Ask HN: How would you solve the chicken and egg problem ( Dating Sites )

[AlexAMEEE]

I read this:

> 8. Dating. Current dating sites are not the last word. Better ones will appear. But anyone who wants to start a dating startup has to answer two questions: in addition to the usual question about how you're going to approach dating differently, you have to answer the even more important question of how to overcome the huge chicken and egg problem every dating site faces. A site like Reddit is interesting when there are only 20 users. But no one wants to use a dating site with only 20 users—which of course becomes a self-perpetuating problem. So if you want to do a dating startup, don't focus on the novel take on dating that you're going to offer. That's the easy half. Focus on novel ways to get around the chicken and egg problem.

http://old.ycombinator.com/ideas.html

I'm wondering, how would you approach this problem ?

[Mz]

In other settings, chicken and egg problems are sometimes solved via backwards compatibility. So, in other words, if you already have a thing people go to, you build your other thing on top of that, basically.

From what I have read, clubs do "ladies night" because men are the ones who will show up anyway. It is the women you need to somehow get to show up. This seems to also be the case for dating. For example, women over a certain age do very poorly in most online dating sites. People are people, whether online or off. The same general trends that impact dating offline also influence dating online.

So, perhaps ask yourself why the women would want to show up? If you can answer that question, you may have an edge over other dating sites.

[allenbrunson]

I have spent a lot of time thinking about this very subject, and have in fact made a few small stabs at solving it.

Here's one way I think would work: Start as a matchmaking service. A severe, almost crippling problem that many dating sites have is that a great deal of the listings are, in one way or another, not in good faith: scammers, liars, fakes, people who are fantasizing about leaving their spouses but will never get up the nerve to do more than waste other people's time, etc. So you can start as a participant on one of those sites, and get yourself a list of contacts, and start vetting them for sincerity. It would help a lot if you can take a "boots on the ground" approach. For example, if the site is for American dudes to hook up with Chinese women, then you should hire an assistant in a major Chinese city who can interview the women in person.

Eventually, you'll have a deep enough bench that you can open up the site to more traditional participants.

[kidlogic]

Hide one side of the market by "intelligently matching users"; users will assume they are in a large marketplace without actually seeing the other side. Additionally, "intelligent matching" can be marketed as a benefit to the user so they don't have to waste time searching on their own.

[eb0la]

Dating and job sites have built-in churn.

If you do it well, you loose clients. If you do it bad, they won't show.

Don't make a dating app. Make an app with a twist, that helps people go on a date... Maybe in special places like cruises, vacation, etc.

[MilnerRoute]

Could you start with an existing community? I don't know if it's an online fan forum or a Christian singles site -- but there might be some way to jumpstart your initial user base. (Choose wisely...)

The other obvious idea is promotion. (This obviously works better if you have some capital.) Maybe flood a college campus with incentives and "free trial" offers. Or host a swanky event which can only be attended by people using your dating site.

[AlexAMEEE]

There are some good points, especially the flooding method.

[19eightyfour]

Not joking here, genetic testing.

It's a niche. The allure of genetic compatibility might be overwhelming when we consider that the basic purpose of all our emotions and behaviours around dating and sex is reproduction, which is driven by genetics.

A community of people who want to have kids ( people who are feeling the urge to reproduce ), further reduced to the niche of those such people who are interested to applying genetic testing and compatibility to assessing matches ( in some suitable legal way that doesn't introduce liabilities for participants in terms of insurance or employment ).

An aggressive marketing technique could be that not genetically matching up is introducing a liability.

A "lite" version of this could attempt to sidestep some of the legal, ethical or censorious issues around genetics, but still benefit from it, by using "odour" matching. Body odour, reflects immune system markers, which reflect genetics, and is a real way that people subconsciously assess mate fitness.

I think anything you do to move into the dating space at this time must include science based signals to some extent. The reason is because there is so much untapped potential of applying science to matching, and it's likely going to be an increasing trend ( consider, IMHO, the super cautious, more evidence based, less authority based, natures of Millenials in general for an idea ) in the future.

Another riff on using science could be to offer to pair people up randomly for 10 minute conversations in front of a video recorder, and apply some kind of microexpression tagging and analysis, to try to predict if these people are emotionally compatible. I'm specifically thinking of the assessments used by Dr John Gottman (https://www.gottman.com/about/research/couples/).

[panic]

Since we're all part of the same species, we're all genetically compatible when it comes to reproduction! But most people care about other kinds of compatibility, too. It's hard to see how genetic testing would let you find people who are emotionally, intellectually or romantically compatible.

[19eightyfour]

This is a valid perspective and it misses much of the picture of genetics, and what makes people feel attracted to each other.

It's very possible that awareness of genetic influence on attraction and relationships, and the potential it has to improve our understanding and choices, is not widely known, so it's worth saying something more about it.

It's true that speciation is a necessary condition of mating usually, but it's not sufficient for getting the best genetic outcome for conception and offspring, and more importantly, attraction is not just about mating. So being from the same species is not enough to have good relationships, genetic compatibility goes far deeper than that.

Our genetic profiles underly much of our individual traits and therefore determine what traits of others we are attracted to and compatible with. Genetics affects attraction in a multidimensional, multiscale way, from subliminally assessing someone's biology from their smell, through how people handle stress in their lives, to determining lifestyle preference, and even to the type of emotional reactions people feel and express when they're fighting, and better or worse compatibility across the genetic spectrum can strengthen or weaken not just the long-term relationship potential but the intensity of the attractiveness.

Relationships reflect who you are, and genetics is a strong signal of who you are. Someone who can factor genetics into their relationship choices is going to be better positioned to create positive relationship outcomes for themselves then someone who is unable to factor genetics in. So in this way a business based on genetic compatibility matching he's giving people a "sixth sense", a kind of superpower to increase their happiness in the world. It doesn't even have to be about changing your choices, you can just be giving you another signal so that you know how better to manage the genetic situation in front of you.

There's useful models of attraction that include a whole range of genetic variables, and evidence that people feel attracted to people whose genetics match their own.

Things like immune system compatibility, and avoiding genes that would produce less fit offspring, all factor into humans biological, subconscious signaling about attraction. A lot of that is based on our bodies doing spectrometry on the chemicals other bodies emit: odor and smell.

But this natural system has room for improvement. People still naturally choose mates with whom they end up incompatible, can't conceive, or inadvertently activate latent generic disease in their offspring with two copies of the carrier gene.

Strengthening the genetic basis of attraction by giving people a "sixth sense", in the form of a matching service backed by genetic science, would positively contribute all aspects of attraction, by giving you a choice of partners you are more likely to be compatible with emotionally, intellectually, romantically over the long term based on who their genetics say they are.

It's not for everyone. Even tho our bodies genetically profile the people we meet, purple understandably have a great fear of this being systematic because independent systematic systems can be abused.

The tl;dr is genetics underly many personality traits, emotional reactions and character as well as biology. Training models on genetic compatibility of successful relationships and using that predictively has potential to improve relationships, not just reproduction.

Even when you take reproduction out of the equation, improving the clarity of genetic signaling, can boost awareness of signals of attractiveness, and of long term, identity based qualities you are looking for in a partner, that can work for homosexual relationships too.

[lookingBack]

Help people. Make real life dating easier in your area. Solve local, think global.

[danieltillett]

Local. It doesn't matter how many people are on a dating site, all anyone cares about is how many are in their local pool.

The way to do this is study how nightclubs are built. This approach does take money though.

[AlexAMEEE]

This is great, thanks for the eye opening suggestion.

[fav_collector]

Paid traffic, affiliates, locality, promotions for users

[AlexAMEEE]

Do you know a service that sells traffic ?

[wayn3]

its not true that i wouldnt want to use a dating site with only 20 users, if those twenty users were all relevant. give me 20 really great potential partners and im set for life ten times over.

i dont want to use a dating site with only 20 profiles that im not interested in, but i dont want to use a dating site with 2 million uninteresting profiles either.

its a common misconception that there needs to be quantity. give me 3, or really just 1, thing that i really want, and ill use your product.

how do you solve that? provide what im looking for. chicken and egg in dating is apocryphal.

same with job sites or freelance sites btw. im a member in 3 highly curated, high-end contractor "marketplaces". at any given time, they usually only feature 3-4 active open projects. but each of them is really desirable. i visit them every day. those are amazing lifestyle businesses for the operators and enable me to run my own amazing lifestyle business.

a dating site certainly doesnt need quantity. it needs quality. the problem in dating is that for the general population, quality is just about average (by definition) - and we all want to do better than average. id say that in dating, youd do a lot better if you ran an actual curated list - and then charge a lot of money. id probably pay for that if i was still looking.

the problem in dating is that a dating site is really just a site where people who are boring in real life try to fake being slightly less boring on the internet. finding interesting people is what makes dating difficult. not finding people per se. unless you are socially awkward, you can just step outside and find people. they are everywhere. screening for quality (or really just relevance) is the bottleneck. i cant have 1000 engaging 30 minute conversations with potential mates per day, or even per month, to screen for what i want out of a longterm relationship, due to time constraints.

the other problem is that so far, there is no gauge for "relevance" in dating. most people dont even know what theyd find attractive. they cant verbalize is, and when they can, its often a lie that they, or the media, convinced themselves of. solve those problems. not the "chicken and egg" one.

i can tell you how to find the "girls who really just want to be loved". but you need an open mind and get rid of all the political correctness first, and im certainly not going to post that in a public place, because its just going to incite hate.

edit: to make this more clear: the solution to dating is not a marketplace. the perfect "marketplace" for dating is a club, or more generally, the real world. thats the quintessential example of something where technology makes the task harder rather than easier. if you want to "solve dating", you need to do the opposite of a marketplace. funnel quality leads. and start with some nonobvious group of people. its easy to find hot young women. it may not be easy to approach them or whatever, because society, but its easy to find them. start with an obscure set of potential couples, like: "guys who like obese women and obese women". those people exist. they are socially marginalized for various reasons and they are probably both at least somewhat desperate. find leads for those guys. i mean, you should really be solving the obesity issue here, but if you want to do dating, do the dating first. once youve "conquered that market", try to figure out how to extrapolate your processes to bigger sets of groups of users.