This is something that is a difficult decision for a fledgling startup trying to get traction with a highly local product. It is hard enough to get traction in

This is something that is a difficult decision for a fledgling startup trying to get traction with a highly local product. It is hard enough to get traction in one market because you don't have an email list to start necessarily. However if you collect all this great segmentation data and email addresses from people in other cities, suddenly you have a huge head start when prepping to launch in new markets. I am not for one moment disagreeing that it is a poor user experience. Just saying that from a business standpoint, I can see where they may make the decision to frustrate some users initially who aren't in their active markets to get a leg up when they expand. Sure you could argue that if they piss you off here, you'd be unlikely to consider them in the future, but then it becomes a numbers game. People who have a hard time finding a good date may still have that problem if this company grows into their market in the future, and may still be willing to give it a shot at that time since the chance for finding love probably outweighs that one time they had a less than ideal user experience. Anyway, just thought I'd play devil's advocate here as you hit on an interesting lead generation point.