> Match than demands that we enter into a confidential agreement where we show them how we are able to generate more relationships and dates than they do, and how we got so much bigger along with a lot of other things they want to know.
If you read the letter Match.com sent to him, you will see that he is misrepresenting it here. All they ask him for is proof that the claims he is making are true.
From Match.com:
> We demand that you immediately cease and desist from making these false claims. If your position is that these claims are substantiated, please promptly provide me with substantiation for each of these claims...If disclosing the substantiation data concerns you, Match.com is open to entering into a confidentiality agreement.
I don't know why Match.com would be the people to follow up on a possible false advertising claim like this. I assume they could sue plentyoffish if they don't provide Match with evidence? As plentyoffish points out, it is likely that Match.com (also?) makes false claims, so this could definitely be bluster. But they definitely don't ask for plentyoffish to reveal their processes.
Oh, but you left out the best part of the whole letter! You know, the part where their general counsel says:
Based on *my* knowledge of the industry, these claims cannot be supported.... [emphasis added]
Because, as we all know, being general counsel of a dating site means you know all about things like how many relationships a dating site with X members can theoretically generate, and such.
In any case, this is just meaningless legal posturing. In the United States, where anyone can bring suit against any private entity for any reason whatsoever, a C&D letter from a competitor like this would barely register on my radar screen if I were one of the people at plentyoffish who's paid to worry about such things. Judging by the last sentence of his post, that seems like exactly what the post author is going to do about it.
A large part of that is that he hasn't really updated the site in ages. It's basically coasting, as far as I (or anyone I know) has been able to tell. That it can make that much money without adding 'new and exciting features' is impressive.
I disagree. Terrible design can be ugly, but also a feature. For instance, the squished pictures may be driving profile views (people click to see the unsquished picture).
To the best of my knowledge (and IANAL...), Match has no standing in this regard, and therefore is in no position to be making any demands. Match is not the FTC (or Canadian equivalent).
I'm no lawyer, either (nor am I ANAL), but I think you're correct. In addition, I believe the FTC only really has jurisdiction to intervene here if it believes actual consumers are being harmed by plentyoffish making the claims they are. Since it's a free site, it seems unlikely anyone's being harmed by anything plentyoffish is doing, except possibly for some wasted time. And, in this respect, I'm sure plentyoffish is no worse than a lot of other time-waster web sites.
I can't see how Match.com could possibly defend their case in court if they tried to sue. They'd essentially be asking a competing firm to reveal their trade secrets.
Again, it really doesn't look like they are doing that at all. They are just asking them to prove their marketing claims. My guess (IANANANAL) is that Match could sue for false advertising charges? Or bring evidence to the FTC? Dunno. But they aren't asking for their trade secrets.
True, but the burdon of proof is on the prosecution. If they have proof, the they could sue, but this looks more like a flimsy attempt to gain information.
I believe there's some sort of legal precedent about coming to court with clean hands when you're bring up charges against another party. And Match would be flirting the line of hypocrisy if they want to talk about false advertising.
Nice chart. I love when they break things down like that and can confirm that the graph with the girls is authentic (been out with 2 of them)
One thing these numbers don't take into account is that when people pay for something they're more likely to take it seriously. It's anecdotal, but my experience with hundreds of dates over the years is the women are less flaky on Match vs. OKcupid. It's a case of having to develop a good flake-dar, such is the price you pay for free.
Saying that, I'd never want them to go pay, I hope OK and the like destroy Match, they're just better companies with better ideas.
Lawyers routinely resolve almost all of their work with nastygrams (sternly worded letters demanding that someone take action on behalf of their client).
Mostly because it usually works. A huge proportion of all people would get quite scared from that letter and comply, simply because it looks so threatening.
I'm curious about how common this is with big corporations?
My personal experience suggests it's ridiculously common. People who work in large corporations often feel that the way large corporations work is the only way to do business.
Because of that, they simply look at all the resources they require and conclude that since they require this, that there must be no other way of doing things.
This is why startups can succeed - large businesses are stuck inside the boxes of their own design.
Match than demands that we enter into a confidential agreement where we show them how we are able to generate more relationships and dates than they do, and how we got so much bigger along with a lot of other things they want to know
It doesn't have the best revenue model and it hasn't fixed the fundamental gender imbalance problem yet.
These two problems have the same solution: charge men for membership, women join for free. Every college keg party has figured this out, I'm surprised online dating sites haven't.
Dating sites run on the network effect: they are useful in proportion to the number of people on them. If they charge money for members, they will have less people on them. Therefore someone interested in a dating website should join one (or more) that don't cost anything. Oh, and they are less likely to be scams that way too.
But the quality of dating sites matters too: is a site with 1,000 flakes or 200 people seriously looking for a date better? One thing that charging, even very small amounts, can do is weed out people who don't care. For example, Love Lab: http://thestranger.selectalternatives.com/gyrobase/Personals... through Seattle's The Stranger seems to work pretty well because a) it's already oriented in the community and b) charges, which keeps out spammers and flakes.
You might be right, but I 'm not sure which element is more important: sheer numbers or the quality of the people who have joined.
On a site that men pay but women join for free you're going to find a lot of women who expect men to pay for everything for them, and the only men on that site are going to be the kind who expect to get what they pay for.
Now, I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that, everyone's a grownup after all. But that isn't the demographic that match.com et al are after - they measure their success in how many marriages they produce. Marriage-oriented people are also more likely to be at the point in their lives where they have money to spend to, they're a highly desirable market.
How do you define quality? What you look for in a date might be different from what I look for or what someone else looks for. In fact, it probably is.
The more people on the site who live near to a user, the more likely that user is to find someone compatible with them.
Having said that, "quality" might be important if it's a way of making it likely that users are more compatible with other users, e.g. religious-minded people who want to marry within their religion.
For the heterosexual use case (90-95% of use cases?) the network effect is a two-variable problem. You have to consider not only the number of eligible mates but also the sex ratio, since the sex ratio affects your odds-per-eligible-mate. If there's more men than women on the site, after a certain point the network effect for men actually gets worse as more men join.
It's not that great for women, either, since they're overwhelmed with contact by large numbers of men.
I dunno - bars/clubs haven't really solved this either. Sure yeah, you have things like no cover for women, but where I am the ratio is still not too awesome.
This hasn't really stopped men from trying, though. The gender ratio doesn't have to be perfectly balanced, all is has to be is not ludicrously out of whack.
Clubs can't programmatically adjust rates based on the current balance, though. The best they can do is have bouncers to filter the quantity and quality of men they let in. A bouncer can be pretty clever but there's room for an algorithm to do well too ;)
If partner selection was as simple as being hooked up and talking to a total stranger for a few weeks, there would be no dating-sites, and blind dates wouldn't be dreadful. There's a reason first dates are often for a early-evening drink in a bar - if just talking long enough would do the trick, first dates would be in a secluded cabin in the mountains :).
I like your thoughts on targeting young professionals, and basing it on an existing network such as LinkedIn also sounds reasonable. Your focus on keeping personal information out of the conversation is not viable - remember, it's not just e-mail and phone numbers, it's also suggestions to meet. I also think that the fee to be hooked up with a second person is going to be a major deterrent.
Call me old-fashioned, but I just send relevant messages to girls that I think I might like. Not everything is some mathematical operation to optimize.
Actually the best way I connect to girls is to be openly nerdy. Show the excitement, but keep it short so they don't get bored.
As for the queuing models & Petri nets, assuming everyone understood I was a more than a little tongue-in-cheek:
- Setup your net as a cycle between weekdays and weekends. I only use 1 week of forward planning, so my base net is 3 weekdays (I save a few weekdays for non-dating) and 2 weekend days. 5 vertices.
- Duplicate the net for different stages, roughly equating one stage per date sequence number. E.g stage 1 is first date, stage 2 is the second date, etc.
- Each girl is a token.
- Each token in each stage tells you how your day is likely to go, once you equate the stage # to an expected progress level. Especially early on in the dating sequence, dates can be short, so multiple dates can be stacked into a day (e.g. an afternoon 1st date vs a dinner/movie 3rd date that night).
Nothing fancy by any means. Note, again, that this is pretty tongue-in-cheek, but it does help me keep a rational (and semi-quantitative) focus on what is fundamentally a numbers game. I don't lose my cool on dates b/c each one I understand as a single token, instead of freaking out on how this or that girl could be "the one."
Edit: clearly this needs work, but I'll have to look up Petri nets again before tightening this up.
Good luck to Match.com - not. Any company could try and use this as justification to find out things about their competitors. For example, 37signals claims: "Over 3 million people use our web-based apps to get things done the simple way." Sending them a letter saying that you don't believe them and that they must substantiate the claim by return mail would, I suspect, be met with much laughter.
37 signals line is genuinely horseshit though. They're quite clearly counting people who signup as "people who use our web-based apps". That's a truly false and misleading claim. It's beneath them.
The great thing about user numbers is that you have so many to choose from!
There are straightforward, well-used definitions of "user" for which I have 60, 1.5k, 2.9k, 50.0k, and "well over a hundred thousand" users. They're all equally true and none of them singly or in combination tell you a thing about the health of my business unless you're intimately acquainted with it.
The problem is that 37 signals qualified the statement. They're claiming there are 3 million "people who use our web-based apps". That pretty explicitly means active and current users of their products. If they said they had 3 million registered users that'd be an entirely different thing, and, ya'know: true.
The question is not about what the _lone word_ "user" means. That's obviously not specific enough to have a single definition.
The question is what does "3 million people who use our web-based apps" mean.
A simple truth test: Are there "3 million people who use [their] web-based apps"? Absolutely not. Not under even the most remotely reasonable definition.
Of course you are assuming that there are not 3 million active and current users of their products. If you consider that many people have multiple user accounts on 37signals products (and that they count free but active users too) it is not unreasonable.
But isn't everybody doing that? Or, at least a lot of people?
If your database has 3 millions lines in the account table, it feels better to use that number than the number of accounts that, say, logged in in the past x months. Especially if that second number is way less.
I'm not saying it's right or wrong, but I feel it's one of these games where since everyone is doing it, you have to catch up one way or the other.
If you read "Rework", you'll come away with the impression that blindly mimicking the competition because "you have to catch up" is precisely not the 37signals way. I do not believe they need to be making inflated claims.
What else do you call people who sign-up if not "users"?
They don't say that "2 million people use our apps and all of them signed in yesterday", they're just giving you an idea of the total number of accounts they have in their db.
So if I take a note of all the people who've used the toilet in my house, I could say, perhaps, 80 people would be on the list. Is it now valid for me to say "Over 75 people use our toilet"? Perhaps, but the implication doesn't match the reality.
Perhaps, but the implication doesn't match the reality
How so? Over 75 people have used your toilet.
This is like suggesting that McDonalds' "over xx billion served" mantra is supposed to mean that there are over xx billion customers in their store at any given time.
I'm not sure if that's how you read it, but I certainly don't take the statement that 37s makes to be misleading.
This is like suggesting that McDonalds' "over xx billion served" mantra is supposed to mean that there are over xx billion customers in their store at any given time.
Except that "served" is past tense and "use" is the simple present. If 37signals had said 3 million have "used" their software, this discussion probably wouldn't have kicked off. Instead, they used the present tense, implying that 3 million people routinely and currently use the software, which is highly unlikely.
Plentyoffish needs to hire a designer. Assuming the number he claims is true, how many users is he loosing because of the site layout?
I might sound like a snob, but I have a hard time taking a site designed like this seriously, I don't care how many users or traffic he claims to have.
As far as dating site designs go, OkCupid looks great.
I'd say he knows his target audience well enough to make that decision himself. There is indeed such a thing as being too polished. The reason late-night TV commercials are cheesy and loud is not because the director lacks the skills but rather because it suits the target market. If POF redesigned their site to look like a glamor magazine website, he might indeed lose a lot of users because they might be intimidated by the design.
Its doesn't even need to look like a glamor magazine website (none of the dating websites do). Even if he doesn't need to make the site look half decent, the design itself is broken. Thumbnails doesn't seem to be properly scaled, they seemed compressed in to a smaller version (I could be wrong but the thumbnails are screwed up for some reason) and what is this in ever profile? http://i.imgur.com/Knicz.png
Its less than 5 minutes worth of work to fix that.
I seem to recall reading an interview where this question was asked, and the answer was basically, don't mess with what works....the idea being that, if you're constantly improving, eventually you'll screw something up. He knows it's bad, but he doesn't want to screw things up.
But I agree with you, the design is painful to look at, and usability could be improved a lot. Why he doesn't clean things up a bit is beyond me.
But then, compared to the competitors, POF may not look so pretty, but functionally it is quite good.
It's true. I built the website for my brother's company 6 years ago and it looks, well, 6 years old. Even so his company gets 80% of new clients through the website. He always asks people why they chose him. Most say because they felt it looked like a professional company compared to the "flashy" companies that have more modern websites. I hate how it looks and he's embarrassed to refer people to it, but as long as it works we don't want to touch it.
Through the years we've watched the competition go through one design after another and try all kinds of SEO, but our crappy, framed, obtrusive javascript website still outranks them. The only downside is the constant calls we get from SEO and design firms offering to "help us out".
I can offer one statistic that backs you up. A friend who had tried match.com without success asked me for dating site recommendations. I pointed her to PoF and OKCupid. She went with OKcupid over PoF saying the latter just looked cheap or 'seedy'. He could definitely improve the style sheet without going all super needlessly web 2.0. It would be interesting if he preformed some split tests with the design on new sign ups but perhaps he already has. I did read once that some e-book sellers purposely keep their sell pages looking less than beautiful as they realised it attracted more conversions. The reasoning they gave was that perhaps it gave the impression that they were just common ordinary people and therefor more likely to be trustworthy.
Match.com has been bloating numbers for a very long time, they just seem pissed that throwing money at downtoearth.com didn't pay off. I'd love for them to be forced to be truthful about their numbers for a change too.
Old joke: How are lawyers like nuclear weapons?
If one side has one, the other side has to get one. Once launched, they cannot be recalled. When they land, they screw up everything forever.
You only need one because someone else uses one against you, and the law was written by lawyers in language only they can understand ;) Thus, in the hypothetical scenario of no lawyers having existed, either they would be replaced by some other ruling and representative class, or the problems they solve wouldn't have been invented in the first place.
Often, lawyers help keep someone from being against you. In contact law, lawyers are there to make keep a dispute from happening. A good lawyer will be able to foresee a potential problem and make sure you negotiate it's outcome before you enter into a deal.
If you read the letter Match.com sent to him, you will see that he is misrepresenting it here. All they ask him for is proof that the claims he is making are true.
From Match.com: > We demand that you immediately cease and desist from making these false claims. If your position is that these claims are substantiated, please promptly provide me with substantiation for each of these claims...If disclosing the substantiation data concerns you, Match.com is open to entering into a confidentiality agreement.
I don't know why Match.com would be the people to follow up on a possible false advertising claim like this. I assume they could sue plentyoffish if they don't provide Match with evidence? As plentyoffish points out, it is likely that Match.com (also?) makes false claims, so this could definitely be bluster. But they definitely don't ask for plentyoffish to reveal their processes.