Simon Willison’s Weblog

Is it difficult to make a dating site? My budget is small. Any suggestion?

30th July 2013

My answer to Is it difficult to make a dating site? My budget is small. Any suggestion? on Quora

Yes, it’s hard. Technologically, dating sites are not that complicated. The difficulty is keeping them populated enough that they remain useful for your users.

Consider this: the better your dating site is, the more likely a user is to get in to a permanent relationship, leave your site and never come back.

The users that DO stick around for a long time are actually your worst users—because the reason they are still there is that they either have unattractive profiles or are bad dates (and hence never manage to form a relationship). This reduces the overall experience for everyone else.

Dating sites tend to need to spend a LOT of money acquiring new users through advertising, AdWords etc. if you don’t have a strong, differentiated plan for user acquisition there’s not much point building a dating site.