We need a startup to fix online dating

Try Grouper (<a href="https://www.joingrouper.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.joingrouper.com</a>). [Full disclosure: I'm a co-founder].<p>The "browse-and-message" paradigm is fundamentally broken, not to mention a little dehumanizing (you're kind of shopping for people, which, let's face it, is pretty weird).<p>Our take is that the biggest problems with online dating are both the online part and the dating part --- it's hard to gauge chemistry online and it's cumbersome (and for women, potentially dangerous) to arrange a meeting. Meanwhile, labeling it as dating increases the pressure and the awkwardness for everyone.<p>Grouper Social Club sets up drinks between 2 groups of friends: 3 guys and 3 girls (or 3 guys, etc.).<p>There are no profiles or messages on our site. We match the groups together ourselves using Facebook info (which overcomes a lot of biases), then take care of all the coordination. Members pre-pay for their drink and the experience (the only fee), confirm a time, then we give them the place to meet.<p>We don't like labels, and don't think of Groupers as dates. To some they're similar, but the expectations are importantly different. Worst case: you're out with your friends and experience a funny story together, the average case is a super fun night out where there are some sparks between at least a pair of you, and the best case is, well, sky's the limit. Also, there's safety (and less awkwardness and more variety) in numbers.<p>We're live in 13 major cities in the US and Canada and growing quickly. 93% of members who go on a Grouper say they want to go on another one, and about half already have.<p>Our mission isn't to fix online dating, it's to end loneliness. Specifically, we want to help people get out from behind the blue glow of their computer screens and actually connect with people.<p>Social networks and online dating sites can be more isolating than social. But they don't have to be.<p>Shoot me an email at Michael [at] joingrouper.com if you have any questions.

'A' startup? As the article notes, there have been several attempts already and no clear winner.<p>Some observations about the online dating industry. There's a market opportunity - money has traditionally been made from dating/introduction services. They seem very suitable to move online. And they would seem to scale: in most services people match themselves, or an algorithm matches them, without involvement from the site staff. You would also expect network effects to be strong (customers want access to all the candidates in their geographical location) therefore rapid growth and huge revenue seems a possibility in a winner takes all kind of way.<p>So tell me: why has the online dating market not been locked up (pace occasional disruption) since 1999? My suspicion is the existing sites just don't have any way to differentiate themselves from the competition that actually makes a difference.<p>Online dating, if it can be 'fixed', will be fixed when someone has an insight into the underlying social question and manages to implement something unique.

If you weren't able to get a date from any of those sites then maybe the problem is you?

Just limit the number of first contact outbound messages a user can send per day to something ridiculous(like one). Response rates on free sites are abysmally low because its not hard to write a generic message and send it out to every person you see, poisoning the well for every poor guy writing a well thought out message and waiting patiently at his inbox.

I'm pretty familiar with the online dating industry both through business and my own personal involvement. While I agree with the issues that you raise (POF, for instance, has 6.6 guys per girls the last time I checked 6 years ago), I don't see how a new business model will really address this. Attractive women are being wooed all the time and that's not going to change.<p>I think an online speed dating service for business professionals, however, would do well. I believe that there are services like this out there but none of them have achieved a true following I would argue.<p>Imagine logging onto a site where with use of full audio and video you meet 10 eligible bachelors or bachelorettes over the course of 30 mins.

An unmarried woman with a child isn't necessarily carrying "massive baggage." What a rude and borderline misogynistic sentiment.

I agree that the issues the OP brings up are problems -- at least from the perspective of a single man -- but I'm not sure these are problems with online dating so much as dating itself, or the world. The male:female ratio is a problem in most dating settings, for example.<p>In terms of whether online dating needs "fixed", I'd be interested in knowing how the success rates for online dating are better or worse than current offline methods (going clubbing, dating co-workers, whatever). My own worthless anecdotal experience shows a much <i>higher</i> rate of success in online dating than trying to meet people IRL. ("Worthless" because I met my wife online, and we naturally hang out with people who tend to spend lots of time on computers.)<p>Also, from the OP: <i>I had average success on this service, but the reason it probably wasn’t better had to do with the fact that the Q&#38;A section tended to expose character flaws that turned me off.</i><p>I think it's interesting that the OP was getting <i>too much</i> information about his potential partners... or at least, too much too early. Most people have flaws, and one advantage of traditional dating is that you learn about their flaws more slowly and have time to learn good things that mitigate them before getting scared off.<p>However, I think it's more likely that people are going to have to adjust to knowing more, rather than using services that expose less: more and more we live our lives online, and it's very easy to learn "too much" about someone just by using Google. We're either going to have to accept that people are flawed, or it's going to get even harder to find partners...

We are in the middle of working on a solution that would bring quality to the experience of dating. We are using creative ways to first have people learn about themselves, discover and understand their own patterns in relationships, and what they are really looking for in a partner (besides the obvious). Then it provides relationship guidance and advice, through an interactive dialogue with an A.I. built for this purpose. The matching is also different. It will not only suggest interesting matches, but also how you may interact with the other, and why; i.e. the different possible dynamics and the likely reasons behind it. The method is based on solid psychology, applied in a creative way, for the purpose of self-discovery, self-understanding in the context of relationships. The main idea is that whoever you strongly like (or dislike) reflects undiscovered aspects of your own self that you are working on developing a relationship with. It also deals with issues of communication and emotional intelligence. All in all it will provide a continuous guiding service for people in order to find and experience fulfilling relationships. Obviously not everyone will be attracted to the service, since it will require some introspection and honest self-reflection, but again we are focused on quality rather than quantity, and from our research it looks like it will attract more women then men – which is not a bad thing :) . We’ve got most of the self-discovery, relationship-guiding, and matching technology – with working prototypes. We are bootstrapping at the moment, looking for help with the back-end infrastructure, web/mobile front-end, marketing, and of course funding. If interested, please get in touch: <a href="http://technosophics.com/home/contact/" rel="nofollow">http://technosophics.com/home/contact/</a> Or take this survey: <a href="http://technosophics.com/home/survey/" rel="nofollow">http://technosophics.com/home/survey/</a>

I'm the lead developer for Set For Marriage (<a href="https://www.setformarriage.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.setformarriage.com</a>), and we've thought a LOT about these issues.<p>We do charge people a subscription fee to be able to start conversations, but it does seem pretty unfair for people to have to pay to reply so we don't require a subscription to reply to messages.<p>I agree with waxman that the "browse-and-message" thing is kind of played out (winks are too), so we're working on some ideas to help people find partners and interact without requiring them to fill out a giant questionnaire or spend hours copy and pasting a message to every potential partner on the site.

We need a startup to fix online dating: agreed. Part of the problem is the overwhelming volume of attention that women receive: agreed. However....<p><i>But even though I received the highest response rate, I was still almost never able to get second or third replies. Once I got a response that I replied to, the exchange pretty much stopped dead in its tracks.</i><p>Women get tons of messages every day, as the article points out, and they don't bother to reply unless they're really interested. I got very few replies on dating sites when I used them, but almost every reply turned into a date. They had already made up their minds before they messaged me. Dating sites are not great and I would love to see something better, but the OP's experience suggests some failure of communication peculiar to his situation, not something from which to draw general lessons.<p>For what it's worth, in my experience, the women who wanted to meet me agreed after only one or two messages. They made up their minds before they messaged me. The women who wanted to chat back and forth were only there to chat; they weren't actually interested in me. Rich online interaction doesn't facilitate meeting in person. It competes with it. When it comes to efficiently deciding whether to invest time in getting to know somebody, meeting them for coffee or a drink risks less than an hour of your time and yields much more useful information much more quickly than trying to get to know someone online. Women follow the same logic men do: if they just want to chat, they chat. If they actually think you have some potential, they want to meet you ASAP so they can find out what you're like in person.<p>If I were trying to make money from an online dating site, I could certainly convince people of the opposite. It's so dangerous to meet someone in person before you <i>really</i> know them... why go out and meet one guy who's probably a dud when you could be talking with a whole bunch of cool people from the convenience of your own apartment... and when you finally meet someone in person, they should be a real person you have a relationship with, not an anonymous profile. I'd do everything I could to keep them on the site, making me money, instead of out in the world meeting people. For myself, I want exactly the opposite. I think once I've skimmed an expressive profile and seen a few pictures, I've already learned 90% of what is possible to learn online, and I want to proceed as quickly as possible to an in-person meeting where I'll learn more in twenty minutes than I'd learn in a week of chatting.<p>I'm not sure how a site could do better at that than Match or OkCupid, but I can't wait to find out.

Hard to judge baggage or anything of someone's character based on an online profile... especially when you're creating an image that you want to be seen as. When I was single I went on PoF to test the waters (pun intended) and it was easy to meet women and I had a few fun experiences.<p>I haven't tried any of them in years, but I don't know how you evolve the model from where it is. There are few social situations where you find a favorable girl to guy ratio except for a college campus.

A friend of mine wrote a good series of blog posts about the issues with current online dating sites, many of which you mentioned.<p><a href="http://gobigorgoho.me/post/5834417671/online-meeting" rel="nofollow">http://gobigorgoho.me/post/5834417671/online-meeting</a><p>His startup aims to solve these problems and is set to relaunch in early 2013!<p><a href="http://blog.acquaintable.com/" rel="nofollow">http://blog.acquaintable.com/</a>

There are always services like tastebuds.fm. Online dating via the medium of your music profile. Obviously it suits a particular demographic, but that's probably the best way for dating sites to work.

I haven't used it myself, but hin.ge (<a href="http://hin.ge" rel="nofollow">http://hin.ge</a>) went through the same incubator the startup I work for did and seems like an interesting concept.

What's easier to do? Change the world or change yourself?

Try youlookgoodtogether.com. It's crowdsourced matchmaking...very interesting idea if I do say so myself.

There's some fundamental dysfunction that needs to be addressed in online dating:<p>- Why the heck do folks use a service built by people who might not have been successful in love? Would I use an operating system programmed by doctors?<p>- How do dating sites overcome the personality shortcomings of having a hard enough time connecting in real life, let alone the computer. In the end the relationship is in real life.<p>- People are nickels trying to get dimes instead of improving themselves. (Analogy can be read here: <a href="http://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com/blog/why-wont-anyone-be-honest-with-you/" rel="nofollow">http://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com/blog/why-wont-anyone-be...</a>).<p>- How do you set the bar of the mindset you want to attract? Should dating sites be encouraging and attracting people, "Love me to validate myself and my worth of receiving love", or "I'm happy, work at being the best I can and would be even happier with someone"?<p>- People who come on a site, find love, and leave might not be profitable customers. It's like the startup stuff out there, does much of it keep you in a startup phase instead of moving into more?<p>- In some cases, the socially challenged geeks that build it who may have underdeveloped personalities themselves trying to help others connect. geeks compensate for in person skills by being behind a keyboard. ie., what does Facebook have that isn't transactional and is transformative, say, like a successful dating match might be?<p>As a society, too many folks don't work on connecting to ourselves, and through that to others. Too many don't know how to be a friend to ourselves, have a healthy inner dialogue, and instead want someone else to know them and love them more than they do themselves.<p>Maybe dating itself is the problem. Statistically fails 99% of the time. To some it's emotional baggage collection. Some people even display their emotional baggage in the large overpriced bags they carry. Not enough time spent on developing one's self into their best self.<p>Maybe dating sites should be about dating yourself to find and become your best self so you can connect with others doing the same and let the love happen as soon as you learn to remove the barriers to receiving and giving love yourself.<p>What do you think?

Well, good luck to you on your search, my friend!

Try beggarscantbechoosers.com