this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2024
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I've been thinking for a bit now that the only way to make a dating app that actually worked for its users would be one that you pay a single fee for up-front. Then there's no incentive to keep people on it forever: you already got their money. You'd actually want people to have good experiences on it so they get their friends to sign up.
The fee would probably have to be somewhat large, both because it would have to cover operating costs for the foreseeable future, and because it would discourage catfishers.
It might still work as like, a yearly subscription, which would mean more sustainable revenue. I wouldn't do any less than that. And no a la carte options to nickel and dime people with.
You'd also want to come down hard on account sharing and reselling, for obvious reasons.
Problem is, if you go to any venture capitalist with this idea, they'll probably fund it, but then immediately sell out to Match Group the split-second they make an offer, and then the enshittification would begin.
The only way to prevent that would be to entirely crowdfund it, or have some sort of collective ownership and governance so no single greedy bastard can sell out.
I think you're describing professional match makers?
Pretty much, but in app form, yeah.
He is describing what professional match makers should be.
But they're more like life coaches in real life. A total scam.
I thought legit ones existed, but I guess the concept exists but hasn't been paired with technology and scaled. Tech bros are more concerned about making a cheap buck than providing a good service so they'd rather come up with a shitty addictive service that you have to pay for forever rather than coming up with an efficient service that actually achieves the goal.
That would make business side incentives more aligned with the user side, but I could never see anything with a high barrier of entry accumulating enough users to actually be usable.
Maybe its free at first and as it grows in size and activity the cost goes up? That feels kinda sketchy
Yeah, I thought about maybe making it free for women, but besides being sexist and exclusionary, I think that would just open it up to the scams that plague all other dating apps.
At the end of the day, people don't realize how much they spend on stupid shit throughout the year. A full year of Netflix or Spotify or a WoW subscription (assuming you're not taking advantage of long-term commitment discounts) comes out to $150-200, and those add up if you're going in on multiple services.
The price point I had in mind was like $99/year. Shit, they're wanting to charge about that much for new AAA games now. I'd have to do more math to figure out if that'd actually be viable, but it's the number that popped into my head. I think it'd be doable in the $100-200 range, and I actually have a bit of experience with how much it costs to run a platform like this.
Paying for a dating app definitely feels wrong, like you're hiring an escort or something, but people spend money on their love life all the time: buying clothes, going out to bars and clubs, paying for cover charges and drinks, dumping money on OnlyFans creators in the hope that they'll pay the slightest bit of attention to you, etc.
I think if the value proposition is clear and obvious, like a dating app where you know everyone there is serious about it because they paid to be there, it would have a decent chance of working out.
There is the question of how to get people on the platform in the first place, because you're definitely right in that there is a chicken and egg problem. Why pay for a dating app that no one is using?
Firstly, there should be some sort of money-back guarantee if someone literally can't get any matches, to avoid people thinking they got scammed. Maybe a no-questions-asked policy for the first couple weeks, like with Steam. A good user experience would be paramount for the success of the platform, so even if someone doesn't have any luck they should ideally still feel like the platform gave them a fair shake.
Additionally, I think it should be open to sign up for free before full launch, to seed the user pool. I have some thoughts on how users can help keep scammers off the platform by verifying each other, and that would be the only thing they can do before launch. This could also be a way for users who can't or don't want to pay to earn access to the platform after launch. And to incentivize users to keep helping out, they could get a boost in search results if they helped verify a handful of users every day.
Also, if the project was crowdfunded, that should definitely come with either a year or lifetime membership, so that's another a source of users who are invested in the success of the platform, and who are going to be excited to use it day-one.
This is a fairly big departure from what you proposed here but your comment made me think about it:
If you had one time / every 5 year payments, you could charge a fairly sizable amount and then use a portion of that money to hire people to vet, interview, and take professional photographs of every user for their profiles (which they could of course combine with their own pictures, though those would be unverified). I’m thinking like $500+, to be clear - but for that you get:
I have no idea how to best present all that you said at the right time and places to capture enough grassroots attention to actually take off, but man. That really does all read like the perfect "disruption (pardon the tech bro term) to Match's model.
There is a dating website for millionaires. I wonder how their revenue stream works but they advertise that they don’t accept men under a certain net worth. I guess a high barrier of entry could work for that market.
Sugar Baby dot com?
Found it: https://www.millionairematch.com/
You have to prove your net worth. Sugar daddy/baby are prohibited.
I highly doubt it has that many real users. My guess is that's just the total amount of created accounts.
Yup, no way in hell 5m users would generate so few chats. It's either less than 1 match per month for those 5 million, or more like 1 million active monthly users having 2 matches on average.
I also can't register because I live in a poor country, lol
Good point. I guess that depends on a quality over quantity promise, which I guess would also fit op's idea.
You could make it a location based service, and prices increase as the number of users in the area increases. This incentivizes people to sign up when there's not a lot of active users in your area because it's cheap/free. Then as more people in an area sign up, new users pay more to reflect the added value of the app.
But if your app was truly so great then the number of users would always be decreasing in a given area.
There's always people growing up and entering the dating pool
Not at the world's current replenishment rate...
and then they start offering a drastically more expensive tier for a separate pool of higher 'quality' candidates that only want to interact with other higher tier meat.
And then the higher quality pool has a larger percentage of bots than the standard one
I would never pay an up-front fee because my past results with dating apps have been atrocious. I would be much more willing to pay for each match I communicate with, because then if they can't at least find people for me to talk to, I don't pay them.
That creates an incentive for them to fill the service with bots and fake profiles, so that's a terrible idea for users.
If their "service" is an outright scam I won't keep paying for it regardless of their pricing structure.
But without a continuous revenue stream, there's no good way to grow your revenue forever. Eventually, you'll peak, as the majority of potential users have purchased the app, and then its downhill unless we get another baby boom.
Could that not be a business model for an entrepreneur? Make the app, advertise it as a limited time only thing. Get the entry fee from everyone and at the end it shuts down. Like those pop up shops. With proper advertisement it could work well since it would go against the counter culture of what regular dating apps are. They would have an incentive to properly match everyone as quick and well as they can since the app isn't here forever.