Monday, December 23, 2013

Stupid investor series: today, LikeBright / part 2

I had posted about LikeBright last January.

Now I had read they received more funds.
LikeBright will be a "Stupid Investors' series" case of study.

If its motto is "you'll be connected with other users who are friends with your Facebook friends" like Hinge, that approach has a 50%+ "divorce" rate.

Please remember: If man A likes playing cards and woman B also likes playing cards, that does not mean man A likes woman B, or woman B can like man A with the same intensity or interest. Compatibility is STRICT PERSONALITY SIMILARITY and not "meet other people with similar interests"

Tinder is backed by IAC, which owns Match, Chemistry, OkCupid, Meetic, Tinder, Twoo and others.
Tinder has not any revenue. It is free because Tinder and Twoo, are marketing tools to migrate free users to Match/ Meetic and make them pay there. It seems other social dating applications are decaying like Badoo, Zoosk (planning 2014 IPO), Skout, Twine, AreYouInterested, etc.
Social dating is vaporware. Online Dating for serious daters does not need to be more social, it needs to be more effective/efficient. It needs to reduce the false positives problem.
Remember failed ones? like: LikeIt / TheCompleteMe, Comiingle,  Perceptual Networks, Zingl, Engage (then rebranded to Ignighter group dating, then rebranded again to StepOut), Thread, Triangulate, Gelato (then rebranded to Twnty), WooMe, 12Like, LittleHint, SmartDate and others.

Social dating is vaporware. Online Dating for serious daters does not need to be more social, it needs to be more effective/efficient. It needs to reduce the false positives problem.
C-level executives are cooking barbecues under the water (selling smoke) and not paying attention to latest research from Academics which could be beneficial for the Online Dating Industry.
Wasting precious time with Matchmakers which should be obsolete. Like eHarmony Plus (eH+) that costs USD 5,000!
eHarmony is a 13+ years old obsolete site and a HOAX, based on a big scientific fraud.

Worldwide there are less than 7 million paid members (adding up all the ones at eHarmony, Match, Chemistry, Meetic, MeeticAffinity, OkCupid, PeopleMedia's Communities, PlentyOfFish, Parship/eCift, and others).
The market remains enormous for new players. 

2 comments:

  1. Hi Fernando, I just discovered this blog, it's a very nice resource.
    Though I don't understand how you can say that Tinder is a marketing tool to migrate users to Match, there's probably less than 1% of the users that know the 2 services are linked.
    Another thing : why in the first place consider that personality similarity and compatibility are synonyms ? Is there evidence that all personality types are attracted by similar personality types ? I have at least a lot of anecdotal evidence that some people are constantly attracted to specific personality types that are not theirs. There's also of course physical appearance that we cannot play much on, but there's also social status, culture, and a whole bunch of noisy traits like humor, or dishonesty in profile filling that make long term compatibility assessment so tricky.
    Now I think the current state of things could use some improvement in this area, but can it really make things like twice better ?
    You're talking about diminishing the false positive rate, but it seems to me a lot of the services you mention are aimed at increasing the participation, tinder makes it very easy because there's few investment, social makes it easier psychologically easy as you're not "really" meeting strangers and women are less likely to receive spams or desperate copy pasted or rude proposals. The success rate can stay bad if the process is more enjoyable don't you think ?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Please read The next wave of innovation!
    http://onlinedatingsoundbarrier.blogspot.com.ar/2013/06/the-next-wave-of-innovation.html

    ReplyDelete