Ask HN: How do I make my dating app popular?

You have to think about competitive advantage. What sets your dating app apart from existing dating sites, already populated with 1000's of profiles?

I don't have a profile on dating sites (happily married), but I can imagine that a big problem for dating sites is people pretending to be different than they really are. That's a problem you could solve, for instance by only allowing profiles that have been referenced by friends/relatives. Heck, you could throw key parties (pun intended) where people could swap their credentials!

Or instead of a traditional dating-app, make a geisha-app. It's not a date, it's company.

Just throwing random ideas out there, but the general idea is either you cater to a niche, or you better have a massive marketing budget to take on the OKCupids of this world.

2. livejournal your progress.

3. tell your friends to look at the pictures.

1. You're right in thinking that bootstrapping users will be much harder than coding the site. A dating site requires not just a critical mass of users, but also a critical mass using it in a certain location with enough people that there are internal compatibilities.

2. We loosely categorized our users into 3 groups. (a) those explicitly interesting in dating. (b) those who would consider it, but who weren't ready to make the decision, and (c) those who would never sign up for our dating features. Our early strategy was to (try to) nail all 3 groups, arguing that there was mobility between b and a, and that group c could still be used to spread around dating-related toys without realizing that's what they were doing. All this led us to personality tests and a bunch of other goofy things that attempted to be viral but could also enhance a profile if converted. On average, 10% of our early users became online daters on our site, and the other 90% were spreading the word in one way or another, but we never heard from them again. As we got bigger, we slowly shifted our message towards the dating side of things, as those "growth hacks" diluted our message.

Of course this is not the only strategy. Consider (1) Tinder, a very simple dating app, which has become a phenomenon. I would say it's hard just to invent this phenonmen, though... And (2) pay dating services, which can collect membership fees and then use the money to market. It's an expensive game which requires a lot of cash and marketing knowledge.

Disclaimer: I left OkCupid a year ago.

Can some one from US/ Europe/ South America throw some light on dating scene in their countries. Do the dating apps / sites like okcupid work well ? Or is there local sites that do better ?.

Otherwise, a web property that ranks for certain keywords can still go a very long way. Make a blog dedicated to dating tips and advice. Write posts targeted at people struggling to find dates, or who are not having success with current dating sites. Write about how to use dating sites effectively. How to act on a first date. There's lots of information on the internet already about this, so it doesn't take too much creativity to pool some resources together and make a quick blog post about such topics. At the end of your blog posts, suggest your dating site/app. People who just read your article are filtered to be your target audience and will trust your recommendation about what dating app to join.

a) define the problem

b) get a MVP together

c) market the shit out of it

d) iterate on product

e) goto (c)

Either the product will catch on and you'll be sipping sake in SFO or you'll fail (more likely) and drop back to (a).

Good luck!

This gives you a better chance of success, enables you to test the overal viability and you can learn and improve.

Since you are doing this for fun, you'll probably have reached this goal at that point. To go beyond, you'd have to come up with something to make the thing spread (which by itself will be rather low for a dating app, so you'll need a trick here, or make money from your local users and use that for heavy advertising) or convince investors based on the initial results so you can have yourselves a marketing budget.

and,

some of the big sites develop "characters" over time. for whatever reason. okcupid is too "goody goody, perfect people, over-educated" for him.

e.g. the user-generated questions- he interprets as social directives. He resents questions being painted into a corner. he resents their binary nature.

I agree with him mostly. It is clear that what sounded good "allow users to propose their own questions" has grown into a maze of people who claim they "like the taste of beer" or "don't". The result is the people who make it on that site are the ones who endure multiple-choice critiques and that just isn't everybody, man. People date differently.

perhaps even if you had no technical improvements, etc., but you could offer a fresh new user base of people, he would be interested. so if you try to invite people and promise them a fresh beginning - without the inertia of users of the first generation.

Also pay attention to BitCoin. it has two parallel users: miners and buyers n/ payers. Different groups take part in different ways.

Please email me at hi@josh.ml. I have exactly what you're looking for but not the development skills. I actually built an MVP last year and gained 2k users in a couple weeks at my local university.

I'd love to chat and see if we could combine forces.

That's one of the weird ideas I had while studying relational algebra.

While we're not building a dating app, we are building something that in many ways functions like one, and so we've studied the model a lot. The simplest version of a good marketing strategy we've seen is

1) pick the side of the market which will be hardest to grow organically, but which will drive growth on the other side (hint: in dating, it's the women)

2) pick a region to focus on. The entire US is too large to start. One region, or a smaller country, helps you get started. (Hint: in the US, I would pick a smallish Midwestern region with lots of universities).

3) Figure out a clever, simple marketing plan to drive your selected market in your selected region, and go after them heavily. Obviously I'm over simplifying this step, but it's going to need to be something which quickly grabs the attention of your target market, demonstrates the value of your product, and gets them to become active users quickly. If you're going to make this product work, you should be able to figure something out yourself, as you're the one who knows your product best.

Best of luck!

2. Then pretend to be said women.

3. Profit.

For instance, you could have some way of promoting users that had brought more users onto the site, e.g. if Alice gets half a dozen of her friends to sign up then Bob gets to see Alice listed prominently in the search results. The incentive for Alice could run deeper than that, maybe only if she has got her friends to join will she be able to see all of Bob's pictures or learn about his sexual tastes. There could also be advantages for Alice's friends, because Alice introduced them to the site they might get the advantages Alice has for a limited period of time.

As soon as you 'gamify' people will cheat, e.g. in the above example, Alice might create half a dozen accounts, one for each of her various email addresses. Obviously you would need a method to make this not happen, and, if you solved it, you might have a competitive advantage. However, how long would you have this advantage for before some developer at match.com cloned it?

When Tinder first launched, at least 90% of the profiles I came across were, after a little investigation, very obviously fake. I became suspicious after being "matched" with every single attractive girl I "liked" after having just created a profile. These "girls" had the mysterious ability to travel vast distances in extraordinarily small amounts of time. One second, a girl's location would be 7 miles away, the next, she was 1407 miles away - incredible. If they responded at all to a message, they were vague, short answers that had nothing to do with what I was saying. I also received 10s of the exact same messages from different girls. They weren't trying to get me to click links or buy things. Their sole purpose seemed to be to create the illusion that Tinder was full of gorgeous women who wanted me. After a while of using the app, the fake profiles dropped off, and I seemed to encounter more real people. I thought initially, that this was because they had gotten enough users to show me real people, but I've now noticed that any time I use the app in a new area, I'm flooded with fake profiles and fake messages all over again.

In short, create fake users.

2) http://platformed.info/

3) Some ideas:

- Have the company confirm the pictures on peoples profile (that way you know that the pictures are accurate, not from 5 years ago or of someone else).

- Have the site compile user data, and recommend 10-20 people for a group date.

- Make it a dating/matchmaking a side outcome. Maybe make it like reddit. User generated content and discussion + reputation. I would think that that would give users a lot more data as to who they'd be compatible with intellectually. This could also make for quite the social news site, because people would be desperate for reputation (because single people are often desperate to be not single), and thus site usage would be very high.