TE
科技回声
首页24小时热榜最新最佳问答展示工作
GitHubTwitter
首页

科技回声

基于 Next.js 构建的科技新闻平台,提供全球科技新闻和讨论内容。

GitHubTwitter

首页

首页最新最佳问答展示工作

资源链接

HackerNews API原版 HackerNewsNext.js

© 2025 科技回声. 版权所有。

Why investors don’t fund dating

232 点作者 andrew_null将近 10 年前

32 条评论

qq66将近 10 年前
The thing about dating services is that they work a lot better when they&#x27;re not explicitly marketed as dating services. Facebook started out as a thinly veiled dating service, where the primary activities were looking up people you might want to date and communicating with them. But the product was marketed as a more general tool, even keeping the meaning of the &quot;Poke&quot; button rather cryptic. Instagram is in the same vein - a large use case is showing your friends and acquaintances how cool and attractive you are, with the goal of raising one&#x27;s dating status. And Instagram is marketed towards making sunsets and pictures of flowers look better, allowing users to realize for themselves that a Gaussian blur might make their selfies look better too.<p>Huge numbers of products are marketed towards increasing one&#x27;s attractiveness in some way, whether shampoo or automobiles or clothing, and outside of Axe body spray, very few of them are explicit about it. There&#x27;s no reason that websites wouldn&#x27;t follow the same script.
评论 #9608929 未加载
评论 #9608339 未加载
评论 #9608360 未加载
mastermojo将近 10 年前
The 5% churn = 79% annual churn is incorrect. Churn doesn&#x27;t compound, because after churn your user base is smaller and 5% of that becomes a smaller number.<p>It is actually 0.95^12=0.54 (5% churn&#x2F;month = 46% annual churn).
评论 #9607355 未加载
评论 #9608283 未加载
评论 #9607356 未加载
评论 #9607496 未加载
评论 #9608565 未加载
评论 #9607818 未加载
评论 #9607362 未加载
beat将近 10 年前
The problem is, founders tend to try to solve problems they&#x27;ve experienced and understand. For the twenty-somethings that are the public face of &quot;startup founders&quot;, they may not understand international trade or enterprise health care or other big problems, but they understand dating. So they write dating apps.<p>And then, by the time they&#x27;ve acquired enough real-world professional experience to actually understand some interesting and high-value problems, they have a mortgage and kids and don&#x27;t want to eat ramen like they did when they were 22.
评论 #9607460 未加载
评论 #9607455 未加载
评论 #9607842 未加载
评论 #9607416 未加载
评论 #9608018 未加载
birken将近 10 年前
There are also many free alternatives which are very good. I&#x27;m not suggesting something like Tinder or OkCupid are perfect, but both of them are fully usable for your whole dating lifecycle without ever having to pay a cent (both of them have premium options, but they are entirely optional). Maybe IAC will change that at some point, but they haven&#x27;t thus far.<p>Dating is also always going to require work that can&#x27;t be replaced with money. I can throw money at my laundry, my meals, my house cleaning and completely outsource them. But with dating, regardless of how good the site or matching is, I&#x27;m still going to have to meet the other person and have to do most of the &quot;dirty work&quot; involved with dating myself. So I&#x27;d think that fact limits the upper bound of money they can charge and upper bound of money a dating company can make.
评论 #9607425 未加载
评论 #9609093 未加载
评论 #9608036 未加载
NhanH将近 10 年前
There seems to be a lot of explanation from a business-y POV as to why dating startup is hard, but I&#x27;m curious from a different POV: does dating company&#x2F;apps actually solve any problem that people are having? To be more precise, dating is <i>hard</i>, but the difficulty is multi-facet, and I can&#x27;t see an app potentially solving any of them for me. I&#x27;m a single 20s-something, so firmly in the target audience for most dating app. And I fail see the benefits of using almost any dating service from a startup out there.
评论 #9607072 未加载
评论 #9607103 未加载
评论 #9607036 未加载
评论 #9607195 未加载
评论 #9607451 未加载
评论 #9607232 未加载
mml将近 10 年前
My takeaway from this article is that Ashley Madison is a great investment. No churn, comprehensible to investor class, generally high disposable income customers. Hmm.
评论 #9607333 未加载
评论 #9607539 未加载
nostrademons将近 10 年前
Dating belongs to a category of industries that also includes jobsearch&#x2F;careers, education, fitness, and socializing. The characteristics of these industries are:<p>1. They are broad, holistic consumer problems where a success metric might be clearly defined (find a spouse, get a job, earn a degree), but the steps to get there aren&#x27;t.<p>2. There is a social status component: people (rightly or wrongly) make status judgments about your life outcomes.<p>3. Success means you don&#x27;t need a product.<p>There&#x27;s a big mistake that many rookie founders make with these industries (and I&#x27;m speaking from bitter experience founding a career-guidance startup): You can solve people&#x27;s problems, but you can&#x27;t rob people of their problems.<p>I met my fiancee on OKCupid. I <i>met</i> her on OKCupid. But I did the hard work of living an interesting life and adjusting my expectations to reality on my own. We did the hard work of earning each others&#x27; trust and respect, building a relationship, and overcoming our differences together. We deleted our OKCupid accounts about a month after meeting.<p>Similarly, someone who gets a job through LinkedIn <i>gets the job themselves</i>, LinkedIn doesn&#x27;t get the job for them. They have to do the hard work of building the skills and meeting the qualifications themselves. They need to build their network themselves. They impress the hiring manager and interviewers themselves. LinkedIn is a tool for managing this, but it is not and cannot be the reason for their success.<p>A lot of founders look at hard problems like dating or unemployment thinking &quot;This sucks. It shouldn&#x27;t suck. I&#x27;m not going to rest until everyone has the perfect spouse, perfect job, perfect skills, etc.&quot; They don&#x27;t realize that <i>this is not a problem they can fix</i>. If they could fix it, it would rob their customers of their humanity, of a lot of what makes them real. The <i>reason</i> we choose people as employees, as spouses, and as friends is because of things they do and challenges they overcome, not because of products they use.<p>Successful companies in these spaces realize this and focus on one individual sub-problem they can solve to make people&#x27;s lives easier. Tinder won&#x27;t get you into a relationship, but it shows you people of your preferred sex. Indeed also shows you options, but getting the job is your responsibility. Google has done wonderful things for self-education by making the whole web available with a few keywords. LinkedIn and Facebook started out as great rolodexes, but then (IMHO) have been steadily ruining their products by trying to creep into more and more of my life.
评论 #9607864 未加载
评论 #9607633 未加载
评论 #9607560 未加载
mbesto将近 10 年前
&gt; <i>It’s super hard to get a dating product funded by mainstream Silicon Valley investors</i><p>Huh? I&#x27;ve seen quite the opposite. Anecdote: The League [0]. $2mil in funding without the existence of a product or a team (when it was funded). There&#x27;s some <i>very</i> mainstream investors on that list too.<p>Investors who don&#x27;t invest in dating apps don&#x27;t do it because they know the problem never gets fixed. Investors who do invest in them, know they can sell to IAC. As I&#x27;ve heard from a prominent VC who is friendly with the Match.com board (paraphrased) &quot;The whole dating app market knows that at scale finding someone on a dating app is statistically no different than finding one at a bar. We simply making going to the bar easier&quot;.<p>[0] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;angel.co&#x2F;the-league-date-intelligently" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;angel.co&#x2F;the-league-date-intelligently</a>
评论 #9607531 未加载
tlb将近 10 年前
He botches the math. 20% monthly churn means you have to replace your customer base 2.4 times over a year, not 8 times. But the conclusion is the same: CAC &gt; LTV.
评论 #9607151 未加载
评论 #9607457 未加载
balls187将近 10 年前
The criticisms made against dating startups could be levied for many other market segments as well. I imagine that if investors are shying away from dating startups, it&#x27;s for no other reason than Dating Startups are no longer in vogue (because dating is complex), and the heard tends to stick together. Dating is a common problem, and investors have gotten &quot;dating app&quot; fatigue.<p>Here are some counter points.<p>&gt; I’ve heard [Churn] numbers as high as 20-30% monthly<p>Making an argument based on hear-say.<p>&gt; Dating is niche and has a shelf-life<p>So is the market segment for weddings, and newborns. Underserved niche markets are ripe for &quot;disruption&quot; which follows with it--investment.<p>&gt; Dating products have historically depended on paid acquisition channels to build their customer base,<p>Source?<p>&gt; City-by-city expansion sucks<p>It&#x27;s an extra challenge, but ubers, and airbnb&#x27;s and many other marketplace as a service have figured it out.<p>&gt; Demographic mismatch with older, married investors<p>While there are investors whose methodology precludes them from investing in markets that have not bearing on them, it&#x27;s probably safe to assume at one point in their life, they had to date.
vannevar将近 10 年前
A more obvious reason that dating sites don&#x27;t get funded is that they&#x27;re uniformly terrible. No one understands dating well enough to create a service that works reliably, and according to Pew Research fewer than 1 in 4 online daters actually find a long-term relationship online. So the sites become an exercise in hand-waving, and I can understand why investors are reluctant to invest in what boils down to pure marketing, the service equivalent of a Pet Rock.
solve将近 10 年前
Curious to point out that Tinder &amp; clones found a solution to the dating churn problem:<p>- Don&#x27;t target people for whom success in the app will make them want to churn = people looking for a public committed relationship.<p>- Target people for whom success will make them want to use the app more = people looking for secret private hookups!
fredkbloggs将近 10 年前
The churn argument overlooks the fact that there&#x27;s a <i>lot</i> of repeat business. I know plenty of people who have been using one or more of these services literally for years. IAC seems to have figured out something the other investors have not, which is how to capture that segment of the market and keep them coming back. It seems to have something in common with slot machines and other casino and freemium games: you have to give people enough wins to keep them playing but not enough that they actually get what they want.
评论 #9609347 未加载
pimlottc将近 10 年前
This is a great analysis although the Silicon Valley jargon is heavy at times. Even as a fairly-regular HN reader, I didn&#x27;t recognize some of these, like IAC and ARPU, and they aren&#x27;t defined or linked in the piece.
评论 #9607480 未加载
评论 #9607499 未加载
评论 #9607546 未加载
Beausoleil将近 10 年前
Dating apps should have a bright future here in the US thanks to the sterilization of the American work force. We have women like Ellen Pao to thank for that. Men are rightfully too afraid of the legal consequences of hitting on female co-workers with HR policies like &quot;no unwanted sexual advances.&quot; How do you know an advance is unwanted until you try?
jrs235将近 10 年前
Too bad this write up showed up after this episode: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=9523431" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=9523431</a>
评论 #9607054 未加载
eonw将近 10 年前
i think part of the problem is the bad taste anyone would have in their mouth after using any of the obviously fake dating sites that have existed to date. as the majority of dating sites are littered with vast amounts of fake or ancient profiles, after a person has been through a few, they usually write them all off as fake or poor quality. its just an industry, much like adult, that collectively has not done itself many favors in the eyes of the general public and past customers.<p>the other issue with growing a date network is the fact that it is a hyper local focused market, so unless you have a good regional marketing and roll out plan, traction will be hard to gain.<p>these two problems coupled make it a pretty tough nut to crack. reeducating, recreating trust and moving market by market is going to a cost a bit. the good news is, members tend to stay around a while, in fact often times for a few months after they have found a new person to date. If you want MRR, dating is even better then porn.<p>one thing that was good for the market was the disappearance of myspace and aol, both of which allowed for searching via zip, dating status and age... making them free places to find possible dates.<p>source: used to work in the web based dating industry.
svalorzen将近 10 年前
Isn&#x27;t considering churning in dating bad kind of like saying that a supermarket or restaurant shouldn&#x27;t give much food to their customers otherwise they&#x27;ll be sated and won&#x27;t eat anymore?<p>It seems to me that it&#x27;s the opposite, mating for humans is such a basic instinct that there will never be a shortage in the market, considering also that new humans that want to date pop up at a pretty much constant rate.
评论 #9607819 未加载
rdl将近 10 年前
I wonder if there&#x27;s a market for angel investing (w&#x2F;o followon) in dating startups SPECIFICALLY to become friends&#x2F;familiar with great early-in-career founders, to try to invest in their second, presumably non-dating startup.<p>i.e. throw down $25k on whatever valuation purely to build a relationship with 10 teams&#x2F;year, with the hope one might survive as a business, and one or two might be stellar teams who fail for reasons specific to dating, but will come to you first when they do their next startup. $250k&#x2F;yr isn&#x27;t that expensive, and you could pre-screen by just investing in 100% of the YC dating-or-adjacent companies.<p>Extra points for going out of your way to be helpful vs. maximizing your return, and being super helpful during inevitable wind-down.
ig1将近 10 年前
While these are all reasonable and valid points it&#x27;s missing a key one: margin.<p>If you look at successful SaaS businesses users who pay &lt;$50&#x2F;month are pretty much always loss leaders. Almost all the money in SaaS is in enterprise and large customers.<p>It&#x27;s very hard to make subscription work for consumer SaaS businesses simply because the margin between CAC and LTV is so small. Gaming (ala World of Warcraft) has shifted away from subs to IAP because it&#x27;s easier to lower CAC through making a product freemium than to increase LTV.<p>Commercially successful dating sites have become so through increasing LTV by locking customers into long term contract and reducing CAC via shady tactics to increase conversion. Neither of which many investors want to be associated with.
评论 #9607558 未加载
lifeisstillgood将近 10 年前
Dating has always been a game of breadth first search and sampling with rapid feedback. The &quot;promenade&quot; (a town or two would meet up, single boys circled clockwise around a circle of anti-clockwise girls) was commonplace in eighteenth and nineteenth century Europe.<p>In the end though, most business and consumer interactions at least begin with something very similar to dating. So solutions found in &quot;proper&quot; dating sites <i>ought</i> to be translatable to sales and marketing apps<p>Even advertising is a weird form of one sided dating, with the most promiscuous and least picky self selecting for paid exposure to man y many potential new partners.
tiatia将近 10 年前
I doubt that. As soon as your product has momentum investors will shit you with money. The problem is the hen egg problem. Same with ebay clones.<p>You don&#x27;t have users and new users are turned off by the fact that you don&#x27;t have users.
alaskamiller将近 10 年前
Uber is dating for drivers and riders.<p>AirBNB is dating for owners and renters.<p>Facebook is dating for content and readers.<p>Amazon is dating for supply chains and consumers.<p>Tinder is for hookups.
rebelidealist将近 10 年前
Dating is a massive business. A major part of our economy thrives around dating. People who don&#x27;t believe you can charge for it are not creative. It&#x27;s true that we don&#x27;t like to pay for membership, but the service can charge for activity tickets such as events, movies, dinners etc.
caseysoftware将近 10 年前
I wrote about this last month.. with dating sites, losing is losing while winning is losing bigger:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;caseysoftware.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;working-for-a-dating-website" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;caseysoftware.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;working-for-a-dating-website</a>
评论 #9608030 未加载
adamzerner将近 10 年前
To me the main points seem to come down to market size. My impression is that the points made are valid, but that the market is still big and unsaturated enough for there to be a ton of opportunity.
yogi123将近 10 年前
Funny thing is that dating as a primary use case led to the creation of social networks in the first place: Friendster -&gt; Facebook (poking, checking out classmates) -&gt; $223 billion market cap.
anovikov将近 10 年前
I don&#x27;t get the &#x27;shelf life&#x27; argument. Most people are constantly on dating sites to keep meeting other people (maybe under fake names if they are already married).
评论 #9607735 未加载
dcre将近 10 年前
&gt; Most investors who can write checks (as opposed to associates) are older, married, and kids.<p>Amusing word omission.
ape4将近 10 年前
But dating services can go viral. Network effect.
评论 #9607035 未加载
graycat将近 10 年前
Once thought about doing a match making business:<p>(1) There are lots of singles, and the number is not going down. Sure, each year some get married, but others <i>come of age</i>.<p>(2) Potentially there is a <i>lot</i> of money in the match making business at least in the sense that most young people, especially the women, are highly motivated to get a <i>match</i>.<p>Let&#x27;s support this claim: The women are motivated by ballpark $10,000 to $60,000 a year and are spending that now. How? Sure: College.<p>It&#x27;s still the case (blame Mother Nature) that heavily women go to college to get their Mrs. degree and otherwise their teaching certificate or RN. Feminists, aside, that situation won&#x27;t change soon. Maybe some people like this situation and maybe some don&#x27;t, but, still, blame Mother Nature.<p>But college is a poor place for young women to get their Mrs. degree: Why? The male students are nearly all too young, too poor, and unemployed.<p>Other main competition: Bars. Bummer. What Mr. Right wants to meet his Angel in, what, what the heck, a, what, a bar!<p>Look, guys, neither the bars nor the colleges are on the way out of the match making business from customers getting married. So, why conclude so soon that a match making service has to be on the way out of business from losing customers from making matches?<p>Match making better than college and bars: The woman can be pretty and the man, older, ready to be good as a husband and father, that is, someone the woman will have a super tough time meeting otherwise. This is a very old story, not going away soon.<p>I remember: In college, the girls wanted nothing to do with me. But nine years later I drove my new, high end Camaro back to my college to look up some stuff in their library, and walking from my car to the library, for the first time, from 60 feet away, I got a really good look from an undergrad woman. That&#x27;s the truth, guys: The car and my age, and that was enough -- I passed the first two filter questions on her list for Mr. Right. Blame Mother Nature.<p>Fathers? They would be better off saving on college tuition and getting some really good match making for their daughters.<p>Big, untapped, totally <i>natural</i> market, very poorly served otherwise: Start with the women younger. Example: Lady Di. When she was 15, she decided that she would marry Prince Charles. About five years later, she did. Mother Nature says: Girls 12+ are thinking about husbands. So, by age 15-16 they might be ready for a Sunday dinner at home with a candidate Mr. Right, late model car paid for, house bought, cash in the bank, good job. Then 2-4 years later, she gets married.<p>In human history, this is not nearly a new idea, but a good match making service -- and it would have to be really good -- can be one of the best ways to make this work for the girls&#x2F;women, their fathers, and the men.<p>(3) How to get new singles to replace the ones that get married? Sure: Go to singles groups; the standard is church youth groups. Churches are smart enough to invest in the future -- have married members who make more members.<p>Another way? Sure, hold singles parties, eventually invitation only. So, meet &quot;the <i>best</i> people&quot;. So, much cheaper than a high end country club or yacht club but with potentially even better results.<p>(4) Barrier to entry. Sure, match making is necessarily nearly a local business. So there is a geographical barrier to entry. So, get the best collection of singles in one area and have close to a natural monopoly.<p>Of course, the software doesn&#x27;t have to be local.
endgame将近 10 年前
I don&#x27;t care how good your article is, if you pop up a subscribe box over the content I&#x27;m not going to read it.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;tabcloseddidntread.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;tabcloseddidntread.com&#x2F;</a>