Dating products are hard to develop

Editor's note: The development and operation of dating applications is a favorite pastime for technical entrepreneurs in their early 20. Dating products, however, are difficult to develop because they require people to stay online and people do not want their friends to know they are dating online. Now we have

Editor's note: developing and running dating applications is the favorite pastime of technology entrepreneurs in their early 20. Dating products, however, are difficult to develop because they require people to stay online and people do not want their friends to know they are dating online. Now we have a place in the field. Earlier this year, IAC acquired Howaboutwe, a new dating product. The product attempts to refactor the entire user experience, so focus on the activity rather than the appointment scenario. Howaboutwe co-founder Aron Schildkrout in this article lists the difficulties in various development paths and more on how to maintain a realistic attitude when formulating development strategies.

You think you can be a great consumer internet company.

The data indicates that you are almost completely wrong. You have a 95% chance of failing for the following 5 reasons: A your product idea sucks; b your market is small; c) your execution or team is weak; d you are not getting enough investment; E Your development strategy is full of whimsical ideas.

Here, I will focus on the fifth reason: the magical development strategy. My main research case is the online dating industry, where startups are prone to whimsical ideas.

I co-founded Howaboutwe in 2010 and joined the CEO until Howaboutwe was acquired by IAC. Like other people who have established online dating companies, we started out with the same development strategy as the Magic Guide. The vast majority of online dating start-ups have not escaped, and historically there have been countless failures in dating products-boring unrealistic ideas everywhere. We have, to some extent, succeeded in overcoming these challenges; I will say that we are overcoming the small victories of the whimsical.

Magical Thinking (magical thinking)

When I ask some of the founders of the project before or at the very early stage of their user access strategy, they have a lot of answers. They will share a document or slide with policies such as "News reports", "Word-of-mouth marketing and friends ' invitations (word of mouth and friend MSN)" "Business Interchange (Biz Dev)" and "content output". They may even be affectionately quoted by Andrew Chen, a well-known blogger at the tech start-up.

But when you really dig into their ideas and make predictions, the essential features of these plans are almost invariably filled with whimsical ideas.

Here are some basic overviews of this, divided by user access channel:

Viral marketing (virality):

There are only two real viral marketing dating sites in the world: Badoo and Tinder. A handful of other websites have achieved exponential growth (plentyoffish,zoosk,skout) by other means, such as huge advertising spending. In these cases, however, the results have undergone large-scale degradation, facing soft pornography, annoying spam strategies, and the short life cycle of the user population compared to Match.com. In addition to Tinder, the only way to achieve viral marketing in the dating industry (so far) is aggressive (or deceptive). Gets the user's e-mail address book, and then sends "junk mail" to those addresses. Basically, this approach makes it difficult for users to have the feeling of finding love (or, more specifically, sex) here. If your goal is to build a dating site that is not just about looking for sex and has the potential to become a respected domestic or international brand, viral marketing has so far not been able to achieve that goal. I've seen 2 or 30 people who want to create dating sites in the past few years. 90% of these people believe in a magical viral marketing system, and none of them really does miracles.

News report (Press):

During the 3 months that Howaboutwe entered operation, we had a full-page homepage article in the Sunday Styles section of the new York times. This is the best non-TV news that we can achieve. And this brings us 10 times times the user traffic. At this stage, this is a remarkable achievement. Four years later, despite the coverage of such a mega-article, it only led to an imperceptible increase in user traffic. In the early stages of startups, we were the top 2% news-focused businesses. This is key to branding. But this is decidedly not the source of traffic for business expansion. This is hard to understand for new entrepreneurs. They will be too convinced of the growth that such news reporting can bring.

Business Exchange (BIZDEV):

The problem here is how much traffic other entities can pull. For example, in Howaboutwe, we have the idea that we feature large dating sites, and in return they provide us with a list of their users. But small places lack meaningful lists. We do not understand this-we believe in the magic of business exchange. In the end, we found a more effective business exchange strategy (see nymag.howaboutwe.com, how we work with larger sources of traffic to pull growth examples); But finding such a strategy is rather difficult. Many, if not most, of the early business swaps are whimsical for the power of partner traffic.

Content output:

Content output is very important for branding. If you have a product that's long life cycle value, it's easy to make a profit for yourself. But this does not provide a way for consumers to get access, unless that content is your product. Howaboutwe, based on thedatereport.com and Nerve.com, has been a great success in blogging strategy. But as a pure flow-driven content output to join our dating products, this is by no means magical. If 100,000 people visit our articles every day. Switching to a dating site is just a flashy ad system--so suppose 1% of visitors will go in, that is, 1000 of the traffic. Suppose there is a 20% conversion rate, that is, 200 people registered. If there is a 10% conversion rate to pay, that is, 20 paid users per day. Assuming that each paid user is valued at $ more than 500,000 per day, it is about $2000, or about a year, of about US $. Not bad, but this is not an important business. Content output is effective, but not magical.

Search engine Optimization (SEO):

Yes of course.

Paid Purchase/Direct marketing (Paid acquisition/direct Marketing):

This is by far the most interesting category for dating sites. This is the only strategy to build a real mainstream dating brand over time, except for OkCupid (the initial strategy was free, took nearly a decade to scale) and Tinder (to be discussed). Few consumer-networking companies are talking about their early stages, buying traffic as a central part of their user-access strategy (though this is changing). This relative loss is more a matter of magic than anything else. Advertising is the only reliable, scalable, predictable way to get users for a mainstream dating site.

Those who will gain direct access to development strategies often underestimate the workload of core customer conversion and user lifetime value (LTV) optimization. Just building a truly effective customer relationship management (CRM) requires years of work, not to mention that this is just part of the optimization, and this optimization is even just an appointment site with the world's main advertising strategy (for example, Match.com spends millions of of dollars a year on advertising; it is certain that their conversion rate has rarely improved) competition is beginning with the return on investment (ROI).

Therefore, whether the lack of a paid-for-access strategy or the underestimation of the actual workload of the optimized conversion rate reflects the ubiquity of magical thinking in most early market plans.

It is very easy for users to get whimsical, especially for first-time startups. It is painful to really understand the difficulty of attracting users, and pain is always difficult to face. Start: * * Pain Calculation (painmath) * *, blind magical Thinking of the "antidote." * * Pain Calculation (Painmath): Prevent whimsical practice **a. Imagine you are developing new products. Aside from the magic, clearly and mathematically describe a solution, is there any real, proven idea of the product in this scenario? Specifically, how many people will become core users every day to help you achieve 10 million dollars a year or become a member of 10 million of the basic users. (This number/metric varies depending on the business, but choosing some very significant accomplishments as a standard will leave you out of the real early stages of corporate development.) ) b. Figure out the source of these core users. Including the conversion rate and viral marketing coefficient of each filtration phase in the scheme. C. Now cut all "organic" flows (including news coverage, Word-of-mouth marketing, any business exchange, and content output) to a minimum, cutting the conversion rate by 50% at any stage, and then redo the calculation. D. If you've already calculated viral marketing into your source of traffic, carefully calculate the percentage of viral marketing in achieving your intended goals. If more than 0.3%, then you must be cheating yourself. Please recalculate. E. Keep this in mind: any single start-up (most of which fails) has a reasonably intelligent but proud person (as you and I do) who believes that their ideas will succeed. Then do the calculations again. F. After starting your project (although the results are difficult to accept, you will start your project), continue to do such calculations. Then measure your results and calculate the results, and compare them over and over again. The results of painful calculations will be painful for almost all new entrepreneurs, especially in the area of consumer Internet. No wonder we resort to wands. * * Create Magic * * Here is a paradox: to win in the game of doing a good company, you must believe in magic. And why? Because so far, the most important and most powerful user access strategy is to develop a user favorite product. And that--that's the real magic. It's a magical thing that your product can generate real love and gain a deep, sustainable market share. Other strategies are important and sometimes key to development, but in most consumer product cases, they are unreliable. Be clear about this: blind belief will destroy you at any moment. The key is to know what magic you believe in and turn it into reality as quickly as possible. If you can't cross this hurdle, you need to change. A long spell of magical thought will lead to the failure of practice. But there is no magical thought--in most cases--you can't even sail. Instagram is a good example.Child。 I don't know what their early ideas are about the market, but what I can say now is that no user-access program can get them to do this, and when it comes to the cruelty of painful computing, there is no whimsical idea. The key to their success is the magic of the product. Instagram makes it possible for ordinary people to become artists. More fundamentally, every person in this era has a dream of becoming an artist. Instagram gives everyone a magical experience, changes them, and this leads to tremendous magical growth. In Howaboutwe, we've created a new dating style that is based on online dating interactions that should be built online. We make dating sites a real date in the real world. This is the newest dating idea since the eharmony matching algorithm. There's magic in it, and there's a lot of people talking about romantic things they want to do. This creates a high conversion rate and makes our ads more profitable. This little magic (not assumed here) allows us to discard business swaps to deal with the real market potential. This also makes the content output, news report, Word-of-mouth Marketing and other strategies can bring higher than average contribution rate of growth. Tinder has reached a more dramatic level on this point: slide to the right ... Match ... Magic！ It's a safe, hot, and addictive magic. This is clearly the key to their growth. Like other good consumer products, pain Computing (Painmath) produces despair, ironically, magic turns out to be the solution. This is an interesting 22nd rule. It is magical thinking that has led to the failure of almost all consumer networking start-ups. And it is the "magic" of these thinking is fundamentally favored by users, and thus fundamentally become a truly successful user acquisition strategy. You can't count on magic. But occasionally, you can create magic.