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CMB 3 Months Reflection from the Founders

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It’s been 3 months since our private launch on Valentine’s Day. It’s been an amazing roller coaster ride ever since. Believe it or not, we’ve made well over 30,000 daily introductions. A LOT of them have turned into SMS connections and in-person meetings, and several of them evolved into relationships—that we know of, but I’m sure there are more. We’ve had our fair share of breakdown moments and panic attacks along the way but these positive early stats and the exciting comments and feedback we hear from our members are what energize us and keep us going. (Note: This may be getting too personal but I lost 8 lbs over the past 3 months, probably due to stress. Can being an entrepreneur be a new form of diet?) I have to say, we’re extremely happy with the progress we have made and grateful for the support we have received so far. It’s only the beginning, but a great one.

We get asked very often where our idea comes from. Our idea was formed at the Art Institute of Chicago last July, when my co-founder/sister and I made a weekend trip to take a break from NYC. We had been looking into the online dating space for a while-both from personal and business perspective. Among many problems we saw in this space, we both wondered why there isn’t a product that people are excited about. For example, I look at fashion brands and see people get so excited about finding the perfect fitting jean from their favorite brand on sale and rave about it. Why can’t we create a brand like that in online dating? Then we thought about Gilt and other daily deal services—the combination of simplicity, curated selection and time component not only made the entire user experience better and less time-consuming but also made it so much more exciting. Bingo. Our mission was set—to provide the world’s most exciting, curated dating experience.

We’re still very far from making that happen. Our user experience needs a lot of improvement and testing, our features need to be expanded and our algorithm needs continuous refinement (BTW, we’re always eager to hear from ML algorithm experts!). But we feel very confident that we’re on the right path and we have what it takes to help our members find the one.

Finally, we have some great releases coming up—including the eagerly awaited mobile app that you have been dying to get. I’m testing it on my Android as we speak, and it’s very cool to see our own app logo on my phone and, well, even cooler to see that it works well. :)

In the next 3 months, we look forward to providing you with a better product. But we can’t do it alone! We ask for your feedback, and most importantly, support in sharing your enthusiasm with your friends and family. After all, more of your friends of friends means better introductions for you. Remember, sharing makes perfect. 

Thanks for reading!

Marriage rate drops DRAMATICALLY in the US

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A few shocking stats:
1. % of married among people 18 or older: 2010: 51%/1972: 72%
2. # of marriages decline by 5% from 2009 to 2010.
3. Mean age of marriage 2010: Men: 29, Women 27/Baby boomers: Men: mid-20s, Women:early 20s
In a recent survey, 40% of people said they believe marriage is obsolete, including 31 percent of married people! Wow.
5% doesn’t seem like a lot but that translates to 100,000 less marriages a year which can be quite a bit, (2MM marriages a year) especially when you think about the economic impact.
The article argues that married couples also tend to have more spending power which helps the economy. But then again, a large part of the reason for delay in marriage is also women pursuing higher education and career, which presumably means that they will have more spending power as a financially independent women. So I don’t know if this is necessarily negative for the economy.
I’m also not sure socially how much impact this might have. Yeah, your kids are going to have older parents, or parents who are not married but from my personal experience, good parenting doesn’t depend on a marriage certificate.
I think at this point, marriage is perhaps a more of a psychological, feel-good celebration that you share with your close people, and more of a signaling effect for the couple themselves and those around them. What this allows is mentally gets the couple ready for a long-term commitment and cooperation—-which may or may not help with the stability of the relationship.
So all in all, I can’t really see how the drop in marriage really impacts the society in any significantly negative way.

Importance of advisor

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I met with my old professor this week to show him and discuss with him about Coffee Meets Bagel. To be honest, I have been wanting to talk to him for a while but just kept putting it off for one reason or another, mostly being “I need to show him a better version” “when I’m ready” etc. The 20 minutes I had with him frankly was one of the most valuable feedback I have gotten so far from anyone about this product. And frankly some of the points he made, I sooo wished I had gotten them 2 months ago. So here are some reflection:

Reflection 1: Advisors can add tremendous value. And I don’t mean Board of Advisors or formal Mentors etc. In fact, the word ‘advisor’ might not even the right word in this context. When I say advisor, I mean just people with real knowledge and experience relating to your business. It could be a professor who has done a lot of research in this area, entrepreneur who has gone through it, or a smart friend who uses similar product and who has thought about the industry etc. And all you really need is 15-20 minutes. Phone/In-person whatever doesn’t matter.

Reflection 2: Just ask. And early. I have to admit, this one is a little harder for me to followup. I suck at asking. I’m happy to help anyone so I don’t know why I suck at asking but I think this is a function of how I grew up—extremely independently. Anyway, just ask. Just ask. Don’t be afraid to ask. I have to remind myself of this. 

The best thing of course that happened from the meeting is that he LOVED our product! :) Can’t wait to get it out.

Women's hunch

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Hunch, intuition, gut-feeling, voice whispering in your ears—whatever you may call it, I have experienced, repeatedly, many instances when my first intuition proved to be right.
In this interesting study conducted by Psychologist and Villanova University Associate Professor Rebecca J. Brand, women could intuitively evaluate men’s physical attractiveness from their written online profiles. Without photos, they were asked to evaluate men’s attractiveness from their writing. The result—the women actually didn’t need photos to to discern which ones are attractive.
This Huffington Post article does not include the details of how these women evaluated men’s attractiveness and how much it correlated with the actual attractiveness of the photos. The interpretation is that women are generally attracted to confident men, and the confidence level is reflected in men’s writing. And because our looks/attractiveness impact our confidence level, the more confident you are, the likely that you are attractive.
I find it fascinating that even in such short online profiles, such deeply personal traits can be analyzed. More interesting question would be whether this would apply if done among men. I don’t think for women, being attractive necessarily translates to confidence. In fact, a lot of attractive women I know are insecure. Also, I am not sure if men will be able to pick up on these subtle cues. It would be an interesting study.

Why do online dating sites force us to make trade-offs?

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I read a very interesting, funny and also insightful article on The Spec on online dating. As a single, 31-year old male, Frank tried both paid service, e-harmony and Plenty of Fish. I’m not sure why he chose e-harmony over match. You can read the full story here but this pretty much summarizes it.

e-harmony:

“The user experience was phenomenal. All the matches came into my inbox. If there was mutual interest, we’d proceed with the guided communication. This was four-step process generated by eHarmony where you had the opportunity to get comfortable with your match until you were ready to take it offline.

And therein lay the reason I stopped using eHarmony. Having two presumably mature adults getting to know one another via a Q&A computer template seemed abnormal. I could have been more patient, and the website does tell you that it may take up to a year to meet your perfect match, but this site just wasn’t for me. I wanted my online dating experience to mimic real world dating as much as possible.”

Plenty of Fish:

“Dating on a free site is about being active. You have to put in the time and that means logging on several times a day and chatting with someone who may or may not be who she claims to be.

Although it’s exciting to meet dozens of attractive single women every day, it can also be a bit scary. Let’s just say not everyone I’ve chatted with was single or even a woman. This is where pay sites have a distinct advantage — the security.”

His conclusion clearly highlights the painful limitations of online dating sites, which therefore forces users to make tradeoffs.

“If you place a monetary value on your time and user experience, and if the added security features are important to you, then registering with a pay site is the way to go.

Conversely, a free site may be more your style if you’re willing to sift through hundreds of profiles and you enjoy the freedom of choice. I see value in both.”


And I’m here thinking, why do we have to make this choice? Why is it that unless you pay substantial amount of money, you can’t get the security you want at the fraction of time you must invest currently in free dating sites? 

Just wait. I think Coffee Meets Bagel might have just the right solution.  :)

Love, Lies and What They Learned

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Some interesting but not surprising findings from a study of more than one million online dating profiles, conducted by Gerald A. Mendelsohn, a professor in the psychology department at the University of California, Berkeley.
1. 80% of people misrepresent their height and weight on their online dating profile. Women on average report that they are 8.5 pounds thinner (that’s a lot!), and men 2 pounds.
Some interesting findings on liars:
“Liars tend to use fewer first-person pronouns. Professor Toma said this is an indication of psychological distancing: “You’re feeling guilty or anxious or nervous.” Liars use more negative words like “not” and “never,” yet another way of putting up a buffer. Liars use fewer negative emotion words like “sad” and “upset,” and they write shorter online personal essays. (It’s easier not to get caught if you say less.”
Of course, you can’t really extract or judge an individual profile based on such collective studies, so it’s somewhat useless in my opinion to try to use this as a guideline.
2. People still date others who are similar to the-particularly in race.
This is somewhat obvious to me.
3. The scholars found that women have a stronger preference than men do for income over physical attributes.
Duh! We didn’t need to analyze gazillion profiles to figure this one out.
Conclusion: Online dating helps people reduce transaction cost and allows them to broaden their network. So one might expect more diversity or at least somewhat different behaviors exhibited by users when choosing a date. However, in my opinion, the fact that the user can search and browse for profile information with all kinds of information, in effect, exacerbates homophily. In the real world, whether it be at a party or a blind date set up by friends, conversations take place before one learns if a potential date smokes or makes $150K plus. She can gather more data points that can potentially open her up having follow-up meetings with the person, even though, let’s say, he is not a particular race that she is used to dating. However, in online dating, we filter and browse first by all kinds of attributes that we think are important and feel comfortable with.
I’m not claiming one is better than the other. The former can cause a lot of wasted time, but the latter can cause a lot of missed opportunities. Perhaps a balanced approach of giving enough information about the date through profiles, but not too much information that gives a reason to rule him/her out immediately would be a good compromise.

Fruitless search on online dating?

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In this interesting research conducted by Frost, Chance, Norton, and Ariely (Duke University and Harvard Business School), inefficiencies of current dating platforms are revealed in simple numbers: On average, online daters spend 7 times as many hours screening profiles and emailing potential partners than in actual face-to-face discussions.

Spending 11-12 hours a week to search and email vs. less than 2 hours to actually interact? That’s not only hard to believe but really, quite sad in my opinion. Needless to say, the average satisfaction level for online dating lagged behind offline dates significantly (on a scale of 1 to 10, where 10=Very satsified, online dating averaged 5.5 vs. 7.0 for offline).
I agree that part of this comes from the fact that people don’t have time to search/email potential dates. More importantly, however, current online dating model does not provide a good way for people to evaluate one another in a meaningful way. In fact, most important criteria that respondents considered when evaluating partners were “experiential” criteria that could not be judged through standard online profiles. When asked about important criteria in a mate, people often cited factors such as “person who can understand me”, “maturity”, “willingness to compromise”. This reminded me of an interview ex-CEO of eharmony, Gregory Waldorf, gave on Huffington Post. In answering the question ““What are the universal qualities” that people across different countries and cultures look for in a mate?” He said,
“You hear some version of the following statement [from men]: “I want to be appreciated for whom I am and be with a woman who’s not going to try to change me.” That’s a really common statement for guys. Women universally, in all countries we go to, are looking for men who are dependable, reliable, and good communicators—someone who tells the truth.”
How are you going to find that out from online profiles! No way. This is why I think the current focus on matching algorithm among online dating sites is somewhat pointless. Filtering out matches for users is necessary, but only up to a point. After that, the focus should be all about “How do we help the users learn about their potential dates more deeply but faster?”
As we design Coffee Meets Bagel, this is the ultimate question we keep in mind. We don’t think the answer to delivering a valuable online dating product to users is about having more users, more choices, or more ways to contact a person. We don’t believe that dating boils down to this kind of numbers game (contradictory to what a lot of industry analysts or venture capitalists believe).
Til the day online dating doesn’t require fruitless search!

In Romance, Too Many Choices May Hurt

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Recent studies found out if the brain is faced with abundant choice, it may make decisions based on what it can evaluate most quickly.
Does this apply for love?
According to a recent study conducted over speed dates, at smaller events (with less than 24 participants), participants were much more likely to make decisions based on deeper attributes, such as education, job, smoking habits. At bigger speed dating events, both male and female choosers were more likely to decide based on attributes that could be judged quickly, such as their dates’ height, and whether they were underweight, normal weight, or overweight.
Does this explain why city dwellers seem much more superficial?