Perhaps we need something like a non-profit donation-driven Signal Foundation but for free dating. It would use concepts from distributed systems, namely backpressure, throttling, and rate-limiting to ensure that almost everyone can feel a winner.
Perhaps we need something like a non-profit donation-driven Signal Foundation but for free dating. It would use concepts from distributed systems, namely backpressure, throttling, and rate-limiting to ensure that almost everyone can feel a winner.
Surely the promise of "exactly like what OKCupid used to be and without secretly trying to fuck your wallet or waste your time, $5/month" would bring in tons of customers, including women.
And then when Match Group comes knocking with a bag of money, even if you sell to them, they can't own the model. Just spin it up again with a new name.
People like to talk about how making successful matches loses customers, but you can honestly view the business like how real-estate prices always go up because there are just always more people today who need housing than there were yesterday. You don't need to keep milking existing customers. New potential customers are constantly coming of age faster than you can match them together anyway.
How’re you going to get people to know about your app if you don’t have a large marketing budget? It’s gonna be hard. You’d need a big influencer or celebrity or something to pimp it out. You’re then running into the same issue.
Also, no one wants to pay for a dating app upfront. Especially women. Remember, women basically never pay for these apps. It’s men who pay. It’s the same shit for nightclubs. Women are insanely desirable users purely for the sake of generating more revenue off the men.
Why would you not have a marketing budget?
> Also, no one wants to pay for a dating app upfront. Especially women.
That's interesting, because I just read an article talking about how people, especially women, are fed up with their dating apps now.
Maybe instead of abusing the women on your platform by stringing them along to keep them around for as long as possible, give them a good experience and get them to get their friends to sign up.
If you take VC money, you’re back at the same issue as every other dating app. Growth at all costs.
You’d need a benevolent billionaire or something to make this app happen.
One possible way to remedy this: the dating app is free to sign on, but you pay a fee when you quit. This would incentivize the app to find you a good match as soon as possible. The issue is, how to know when a match is successful?
There are many ultra wealthy people that recognize declining birth rates and population will destroy economic growth, and that this isn't a problem that can be solved with more competition.
In software, when there's a technology that can benefit everyone in an industry but individual control creates perverse incentives, companies will band together to create standards organizations or non-profits to harness the tech in a way that benefits everyone. This already happens with the Linux Foundation and open-source more generally.
Dating apps should have the same model because the negative externality of a perpetually single society is going to kill the economy and possibly destroy the world.
Hence the corporate and government push for open borders and mass migration despite citizen/voters opposition and the shift towards right wing populism.
Ever hear of Angela Merkel and her Willkommenskultur which upset a lot of people and countries? And various EU politicians promoting the same policy.
It can't destroy the world if it kills the economy. One or the other.
It would be like your PT offering you infinite visits. The whole point of PT is for me to get better. If I’m still coming in a year I probably need surgery not more Physical Therapy.