Young people. For people in their 30s, it's a different ball game. Lots of well-off career people panicking to pair up. I have no doubt there is a lot of money in that. Actually I'm bullish on 30+ arranged marriage apps. It seems like one of those megatrends that's going to hit like a tidal wave.
It's not arranged marriage by any means, it's just Blind Date As A Service.
I signed up in my 20s. They admitted I was young versus their median, but I wasn't alone and had plenty of dates in the few months I was a member.
There was a lot of appeal to the idea of not dealing with the usual grind of the average dating app, and getting something a bit more personal/high-touch.
(Though even then it seemed apparent that it was less high touch than it seemed for the cost, and the real gatekeeper was the cost.)
There should be ways to sell human-moderated dating apps (Blind Dates as a Service) to young people just on how dumb and how much work even the "swipe left/right" systems are. Figuring out how to scale that cheaply definitely seems to be the impossible problem.
I am reminded of a conversation with the CIO/CTO of an Au Pair matching service.
Their process at that time (2008) was to have a set of employees who were matchmakers. They would read hundreds/thousands of family requests and requirements and then hundreds/thousands of applications of the young people from various countries around the world. They would match them with prosperous US families that were looking for an au pair.
As he explained the process I began brainstorming ways to use NLP and earlier versions statistical analysis, machine learning or maybe genetic algorithms to take over or at least assist in what was a very manual process by those matchmaker employees.
He left for a different job not too long after and we never did more than a bit of brainstorming. And, I suspect that this matching is still being done largely through human reading and thinking including how humans "read between the lines" which can sometimes be so accurate and other times just reveal the biases of the matchmaker.
However, thinking about those kind of person to person compatibility and matching problems led me to reserve the domain name trupeer.me - the idea of helping professional career people find their tru peers in industry
