OPW INTERVIEW – Feb 20 – Jeannie Assimos has been at eHarmony coming up ten years. She's the VP Content and was my interview at iDate. Here's the full interview.
Post by Mark Brooks , CEO IDEA
Category: All Interviews
Interview With The Head Of Lovestruck Infinity Matchmaking, Lorraine Adams
What is your company and founding story?
Gorgeous Networks launched Speed dating events in 2000. The media had a love affair with the Speed dating trend and the events we ran were called, 'Gorgeous Get-Togethers.' One year later I started my first online dating site aimed at busy professionals. I have continued servicing this demographic by introducing new events, online sites and in recent years matchmaking services with my 'Coffee and Company' brand. I also had 'Calcudating' published in 2010.
You've teamed up with Lovestruck for matchmaking services, how does that work?
Gorgeous Networks was approached in February 2017 by the Love Group who had acquired high-end online dating site 'Lovestruck' from founder Brett Harding months earlier. As a company with a big audience in East Asia the Love Group felt they needed to evolve the online business to stay in tune with the needs of their core demographic, busy professionals. They decided an affordable matchmaking service could potentially be the answer. Research had shown many of their typical online users were becoming jaded with the online dating experience.
Lovestruck Infinity was launched in London in March 2017 to offer an alternative to online dating. I put together and trained a team of talented sales people and client services staff and worked closely with the Love Groups new CEO Michael Ye, to help build a pioneering CRM system which included my unique matching algorithm. I trained the East Asian teams on how to operate a matchmaking service. The aim was to build and scale a service similar to the Coffee and Company brand.
The new business direction has been a success and really seems to have struck a chord with an audience who were very obviously lacking enthusiasm to continue with online and App dating.
What kind of matchmaking do you do and where?
We market ourselves as a Match Consultancy to our potential clients and we offer a great service. After a free face-to-face sales consultation in our London West End offices joiners are then invited in for a full evaluation. This is to understand their key qualities, traits and attributes, such as values, energy aura and characteristics. We also look at what we call a clients specific 'Dating DNA' – their masculine or feminine traits and preferences. Learning all of this helps us ascertain if there's a good chance of a mutual chemistry between prospective match candidates.
How much do you charge?
Our team creates the clients profile, source matches and make all the arrangements for the coffee date or a glass of wine. They also seek and give an overview of the feedback after the date. Our fees range from £500 – £4k+vat which is far more affordable than typical matchmaking services. We operate in London, Hong Kong, Singapore, Shenzhen and Bangkok. Typically our conversion rates from online users to Match making services is around 50/60%. The Love Group is hoping to expand their business as a global franchise operation. The business model could be very appealing to other online dating businesses looking to open new revenue streams.
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Post by Mark Brooks , CEO IDEA
RomanceOnly.com Launches
OPW INTERVIEW – Dec 7 – Laura Brashier has a fascinating dating site. It's for Sex-C people. Sex-C is her acronym for Sex Challenged. I interviewed her to capture her story.
What's your founding story?
I found myself disheartened after extensive cancer related radiation and chemotherapy, that I would no longer be able to participate in physical intercourse relations. I kept my secret to myself for a few years and finally decided that 'this has happened,' and will continue to happen to thousands of people for different reasons. Most, if not all them will not share their story of why they now have this dilemma. I decided to be of assistance to the Sex-C community, and my niche internet dating site was launched (initially as 2date4love.com).
Why did you change the site name?
The reason I changed the site name because it was brought to my attention that it wasn't a good plan to have numbers in the URL (2date4love.com). The name also didn't tell the public what the site was about in the name. So, I found and purchased RomanceOnly.com because it tells the essence of what the site is about, as well as being a premium domain name. I'm much happier with this name!
You have a new acronym, Sex-C?
I created this new acronym Sex-C because I thought it was a catchy phrase. Those that have intercourse related dilemmas still feel sexy there's just a missing link. They're "challenged" when it comes to intercourse but not in the many other aspects of love and affection that we all desire! Sex-C.
What's your goals for RomanceOnly.com in 2018?
My goals for 2018 is to get out and spread the word for all those keeping their Sex-C side a secret! I plan on going to doctors conferences to spread the word. Most doctors deal with this dilemma. They just don't know what to do for these individuals after they've tried all the meds and therapies that have failed them. There are so many reasons people have this dilemma, nobody talks about it…I do!
What advice would you give to someone building a new dating app, based on your experience?
Based on my experience this far into the game, "make sure you have an amazing/experienced programmer"! It took me four different programmers, and three re-writes to finally market my idea…it's been a loonngg time, and now my website functions and looks great!
Full Disclosure: Courtland Brooks advised Laura (and referred her to her ace programmer)
Post by Mark Brooks @ Courtland Brooks
Interview With Happy Couple’s Founder, Julien Robert :: HC Is Raising Capital
What's your founding story?
The origin story of the Happy Couple app is the story of a real-life happy couple: Julien and Erin. At first, there was Julien, a French serial entrepreneur and a serial dater, who spent most of his time building businesses and very little time building relationships. Until one day, following a series of life events, Julien decided to reexamine his life, both as an individual and as a partner. Under the guidance of a therapist, Julien began to ask questions to not only learn about himself, but also to understand his partner at the time and what it meant for each of them to be in a relationship. Equipped with life-changing insights and a new approach to relationships, Julien ran into Erin, a Google designer based in San Francisco. And the rest, as they say, is history. But wait! Julien and Erin set out to make history. It didn't take them long to realize that in addition to their mutual attraction and a genuine meeting of minds, they also shared a passion for creating an opportunity for other couples to discover each other in a fun and easy way, start meaningful conversations, and nurture closeness. As Julien began to think of ways to "connect his heart and his brain" (after all, the guy is an engineer), the idea of an app was born. Erin and Julien joined their skills and talents, Julien working full-time and Erin dedicating her weeknights and weekends. They launched Happy Couple app in late 2015. Designed as a game app, Happy Couple provides couples with questions across different life topics, aimed at helping partners to learn about each other in a playful, yet meaningful, way. Thus, one couple’s story of self-discovery and belief in a conscious approach to relationship-building became an inspiration for millions of couples around the world to revisit (and sometimes rebuild) their own relationships by asking questions and starting conversations they otherwise might never have. (And, have fun along the way!)
What does Happy Couple do, for whom?
Happy Couple is a game app for couples at any stage of a relationship, straight or gay, young or not so young. The only requirement: it takes two to play. Couples answer questions from six different life topics, for themselves and for each other, to find out how well they know each other, or to discover something new. When their answers match, they unlock new levels and gain access to more questions. There are also customized questions and tips on building closeness. But beyond the playfulness of the app lies a deeper purpose: to provide couples with an opportunity to ask questions they may never have thought to ask, or just wouldn’t know how.
How many users do you have at this stage?
We have reached half a million unique downloads in two years since the launch. Keep in mind that we have acquired all of our users without any marketing campaigns or outreach. The numbers we have reached so far are thanks to organic searches and referrals.
Here's the breakdown of user behavior:
- 20K daily active users (DAU)
- 35K weekly active users (WAU)
- 60K monthly active users (MAU)
Our most dedicated users play 300+ days in a row. Also, only two years after we launched, our users have been answering more than 100 million questions!
Why should the dating industry take notice? How might you work with them?
Most, if not all, dating apps are focused on introducing people to each other, with a goal of getting them to meet in person and, ultimately, to get into a relationship. When dating apps do a good job, they lose their users. Happy Couple picks up at that point, helping couples to discover each other and further develop their relationship. If you were to look at dating as a user journey, you could say that Happy Couple addresses users' needs at a point where other dating apps stop or become irrelevant. So, we like to think that we offer a continuation of services, rather than work in direct competition with other dating apps. In that regard, we are open to offering our content and technology under white label to other dating app publishers. By using our technology under their own brand, app publishers can extend their user lifetime, increase time spent in app, and boost user lifetime value.
Even though Happy Couple differs from other dating apps in the sense that the focus is on a couple, versus individuals looking for a date and/or relationship, the way users interact with Happy Couple is similar to the game-style experience they have with a number of other popular dating apps: it's easy to use, playful, and fun. For example, if on Tinder users swipe right or left to find a match, in Happy Couple, users answer questions about themselves and their partners, and if their answers match, they earn points. What's different about Happy Couple is the wealth of content, in the form of questions and tips, that offers more substance and opportunities for user engagement. To that end, Happy Couple can share the API and provide access to content, including questions that serve as conversation starters for users and keep them engaged and returning to an app.
Are you raising money now?
Yes.
What have you raised so far and what will you do with your next raise?
We've raised $600K so far, and plan to raise $500K to invest in marketing and content, with primary focus on user acquisition. We are also looking into offering premium subscriptions for paying users and boosting efforts to keep our existing users more and more engaged and returning to the app more frequently. At the moment, the majority of the app's active couples are daily users. So, we would like to provide them with more in-app activities to help keep up their daily habit.
Post by Mark Brooks @ Courtland Brooks
Interview With Besedo CEO, Patrik Frisk
OPW INTERVIEW – Sep 18 – I've known of Besedo for several years now. They've been diligently serving the dating industry for all those years, and have recently merged with IOSquare to provide a more intelligent and cost-effective means of doing User Generated Content review. Of course, this is a high priority for dating sites to clean up profiles and photos, and protect against abuse, scammers, spammers, the obscene and the obnoxious. Users want a high quality experience without the surprise of finding noxious profiles and content and communications. So Besedo is doing well and have managed to service and maintain the loyalty of Meetic (Match Group) for 5 years, no less. Here's my interview with the CEO, Patrik Frisk. (Full Disclosure: Besedo is a Courtland Brooks client) – Mark Brooks
What does Besedo do?
Besedo is a company that was founded on the principle of helping our clients create trust between their users. Essentially what we do is we help clients with content moderation and customer support. We’ve been doing that for over fifteen years.
What is your founding story?
The principle has always been that we are wanting to help our clients to generate trust between their users. Our founder started the company over fifteen years ago here in Sweden. We have always been working in the marketplaces and with dating companies. We have been quite focused on classifieds. That's how we got started; that's how we got into the business. Over the years, the red thread has always been content moderation, creating quality content, making sure that we fight fraud, and all the issues around that. That's what we've been focusing on. We have been working quite anonymously over the last several years; focusing quite a lot on bigger players. Over the last two to three years, we have opened our product strategy and are focusing on smaller clients. I hope we make a lot more noise over what we do and what we know about.
How have things improved and changed?
If we go back, we started by doing services, manual moderation primarily. We did manual content moderation before it was even a term out there. Over the years, we added a lot of technology to support our manual services. Over the last two to three years, we have had a hard focus on building a technology platform that helps us to be even more efficient.
Who are your testimonial clients?
Within the dating world, we have quite a few clients. The most notable ones are Match Meetic Group and Affinitas.
How long has Meetic been with you?
Meetic has been with us for years. (5 years and 1 month in total)
What is the sweet spot, in terms of client size, for Besedo?
The good thing now, Mark, is that we have the capability to handle a variety of clients. We are a company of roughly 600 people. A lot of those are moderators and agents. We also have a lot of analysts and various other roles, including trust and safety experts. We can really form ourselves around the client's needs. We have products that are suited for the large players with huge volumes, and we have products that are also suited for the smaller ones. Our focus is marketplaces and dating companies; companies that really want to make sure that they have quality content and have created a user platform that is built on trust.
What is your price spectrum, roughly?
We're probably not the cheapest out there, but we are very affordable for the quality that you are getting. We are not competing primarily on cost. We are competing on the quality that we provide, and the comprehensive services that we provide. We are leveraging the experience we have gained over fifteen years, all the data that we sit on, and the collective number of clients that we have.
Over the next year or so, what are your goals for the dating industry?
For the dating industry, we want to continue to develop our services and adapt them to specific problems they face. To that end, we will place a lot of focus on dating-specific services. That is one of our goals. We want to grow, as any company wants to do. We also value the relationship we have with our clients, so we cannot grow too fast. However, we are looking to expand. We are very strong in Europe, Asia, and South America. The U.S. is very interesting and will be a focus for the coming year.
Post by Mark Brooks @ Courtland Brooks
The Path To Greater Profits For Meetme + Skout + Tagged Is Paved With Video Creators
The Meet Group (formerly Meetme) acquired Skout in 2016 and if(we) which operates Tagged, in 2017 and has been working to merge the platforms so members can interact between all three apps: Meetme, Skout and Tagged.
I spoke to Geoff Cook yesterday about the integration projects and he said it was going quite well. He had previously mentioned that Skout was on track for doing $7.5m in adjusted EBITDA in their first year and almost one year later, he said they're on track for that. They just launched live streaming video on Skout last week, using the same engine as Meetme. Now their intention is to add gifting in another month and then combine user-bases between Skout and Meetme.
Ultimately, this adds to the membership density, but Skout is more International. Skout is 80% international, whereas Meetme is 40%. What is common is that people on both platforms are looking to connect with new people, and not just for dating. That's a key distinction that really separates these platforms from the likes of Facebook and Match.
So what of Tagged? Geoff described Tagged as an African American app inside the USA. "That's what we found so attractive about it. It has similar features to Skout and gives The Meet Group the opportunity to create a live streaming app for African Americans. Video is now available to all of Tagged and is being well adopted and used."
By early next year, Geoff said they will have Tagged, Skout and Meetme on one video platform and they're working on adding some interesting new video features like the ability to add guest videos into a stream.
Just where does Meetme fit in the market now? Is it a social discovery service? Not so, said Geoff. Ultimately, the social discovery descriptor really faded out. He'd describe Meetme's services as belonging to "one big meeting category," which makes sense really. Facebook, Match and The Meet Group all seem to share a common cause in helping people meet. But the nuances of these services differ in that Facebook helps people stay in contact with people they already know, Match helps people within the context of wanting to meet a mate, and "Meetme and Tagged are the neighborhood bar, stated Geoff. "Video is the live entertainment at the bar."
"Meetme has always had a mission of helping users meet the universal need for human connection." Meetme's live streaming video is different from dating apps. Live streamers can ask and answer questions and receive gifts and the whole experience is more about "social entertainment." It's not really fundamentally about dating. "Meetme is the social graph of the people you want to know," stated Geoff.
Geoff described the distinction with Facebook further. Zuckerberg talks about connecting with communities and helping the world become less fragmented but Facebook doesn't want you to make a bunch of friends with people you don't know. That would just complicate the product and change the context too much.
The Meet Group will continue to be focused on live streaming. In fact, Geoff believes the entire live streaming video category to be fledgling. "Video has the potential to be as disruptive as mobile was to the web," Geoff believes. What do you think? Your comments, please.
(Full Disclosure: Mark Brooks owns shares of The Meet Group)
See all posts on The Meet Group
Previous interviews with Geoff Cook:
Post by Mark Brooks @ Courtland Brooks
Interview With Affinitas Head Of Brand Marketing, Bart Visser
OPW INTERVIEW – Aug 8 – Affinitas wants to be the world's leading operator of paid (premium) dating services. They're in the process of merging with Spark Networks (JDate). I paid their HQ in Berlin a visit a few weeks back and met Bart, and then we did this interview for you. Attractive World is launching in Australia. Bart is Head of Brand Marketing, so I asked him about market fit for Attractive World.
See all posts on AttractiveWorld
Post by Mark Brooks @ Courtland Brooks
How Much Did MeetMindful Really Raise? Amy Baglan, CEO Of Meet Mindful
OPW INTERVIEW – Apr 11 – Here’s Amy Baglan. She’s doing a great job with MeetMindful. Apparently she raised more money than we thought. Watch the video to learn the correct amount, and what’s next for MeetMindful.
Post by Mark Brooks @ Courtland Brooks.
Matchmaking Institute Conference, Co-Founder Interview
What does The Matchmaking Institute do?
Lisa Clampitt founded MMI in 2003 as the only state certified school in the world offering certification in matchmaking. It is the go-to place to train, network, and grow a matchmaking business with a set code of ethics, quality standards, and a rock solid community. In addition, MMI offers workshops and professional conferences providing relationship and dating experts with a strong group of peers and constant support.
What will Internet dating professionals learn at your matchmaker's conference, and why should they attend?
Often, Internet dating professionals spend their time at tech conferences or focusing on the technology without understanding the resources and know-how of the matchmaking world. If we are truly to connect online and offline dating, it's crucial for the dating tech professionals to learn the latest matchmaking trends, how to grow and keep an affiliate base, etc. just as matchmakers have been learning the online market.
As our annual conference is the largest gathering of love professionals from over 35 countries, MMI has been instrumental in revolutionizing the concept of matchmaking and the dating industry – going from competition to collaboration. The belief is that together, we are more powerful. The Institute has been at the forefront of connecting technology and matchmaking to create a global marketplace for love. It combines the ease and global reach of technology with the personal, customized touch of matchmaking.
Who would be the most relevant speakers to inspire them with their iDating businesses?
Jenn Scalia is a leading Visibility Coach and Strategist for entrepreneurs looking to get known and grow their business online.
Mark Brooks and Marc Lesnick will be speaking about the immense opportunities for online and offline dating, as well as an overview of matchmaking and dating industry.
Paul Carrick Brunson who after studying with billionaires from around the world, he picked the key characteristics of these world-class leaders and will be speaking how you can integrate these into your business. Paul has worked with Oprah Winfrey on this very topic, among many other top leaders.
How can iDating companies work with matchmakers?
The Institute will be presenting an innovative concept on taking the technology of online to offline and specific strategies to create global collaboration and a global marketplace. This is key for the online industry to get into the mindset and understanding of how matchmakers work in order to harness the strength and opportunity of the collaboration.
See all posts on Matchmaking Institute
Post by Mark Brooks @ Courtland Brooks.