Zoltan’s Business News & Blog

David Evans, wrote an interesting post in his blog about Selecting the Right Dating Software. On a similar theme, Mark Brooks, wrote about List of Dating Softwares and Services. Very good points although I have my own comments as well.

In  my opinion, you are not going to make a big deal with a $50 - $1000 script you buy. You can not become successful if you do not have your own development team or if you know nothing about servers and scripting / db. Show me one successful dating site using a script that is sold in tens or hundreds of copies. I bet you can’t.
Create your own software and be prepared to work on it as your community is growing. This is what we (or me alone???) are doing at www.onelovenet.com dating site. I could have bought a $50 script and launch the website a lot more earlier, but I preferred to wait a few more months and develope something I can understand from A to Z.

Actually, I had a prealfa version in 2003… of the script used right now on OneLoveNet.com. I think if I would have launched in 2003 my site could be somewhere in top although I have to admit that at that time I did not have my current marketing knowledge. In 2003, I had been involved in some other B2B related projects and put away the dating one, the dating market was saturated and I really didn’t have a marketing plan. Now… the market is even more saturated, but I have some marketing knowledge and have a real plan and budget.

Dave wrote: “I still say it costs several million dollars in marketing money to build up a decent-sized dating site. Some things get cheaper like hardware and development costs due to advances in software. Marketing just gets more and more expensive.” The question is what we call decent-sized dating site: 100,000 members? 1 million? 10 million? In my opinion, you can build a 100,000 member community in 12 - 18 months with much less than 1 million dollars. You just need to know where to put your money. Yes, affiliate marketing is a waste of money. But there are many other ways to promote your website. One of them… probably the most important one is the viral effect. Build something that will make your members talk about your site. Viral marketing is a very powerful tool and if you use it wisely, it can be your best friend. And, someone should give me those “several million dollars”, I can make a miracle.

So, to summarize, to start a new niche or general dating site in 2007:

• build a custom software
• be prepared to have someone who can constanly work on your IT part
• be prepared to spend a lot of money (I let you decide the amount, but I do not think we can talk about millions of dollars) to reach the critical mass
• have a well wrote marketing plan where you prepare for every possible scenario.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 19th, 2007 at 8:20 pm and is filed under Internet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.