Looking to acquire.

I’m letting hundreds of millions of dollars in revenues slip through my fingers every year by sending people to competitors sites.   Given what everyone else in the market is doing now the only real choice we have is to acquire a mass market paid dating site or build one myself.   I am looking for something I can take and build into a huge site to rival the other top sites.    So if you are selling a site feel free to contact me!.   
I’m going to have a lot of work to do to figure out how to run a paid site properly.
1.  There are a lot of differences between free and paid,  on a paid site people expect limited high quality choices.   On a free site users expect unlimited choice.   This is why things like personality testing work so well on paid sites  and on free sites are considered more of a joke…  User expectation is so different.

2.  Site design for POF is fine as a free site,  but if i use that design on a paid site users would consider it a joke and not pay for anything.

3.  Paid sites require a lot of employees/customer service  and currently have little to no viral aspects to them.
At the end of the day paid sites are currently consolidating and the growth for the industry is flat,  especially in the US.  But within the paid sites category  the top few players continue to get bigger every year and all the others shrink.   I think there is a lot of opportunity right now and a opening to create a major paid site right now.

No more gifts…. & lots of changes.

Spent some time this weekend and rewrote parts of the site…

1.  Ditched the paid virtual gifts on the weekend  not really core to what we are doing.

2.  Instead of allowing you to remove people from searches  I added a new search that removes any profile you have ever viewed from the search..

3.  Added a thumbnail cropping tool built in Ajax…

4.  Revamped the profile system  forcing better quality profiles…

5.  Semi new design and cleanup of a lot of pages..

5.  A whole bunch of tiny changes all over the place.

With so many different free sites all over the world the only way forward is to offer better features than paid sites  and more of them.  But only if it actually helps users.

entrepreneurship

I found myself reading an entrepreneurship  forum today talking about the Inc Article.     I thought I would post here as well as some others might find this useful.

1. I hardly call myself lazy or a sloth. I built the site in 2 weeks 5 years ago. Since then and even now all the user interaction happens in only a handful of pages. At the end of the day there are only so many ways in which you can reorder the search results. It’s like trying to rearrange the deck chairs on the titanic, it accomplishes nothing.

2. The only way to grow a site once its running its self is to have brilliant ideas. Great ideas don’t come from sitting in front of the computer screen for 8 hours of the day wondering what to do next. You have to inspired or have a really deep understanding of what is going on. So a Brilliant idea may start a business but you need to have many many more brilliant ideas if you are going to go from one of many to an industry leader.

3. Opportunity/luck doesn’t come to you, You are the one that creates it. I debated with myself for weeks before posting the million dollar check, and I figured the best way of doing that was by creating a blog and give myself a voice. I knew my free site competitors where going to venture capitalists and asking for huge sums of money, and my competitors where claiming to be first movers etc. After posting that check their chances of raising money went to 0. The wall street journal called after reading that post. WSJ article came out, next day the Today Show Called. The next week my total US site traffic was up over 50% and kept on growing. In Fact many things i’ve written on my blog have made it into the national papers. Inc Magazine story was a result of my blog, and i’ll be going on a national talk show next week again as a direct result of my blog. I post a lot of things on my blog, many of which seem like bragging, but when reporters read that it gives them an idea for a story which is the whole point of a blog anyways.

4. Work smart not hard. If all you do is work hard making incremental improvements you are just like a hamster running in a wheel and never really getting anywhere. If you want to get somewhere you need to come up with great ideas, or something that is significantly better than the competition and execute on that. Then you go back again and do the same thing over and over. Far too many people think entrepreneurship is like an attendance award, where you can win just by showing up.

Flash Image Resizing Preupload

Downtoearth.com has a really good image uploader that is done in flash.    It allows you to resize the image before submitting to a asp.net upload page.    This would dramatically reduce the 10 megs a second of images uploaded to my site! And fix the image sizing problems.

Where did they get this?    If its a custom job  who could I hire to replicate this?   I had always thought this could only be done in java.

My first Magazine cover…

This “super sloth” got featured on a magazine cover this month….    Right before heading to maimi  for the dating conference i’m going to be going on national TV for a talk show interview.  Big month for PR!

Its official Match.com Abandons Paid Dating…

Match.com has launched a free dating service.        They picked a damn good domain name and the site looks really good.

 http://downtoearth.com

 Downtoearth is headed up by Jacob Solotaroff,   the former Director of Product Management and Member Integrity at Match.com.  He also writes on this blog…  http://thefraudczar.com/   On the marketing side its headed up by Steve Hammer  It looks like the project was started back in June 2008.  

It looks like match.com realizes they are losing marketshare fast and paid sites don’t really have a future.    15% of my users in the US pay on other dating sites every month,  but they all say if there was another big free site like plentyoffish they wouldn’t pay elsewhere.    This has already happened in Canada where plentyoffish is pretty much the only dating site people use,  and eharmony a distant second. 

Looks like 2009 will be the battle of the business models,  Free Verse Paid….    I wonder if Match.com will now pay me $7.50 like everyone else  for writing about downtoearth ?    If you are looking to get a job at Match.com’s latest startup  you can see the openings here