Dating : Would this all work?

This blog has become an advice column for that oh so prominent demographic, product managers of dating apps. Obviously this is lacking in mainstream appeal, but it’s been good for my own personal catharsis. But you might wonder: Would this all work? Is this a recipe for a successful dating app? Can I build this and become a successful entrepreneur?

Well, maybe.

My advice is all about how to make users have a better end result in terms of who they’re matched with at the end of the process. Hopefully if that can be accomplished it will naturally result in business success. But that may be be an overly idealistic or naive view. And even if you would give people good results if they were using your app, it won’t do anybody any good if you don’t have any users. Let’s walk through what’s involved in making an app successful, and how (ir)relevant good results are to it.

To make an app successful you need to do three things with your users: attract, retain, and monetize. On straight apps these are very different for men and women. As per usual as explained in my inaugural post straight users are coming in from the outside world where massive gender asymmetries exist and the purpose of treating them differently in the app is to correct the balance rather than discriminate. Since it would be ridiculously cumbersome to repeat this caveat once a paragraph I’m stating it up front and pretending it’s sprinkled through almost everything said here, which makes for better readability but would also make it easy for anyone looking to be outraged to take things I’ve said out of context. Anyway, back to taking gender asymmetries as a given.

For attracting users there are three basic approaches: directly acquiring users through advertising/partnerships, building a brand which causes users to come to you based on reputation, or sponsoring/accepting investment from celebrities/influencers to got them to use your platform and tell their fans about what a great experience they’re having. All of these have worked very well for someone, but there’s a market equilibrium where the possible rewards attract people to go that way until it balances out at an overall slightly profitable but extremely cutthroat business.

You don’t want to follow the advertising based approach. It’s a brutal grind where you’re completely beholden to the whims of the advertising platforms, but more importantly it is not in any way meritocratic. Building a better experience for your users simply doesn’t matter if that won’t drive more users in the future, and if your business is based on that your inevitable business model will be to squeeze as much money out of your users as soon after their signup as possible, then recognize when the winds of the advertising world have turned against you and it’s time to fold up shop before you burn through all your profits trying to get back to profitability. My advice is all about building a better experience, and won’t even slightly help here.

Building a brand has a lot of meritocracy to it, but is a long and difficult slog to get there. Working with influencers is somewhere in the middle, with some of them willing to accept sponsorship for basically anything and others being more selective. If your goal is to succeed on merit you should start off working with influencers who are selective about what they’ll recommend, because that will cost less and be more credible to their fans, then over time transition to having a strong brand yourself. With this strategy giving your users a better experience is critical, but it will take a while and like everything requires good execution in the details.

All of that has to do with attracting women. If you can attract women the men will follow, so that’s easy.

Retaining is where there’s a gap in my approach which be a fatal flaw. The story for men goes like this:

Instead of signing up and having to go through a constant slog of giving your all to impress women who are overwhelmed and will probably barely respond, now you simply have to wait patiently and only be matched with women who have shown particular interest in you and then you can go about trying to impress them with reasonable assurance that your time isn’t being completely wasted.

That one is an easy sell. Maybe women will be signed up for multiple apps and treat the matches on all of them the same, which would undercut the thesis a bit, but let’s assume that there are some number of women who are signed up to just this one app and taking it seriously. That brings us back to the point that if the women join the men will follow, and the story for the women:

Instead of signing up and being overwhelmed by desperate men, you’ll sign up here and with a minimum of effort on your part get matches with non-frustrated, engaged, well behaved men, and be assured that none of them are matched with a huge number of other women.

As innocuous as it sounds, that ‘minimum of effort’ is potentially a high bar. Women have gotten trained by other dating apps to make no effort, handle no rejection, and get lots of men trying to impress them anyway. The spreading out of matches can also be a problem. If your matches aren’t getting spread out to too many other people, that means some potential matches are getting snapped up by other people and not shown to you. I think I’ve outlined a plan where the ‘minimum of effort’ is so truly minimal (do a little bit of swiping, pick the one you like best out of a list) that it’s unobjectionable even to people who have become accustomed to having to do nothing, and the spreading out of potential matches can be spun as a positive in that it puts a damper on guys trying to hook up with as many women as possible. But this is by far the weakest link in the whole plan. Thankfully the dating space is big enough that if even a small fraction of women like this story it’s still a big niche.

Monetization is harder with an app with a dating app which produces better end user experiences, but it isn’t the end of the world. If a user is having a good experience there’s less need for them to pay to have a better experience, so you’ve undercut yourself a bit there. Also if you want to maintain a good reputation you’re limited to letting people pay to promote themselves over others but not to blow past the rules you have in place of how matches are formed. The biggest part of is showing men who pay more frequently to women who are swiping. That creates another barrier to monetization, which is that men who are waiting patiently aren’t getting much feedback on how the service they’re paying for is giving them a leg up, and hence might be inclined to cancel it. Telling the users which matches wouldn’t have happened if they hadn’t paid may help with this. But all of these are high class problems. If you’re doing well enough that you’re having to worry about the details of subscription monetization you’re already so far ahead of relying on selling ads that you should count your blessings.

One final note about something which pains me greatly and I’m stumped about what advice to give is the selling of false hope. Swiping has the advantage that you can show very attractive people who it’s unrealistic for most users to match with thus increasing engagement. Doing this may cause users to reject better matches for them based on unrealistic expectations, but it also may cause them to stay engaged and wind up with someone they can actually get. The harm of disappointment from not getting someone they can’t is going to be far less than the benefit to them of matching with someone they can. Following my advice about making it so men only swipe on women who have said yes to them is good for women’s privacy and avoids giving men false hope, but some amount of false hope may be a good thing. Thankfully the principle that men will engage if there are women still holds, so you aren’t risking much by making this tradeoff.