Ask HN: Given $50k, how would you market a dating site?

Give users $10 off their first date, for the first 5000 dates.

Hold a contest for $50k to the first users to get married.

Facebook Ads targeting people who are 'single', then offer those people free 'pro' upgrade if they refer 3 more of their facebook friends who are single (via a facebook share link).

What makes a dating site work is having people who are going to chime with each other; you don't need mass-market hegemony. So, what you want is demographic similarity but little social intermixing – people drawn from similar, geographically close but socially-separate communities.

In other words you need a niche. I'd hit up – maybe even sponsor – something like book groups. (Pick a major metro and blanket it; that buys you the geographic proximity). Then, once you're rolling, use the success to knock over the surrounding geographies.

Make it a concierge service. Manually match people and set them up on dates (maybe even pay for the dates). It's a lot more work but it's the only way to create incentives to join an empty dating site.

Mystery tickets raffled off to users to go on dates based on compatibility. (Credit goes to my mom for that one)

Get a ridiculous prize for the affiliate that does the most volume for you (like Epic's playboy mansion parties), and spend all of your time and money trying to convince large affiliate marketers to drop whoever they're pushing currently and push your site instead.

Sponsor weekly dance lessons leading up to a competition at the end.

Make it exclusive and hip. To me, at present, dating sites seem to signal some degree of desperation. I suspect that is very common and why a lot of folks won't use them. I'm not going to go on a "date" with someone from a dating site because (a) I don't ever go on anything that get called "dates" and (b) I'd assume that folks that needed to get dates online are those can't get them in real life.

So, if you made them zany events -- like renting out a full restaurant and curating a list of 50 top matches where folks don't get to pick them ... all of the sudden that sounds fun. Or a first class at ball-room dancing. Or canoeing. Actually, I'd prefer even goofier stuff like the flash-mob-ish sort of things where you have groups that baked into their activity / assigned mission you have some reason for pairing them up.

If you can just create environments for people to do stuff that's fun and meet other people along the way without the baggage of calling it a date or the signaling of "I can't get a date", then it's cool, not desperate and attacks the largest part of the market: the folks that wouldn't use current dating sites even if they didn't suck.

do a the worst date contest. But give the money to a charity. Choose 3 worthy charities - something couple oriented.

Then get radio shows involved. Radio shows need new material everyday. Everyday do a mini contest with no prizes for different topics:

1. worst place to meet 2. worst pickup line 3. worst foobar 4. worst dressup etc.

do this every week before the contest ends.

make sure to get the nonprofits involved. Feature a nonprofit each week. Always make a story about how a specific person would specifically benefit from the charity.

Felix Denis in his book mentions selling beer on the island, donating a portion of the profits to the women and orphan fund.

Holding a contest for the winning cap. He describes in detail here: http://books.google.com/books?id=meKL68N5esEC&pg=PA261&#...

word of mouth, would spend money on sponsored blog posts, facebook ads, pr and news stories, etc.

Give away 1 $5k Date, 10, $1k dates, and 100 $200 dates, and let PR do your thing. Spend the other $5k letting news outlets that you're doing it

$50K is not enough to get a dating site to critical mass for a broad demographic. Most dating sites spend over $50K every day driving traffic. So the question then becomes "How do we leverage this initial $50K to generate enough initial traction to demonstrate a scalable user acquisition model?"

The best way to do that is to focus on a specific untapped niche (dating for hackers/geeks/reddit users?) or a small geographical area you can take over. Once you have a manageable, highly targeted audience, it becomes a lot easier to reach them in a cost-effective way. Then:

1. Seed the site with some profiles to start. You NEED to do this. Everyone does this, and it works. Either work out a data sharing deal with a small niche dating site to cross post some(mostly female) profiles to your site or just make some yourself.

2. Males join many more dating sites than females. Since you already have lots of female profiles, you can start by targeting males in your niche. Male dating traffic is SIGNIFICANTLY cheaper than female dating traffic.

3. Spend $10K testing _interest targeted_ Facebook Ads. Don't just target all single males- you will get destroyed by better funded competition. Target by specific interests "Like WoW- Meet Gamer Girls!" and optimize for the highest CTR possible until you get cheap clicks. Once your CPC is below $0.30 or so, up your budget and scale.

4. Spend $10K on carefully targeted Plenty of Fish Ads. They have an excellent, powerful self-serve ad system that many dating sites use successfully. Think about it- everyone on POF is interested in online dating, so it's super relevant.

6. Spend $20K doing carefully selected direct media buys on community forums, discussion groups, etc. If I'm targeting WoW players, there are many forums happy to sell banner space at a cheap CPM. Same thing if I'm targeting athletes, fishing enthusiasts, etc. The general thrust is "Meet someone to do X hobby with". You can also do this on AdWords(content network).

7. Deposit the remaining $10K with a reputable affiliate network. If you offer an attractive payout and have high converting landing pages, you can get thousands of affiliates to promote your site on all of the niche traffic sources you don't have time to test. Pay significantly more for female signups to balance out the site. This is where you begin to get consistent growth every day and can presumably raise more money or start monetizing your users.

The most important thing is to get WOMEN onto the site first, and mostly attractive women. A dating site is similar to a bar or club. Where attractive women go, men follow. Do you think you are going to get a lot of male signups if there's nothing but unattractive women on your site?

How do you use $50k to get attractive women, who can easily get dates in real life, onto your dating site? Offer them something they find valuable, but most importantly, wouldn't be embarrassing for them if their friends found out.

What might that be? What about a charity auction? Men bid on women's profiles and the highest bidder gets to take the woman on a date. 90 % of that money goes to charity (10 % to you, the owner of the site). Women can choose to either make their bid amounts public or private. They can also choose a charity of their choice.

Women don't have to be embarrassed about doing something for charity - in fact, they might drag their friends along for kicks (and among some groups of women - to see who can get the highest bid). They also get to go on dates with generous and/or wealthy men. Valuable + not embarrassing.

To set this up, start in NY. Throw events with the $50k where women get to set up profiles online and men bid on them, preferably with influencer type groups.

You can offer the reverse as well, so it's not sexist (although that sort of controversy mixed with charity gets you a lot of press) and because some women would delight in bidding on men.

Later, you can expand bidding to include other, non-monetary things: home cooked meal by professional sushi chef, help with moving, etc. So the less wealthy men can too have a chance at wooing the women of their dreams.

a) Buy or Rent a Hot air balloon and let the best couples date on it.Choose a couple based on how much interaction they have had and their engagement with each other.(no.of messages passed between them)

If you are just doing a thought experiment, might as well not limit ourselves to ethical approaches. There are two unethical approaches that come to mind, one of which we know someone has already tried, and one that I suspect has been used.

The one that we're sure has been used is simply scrape profiles from somewhere else. Someone just did that, scraping from Facebook, and it made quite a stir. At first you'd think that could not even have a remote chance of working, as the scraped people would certainly notice when you started matching them for dates!

If you were a bit smarter, though (and unethical people can be smart), you'd just use those scraped profiles to make your site look busy. You'd never match anyone to them. You'd only make matches among people who actually come to the site and register.

do a contest to select a group of people where you give them a make over and a perhaps a couple dating lessons. then pair up people on dates. Document everything in videos. what kind of fashion advices were given, what kind of places you should take people to along with dating tips that were given to them. and then post the videos on the website. your dating site could also serve as a goto resource on dating etiquette and tips to improving your odds in dating success.

A big percentage of people go on dating sites because they don't have time to actually go out and meet people. But I believe there is a bigger percentage of people that just lack the know-how of doing things in real life.