Dating
I was asked recently if I was going to expand into regular dating, without hesitating I said “no”. The reasons are:
- The dating market as a whole is shrinking. My speculation is that this is due to the rise of the social networking sites (My Space, Friendster, Facebook, etc) which are free, more fun and have many more members.
- The market is very, very competitive with really muscular players such as Yahoo! and Match.com, the latter even advertises heavily on television. I’m not that keen on going head to head with businesses like that.
- My gambit of going free wouldn’t really work as there already are free dating sites — the famous example being Plenty of Fish — but there are also a few venture-funded competitors.
So, all things considered, a shrinking market that is highly competitive and indeed already mature enough to be going through consolidation is not a market that is very attractive to enter.
To be completely honest I think you would need to be staggeringly ignorant of the market to launch from swinging into regular dating, although in another hilarious move my friends at Swinging Heaven launched Heaven Dating which, to be polite, is a brave move!