laurenkay

All while having a newborn and being a fantastic dad :)

Thanks for unkilling, but it's pretty ironic that a piece about Silicon Valley being a boys' club was flag-killed. With HN's prominence in SV, I really wish this were a progressive enough community to at least acknowledge the existence of sexism, and realize why articles like these continue to get written. Getting past the clickbaity photo that was used (we can save journalistic ethics for another night), this was a relevant profile of one type of startup that isn't well understood by SV. I'm glad the moderators viewed it as worth saving, but I really wish this community didn't need babysitting when it comes to discussions on sexism.

Great tip! And that's awesome that you took a class. Often, people think that flirting and dating are things you can't learn, but it's the opposite. Learning to be a great dater takes a lot of practice.

And sorry we’re not in Portland yet! Our service is live in 4 cities right now (NYC, SF, Boston and LA) which is why the contest is offered there, as we have a large membership base to match members there.

We added that to staging based on a previous comment, and the change will be live by tomorrow. And getting signups in other cities doesn't help our stats or conversion rates (it actually lowers them). We have it available since we plan to launch in other cities, but when we do launch in Europe that is great feedback for us to have, and we'll be changing quite a bit before then.

Nothing about that campaign itself was sexist. But mix women and dating, and you get a ton of outcry from the media that the women are prostitutes. As a feminist company, that wasn't fun for us to be associated with, but there was little we could do about that. The trip was mostly a joke, and also because we honestly thought a few people may end up having a good time. And one woman ended up falling in love and is now moving to SF.

So, I'd hold off on insulting YC based on some publicity we've received. And .. all press is good press for growth for an early stage startup.

We have 5 full-time matchmakers with varied backgrounds, mostly in psychology, theater, and working at other matchmaking agencies. We often get questioned more on what makes our matchmakers good, than another company would get questioned on what makes their engineers, or other employees good. This is both because matchmaking isn't a common profession, and because matchmaking is a majority female profession that tends to get undervalued and not viewed as a 'real' profession.

Our matchmakers stay up to date on trends, have exceptionally high EQs, have experience matching thousands of people, and we accept under 1% of people who apply for the job.

@genericuser A big value add to what we do is that we will offer advice to people who keep getting rejected. If it's that their expectations are too high, we have it on our list to guide some people toward Premium. Not so we can make more money from them (our margins on Premium are lower) but because some people need coaching more than they need matches.

Ah, yes, we have been doing this since we launched. The $20/month gets you access to free, exclusive Dating Ring parties (lotsss of people find dates through those) as well as that one match a month. We should definitely surface that better.

Of course. HN has been super helpful today and I'll definitely be working on providing a better explanation - and making other changes people have suggested as well.

Thanks, this is a great comment. Moving signin with Facebook way up on our list.

And you're definitely right that it's the principle, and we should think about that more. I like the idea of giving something, and not paying $20 for nothing. It's a tricky scenario (we played around with the business model for months before releasing the new site) but we'll be brainstorming this a lot more.

If we did that, we'd have to charge $100/match. That's why we have Premium - it's a higher price point for a guaranteed date. But in order to personally match people and provide great customer service, you can't guarantee a date for $20. At least not yet, unfortunately.

We do also have you fill out a profile, and you're able to share any info you want with your matchmaker. You can also update them after each match. If you really want to spend hours and do a more in depth search, that's what Premium is for.

@Minimaxr - Calling us a direct competitor is a HUGE compliment. Thank you! I've talked to people at OkC and they could care less about us now. We're peanuts compared to them. Also, they have really good spam filters etc, so they can (and do) kick us off whenever they want.

Nicest comment ever. Marry me?

@rogerbinns - The problem with being paid on success is that people are really bad at understanding the value behind 'success' and also, it's very hard to verify. Working backwards, it's easy to convince someone that finding their life partner is worth $1 million, and a 1% chance of that therefore is 10k.

But most people still think $20 is too much to spend at just a chance. If they were to pay on success, no matter how good we were, we'd be losing a lot of money. Some startups are fine doing that, but we wanted to create a sustainable business model from the start.

Also, I've heard the 'if you're good, you lose customers' comment a lot, but that is not the case with dating. People who are successful still go on a lot of dates, and the better you are, the more people they refer. Our goal is 100% to provide the best matches possible, so that people like us, refer their friends, and end up happy / in love / dating / having sex / doing what they want. If we had a crappy service that kept 'dangling' people in front of one another, a) none of us would want to work here and b) we'd have very high churn and die very quickly.

Also, to clarify, while I did personally message a ton of people during our early days (CEO in her pajamas at 3am doing anything to get a site off the ground) - this is not at all what we do now. Our Premium Matchmakers will contact someone if they have someone they want to set them up on a date with. You're on OkCupid for dates, right? So we're trying to help :)

Our employees don't have fake profiles on OkCupid, although the Premium Matchmakers do occasionally use their real profiles if they find someone that is exceptionally good for one of their clients. This is a pretty common practice overall in the matchmaking industry - do whatever it takes to find a good match for clients who are paying you a good amount of money for the search.

We do our best to not spam and inspire trust by being available 24/7 to answer questions and personally interact with users. At the same time, we're constantly trying to grow so that we can provide the best matches. It's hard! Cut us some slack? No? Because it's HackerNews? Yea, I guess that's okay then.

Ah, correct. I meant to say also that we used to send people on dates for $20, and the few times people had bad times, they said they would have rather paid $20 not to go. So it's better to spend $20 and not waste time, than it is to spend $20 and go on a date that you know instantly isn't a good fit.

[1] We should explain this better, but when you sign up, you'll see you can tell your matchmaker a lot more about yourself, and we use feedback from each match / date to improve matches. Plus, of course, we're using all of the research we've collected on what makes people compatible. So it's definitely off of more than just a profile, but I get what you're saying.

Thanks Meerko, right on point.

The more people using your service, the less work for each matchmaker. Most premium matchmakers spend most of their time recruiting. We don't need to do that since we have so many users. We also have a lot of technology that automates the non-personal stuff, like sorting through age, height, etc.

In terms of knowing what people are looking for - we met our first few thousand users and arranged a few thousand dates by hand. We learned a lot about what matters, and what doesn't - for instance, how active people are tends to matter a lot more than their political preferences. I hate to pull the whole 'proprietary' card, but we're not very public about how we match beyond that .. will try to add more info to the site soon.

Thanks for the replies, all.

Re: restaurants - maybe not the best analogy. But just like a restaurant, we don't openly advertise it, but when people complain, we're always more than generous with credits / refunds.

I'm working on a blog post to explain this better, as it's much more complicated than I could gracefully express in a HN comment, but just because someone is rejected doesn't mean we didn't do our job well. Dating is a numbers game, and success is no where near 50% for any dating site. What we do - unlike most other services - is work behind the scenes to improve success rates for future matches, if we see that certain people are being rejected often.

For some people, though, the $20 model simply won't work if they find they're not getting enough dates. That's why we also offer Premium, which is a more personalized, tailored approach for a higher price point. Some people simply don't do well with photos, or for other reasons, and at $20, no matter how good we are at matching, it's simply not the perfect fit for everyone.

And lastly - this is our first week with this model, so we are taking all of these comments very seriously, and thinking a lot about how to make a sustainable business model that satisfies the most people. When it comes to dating .. you're unfortunately never going to make everyone happy, but we're trying really hard to make as many people happy as possible. What's interesting is that we've heard almost no complaints about the $60/month model, only about the $20/month one. So we're debating how to make that plan more enticing, or if such a low price point works for the amount of personalization that goes into our service.

Thanks - I definitely need to update our blog since we made so many major changes. (We've explained in our newsletters but I should make those public.)

Here is our newsletter explaining the changes: http://us4.campaign-archive1.com/?u=7bc3b2bd2f03996c6dbee867...

The group dating piece: A lot of you wrote about missing group dates. Ah, we do too! While we are big fans of the magic of groups, we realized that we could either focus on compatible matches, or keep group dates -- but we couldn’t do both well at the same time. Since you expressed that compatibility with one person is more important than meeting three singles at once, we decided to focus on 1-on-1 dates. Scheduling 6 compatible people in cities like NYC and SF was just not as feasible as scheduling 2 compatible people.

Sorry about that - great suggestion. Will add that to the form.

shkkmo is right that the reason we have you fill it out is so that we have the ability to launch new cities faster.

Thanks for this feedback - very helpful.

1) It's now on our list to add signin without Facebook, since that's been such a popular request.

2) The problem there is that if you don't like your second match, then what? What's hard is that matchmaking isn't a common thing you pay for, so people aren't used to the risks involved. If you go to a restaurant, you generally don't ask to try out a meal for free, or ask for a second one if you don't like the first. If we were to provide two choices, we'd have to raise the price. We're the one matchmaking service where a personal matchmaker is going to send you a match for $20 .. most charge thousands.

Additionally, it's not so much about the business model as it is about trying to change the way people so quickly write one another off. If you know you only get one shot, and this person has been chosen specifically for you by a matchmaker, there's a much higher chance you'll give them a shot, which is what we want. People are far too picky and miss out on lots of great people. If you want 1,000 chances, there's always Tinder :)

And lastly, we're going to build a free match into the signup flow, so there's at least that :)

Have a page about our matchmakers that we'll be adding back this week, and you also get more info about your matchmaker after signing up.

You're completely right that we should have more info on the matchmakers featured prominently on the site. Appreciate that feedback and will be changing that soon!

(In short - they've been with us for the past year and matched thousands of people.)

Are you in SF or NYC? Those are the two cities we're live in. Will be launching LA / Boston next. If you are NYC or SF and are on the waitlist, we're able to get most people off within a week. Email me - lauren@datingring.com if you're still waiting.

Predicting who people will be attracted to is not actually that hard, and if you get a match and aren’t attracted, you tell us why and we’re able to improve future matches. Heck, some people email us pictures of their exes and we use that to send them better matches. You’re right that similarity / interests / and whether you’re attracted are all important. This is something that we can predict really well. A big part of this though is that people (especially women) are so inundated with ‘matches’ and messages on other sites that they never meet. OkCupid had a great recent blog post that showed that the power of suggestion is just as important as the matching algorithm. So what’s nice about our service is that people are much more likely to meet, since they only get 1 match and because of the matchmaker suggestion. This is not to say that it’s not worth using OkCupid or going to bars or picking up hobbies but I’d say to do them all. What’s $20 if it means a 1% higher chance of meeting your next partner? I know people hate putting a value on love, but the happiness I get from my partner is worth at least a million bucks (he cooks and cleans..). I was single for 3 years before meeting him, and if someone had told me there was a 1% chance of meeting him, that would be equal to $10,000. So even if you don’t agree with my math, $20 is still a far cry from 10k, and I would have paid a lot of money to have spent less time single. Of course, tons of people are fine being single or dating around, so it definitely depends on your priorities.

Considering that this is the biggest complaint we've heard, we're also considering adding a way to sign up without Facebook.

Thanks, this is great feedback for us. We explain more in our FAQ: datingring.com/faq . We're going to work on improving the explanation and building in a free match, because the easiest way to explain why what we do is better is just to experience it. (Since most of how we match is private.)

We definitely realize that Facebook is problematic. The pros are that it helps some with security, we don't post to your wall, and it makes the signup flow much faster. But we're considering adding a way to sign up without Facebook since it's definitely the top complaint we've heard since the relaunch.

Additionally, our matchmakers review each profile before approving a member. So Facebook definitely isn't perfect, but it helps to prevent some spam, as well as multiple signups from the same person. It also makes the signup flow a lot faster for members.

Perfectly valid comment, and not hating on us at all. If this were just a random match each week, you'd be completely correct. Dating is definitely a numbers game, and it takes a lot of choices in order to find the right person. But there is a whole lot you can do behind the scenes to improve those odds. We've gone through the research, we've met thousands of members in person and coordinated thousands of dates, and we've learned how to greatly improve the odds when it comes to personal introductions. I'd say a big reason other dating sites don't do this is because the more clicks they get, the more money they make. But we're not in it for clicks.