CBS – Feb 8 – AARP has joined the online dating services. They debuted their new dating website, AARP Dating powered by HowAboutWe. HowAboutWe has currently ~1M members and has been around for several years now. OurTime.com has been around over a year and is part of the Match.com family. SilverSingles.com is part of the Spark network of dating sites. It has been around for 10 years and claims to be the premier online community for seniors. SeniorPeopleMeet.com is a place for those over 50. It’s partnered up with Match.com and Chemistry.com as well as BabyBoomerPeopleMeet.com.
OPW – Jan 9 – After entering mine and Irena's contact info HAW presented me with a list of date ideas called the 'DateBook.' For a membership fee we can get up to 75% off every date in the 'collection.' We can go for Trivial Pursuit night hosted by Huffington Post, or various other games nights…drinking, eating, painting, and terrarium-building fun. The 'Built For Two Membership' is $22. Cool! But, that's it?
BUSINESS INSIDER – Jan 10 – At the end of the day, it's all about execution, not the idea. So far HowAboutWe is a success, raising $18.5M to date and hitting ~1M users since launching in April 2010. Co-Founder Aaron Schildkrout says it has everything to do with the process. "Brian and I did everything together. We were working 90 hours a week, but if you're not willing to do that, you shouldn't launch a startup. As a company leader you have to work diligently to avoid excessive siloing, and yet the more collaborative your environment is, the more complex your structures have to be. "As CEO you have a number of responsibilities, including making sure you have the right people. Make sure your personal contributions are the overall vision and overall company management. The obvious things are that you want people who are relentlessly driven and smart. Really talented people just don’t like to work inside broken processes. It feels dumb to them. Building a great process is very hard.
THE NEXT WEB – Dec 27 – New York is the world’s most populous city and it’s been dubbed creative capital of the world. Here is a look inside some of the coolest NYC tech and startup offices.
HowAboutWe allows singles to connect by letting them come up with fun date ideas. And it helps couples enrich their relationships by offering them a curated collection of great date experiences, built for two. The team operates from Brooklyn’s DUMBO (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass), in a former warehouse of the Grand Union Tea Company.
DateMySchool Sunset Park headquarters in Brooklyn was a weapons production facility during World War II. Today it houses creative companies. One of those is DateMySchool, the US’ largest dating platform for students and alumni.
USA TODAY – Dec 3 – The latest trend in online dating? Going offline as fast as you can. AARP is launching an idating service in partnership with HowAboutWe. 25% of AARP's 37M members are single and over half of the singles are under 70. Online dating industry consultant Mark Brooks says the AARP move into dating seems smart. "Seniors is a very good niche. Most dating sites skew toward guys, with more guys than women. But senior dating sites have more women. Being a 75 year old single man is the equivalent of being a 21year old hottie."
Older sites such as Match.com and newer ones such as DinnerDate, CupidRadar and Grouper, all are focusing on the importance of a personal connection offline. "I cringe a little when people describe it as online dating," said Michael Waxman, co-founder and CEO of Grouper. The typical experience for a Grouper member is to spend ~5 minutes on our website and ~2 hours at a bar with your friends." By the end of this year, Match.com say the site will have hosted ~ 2K events with 150K singles. PlentyofFish, a free online site, also hosts facetoface events.
NEWS4JAX – Nov 20 – "Singles Around Me" says ~20K singles are installing the app each week. "OKCupid" says one million of its 3M users use the GPS features. And "How About We" estimates that about one in four of its online daters are now incorporating location-based dating into their search for a soul mate. "One of the biggest problems with GPS dating is the immediacy of it," said Alan Rosenthal, author of the book "Safer Online Dating." In regular online dating, you have time to exchange emails or talk on the phone before you actually meet. But with GPS, he says you could be face to face in minutes.
ABC LOCAL – Oct 5 – Finding love the smartphone way is a trend that is definitely taking off. SinglesAroundMe says ~20K singles install the app each week. OkCupid reports 1M of its 3M users utilize the GPS feature. And HowAboutWe estimates that 1 in 4 of its online daters are now incorporating location based dating into their search for a soul mate. One of the biggest problems with GPS dating is the immediacy of it. MeetMoi, which sends profiles of people in your general location, says they never share a user's exact location. SinglesAroundMe has privacy options that allow users to turn off their location GPS or to hide their profile.
TECH CRUNCH – Sep 27 – Helping couples to stay connected and in love is what HowAboutWe is all about. Each month, couples receive a DateBook with one-of-a-kind dates specifically curated for its users. For October, the company provides different dates, from a hike in Harriman State Park with pickup in New York to a private 3-course brunch at Kin Shop with Top Chef Harold Dieterle. After having subscribed for $80 a month, couples can fo on free dates, such as a Korean food cooking class. HowAboutWe has raised $18.5M so far. The service is currently available in New York City, with plans to expand in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago, Washington DC and more in 2013.
OPW INTERVIEW – Aug 14 – HowAboutWe has one of the more unique and innovative idating business models we’ve seen in a while. Brian Bowman, the CEO of theComplete.me and former VP Product for Match.com interviewed Aaron Schildkrout the co-founder, co-CEO of HowAboutWe.com. – Mark Brooks
What makes HowAboutWe unique? HowAboutWe is the offline dating site. It is about getting offline and going on dates. People are posting dates that they want to go on and connecting quickly around those date ideas and getting offline. We will be also launching a site for couples that is also oriented around doing things in the real world.
Do you think that online dating still has a bunch of stigma associated with it? How important do you feel anonymity and privacy are to the online experience? I think that people experience dating as a private activity inherently because it is a private activity. I do think there is a stigma and a taboo with online dating, and a discomfort with the perceived unnaturalness with the process. But I think that most of the barriers comes from people’s genuine desire for their dating lives to be very private. Particularly private from their social networks. That seems like something that won't ever be overcome because it's incredibly human. The stigma piece is rapidly diminishing.
Do you believe that anonymity should be a user preference? Some people on many sites, dating or otherwise, experience anonymity as a supporter of free expression, of privacy, of creativity, and the ability to take risks that they wouldn't necessarily otherwise take. People who run dating sites who charge for the capacity to communicate definitely have reasons to keep people anonymous because there's obviously ways to circumvent payment walls if you know how to contact somebody with an app, Tweet, whatever.
Do you think criminal background checks are important? I think it's very important for dating sites and all sites that involve interaction, particularly amongst strangers, to take very seriously people's privacy and safety.
How do you folks make money? Our subscribers pay a monthly fee in order to gain access to all of our advanced features.
And how do you guys match people, or do you? Our goal is to help people get offline on actual dates. The chemistry happens offline. We understand that it's important to have an online experience that connects you with the people that you're most likely to be excited about meeting offline. Our entire framework for matching and for thinking about who you see are based on who we think you're going to have the best experience on actual dates with.
How are you deriving that information? Is it based on interests? It's much more based on what we experience as people's actual behavior on the site.
Do you feel that the integration of social networking features, whether that's friends, the interests graph pulled out of social profiles, is an important component of dating, or no? Well, definitely not necessarily at all. I definitely think there is a business, or set of business, that can be built on your social graph that help you to find people to date. I don't think anybody's ever done that well yet, but I think they could. I'm actually thinking about that question all the time.
To that end, how would you define social dating? The word “social” is so overused that the particularities are far more illuminating than that general statement. I think there are a number of possible ways to use your “social” data in order to provide a better experience. From smarter connections to figuring out how to facilitate introductions, to using your friend graph in order to understand the kinds of people you tend to hang out with, and so forth. There's great potential, but I think it's very, very hard. There's a reason why many, many people have tried. The start-up path is littered with the skeletons of those attempts.
Why do you think that major dating services have not tried to integrate in the social graph or the interest graph? First of all, they're based on brands that are all about privacy, about anonymous experience, about really protecting those aspects of your interactions. eHarmony and Match are based on very systematic ROI calculations against paid advertising. To skew or mess with that model and that core dynamic is very dangerous.
What do you feel are the most important features for mobile dating? It depends on what market you're going after. The user interaction is going to be particular to the brand and the target market.
How important are mobile check-ins? I think the whole concept of check-ins is an out-dated concept in a lot of ways.
Are there any questions that we didn't talk about that you'd like to raise? Sure, there are many. I think the real question is when we, and possible a few other companies, start to create a deep and genuine threat to Match.com's business, what happens? What is Match going to do? OKCupid was sort of gobbled up by them. I can't wait to see what happens there.
I think they are certainly stuck with the innovator's dilemma. So it will be interesting. If I look back at their acquisition strategy of external businesses, it's really been to fill in gaps where they see weakness. Compression starts around the pay to communicate business models. Compression has happened many, many times and they've just bought their competitors or destroyed them. That's really effective work. They are very smart, particularly around M&A, they've done an excellent job.
What do you have to say to entrepreneurs trying to raise money in the dating space? I think venture capitalists generally run away from dating sites incredibly rapidly and for great reason. It takes unbelievable innovation, execution and cash to genuinely disrupt. And basically nobody's been able to do it in the mainstream dating space.
What do you think is unique about Skout in terms of their approach and why it's interesting from an investment thesis? The actual user experience is pretty atrocious. Their process for converting users and building the kind of virality dynamic that has allowed them to grow so fast, are things that appeal to some people. It's very, very difficult to turn that into a sticky long term experience. I totally understand why someone would invest in that. If I was an investor and I saw that kind of growth, I would at least consider it. Power to them. I'm looking forward to seeing what they do.
BOSTON GLOBE – Aug 5 – OkCupid Locals is meant to follow you wherever you go and find you matches along the way. “Mobile dating has created a new promise, an enticing one,” says Aaron Schildkrout, co-founder HowAboutWe. “When you see these people on your phone, you think, ‘This person is real, they’re near me, and I may actually be able to encounter them in the real world". Grindr was the first app of its kind to get traction. By March 2012, Grindr had 4M users in 192 countries. MeetMoi, which came online as an iPhone and Android app in 2010, alerts users when another MeetMoi user is nearby. SinglesAroundMe, also released in 2010, features a singles-locator map of sorts. OkCupid launched its Locals app in 2011. Sam Yagan, founder of OkCupid, says two-thirds of its mobile users activate the GPS-positioning info. Mark Brooks, a consultant to Internet dating sites, points out that men tend to use location-based dating features more than women, and that location-based dating apps are most often used by singles in big cities. What’s more, the singles that use them are using them all the time. “People don’t view as many pages on their mobile dating apps as they do when they’re looking at profiles at home, but they’re logging in as many as eight times a day,” says Brooks. Mark Brooks jokes that one reason location-based dating hasn’t yet gone mainstream is that there are too many men running the sites.Match is the only major dating site run by a woman, and its CEO, Mandy Ginsberg, has said the company won’t rely on location-based tools. Robinne Burrell, the company’s director of mobile product and distribution, says its experts don’t believe the location-based approach puts singles on the path to long-term relationships.
CBS – Feb 8 – AARP has joined the online dating services. They debuted their new dating website, AARP Dating powered by HowAboutWe. HowAboutWe has currently ~1M members and has been around for several years now. OurTime.com has been around over a year and is part of the Match.com family. SilverSingles.com is part of the Spark network of dating sites. It has been around for 10 years and claims to be the premier online community for seniors. SeniorPeopleMeet.com is a place for those over 50. It’s partnered up with Match.com and Chemistry.com as well as BabyBoomerPeopleMeet.com.
