The Lie Hollywood Loves to Tell

Good luck with the endeavour. Some thoughts:

Requiring 100+ Facebook "friends" to join may serve as decent "this is a real person" filter for college educated urban 20 somethings, but you are likely filtering out lots of potential customers older than 30, people who never left their small town, etc. Is there a better way you can accomplish the same goal?

Also, I'm not sure that one can ascertain that "men don't read profiles" from a study that 21 men in a coffee shop spent half the time looking at picture as 18 women similarly accosted by market researchers. That's a pretty thin read to make a decision on. Have you a/b tested how profiles might work for your users?

I'm wondering how the "I was looking on behalf of a friend, but stumbled across someone really appealing." thing plays out.

Again, good luck.

"Put your money where your mouth is" Paying online dating will always have better results because of this.

Also you take under consideration almost exclusively OkCupid.

OkCupid != Online Dating.

Because of how it works, OkCupid is full of needy girls (and starving guys).

They go there, put three pics, play the dumb-ass matching game (understand answer 30 questions) and then enjoy receiving 4000 messages the first day. Deep down, they feel "woa I'm that good!" and they wine about guys being lame (and their pick up lines).

But here is the cold truth (from what I saw in the silicon valley) 1/ most girls are gold diggers OR what-have-you-done-for-me-lately (Eddie Murphy-style) - including your ex. 2/ most guys just want to hook up.

You can't sort this out with friends or anything. Even if people have a tendency to protect themselves from bad-people by closing their circles that is a negative reflex when trying to do online dating.

And online dating, especially when free, is the perfect fuckable-meat-supermarket. (excuse my french, I am... French) So you can come up with any pickup line, as long as the quality stays the same, it's the looks that matters. With the few exceptions based on luck OR coincidences.

This is also why a lot of people have a negative image of online-dating. There is of course the geeky-desperate, you're-not-capable-otherwise image.

For at least some time, people will still have this image. If you try to educate the world about online-dating, you're screwed. You should try to kick ass at your website, and make it feel like it's _not_ online dating. Take distance from this image.

And it won't work if it is free or if you try to involve friends. It will work by solving the question: "how to raise the quality of the members commitment to the idea".

I think good leads could be: 1/ pure and guaranteed balance in girls/guys (for straight websites) - It can be extremely repulsive. 2/ remove un-active accounts. 3/ Push people to open themselves - more privacy, different layers, many technical ways. 4/ force them out of the website. (you provide the first contact, but try setting up the date, suggestions is a great step already) 5/ limited amount of members (increased by periods, without some elitist bs)

The issue is, it's all about quantity not quality. The big problem I foresee is that might go against a juicy business plan - at least at first, and definitely when raising money. (better have 200M people poking each-others virtual a-holes than 10k people doing something and paying for it).

As for Hollywood's lie, it's always the same bitching. Hollywood's lie is only as valuable as the number of people who believes it. The truth is, people want to believe in Hollywood-dreamy-love but they tend to take everything too seriously to actually catch it. But hopefully, they will one day get tired of it and get down to earth.

Good luck in your adventure.

> That's a little tricky

Ahh, the enthusiasm of a new startup. :)

Relationships are such a spectrum that this part is actually really, really hard. OKC gets it mostly correct, which is one of the reasons they're really popular with that crowd.

This is the core problem of a dating site:

1. Forging connections between pairs of strangers where they will fall in love,

2. …under conditions of oppressive patriarchy.

Number 1 is a pretty easy numbers game. for each person, a subset of people match them algorithmically. Another subset will be good matches. If your algorithm doesn't suck, some of the first set overlaps the second.

Number 2 is the problem. If you are asking why women are being swamped with textual street harassment such that the noise quite drowns the signal, why women need pseudonymity and ignorable messaging and no-appeal blocklists, why women get shamed for taking an active role in seeking a date (such as OKC) and don't want to admit it, why Mills & Boon nonsense holds so much cultural sway, and why social proof is the most effective way to get dates, the answer to all of the above is patriarchy. Rapey, commoditizing attitudes to sex are patriarchy. Passive, romance-movie, pedestal-putting, shaming, antisexual attitudes to love are patriarchy.

He is, in a useless kind of way. It's one thing to think this way and another thing to propose that everyone voluntarily adopt social mores that put them at a disadvantage relative to the people who continue to use the same old stratagems. For something like that you need a social movement organized around a moral cause, with constant moral vigilance against cheaters (who would otherwise prosper, and might prosper even in spite of such vigilance.) That's unlikely enough, but it gets worse. Skill at organizing and inspiring a social movement is, by my guess at least, highly correlated with skill at succeeding sexually under the current social conventions. The people who are highly motivated to change current social mores around dating are exactly the people who are least likely to inspire a following.

Take it from someone who wasted his first five years after puberty learning the hard way :-|