Dating Services

Last month, Tinder rolled out its new and highly anticipated premium service Tinder Plus, which had been teased in the press with few details for months. But rather than praising its new features, Tinder has been criticized for discrimination. The company charges $9.99 per month for users in their twenties, but once you hit the magical age of 30, the price jumps to $19.99.

Compare this to the price daters pay for a service like eHarmony ($18.95 per month with a 12-month commitment as of this posting), which touts its match-making capabilities, and Tinder seems like a rip-off. After all, the monthly fee for eHarmony includes a lot of filters to help find a more "quality" match - an extensive questionnaire, a detailed profile, and a “communications process” - all aimed at helping you find a lasting relationship. While people do find good matches on Tinder, it's a lot more hit-or-miss.

Still, people seem to prefer the game-like swiping of Tinder. And according to experts, they will probably pay for it – even if they are 30 or older.

A recent article in The Washington Post claimed that there is a war among dating services like Tinder and eHarmony, who are categorizing daters and their behaviors according to their ages. Tinder assumes that younger daters are their target market (after all, the service began with heavy promoton on college campuses before it was unleashed on the greater population). eHarmony however, is going after the more “seasoned” dater, who has had enough with all the hook-ups and wants a real relationship.

The online dating industry is said to be worth about $2.2 billion, with one in ten adults averaging more than an hour a day on a dating site or app. This rise in popularity isn’t a coincidence – it’s gone hand-in-hand with the amount of time we spend on our phones – a near-constant accessory. Tinder appeared at the right time and made online dating seem like a game, and more importantly, removed its stigma.

The popularity of Tinder however has had a cost among daters. There is an assumption that the app is only for hooking up, and that people using dating apps aren’t serious daters. At least, this perception has been what traditional dating sites like eHarmony have been pushing. It founder Neil Clarke Warren told The Washington Post: “They put all their money on one variable: looks. That fills me with quite a few little chills… I have presided over the funerals of more marriages than any psychologist, and it is miserable.”

eHarmony isn't the only one speaking about Tinder's flaws. “There are limits to the percentage of single people who will become active Tinder users and repeating ‘casual daters,'” Morgan Stanley analysts told their clients in February. “And in our view, Tinder is reaching those limits.”

So what does this mean? Is Tinder trying to embrace their young daters as the future of dating, or does eHarmony recognize they will never have a service that’s so addictive and easy to use?

Both services offer very different ways of meeting people, and attract different types of users. But it will be interesting to see who will pay for them going forward.

Female Tinder users have dealt with a lot of inappropriate messages from men when dating through the app – it’s one of the issues challenging dating apps today. Men are particularly aggressive in their flirting, crossing boundaries with their sexual suggestions and then wondering why they don’t hear back.

A California-based computer engineer, who incidentally met his girlfriend on Tinder, had heard a lot of his female friends complaining about the guys messaging them over the dating app. In an interview with website The Verge, he disclosed that he had been able to hack Tinder, matching straight guys with other straight guys to see how their typically aggressive flirting progresses.

"The original idea was to throw that back into the face of the people doing it to see how they would react," the hacker said.

His program identifies two men who swipe right on one of his bait profiles (one using a prominent vlogger’s image, the second one of a friend who had let him use her photos). Then they are matched to each other (since they already have the woman they were originally attracted to in common). The suitors’ messages, according to The Verge, were all “unabashedly flirtatious” and relayed back and forth to each other through the dummy profile. Sometimes, it took several messages before the duped men started to figure out something was off.

The creator of the hack apparently stepped in before things got to heated and the matches decided to meet in person. Most of them seemed very confused after exchanging a few flirtatious emails, only to discover later that they weren’t flirting with women, but other men. The hacker witnessed about 40 conversations in the first twelve hours.

It has been reported that Tinder is vulnerable to hacks. There have been a few instances of people tweaking the app to “mass-like” several women at the same time, improving their odds of getting a match exponentially.

The Tinder hacker looked into Tinder’s API and discovered it had few safeguards. “Tinder makes it surprisingly easy to bot their system,” he said. “As long as you have a Facebook authentication token, you can behave as a robot as if you were a person.”  

When asked how he feels about hacking into Tinder’s system, he has mixed feelings. "They ignore all the signs, they ignore all the weird things," he says of the users. "When someone is so quick to meet up without any detail or know anything about the person at all — maybe it’s deserved."

Before flirting with someone you just met over Tinder, you might want to ask a few basic questions first.

Do you have Tinder overload? You’re not alone. Dating apps have made meeting people easier than ever, but dating behavior can be pretty brutal. Messages go unanswered, and connections are forgotten in favor of swiping left and right. With all of the distractions and annoyances that come with dating today, it’s difficult to get to know someone special.

Maybe it's time to disconnect.

When you’re experiencing frustration and overwhelm, it’s a good time to take a break so you can recharge. A fantastic benefit of being single is learning how to take care of yourself without relying on someone else to come along and do it for you. Instead of dating aimlessly and without much enjoyment, focus on yourself and what makes you happy.

Following are some tips to nurture your heart and soul and get you back and ready to date again:

Get away. There’s nothing that lifts the spirit like a new setting. It’s easy to plan a getaway when you’re single – there’s nobody else’s schedule preventing you from making plans, so take advantage! Plan a weekend getaway with friends or jump in your car for an impromptu road trip, even if it’s just for a day. It will give you a much-needed break from routine.

Set a goal and work towards it. Have you ever dreamed of running a half marathon, or finishing college, or getting that certification for a new career? Now is the time to establish your personal priorities outside of a relationship. When you find someone special, you will still want to challenge yourself – why not start now?

Learn a new hobby or sport. This is the perfect time to explore. You learn about yourself when you try new things – sometimes a new activity can become a stress relief and source of life-long happiness, whether you're in a relationship or not. You never know unless you try. So sign up for Zumba, join a volleyball meet-up, or try out that pottery making class – whatever sounds interesting to you, give it a try.

Relax. Sometimes the stress of dating takes a physical toll on our bodies as well as our psyches. For me, hiking and running were great ways to get out of my own head and truly relax. For others, it’s booking a massage or meeting friends for dinner. Fill your schedule with activities that replenish your spirit, and you will find you have more energy, too.

Meditate or practice yoga. This might sound New-Agey, but yoga and meditation are truly helpful ways to let go of anxiety, and there’s a lot of it in dating. Practice taking deep breaths, sitting still for a period of time, and stretching your body on a regular basis. These techniques help you feel more comfortable in your own skin, and less worried about where you “should” be in life. This is most important when it comes to finding a truly fulfilling relationship – you realize that you are enough, no matter what.

You may know Coffee Meets Bagel as the company that turned down the largest offer in Shark Tank history.

For those of you keeping score, that would be a mind-blowing $30 million from Mark Cuban.

Entrepreneurs and sisters Arum, Dawoon, and Soo Kang came to the tank seeking $500,000 for 5 percent of Coffee Meets Bagel, a dating service that uses Facebook profile info to make matches between friends of friends. Without flinching, they rejected Cuban's $30 million offer on the grounds that they saw CMB growing as big as Match, a billion-dollar business.

Anyone else wiping sweat off their foreheads just thinking about that?

CMB went on to close a $7.8 million series A financing round earlier this year, and has now started its international expansion with Hong Kong. The sisters chose Hong Kong for their international launch due to “the highly social nature of life in this city,” they told Forbes, “coupled with the fact that people are often time poor thanks to long work hours.”

Dawoon Kang lived in HK for three years while working at J.P. Morgan, so she's well-versed in the city's dating scene. “Hong Kong is a very young, vibrant city full of ambitious singles in their 20s and 30s who are eager to meet new people but have very little time for it,” she explains. Coffee Meets Bagel was designed for exactly that market of busy young professionals, making Hong Kong an ideal choice for expansion.

Dawoon says the service has achieved consistent 20 percent week on week growth since launch, primarily driven by Facebook. Hong Kong members have a substantial number of Facebook friends – nearly 8 times the worldwide standards – resulting in each Hong Kong Coffee Meets Bagel member having around 48 Facebook friends who also use the app. CMB is primed for success in its new home.

The Kang sisters have noticed differences in the way Hong Kong members and US members use the app. Dawoon says: “On average, 72 percent of Hong Kong members log in every day to check their Bagel. Of these, 77 percent are connecting on an iPhone. They log in 4.3 times a day (33 percent higher than US members) and spend a total of 7.7 minutes a day (117 percent higher than US members).”

On the other hand, the gender ratio is similar in HK, NYC, and Washington DC (62 percent of members in Hong Kong are female). Academic achievements are also similar, with 98 percent of membership in both HK and the US boasting bachelors degrees.

From here, the Kangs plan to continue their international expansion, perhaps one day to their birth country of South Korea.

Almost 5 years ago Plenty of Fish Media launched eVow, and as of April 17 we were informed that the dating service appears to have been closed. The dating apps have been removed from iTunes and Google Play, and the website now redirects to POF.com. Plenty of Fish Media has not release an official statement about these changes but with the service now being completely inaccessible I think it is safe to assume that it has been shut down.

eVow was design to compete with dating sites that specialized in long-term relationships (like eHarmony). With the advertisement might of POF behind it in the beginning eVow quickly grew and was a popular choice for singles. Unfortunately after 5 years and intense completion in the dating sector eVow was not able to sustain itself without relying on the free advertising it received on the Plenty of Fish dating site. eVow must not have been making enough money through memberships and advertisements to justify the cost of taking up advertisement spots on POF (which other advertisers would pay money for).

I think one of the problems eVow ran into is that it also competed with their sister service POF.com. While POF doesn't cater to only long-term relationships, it does have the Chemistry Predictor matchmaking system which does attempt to match single together based on personality types to which is a key ingredient in long term relationships. A lot of members of POF looking for long-term relationships obviously didn't feel the need to move to eVow since POF was meeting their needs.

It's too bad eVow had to close down. The dating service had a lot of good ideas. Unfortunately the dating industry is intensely competitive and most dating services will not survive more than a few years.

Dating app Coffee Meets Bagel has taken a back seat to the spectacular rise of Tinder the past few years. This however has not daunted the company’s founders, three sisters who left their cushy corporate jobs to fulfill their entrepreneurial dreams. (Not to mention, they wanted to create a dating app that they would like to use!)

Now, the company has taken its carefully executed roll-out in the U.S. and is expanding internationally. Hong Kong was the first place outside of the U.S. where the service was launched.

CMB takes its operations seriously. Instead of giving in to the “more is more” trend in dating - offering unlimited looks at profiles and encouraging users to choose “yes” or “no” in a matter of seconds – this dating app offers users one match per day. And you have 24 hours to mull it over, choosing to like or pass. If you like, you have a week to make a real date happen through the app’s private chat line, or it’s on to the next. In other words, it forces users to carefully consider and follow through, instead of swiping at will and sending a few messages that never lead to a date.

Facebook is a key platform in spreading interest in the app overseas, since Hong Kong users (according to a recent article in Forbes) have an average of 768 Facebook friends each, eight times the worldwide standard. Also, Hong Kong is a highly social city, although people spend more time at work than they do trying to meet people to date. It made for the perfect place to launch the dating app’s international roll-out.

Co-Founder Dawoon Kang lived in Hong Kong for three years, experiencing the dating scene for herself. (She and her current boyfriend met over CMB). “Hong Kong is a very young, vibrant city full of ambitious singles in their 20s and 30s who are eager to meet new people but have very little time for it. Coffee Meets Bagel was designed with these young professionals in mind, which made Hong Kong our perfect market – and our initial results show that,” she told Forbes.

On average, Hong Kong users are logging in 4.3 times per day (33% more than U.S. members), and 72% log in each day to check their matches. Like in the U.S., more CMB members are female – 62% of the Hong Kong user base are women, although there are more single men overall in China.

The service launched in Hong Kong on March 4^th, and before the month was over, the company had made 3,000 connections. According to Kang, CMB has also achieved consistent 20 percent week on week growth.