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Seems a little weird to me, honestly. I mean, we started curating our own dating on the web to get away from this type of haphazard matchmaking, didn't we? This

Seems a little weird to me, honestly. I mean, we started curating our own dating on the web to get away from this type of haphazard matchmaking, didn't we? This seems a bit like reinventing the horse and carriage. And anyway, since when was flirting with people online work?! It's also a little insulting to not even be the one selecting your date. I know we get set up by our friends now and then, but they are our friends, not some random service on the Internet. This service has not built trust, and its results seem to me fundamentally dubious.

gyardley 12y ago
I thank whatever powers are out there that I'm married, because when I see the time and effort my single friends sink into meeting people online, it certainly looks like work.
- TeMPOraL 12y ago
  From both observation and personal experience I believe that for typical person from a western city finding a partner gets orders of magnitude more difficult the moment you finish college. In high school and at university, you're constantly exposed to hundreds of possible dates, but after that your social circle tends to shrink to your family, friends and coworkers. Expanding the circle and eventually finding someone starts to require effort.
laurenkay 12y ago
We're still primarily in the first wave on online dating - where we've added a layer of technology to make something as important as finding dates easier. But as with any first wave of technology, there are tons of flaws, and on average it takes 7 hours on an online dating site to line up a date. The majority of online daters are dissatisfied with how long it takes to get a date, and the quality of dates they meet in person. Additionally, 90% of people lie in their online profiles, and most people are not very certain about who they're looking to date - much less who they're looking to date based on just browsing an online profile. If you do want to select your date, there are tons of these 'first wave' online dating websites to do that. But we wanted to provide a different experience, and use matchmakers to make the overall experience better. In other industries, it is accepted that you need an expert to help out. You wouldn't have a friend perform heart surgery on you. But societally, there's a huge stigma against needing professional help to find dates, which is quite silly, when it's one of the top drivers of life in general and when statistically, no matter who you are, it's really, really hard to find people you connect with. In terms of building trust, that's what our relaunch is all about. If you sign up, we'll send you a promo code for a free match, and we do much more than any other service to gain our users' trust - from monthly parties with everyone who works at the company, to live chat through our site, to personalized notes about why each match was selected (plus, of course, email support). Creating a great dating site that people trust is a really, really challenging feat, and not one achieved overnight, but we're working as hard as we can to get there.

gyardley 12y ago

I thank whatever powers are out there that I'm married, because when I see the time and effort my single friends sink into meeting people online, it certainly looks like work.

TeMPOraL 12y ago
From both observation and personal experience I believe that for typical person from a western city finding a partner gets orders of magnitude more difficult the moment you finish college. In high school and at university, you're constantly exposed to hundreds of possible dates, but after that your social circle tends to shrink to your family, friends and coworkers. Expanding the circle and eventually finding someone starts to require effort.

laurenkay 12y ago

We're still primarily in the first wave on online dating - where we've added a layer of technology to make something as important as finding dates easier. But as with any first wave of technology, there are tons of flaws, and on average it takes 7 hours on an online dating site to line up a date. The majority of online daters are dissatisfied with how long it takes to get a date, and the quality of dates they meet in person. Additionally, 90% of people lie in their online profiles, and most people are not very certain about who they're looking to date - much less who they're looking to date based on just browsing an online profile. If you do want to select your date, there are tons of these 'first wave' online dating websites to do that. But we wanted to provide a different experience, and use matchmakers to make the overall experience better. In other industries, it is accepted that you need an expert to help out. You wouldn't have a friend perform heart surgery on you. But societally, there's a huge stigma against needing professional help to find dates, which is quite silly, when it's one of the top drivers of life in general and when statistically, no matter who you are, it's really, really hard to find people you connect with. In terms of building trust, that's what our relaunch is all about. If you sign up, we'll send you a promo code for a free match, and we do much more than any other service to gain our users' trust - from monthly parties with everyone who works at the company, to live chat through our site, to personalized notes about why each match was selected (plus, of course, email support). Creating a great dating site that people trust is a really, really challenging feat, and not one achieved overnight, but we're working as hard as we can to get there.