Free Dating Site

[Evan]

[ QUOTE ]
Actualy those sites you just named all cost money and are not free. Second if you are going to just be a [censored] Evan then keep your opinions to yourself. Ive been working hard on a project and you got to have an attitude. Maybe the site will never make anything. I dont care but you dont have to be a jerk. Its my first project like this.

[censored] you too Sniper.

[/ QUOTE ]
Be ready for criticism or don't post anything. Acting like I called you a bad person because people don't see any competitive advantages of this site is unacceptable.

Okay, so those are not free. How about Hot or Not? Their dating service just went free a couple weeks ago.

[JoshK]

With a market this huge even if you get a small percentage of it, it's still a pretty large chunk of people.

I've noticed this trend in the way a lot of people think here at 2p2 and even other places regarding IM. To be successful you don't have to reinvent the wheel or come up with the next big thing.

Cheers,

Josh

[Evan]

[ QUOTE ]
With a market this huge even if you get a small percentage of it, it's still a pretty large chunk of people.

I've noticed this trend in the way a lot of people think here at 2p2 and even other places regarding IM. To be successful you don't have to reinvent the wheel or come up with the next big thing.

Cheers,

Josh

[/ QUOTE ]
You're delusional if you think you can come up with "the next big thing" without some explainable competitive advantage. If you can't tell me what you do better than the next guy how the hell am I supposed to figure out why I should be using you and not him? This doesn't mean it has to be particularly impressive or complicated. Youtube: we make it easy to share video. Google: we make it easy to find stuff. Now, obviously despite being simple ideas these are both complex in execution. That tends to be the way "big things" go. If they were simple to do, they would have been done. If they were extremely complex problems, very few people would have them or be aware that they had them.

Whether or not this site will make money/be profitable is a whole different story. Sure, you can do both of those things without much of a product. Next big thing though? Come on man.

[JoshK]

The only thing I said about "the next big thing" is that you don't have to find it to be successful.

What are you ranting about?

Cheers,

Josh

[Sniper]

[ QUOTE ]
What are you ranting about?

[/ QUOTE ]

Seriously Evan... whats the deal...

The guy is not trying to be the market leader in the dating site market... he's just trying to open a small dating site, and make some money.

[Evan]

[ QUOTE ]
The only thing I said about "the next big thing" is that you don't have to find it to be successful.

What are you ranting about?

Cheers,

Josh

[/ QUOTE ]
I misread "you dont have to reinvent the wheel or..." as "you dont have to reinvent the wheel to...". I ordinarily wouldn't have even noticed, except that majesty got really angry at me like a week ago when I said I didn't think anyone from 2+2 was going to start "the next big thing" (his words). He made an unnecessarily big deal out of it and I thought you were referencing that.

[IRuleYouHard]

He quoted you from ATF. I don't think majesty was out of line quoting you... he was using it as a motivator tool, not just to bad talk you. Kind of like "the mod doesn't think we can do it guys, so lets prove him wrong!"

[Evan]

[ QUOTE ]
He quoted you from ATF. I don't think majesty was out of line quoting you... he was using it as a motivator tool, not just to bad talk you. Kind of like "the mod doesn't think we can do it guys, so lets prove him wrong!"

[/ QUOTE ]
I never said he was out of line. If I post something on a public forum it's anyone's right who reads it to quote it. As far as I know posters' own the rights to their own posts on 2+2, so I'll announce here that I will freely license the content of my posts to be used on 2+2 or elsewhere however anyone wants.

I think he made it a much bigger deal than made any sense. However, it was, of course, well within his rights to do so.

[scott1]

I work in software development and testing for a company that develops social networking sites.

I checked out your site and I think you could turn this into something that could make money, though you have a lot of work in front of you.

In general
I'd strongly consider developing this towards a specific niche. Either pick a geographical region, or some sort of common bond that would attract a certain set of people, like tatoos, emo music, fans of tartar control toothpaste. Once you have success in that niche, expand.

(This is a big trend in social networking sites today. The general thinking is that the big sites exist and they are designed to work for anyone, but as a result, they are not very satisfying for most people. Focused sites which target a specific audience is the way to make money going forward. I was just throwing out suggestions off the top of my head, but tatoos is something that might work, if it doesn't already exist, judging by what the average 22 yeard old looks like these days. Music probably wouldn't. People would expect some access to they type of music.)

Using your site
It's obviously far from complete. If I was handed this to test at work, I'd give it back to the developer after registering.
What I saw quickly -

* When I registered I left a piece of information off the registration page. I was sent back to it and had to fill out every field again. This is a barrier that keeps people from getting on to your site. In general, you want registration to be as easy as possible.

* I tried to register again from the same machine and I get the "Thanks for registering" message when I go back to the registration page.

* The welcome message needs to be formatted. Make the steps bullet points. Add some sort of image or style to the page.

* Profile. Either it doesn't exist yet or I couldn't easily figure out how to fill it out. Force users to the edit profile page upon successful login after registration. Have at least a few required fields (other than state, city and zip from registration). Having registered users that are not searchable in the db sucks.

* Search must be avaiable to non-registered users. A decent amount of traffic on the average dating site is men just trawling for pics of hot women.

* Will you censor photos or allow users to upload anything?

* Will there be a way for users to flag inapporpriate language in the forums, blogs profiles? There definitely should be for forums.

* Think about the lauguage and wording used on the site, make it consistent. Get rid of inkspot is a good call.

* Too much going on on the dashboard page. Try to make design simpler, less busy.

Testing ideas

* What happens if I try to register again with the same username?

* What happens if I put unexpected characters in profile or search fields, like quotes, parentheses, etc (look up SQL injection and cross site scripting for more on this).

Good luck. If you get further along with this, post again. I'd be interested in seeing how you progress.

[majesty2009]

Thank you very much for the great suggestion. It realy is just in bare bones testing stage. I realy appreciate the fact that many of you took a serious look at the site and gave me great feedback. I realy am taking not of all comments.

I shouldnt have yelled at Sniper he didnt do anything on purpose. Sorry man you are always helpful.

As far as a niche I may targit it only to San Diego users at least at the moment. Also my friend just started a similar site that is a gay dating site. It has only been up a few days and it actualy is doing pretty well.

What do you guys think about targeting only San Diego users. Would that work as a niche? What about the gay dating site? We both own 50% of each project.