How Badoo built a billion-dollar social network on sex

"Your "use case" should be, there's a 22 year old college student living in the dorms. How will this software get him laid?" -- jwz, <a href="http://www.jwz.org/doc/groupware.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.jwz.org/doc/groupware.html</a><p>Which is to say, selling sex has always been a nice business.

I've been on this network for about 4 years now (maybe less, can't remember), and it really worked for me, I've met several people there and had a really good time doing so.<p>What I think provides the most value for the user is location, as the article says. I can filter users by my location, and just interact with them. Since this is a dating site, it's ok to just say hi to someone without a formal introduction by someone else, and everyone acts accordingly.<p>What I really dislike about the site, is how invasive the business model has become. They try to get viral with facebook apps, desktop apps, iphone apps, but those apps tend not to respect a user's privacy. A while ago they tried to charge users to filter by online users. If you didn't pay, you could filter by location, but you'd have to go through all offline users to find those that are online at the time. It rendered the basic, unpaid product, useless. Fortunately, they rolled back that "feature".

This quote is noteworthy:<p>"Does Andreev have Facebook in his sights? "Badoo is more of a social network than Facebook, as on Facebook you interact with your existing friends in an absolutely virtual life," he says. "Badoo is more social: it provokes you to go down on the street and meet these people.""<p>I hope the next phase in social networking is actually centered around meeting new people. I don't know if Badoo will be the winner here (I doubt it), but some company will be able to win big by helping people meet new people.

If you've never used Badoo, I would encourage you to sign up just to see what tactics they use to encourage users to pay, how they do account retention and also how they encourage you to add profile information and photos. Interesting stuff.

Read the comments at the end of the article. About half of them are complaining about Badoo being a scam of various sorts. Fake accounts, fake female to male messages, email harvesting, can't get out once in, spam, etc.

Are all users listed real? (That is, not generated by Badoo?) It just feels kinda fake when looking through the list of accounts in my city (with a somewhat "small" population of ~50k, 814 Badoo accounts) that there is a lot of users. More than I anticipated for a service which I, as a person very interested in technology, did not even know about. Some of the pictures look very legit (with car-plates matching the country standard etc), as well as descriptions. Any thoughts?

Unrelated question - but I would to hear what others think.<p>I noticed that two sites we have developed in the past (chat/dating site and food review site) had much better acceptance in Mexico, Brazil, Netherlands, etc. than in US.<p>First we thought this is just a western anglo-saxon thing, but we also have much higher acceptance in UK.<p>It seems like that users in US are not early adopters. Did anybody noticed the same trend?

I used to use Badoo during 2007-9 and the only reason I can think of being there was sleazy pics that users uploaded. Slowly Badoo restricted how much "porn" users to display. After reading this and re-visiting Badoo after about 3 years I somehow feel funny as to how big funds are chasing it.

| the free-to-use network [..] is a mass phenomenon in Brazil (14.1 million members), Mexico (nine million), France (8.2 million), Spain (6.5 million) and Italy (six million)<p>Does anyone have any insight as to why Brazil is such a target for fringe social networks? I find it interesting that first Orkut and now Badoo have a major stake in that market and practically none in Western Europe.

Let's not call a site that gets 2 million unique visitors a month a billion dollar social network. I know it sounds sexy and it makes for good journalism, but let's reserve the "billion dollars" for companies that truly got over The Dip to make themselves a billion dollar company.

Single page version for the lazy: <a href="http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2011/05/features/sexual-network?page=all" rel="nofollow">http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2011/05/features/sex...</a>

I'm reminded of Reid Hoffman's quote: "Social networks do best when they tap into one of the seven deadly sins."

I just created an account and found that most of profiles are obvious fake. Almost of all profiles share the same characteristic: a simple one-liner comment and an irrelevant picture of this area, which is uploaded within twelves hours. Kudos to the founder of Badoo, who focused on giving the "user experience" from fake and false profiles, which are "manually curated" to hook up the guys who lost his mind from the urgent urge uprising from his gun.<p>I bet this kind of service wouldn't take off in my country where lots of 18-34 are already sharing comments and photos real-time and real-location at a mind-splitting rate using their smart phones. Lots of photoshopped pictures, but at least, they're real and they talk back, definitely better "user experience."<p>As a side note, in my country, a television program features a college girl who boasts that she didn't have to spend a penny for expensive meals and gifts, as she has more than two hundred "SNS friends" who agreed to buy her dinners. It's indeed not an exceptional case. Definitely possible.

Just tried it a little. The main thing I dislike is the extreme superficiality. On most parts of the site where you meet new people, you only see the image and the age, but no interests etc. I mean come on -- to decide whether I want to meet someone, the image is really saying close to nothing.

Sex is a huge motivator - duh.<p>The essential thing I'm learning from trying to start my own company is this: "Understand People" - what they do, why they do it, how they do the things that they want to do, how they interact, what motivates them etc.<p>If your not a people person its going to be hard to create a startup - ie a truly innovative solution that has a real business need. You might be better of running a small business where the cashflows are known or better yet working in some part of someone elses business.<p>Bottom line - Sucessful entrepreneurs understand people.<p>And badoo understood that sex is a great people motivator.

I signed up today. I found an incredible girl whom I'm going to a date with next week, over some sushi! :) Lives 10 min away from our university as well. I like this site!<p>Disclaimer: I'm 23.

I don't believe in these numbers. Badoo's strategy is scraping other social networks and spamming you and your friends with emails, pretending they sent messages to you and you to them. It's the second worst spammer on the web I know.

Wonder how many of those 14m brazilians are actually users. Almost everyone I know has received, at least once, an email from badoo saying everyone else is there (e.g saying I am, which is not the case). Fishy, very fishy...

Money, money, money.