How to Start a Dating Site

Over the five+ years I’ve been coaching people on how to market their websites, the biggest myth I’ve had to address time and time again is the myth of market size:

When designing an online business, so may people focus on the largest possible market. It’s easy to see why. After all, if you’re potential marketplace is the entire world, you only need a tiny slice to succeed.

That works if you’re selling on eBay, but it’s not a sound approach for online dating sites. Remember that you are selling access to profiles, and you only bring value to the table if I find promising profiles.

So if your dating site invites members from around the world, you could easily get thousands of members, and still not have critical mass in any one geographic area. The result is a “dead” site, where nothing happens.

It’s far better to restrict your membership to a tight area — a single country, state, or even city. You’ll be more focused on your efforts, have an easier time leveraging search engine optimization and search engine marketing, be able to take advantage of local media, and — most importantly — be able to build critical mass in a single location to start with.

1,500 members from around the world is useless: your members still won’t be able to connect.

But if you have 1,500 members all from New England, for example, you’re starting to get traction.

Great post from the gang at 37signals, arguing that you don’t need to drop everything — including your current job and income — to launch a new business.

Reserve a couple of nights per week, a Sunday morning here, and a day from vacation time there. It’s never been cheaper or faster to build a web startup, it’s never been more possible to do it as a side-business.