[mbesto]

> It’s super hard to get a dating product funded by mainstream Silicon Valley investors

Huh? I'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's some very mainstream investors on that list too.

Investors who don't invest in dating apps don'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've heard from a prominent VC who is friendly with the Match.com board (paraphrased) "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".

[0] - https://angel.co/the-league-date-intelligently

[andrew_null]

that's one data point. Not saying it never happens, and in fact, Dating Ring raised $500k or so. But here's a lot more commentary on the topic: https://www.cbinsights.com/blog/dating-startup-venture-capit...

[mbesto]

So Shasta, IDG, Cowboy, XSeed, Khosla, Lowercase, etc are not mainstream?

Here's some more data points. According to AngelList

https://angel.co/online-dating ~38,000 investors

https://angel.co/cryptocurrency-2 ~989 investors

https://angel.co/travel-tourism ~1,082 investors

Yet the market for Travel is $300b (online) and the dating one is $2b (online).

How does that constitute as investors not wanting to invest into dating startups when there's 38x as many investors (by absolute numbers) as travel and yet the market is 150th the size? Seems like it's quite the opposite, no?

If anything the talking point here should be "why are so many people investing in dating apps when their returns aren't great?"

It'd be also helpful to define what you consider "mainstream" before drawing a conclusion...

[andrew_null]

You're being pedantic. I'm not saying that literally no dating products are getting funded - in fact, I'm an advisor to CoffeeMeetsBagel which is on that list. Just that there's major resistance (which that article talks about) and there isn't very much funding for the category compared to a "hot" category like SaaS/on-demand/messaging, etc. My point is that it's an uphill battle, and I gave the reasons why for investors are skeptical.

[TimPC]

Travel is a misleading outlier as it has historically terrible margins and a large portion of the market volume is in airlines which historically generally lose money. On the other hand the market cap from online dating is pretty much entirely captured in online dating and isn't dominated by companies that own airplanes or hotels. "Revenue" that includes directly passed on fees is highly misleading as an indicator of relative market size. I'd rather own a company that made 1/4 as much than a company that passed 90% of revenue to other companies.

[mbesto]

Expedia's 1.1B EBITDA alone last year [0] was nearly half of all of the revenues for online dating services...

[0] - http://www.wikinvest.com/stock/Expedia_%28EXPE%29/Data/EBITD...

[pjungwir]

Not saying I disagree but travel is the poster child of structurally disadvantaged startup ideas:

Travel planning software: The most common bad startup idea

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8419658

So maybe it is not surprising to find few investors in it?

[cdcarter]

For the record, I'd heard of none of those companies, and I've been around HN a while.