为什么在线约会有很难与风险投资联系

When Match Group, a division of New York–based digital media behemoth IAC/InterActiveCorp, bought网上约会site PlentyOfFish (POF) Media for $575 million in July, smaller dating sites felt encouraged by the Goliath-buys-David tale. Mark Brooks, an Internet dating business consultant who has worked with POF, says the news prompted one start-up to approach him with a business plan.

“They told me they’d like to get purchased by Match in six to nine months,” Brooks says of the would-be clients. He had to set them straight, explaining that the POF acquisition was many years in the making. POF didn’t look like much, but it had impressive back-end features and 100 million users.

That’s the thing about wild success stories like POF’s: They inevitably breed followers. But although dating apps are extremely popular to build, they’re not the easiest businesses to sell to venture capitalists.

The less savory traits of the business include the high cost of scaling dating apps for new metro areas and the fact that the more successful the app, the sooner the users stop interacting with the service. Andrew Chen, Silicon Valley start-up adviser, posits that if POF had been a messaging app with as many users, the deal would have reached $10 billion or more. “That isn’t to say that dating start-ups won’t find investors,” he says. “It’s just that big, mainstream guys aren’t going out and investing in ten or 12 dating sites the way they would for other types of online companies.”

Bill Pescatello, a partner at Lightbank, a venture capital firm in Chicago, is one of those rare angel investors who feel optimistic about online romance. “It’s crazy looking back in as short a time period as five years ago to see how Tinder and other mobile applications have changed the game,” he says.

Mobile allows a lot more dating to happen, period. Tinder requires users to simply upload a photo and some basic information, or just sign in through Facebook, to create a profile “card,” unlike fellow Match Group properties Match.com and OkCupid, which ask new members to answer a lengthy personality assessment questionnaire. Tinderites may be anywhere from age 18 to 35, the younger set being those not yet interested in marriage prospects and likely to stay with the service for a longer time, notes Brooks. Moreover, Tinder’s geolocation function allows users to home in on potential connections — a feature shared with early mobile adopter Grindr, an app for gay men that’s independently owned and in search of a buyer.

“No one looking for a date wants to sit at home alone with a computer,” says Brooks. “It’s lonely.”

Other apps have since adopted the mobile-oriented approach.

咖啡符合Bagel（CMB），这是一家三岁的约会网站，由三个商业魅力姐妹曾在旧金山举办，已在公司的收入结构中结合了一些应用世界方法。与其他服务一样，CMB可以自由地开始，涉及快速注册，但姐妹们还纳入了闪存销售模式，鼓励消费者快速行动。什么CMB为“百吉饼” - 潜在匹配的代码 - 每天在中午发送给用户。百吉饼将在一天内变得无法到达，此时重新连接将花费一些数字豆类，购买应用程序。“From the research we’ve seen, endlessly flipping through pictures of dudes just doesn’t do it for most women” — the goal here is to appeal to women, which most sites don’t do, says Pescatello, whose firm put $600,000 into CMB. “With CMB, you get one match at noon. This is the opposite of getting sprayed by images,” he says.

All of the site’s so-called bagels are chosen from users’ Facebook friends of friends, a premise also employed by Hinge, another app. (Tinder includes people from one’s Facebook network among its cards, but doesn’t only pull from connections.) The friends-of-friends approach addresses another complaint women have about online dating: receiving messages from total strangers who elaborate their desires with a provocative selfie snap — or those users who flat-out lie about their intentions or relationship status. In a highly publicized update in May, Hinge put users’ Facebook relationship status front and center on their dating profile. In the week following the update, the attrition rate among male Hinge users was 40 percent higher than average; among women, subscription rates picked up 26 percent.

Dawoon Kang，CMB联合创始人和斯坦福大学商业毕业生，表示，她认为她的网站将成长为竞争对手。虽然她没有发布用户号码，但她表示，CMB在美国的少数几个全球城市中看到了两位数的增长月份。她可以赶出让她对该部门看涨的统计数据。在美国，在21到40年之间有8000万个单打。就在今年，美国的单打数量通过了已婚人士的数量。千禧一代，谁越潮流，在生命后期都结婚。康说：“在昂贵的订阅到弗里西亚或支付时，商业模式将会巨大转变。As more apps provide services that are just as good or better than sites like Match.com, and people realize that you don’t have to pay $60 per month for a service that may not be working for you, it’s just won’t be attractive anymore.”

那种信心让她变得很容易Mark Cuban’s offer to buy the company for $30 million when the founding sisters appeared on the television showShark Tank. The women were seeking $500,000 for a 5 percent stake in CMB.

Chen在他的客户中统计CMB，同意移动机动性可以重塑市场，考虑到全球60亿人可以进入手机。“谁知道？也许它会使下一个POF，而不是最大1亿用户，将是一个大幅度的阶数，更加倾向于十亿，“他说。

如果投资者开始相信,智慧h venture capitalists will become a lot easier.

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