| Dating belongs to a category of industries that also includes jobsearch/careers, education, fitness, and socializing. The characteristics of these industries are: 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't. 2. There is a social status component: people (rightly or wrongly) make status judgments about your life outcomes. 3. Success means you don't need a product. There's a big mistake that many rookie founders make with these industries (and I'm speaking from bitter experience founding a career-guidance startup): You can solve people's problems, but you can't rob people of their problems. I met my fiancee on OKCupid. I met 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' trust and respect, building a relationship, and overcoming our differences together. We deleted our OKCupid accounts about a month after meeting. Similarly, someone who gets a job through LinkedIn gets the job themselves, LinkedIn doesn'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. A lot of founders look at hard problems like dating or unemployment thinking "This sucks. It shouldn't suck. I'm not going to rest until everyone has the perfect spouse, perfect job, perfect skills, etc." They don't realize that this is not a problem they can fix. If they could fix it, it would rob their customers of their humanity, of a lot of what makes them real. The reason 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. Successful companies in these spaces realize this and focus on one individual sub-problem they can solve to make people's lives easier. Tinder won'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. |
This is a remarkably insightful phrase (I'll be stealing it for my own use ;-) and I thoroughly enjoyed reading your comment.
I think its core message goes way beyond the dating domain and even the wider domain of similar services you describe - it's actually a great perspective on the general startup scene and speaks to a very deep philosophical question - at what point is solving what we may naively define as 'problems' actually to the detriment of people's ultimate quality of life? In fewer words: if everything's easy, what's the point?
I won't attempt to discuss that here, because I'd need to think a lot about it before I do :-) But thanks for the comment and giving me a new perspective to think about.