Dating is a filtering problem with highly varied solutions. Therefore, a dating site should be a platform with highly varied filtering solutions.
Create a broad, uniform spec for dating profile content (bio, interests, etc), and a great UX for populating it. And then open it up as a platform. Restrict nothing. Want to filter by height? weight? race? Have at it. Give users a few basic, somewhat customizable frames for searching and filtering the userbase.
But search filters are like microapps / facebook games: developers can build their own search plugins, so one global userbase can serve as content for a million different kinds of dating apps. Hikers, metalheads, people who are afraid to eat fruit, whatever.
Queries cost money (perhaps as low as a fraction of a penny), and the first message from each party costs a bit more (but still trivially cheap, probably sub $1). There's a base monthly cost like $5. If you don't use your whole budget, credits roll over. If you overspend, you get charged pro-rata. A portion of these fees go to developers to incentivize building useful applications. There is no free plan.
There are interesting things to be done with rate-limiting/sliding scale pricing. Perhaps first messages get expensive if you try to send them too fast, so it's trivially cheap to message 2 people per day, but extremely costly to message 50 people per day. Something has to 1) protect women's inboxes from a deluge of low effort garbage and 2) encourage men to be selective upfront rather than indiscriminately shotgunning messages and waiting until response to filter.
I'm not confident that this is a profitable idea, especially compared to something like tinder, but it would be neat.
I like the filtering idea, although people will probably just end up putting in false entries and you would just be scrolling through people who don't actually fit those categories. It feels gross to objectively exclude people on things they can't control like race and height, but I think that is what people want more control over. And yeah income, occupation, are all actually really important.
Dating is a filtering problem with highly varied solutions. Therefore, a dating site should be a platform with highly varied filtering solutions.
Create a broad, uniform spec for dating profile content (bio, interests, etc), and a great UX for populating it. And then open it up as a platform. Restrict nothing. Want to filter by height? weight? race? Have at it. Give users a few basic, somewhat customizable frames for searching and filtering the userbase.
But search filters are like microapps / facebook games: developers can build their own search plugins, so one global userbase can serve as content for a million different kinds of dating apps. Hikers, metalheads, people who are afraid to eat fruit, whatever.
Queries cost money (perhaps as low as a fraction of a penny), and the first message from each party costs a bit more (but still trivially cheap, probably sub $1). There's a base monthly cost like $5. If you don't use your whole budget, credits roll over. If you overspend, you get charged pro-rata. A portion of these fees go to developers to incentivize building useful applications. There is no free plan.
There are interesting things to be done with rate-limiting/sliding scale pricing. Perhaps first messages get expensive if you try to send them too fast, so it's trivially cheap to message 2 people per day, but extremely costly to message 50 people per day. Something has to 1) protect women's inboxes from a deluge of low effort garbage and 2) encourage men to be selective upfront rather than indiscriminately shotgunning messages and waiting until response to filter.
I'm not confident that this is a profitable idea, especially compared to something like tinder, but it would be neat.