Speed Dating?
We had the first speed dating event on May 31st jointly with the largest print media group in Shanghai Xinmin Media Group. We designed this event for IT professionals, colloquially known as "Zhangjiang Men", who work for the technology firms located at Zhangjiang High-tech Park. FastLife's 's team was organizing and running everything. We got over 100 women and XinMin Group helped get 100 IT guys.

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