[justboxing]

I don't understand how their business model could scale, i.e. how they would be profitable, if indeed, they have real person(s) responding to multiple women (or users who've designated themselves as a woman :).

Let say 1 "real human" is responding to 10 women at the same time, the membership income from these 10 users (not accounting for software, hardware overheads even) = $25 / month X 10 paid users = $250.

If this "real human" is located in US, even taking a minimum wage of $10 / hour and assuming he/she works 160 hours a month ( 8 hours per day x 5 days a week x 4 weeks a month), the cost of having this "real person" on the payroll = $1,600 per month!

$250 - $1,600 = - $1,350. i.e. they would be losing over 1K per every few users if this is how they are doing it.

Unless, of course, the "real human person(s)" responding to multiple women are located in India / China and work for $1 a day or something like that.

Or maybe they are using Machine Learning or some sort of Artificial Intelligence, to come up with "Cute" Texts and responses based on the User's selected preferences and his/her past Texts to this "Invisible Boyfriend".

Only in the last case does it makes sense. But then, they'd be guilty of "false advertizing" if they claim that a "real human person" is at the other end responding...

[ghshephard]

You are off by a couple orders of magnitude on the number of people that a real human responds to. They get paid a few (Say, 5) cents for each text, so, to earn around $10/hour, they would need to send 200 texts/hour (which is pretty easy/trivial if you are doing this full time). Each package includes up to 100 texts/month, so, that is 1 real person per two customers/hour, or 16/day, or 320 customers/month per customer representative.

Looked at another way - one customer representative can support two customers/hour (in aggregate, obviously they don't send all their texts to one person in an hour). The customer representative gets paid $10/hour, the two customers pay $50/hour.

Pretty good business model.

[ajays]

> they would need to send 200 texts/hour (which is pretty easy/trivial if you are doing this full time).

Context switching would take a while. You can't just reply with random phrases a-la Eliza[1] . In the article, the "boyfriend" responds to a specific question about Downton Abbey. Sure, in this instance the responder may be a fan of DA; but in the general case, it'll require more than 18 seconds (@200/hr) to just type up an intelligent, context-relevant response.

[ghshephard]

It turns out they watched Downton Abbey, in which case it's a 15 second response. If they hadn't watched Downton Abbey - also 15 second response.

And, from reading the script - it's apparently the case that the same CSA will get scheduled in for short periods of time with the same customer - able to maintain a thread, and presumably, all the CSAs have the thread available to respond.

[discardorama]

> all the CSAs have the thread available to respond.

That's the catch: they have to read the full thread and then respond... in 18 seconds on average! That is a lot. I can barely read a decent-sized paragraph in 18 seconds; and the average typing speed of a professional is 50 - 80 wpm; which means even a 10-word response will take around 10 seconds to type. So you have 8 seconds left to grok the entire context and form a coherent response! And do this for hours at an end.

[ghshephard]

Yes - I concur that if there is a context switch - you'll run into some performance issues, good point. This suggests then that the system performs best when people are doing back-and-forth on a single thread.

[diverightin63]

The service is ran by CrowdSource, who uses Mechanical Turk to divvy out the task of responding to texts at a very small rate. So, it is a lot cheaper.

[justboxing]

Oh Ok! Thank you @ghshephard @diverightin63 . Now it makes sense. Wow!