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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.  :)

Original Article

Don’t Waste Time.

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I read this several weeks ago but I really like it and have been thinking about it a lot so want to post it here for a reminder for myself.
It’s a post by Jason Freedman. You can read it here.
I often get distracted and think about all kinds of things that I need to look into, like talking to investors, getting terms and conditions right, making connections etc. That’s all you read in the startup world online so it makes me nervous that I might not be spending enough time doing that. But honestly, Jason is right. Customers don’t care how you build the product—they care about the product. So let’s focus on that.
I also realized that when people tell me “you need to be out there and talking to potential investors”—there are different degrees of “talking” that you can do. For example, our product is not out yet so I’m very hesitant about talking to anyone that I don’t know about the business in details. I often struggle with how much information I should reveal, and whenever I politely give a vague-enough answer, I end up feeling a bit awkward. But the more I engaged in such conversation, the more I realized that people are often okay with this vague answer, and there are still a lot of critical feedback that I can get from talking generally about industry problems and solutions.
So by “talking to investors” it’s not necessarily that you talk to them or pitch to them about your business. It’s talking to them about your interest, your passion, your industry, your insights etc. And just being around to keep yourself familiar in the scene. That’s what it is.
Even as I write this, it is still somewhat hard for me to “talk” to strangers at networking events without being able to really “talk” to them about my product. But it’s definitely more clear now.

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?

/in , /by

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?