What is your position on investing in marketplace startups, i.e. all other things being equal is a YC application describing a marketplace idea disadvantaged in anyway or scrutinised any harder than an idea not predicated on marketplace economics or the network effect?
A while back I went through and analyzed all the marketplace startups that YC had invested in, and from a mixture of gut experience and the data it seems like YC is less likely to accept marketplace startups than non-marketplace startups (i.e. first time founders disproportionately found marketplace startups but this isn't shown in the YC cohorts). The ones that YC have accepted have generally seemed to been where they've really liked the team (i.e. AirBnB) as opposed to the idea.
This is actually somewhat different to most funds who invest in marketplace startups, generally for most investors there's only one thing that makes a marketplace startup worth investing in and that's traction (because in most cases the technology itself is trivial).
How will you get users? If your idea is the type that faces a chicken-and-egg problem in the sense that it won't be attractive to users till it has a lot of users (e.g. a marketplace, a dating site, an ad network), how will you overcome that?
From that I suspect the barriers to YC entry with a marketplace startup are somewhat higher.
I checked out this plenty of fish website. It is amazing because most dating websites cannot get people to upload pictures of themselves. Plenty of Fish has broken the personal photo stigma.
The odd thing is that, according to their website, Plenty of Fish is actually hiring despite what is printed in the New York Times.
On face value, Plenty of Fish is a standard dating website (compare to OKCupid) which makes its success more impressive.
What would be some cool ways to for instance gamify dating sites to make it more appealing to fill them with lots of good content (ie photos and profile text)?
When the site started there weren't very many competitors. They were also unique in the fact that they are absolutely free.
Sites like match.com and the other dating sites at the time (most were bought out by match.com) allow you to search, but messaging costs money. It was the standard model of the dating site for many years.
I don't know how you can say there weren't many competitors. There were tons. You're right about the business models though. But they were all created before Google and similar ad networks. Perhaps that is the major distinction with PoF.
I used to hangout with Markus in the old webmasterworld forum. Yes, POF site was a one man show until 2008 but not anymore. The last i heard POF has around 20 employees and generate $30 million revenue!...BTB, POF's initial growth was mainly from SEO especially ranking for 'free dating' related keywords.
I can't imagine that there are interesting women on this website. Are smart+goodlooking women not actually interested in the dating site fees, because they want to find men who are willing (and able) to spend some money on their relationship?
I used OKCupid (free) to give more spontaneity to my dating and the vibe I get is that nobody identifies with it as a serious pursuit. Paying for a site can seem try-hard if you aren't one that feels very invested in it (despite how invested you might actually be).
Whenever OKCupid itself comes up in conversation with a girl I hang out with from there, they always say that they registered to just see what it was like -- "might as well". No perception of personal investment that would validate spending money. If it comes up, girls even mention that premium membership comes off as sorta tacky/corny and that's my feeling as well.
they always say that they registered to just see what it was like
Yeah, it's just an amazing coincidence that they ended up going on dates, with people they discovered on a dating site. Maciej Ceglowski (idlewords here) once commented that part of OKCupid's strategy is to give you other things to do on the site, like quizzes, for plausible deniability.
But you're right, being identified as a premium member is probably bad social signalling, too.
"Mr. Frind says that close to 50,000 new photos come in every day, each one of which needs to be checked to verify that it is an actual person and that it does not
