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Software-wise, there are plenty of apps that are barely manned, generating zero revenue and somehow still exist. I think the main cost of dating apps is marketing, advertising on non-software platforms where you might find young women. It's the holy grail of advertising and it takes top-dollar to get it.
There's something counter-productive about women going on dating apps, as needing to jump through hoops, filing forms and boxes and so on is a signal that a woman is not attractive enough to just have a knight in shiny armor show up for her. So perhaps this is something that should be left to her parents. Perhaps already a thing in China. Otherwise with technology-minded millennials' children reaching adult age it should be. I know I'm concerned about my daughter's marriage prospects, so if I have to sign her up to an app to have access to a pool of relevant bachelors the world over, it might be worth it.
Otherwise another solution would be some kind of wife-hunting service, for this guy:
No need to have the women sign up for that, just identify them and let the customer actually do the effort of dating them. What's Palantir for?
There was a famous noughties fake website offering exactly that service. Large parts of the MSM were taken in and wrote outraged articles about how awful it was.
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Really, it's the same for a man. Attractive men (some combination of looks, personality, and social presence/status) don't need to put more than a cursory effort into getting women. They just show up to places and women make themselves available to them - maybe not every single time they go somewhere, but often enough that "meeting decent women who are willing to fuck" is a solved problem. Of course, meeting a woman that the attractive man would be willing to settle down with is a completely different issue.
So I think that if an attractive man is using a dating app, it's just for convenience.
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Would you pay 1k a year to give your daughter a better shot at marriage? Whats the upper limit you’d be willing to spend per year with a lump sum at the wedding? One really needs to think of the funding model of these companies they are VC invested short term companies where the goal is to hit a suitable critical mass of users and then ratchet the crank to turn a profit. And the barrier to entry is in the dirt. Their mercenary network of users is pretty much only the moat.
You've rediscovered Greek life. The entire point of sending your daughter to join a sorority is to make sure your son in law is wealthy and culturally compatible. They dress it up with dance routines and mansions to make it more appealing to eighteen year old girls, of course. But the SEC parents are the ones paying for it, not the girls.
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1k is nothing. If she gets married in her early twenties that's less than 10k.
Many people spend a lot more than that just on the wedding day.
Many parents spend a lot more than that every year keeping their kids in private schools where they can ensure their kids are around other 'good-enough' kids. Many parents spend a whole lot more than that sending their young adult women to college for the reward of them ending up childless girlbosses or worse.
Ideally the service should be able to vet out people with criminal pasts or tendencies, certain early-adulthood onset mental illnesses, scammers, etc.
If you want to get into a delivery-based system, it should go beyond the wedding. A husband who disappears, becomes a deadbeat, starts a second family, becomes a reddit moderator, etc, should not be considered 'success'. Perhaps some kind of life insurance model with a mafia/bounty-hunting component for retribution would work.
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In theory that's what keeper.ai is working towards.
Interesting site, but I’m not sure what the AI adds other than marketing gimmicks. Matchmaking algorithms are apparently good enough, okcupid was successful before match.com bought it and heavily monetized it into oblivion.
Yes, there legitimately should be no need for the 'matchmaker' role at all, if they let you search with the precision that I'd like.
Imagine if Google, instead of returning an array of results that are mostly responsive to your query, it showed you a snapshot of some webpage that sort of matches your general interests, and then makes you swipe through each one individually. A large enough database with a powerful enough search function shouldn't need a middleman I have to pay to find and access the result I want.
I think the appeal of Keeper is the promise of basically "one and done" being a real possibility rather than a whole process, so if you're really to in the mood for going through the process for months on end, they give you a shortcut.
I get the vision, but i think the average user is going to use it to search for the hottest member of the opposite sex they can find in their radius (lets be real it will almost always be men -> women) that meets some of their criteria. This just devolves into the pareto problem again. If you are a hot woman you are going to get spammed with messages. Theoretically a good matchmaking app acts as a filter by preventing you from needing to see all the spam and only connecting you to mates that it thinks are comparable.
That might be the sales pitch but is there any evidence of it? Thats essentially both OKC, Hinge, and hundreds of other matchmaking services pitch too.
Well yes and no.
If ALL you had to go on was physical appearance, then yeah you zero in on the pure 'hottest' and drop from there.
But OKCupid in its prime let you get granular and find someone who was 'hot' in the way you actually prefer, and would have enough preferences in common that you could actually expect a positive interaction.
And of course it let you identify various dealbreakers easily so you didn't waste time.
These days I basically can only snap judge someone based on whether they have a nose ring or they have aggressively liberal politics mentioned on their profile.
Nah I think that's the hilarious thing. The sales pitch of swipe apps is "we'll connect you with so many people! The possibilities are (theoretically) endless!" and they never explicitly promise those connections are likely to go anywhere.
The bait is the theoretical ability to find that perfect match amongst the detritus... whilst denying you the tools necessary to do so.
They avoid any, call it 'liability' for providing 'bad' matches because hey, you're the one swiping on these people, we're just putting them profile in front of you. But if it DOES work out somehow be sure to thank us because but for us that connection wouldn't have happened!
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Perhaps some kind of ranked competition system? Let the men have a way to express interest, then set them up in 1-on-1 or 1-on-many competitions. Could be actual physical fights, could be 'paperwork-filling competition' or even filling captchas, if the problem is simply that a given woman will get too much volume, forcing captcha would make it harder for male users to flood too many women at once. Perhaps have a setting for women to be able to pick the competition, or let the male users pick the competitions they want to engage in.
Lol if this existed it would make me regret being born a man even more, the sheer joy of being able to force all my suitors to compete in a tournament of Twilight Imperium 4E for my interest would be too fun.
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You could apply the filter to messages, too. Perhaps with "... and here's 99+ more that don't quite meet your filters" glimpse of what you can get if you compromise a bit.
Sounds like we are just reinventing pre-sale OG OkCupid. Which was great, so great they got bought and neutered.
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The AI adds apparently nothing because the app doesn't work due to the creators pairing people by hand. Why even be a website at that point?
Marketing probably, and giving me amusement. Gotta get on the AI grindset for VC funding.
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