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Notes -
Seems there's a market for a company whose whole MO is to pair people up. There are evidently millions of people who want this but can't get it. Profit opportunity! It's no more difficult to monetize than wedding planners. Wedding planners too face the prospect of people no longer needing their services. It's one-and-done in theory. But it's a business form that persists.
My first thought was whether a fixed one-time price model might be salable to users. "It's expensive up front, but we'll keep supporting you until you find The One" might work. But I could also see other changes to the normal model being necessary.
It seems like the obvious answer is a deposit+bounty model. You pay a deposit to register and the couple pays a larger fee after successfully having a serious relationship. Alas for a whole host of social reasons, that'd be unworkable without heavy filtering- too many people would just not pay the fee.
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Wedding planners are essentially connecting couples with event vendors in a way that's aesthetically pleasing, and while the couple goes away the vendors stay in their "toolkit" to be used for the next couple. The planner is going to be generally capable of creating another copy of whatever events they've done in the past, so if a couple likes a wedding the planner previously did, they will be interested in hiring the planner. It's also pretty easy to evaluate: did you or did you not think the wedding looked nice?
A matchmaker is connecting two people with each other, and both sides of that go away: if you see them pair up Matthew and Laura, that doesn't mean that they can produce another Matthew on demand, or that if they could Matthew would be a good match for the next customer. And because it's symmetrical and relational, it's kind of weird to evaluate: the ideal matchmaker for me would produce someone I think is way better than I would have been able to otherwise get, but does that mean he's a bad matchmaker for that person, or are we just relying very heavily on subjective criteria (so she also values me higher than she would have been able to otherwise get)?
Network effects apply differently here too: vendors are happy to give a planner their contact information, because worst case scenario they just don't get any jobs from the planner. But the first person signing up to a matchmaker is getting access to a completely empty Rolodex and a long wait, and unless the matchmaker gets very lucky the second person is going to have a similar problem. Before you start getting any real matching capability they're going to have to have a lot of people paying for nothing.
I guess they'd just have to work for free (while spending for advertising to build out the list) for a while, but those people are also going to be dropping off their contact list as they play the field and occasionally find something on their own while waiting for a call.
There are cultures with professional matchmakers today, no?
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